Dumbledore's fall from the tower (Was: Why are wizards so incompetent?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 140648

> Chys asked:
> Why wasn't he splattered against the ground then? This part confused
me, he seemed to be whole and resting peacefully at the bottom, when
he just fell from the tallest tower. What gives?

> It's perfectly argueable that there'd be blood. I just thought more.


Carol responds:
You're absolutely right. Whether DD was already dead from an AK when
he fell, died on the way down of his own volition combined with poison
and loss of powers (as his peaceful expression may suggest), or died
from the impact with the ground, surely there ought to be more damage
than a trickle of blood and his limbs splayed at odd angles. His body
should have been broken, or, even, as you say, "splattered" on the
ground. (I can't help thinking of the people who jumped from the Twin
Towers on 9/11 though of course their fall was longer than his.)

Instead we have "Dumbledore's eyes were closed. But for the strange
angle of his arms and legs, he might have been sleeping." His
spectacles have slipped off his nose, but they're not broken. Harry
straightens them, wipes away "a trickle of blood," and "gaze[s] down
at the wise old face" (HBP Am. ed. 608-09), still completely
recognizable. 

What's going on here? DD was wandless; he can't have used a spell to
slow his own fall. Yet he has landed exactly like a rag doll dropped
from the top bunk of a child's bunkbed. And "rag doll" is indeed the
simile used as he slips over the tower wall:

"For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the [Dark
Mark], and then he fell slowly backward, like a great rag doll, over
the battlements and out of sight" (596). As many posters have noted,
it takes a while for Harry to be released from DD's freezing spell,
long enough for Snape to order the DEs out and for all six people
other than DD and Harry to vanish out the door. If the spell were an
AK, Harry would have been instantly released as it hit Dumbledore.
Almost certainly, then, DD isn't dead as he goes over the battlements.
And the fall takes longer than it should. Whether DD dies in mid-fall
or when he hits the ground, too much time passes before the spell is
released for the fall to occur at normal speed.

Could Snape have cast not one but two silent spells, the first an
Impedimenta or some other nonfatal DADA spell (disguised as an AK) to
"blast" DD into the air and a second one to slow his fall (something
like the unnamed spell DD used to slow Harry's fall in PoA, "Grim
Defeat" or even some form of hover charm) and send him floating to the
ground like a rag doll?

I'm not arguing for this theory, but the near-absence of damage to
DD's body after a fall from the highest tower in the castle is (IMO)
not natural.

(On a side note, we don't know what color the light from an
Impedimenta is. It could be green. Not all the jets of green light in
the fight between DD and LV in OoP are necessarily AKs. Most can't be
identified because they're nonverbal. Another side note--Snape's
Expelliarmus in CoS, with its flash of scarlet light, is a lot more
spectacular than any others we've seen, even the three combined
Expelliarmuses in PoA, which knocked him out only because his head hit
the wall. Maybe the Expelliarmus that throws Lockhart off the platform
in CoS is combined with some silent spell to give it a little extra
flare, erm, flair?)

Carol