Disappearances and Nagini

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 158563

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "zanooda2" <zanooda2 at ...> wrote:
>
> > Ken asked:
> 
> ><SNIP>
> 
> > I'm never sure just how big Nagini is supposed to be.
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> Nagini is described in GoF as "a gigantic snake, at least twelve feet
> long" ("The Riddle house", p.12 US).
> 

Ken:

I didn't recall that statement but it doesn't quite answer my real
question. Is Nagini big enough to really eat an adult human or not?
Length alone doesn't settle the matter although a snake of typical
proportions that is 12 feet long would be too small. That is the kind
of detail I would not expect JKR to have a firm grasp of, she thought
constrictors were venomous after all. I saw a TV show about King
Cobras recently and the "big" male in that show was about 15 feet
long. It only weighed 19 pounds though, so it wasn't nearly big enough
to eat an adult human. Oh it could kill you with its venom, it just
couldn't eat you.

The biggest constrictors, Reticulated Pythons and Anacondas, are 20-30
feet in length but weigh hundreds of pounds. These are much bigger
animals and they do prey on other animals that are as large as humans.
Apparently there are reports that they have eaten humans but these
reports have not been "verified", whatever that means. 

> > Ken again:
> 
> > It's possible too that in his weakened state BabyMort could not kill
> > Frank, and just stunned him even though he used an AK.
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> In the same chapter, Frank Bryce's death is described like this:"He
> was dead before he hit the floor"{p.15).
> 
> Well, I guess it was LV who killed the old man, but maybe Nagini is
> large enough to swallow the body.
>

Ken:

I guess that nails the lid on that coffin. DD was just wrong, whether
intentionally, unintentionally, or the victim of the author's
sloppiness. Steve remembers DD as saying simply that Nagini killed a
Muggle, without specifiying that it was Bryce. I remember him saying
that LV used Nagini to kill the old Muggle caretaker. I don't have the
books in front of me but if it was the latter, it was pretty clearly
Bryce's death that DD was talking about. I do have to agree that if
Frank's death was reported in a Muggle newspaper there most likely was
a body found and it probably would not have been left for Nagini to
eat. If Frank had just disappeared, fate unknown to the Muggles, then
he most likely would have been reported as missing. Of course our
author is not perfectly consistent, we may later learn that Nagini
does eat LV's victims whether that squares with previous statements or
not.

Ken