Eileen Pince

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 155833

Tinktonks:

> I'm not sure if this topic has been discussed before but 
> I was just re-reading HBP and it jumped out at me that Snape's 
> mum attended Hogwarts at around the same time as Tom Riddle.
> This makes me wonder whether there is a link between the two.

houyhnhnm:

I am highly suspicious about the assumption that Eileen 
Prince attended Hogwarts in the 1940s.  In fact I am highly 
suspicious about everything relating to the Half Blood 
Prince even though the mystery appears to have been cleared 
up at the end of book 6.  It's not that I have an alternative 
theory.  It's just that bearing in mind the current discussion 
about the unreliable narrator device, I can't help thinking 
about the extent to which the reader has been manipulated 
with respect to the HBP.

First there was the "small, cramped handwriting".  Oho! 
I got that.  It was easy.  A little too easy?

Then, at the Weasleys' during Christmas break, Lupin 
pointed Harry to the publication date "nearly" fifty years ago.

Then there was the way Snape honed in on Harry's possession 
of the HBP's potion book, as if he were already suspicious 
(because it was his).  But we never got to find out for 
sure because Harry hid the book in the RoR.

Hermione discovered a "very old" newspaper article about 
an Eileen Prince who was captain of the Gobstones team.

Then we had Snape shouting, "It was I who invented them--I, 
the Half-Blood Prince!"

Finally, Hermione: It's just that I was right about Eileen 
Prince once owning the book.  You see ... she was Snape's mother!"

It's as perfect as a syllogism.  Who wouldn't draw the same 
conclusion as Hermione, and from there, make the further 
deduction that Eileen Prince was a contemporary of Tom Riddle.

So certain was I of this series of logical deductions that 
I "remembered" that the date of publication of the Gobstones 
article was 1945.  However when I went back to check (because 
of a discussion on the list) there was no date for that 
article or for the marriage announcement.  What seems as 
logical as a geometry a proof is really a series of 
temptations to leap to a conclusion.

I'm not trying to advance a theory that it was not Snape 
who fled across the lawn, because I don't see how that 
could work.  I'm looking at it from the other end, the 
extent to which the reader is tempted into making one 
assumption after another. There's just an awful lot of 
manipulation going on it seems to me. 

Even the *proof* that Snape is the HBP is based on a 
circular argument:  We know Snape was the HBP because 
he claimed it during the Flight of the Prince and we 
know that it was really Snape (and not someone polyjuiced 
to look like Snape) because he admitted that he was the HBP.

There are all sorts of simple explanations for why Snape 
had a fifty years old textbook, including the fact that 
it belonged to his mother who purchased it new fifty years 
ago.  She may also have attended Hogwarts many years later 
with a used book for NEWT potions, or the book may never 
have been hers at all.

OR there's the possibility that we have been set up for 
a really big shocker.  I, for one, am keeping my fingers 
crossed.  The fact that I can't imagine, at this point, 
how Rowling will pull it off, will make it all the tastier 
when the time comes.