Professor R. J. Lupin (Was: ESE!Lupin condensed)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 146933

houyhnhnm wrote:
<snip> 
> When Lupin was on the train with the Trio at the beginning of PoA,
Hermione knew who he was because she saw *Professor* R. J. Lupin "in 
peeling gold letters" on his suitcase.  Where and when was Lupin a 
professor?  Not Hogwarts as far as we know.  Durmstrang?

Carol responds:
Christina made some interesting suggestions upthread, one of them
being that the trunk belonged to Lupin's father or (paternal)
grandfather, another being that he was a tutor (for home-schooled WW
children?) rather than a teacher. Since Hogwarts is the only wizarding
school in Britain and there are no wizarding universities, I think the
tutoring is at least possible ("Professor" would be merely a courtesy
title), more likely than a snobbish school like Beauxbatons or
Durmstrang hiring someone so shabby and ill looking. Also, how likely
is it that Durmstrang, which teaches the Dark Arts, would have a DADA
teacher? 

And I think Lupin's secret would be rather difficult to conceal
without Potions Master Snape to make wolfsbane potion for him. (BTW,
surely Lupin would have missed more than one teaching day [and a
Christmas dinner] in his year at Hogwarts. Maybe Snape substituted
fairly frequently, but JKR chose to depict only the first of those
classes.) At any rate, one night of anguished howling and lunging
against the locked doors of his living quarters at Beauxbatons or
Durmstrang, or worse, breaking free and loping through the corridors,
terrifying the staff and students, and he'd be out of a job and quite
possibly dead.

I don't think he could have taught in Muggle schools considering that
his specialty is DADA, specifically minor Dark creatures. (Imagine
Dudley Dursley coming home to Petunia and informing his mother that
he'd been learning about grindylows and was looking forward to
learning about werewolves later in the school year.) More likely, he
could have taught at one of the smaller European wizarding schools, or
even in the U.S. or Canada (though the British WW does seem to forget
that the Western Hemisphere exists).

And here's another possibility (I'm expecting to be Howled at for my
stupidity, but here goes): We know that at least one person, Professor
Quirrell, taught DADA at Hogwarts twice, with a year-long gap in
between the two classes. We know how the DADA curse affected him the
second time; I've speculated that the first time around, it took the
form of an irresistible desire to go to Albania, ostensibly to see the
vampires but really to try to find the vaporized Voldemort. Regardless
of how he did it, however, he did manage to teach DADA twice before
the curse finished him off. So it's possible that Remus Lupin also
taught at Hogwarts earlier (before Harry was a student there), either
using the Shrieking Shack to transform in or having access to Snape's
wolfsbane potion as in PoA. The DADA curse would have found a way to
cause him to lose his job the first time around without Snape
revealing Lupin's secret. If Remus held the position very early in his
adult life, either right after he graduated (while Severus was still a
DE) or during Snape's first year or so as a teacher, the letters on
the trunk would be around fourteen years old and quite likely to be
peeling. (Then again, Sirius Black didn't know that Snape was teaching
at Hogwarts and surely Lupin would have told him if they were there at
the same time, so it would have had to be while Snape was still a DE
or a spy for Dumbledore, IOW before September 1, 1981, when Snape took
the Potions position.)

What I don't understand is why he couldn't use Reparo or some similar
charm to fix those peeling letters. For that matter, he should be able
to repair his robes with some sort of mending spell. Surely he would
take them off when he knows it's time to transform?

As for the question asked in another thread about why Lupin looks so
ill and gray-haired now compared with PoA, I think the answer is quite
simple. He doesn't have Severus Snape around to prepare the wolfsbane
potion, and he never learned how to make it himself, so he suffers
horribly during his transformations, as he didn't during PoA.

Carol, noting for Catlady that Snape began teaching at the beginning
of the term and could not have been at Godric's Hollow on October 31,
nor could he have learned about the change in Secret Keepers, which
occurred the week before Godric's Hollow