Godric's Hollow

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 149869

Laura wrote:
<snip> 
> My personal opinion is that all the bodies in Godric's Hollow were
at least disfigured in the destruction of the home.  Voldemort surely
wouldn't settle for a body which showed evidence of his mistake.  But
I bet JK Rowling wrote this part of the story assuming there wasn't
much left of any of their bodies.  Probably James' and Lily's graves
that are mostly symbolic, not really holding much of their mortal bodies.
> 
> -Hope this is helpful and might spur discussion, as I too am tired 
or the seemingly endless dialogue on Snape.
>

Carol responds:
I'm *not* tired of the Snape discussion, but I do have a few ideas on
this one. Wizards seem to be less easily destructible than Muggles
(the fall that broke Neville's arm would have killed a Muggle; Hagrid
scoffs at the idea of James and Lily being killed in a car crash, ad
infinitum). It's possible that their bodies are also less destructible
than ours. Certainly fifteen-month-old Harry is unscathed by the
explosion of the house; his only injury is the lightning-shaped cut on
his forehead. Also, Sirius Black tells Harry in the Shrieking Shack
that he "saw their house, destroyed, and their bodies" (PoA ch. 19).
So I think we can safely conclude that the Potters' graves do hold
their bodies, which suffered little or no further harm from the
destruction of the house. What happened to Voldie is slightly more
mysterious, but since the Daily Prophet reported the story of the Boy
Who Lived, his body must have been present and recognizable, but it
must also have been torn apart by the deflected spell, unfit for
possession by its former, erm, occupant, who would not have let a
little thing like disfigurement reflecting his defeat prevent him from
occupying his own body so he could hold a wand.

Here's what I think happened. James and Lily were AK'd in the normal
fashion and died unmarked, with the usual open eyes and surprised
expressions. Harry was hit with an AK that at first left *him*
unmarked (it made no mark on entering) but which burst out of him as
the result of Lily's sacrificial magic, leaving the lightning- (or
rune-?) shaped cut. This intensified, renegade AK hit Voldemort, whose
Horcruxes prevented him from dying but could not prevent him from
being ripped from his body, "less than the meanest ghost." Since LV
retained the power of possession, even in this formless state--shaken,
weak, and helpless--he could have possessed his own body if it had not
been destroyed. Ergo, it must have exploded, but parts of it (the
face?) must still have been recognizable. Otherwise the Daily Prophet
could not have reported that he was responsible for the murders or
that he was destroyed after failing to kill Baby!Harry. The explosion
that ripped apart Voldie's body was so intense that it also blew up
the house, but James may have been outside the house and Lily and
Harry were upstairs, so only part of the house fell on them. As
previously indicated, Hagrid had just pulled Harry out of the rubble
when Black arrived, but the Potters' bodies were visible, and Black
had no trouble concluding that Pettigrew had revealed the secret to
LV. (Whether Voldie's body was also visible, Black doesn't say, but it
must have been because Hagrid later concludes, wrongly, that it was
Voldemort's apparent death, not the deaths of the Potters, that
disturbed "the murderin' traitor.")

I was going to discuss the tricky timeline for these events and the
next twenty-four hours, but I'm forced to conclude that JKR isn't
concerned with synchronizing events that occur off-page with those
that appear on-page (which would also apply to the so-called missing
five hours with Snape and the Battle of the MoM, Neri!). For one
thing, there's just no way to fit Hagrid's revealing the location of 4
Privet Drive to McGonagall into the timeline. I do think, though, as
an aside, that the AKs, including the failed one, must have registered
on the MoM's radar, and they would have come to investigate *before*
Hagrid left the scene, along with some reporters and photographers
from the Daily Prophet, and to Obliviate any interfering Muggles.
There must have been photos in the next morning's Prophet of the Boy
Who Lived, showing the soon-to-be-famous scar, the demolished house,
and the recognizable remnants of Voldemort. But that can't be how DD
found out about it because Hagrid is the first person on the scene.

What interests me is that Hagrid's account of these events in the
Three Broomsticks (PoA) doesn't quite match his earlier account in
SS/PS (which has Black lending him the motorcycle instead of not
needing it any more). The second account, IMO, arranges the events to
fit his interpretation of Black as a "murderin' traitor." Much the
same thing occurs with Harry when he relates the events on the tower
and the reason for DD's trust in Snape to the members of the Order,
which has repeatedly been shown to deviate from DD's actual words. As
Black says of the Muggles who testified against him (before their
memories were modified), "They didn't see what they thought they saw."
The mind modifies what the eyes perceive and what the perceiver
consciously remembers. (Thank goodness for the objective record of the
memory, which can be viewed in a Pensieve!)

Carol, who thinks that we can at least safely conclude that Lily's and
James's bodies were intact and Voldie's wasn't even if we never
untangle the Missing 24 Hours