The Prince's potions improvements (Was: Harry the author)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 175569

muellem@ wrote:
> 
> My  apologies but I haven't really been following this thread but .
. .  are we sure it is Snape who wrote the additions? At one 
> > point we are  told that the book is 50 years old, well before
Harry's father and  thus Snape's time. The book must have been Snape's
mother's book  before it became his and thus it is likely that it was
> she who made  the changes -
> 
Melissa replied: 
> Well the book could have been his mother's book given the age but
that doesn't mean that the notes made in it were made by her.  He
simply was using a hand me down school book.  Interesting though  that
they were  using one that was 50 years out of date.  I would have
thought that a few  new potions would have been thought up/improved
upon enough to warrant a newer  edition being printed.  
>  
> Melissa  

Carol responds:
I agree with Melissa. There is never any suggestion in the books that
the potions hints and the spells, which we know to be Snape's own, are
not the creations of the same person. Both are in the same small,
cramped handwriting that Hermione thinks looks like a girl's (perhaps
because it resembles hers) but which is identical to the small,
cramped writing with which the teenage Severus fills his DADA OWL in
OoP. Eileen Snape is both a red herring as to the identity of the
Prince (disputed by Harry, who is rightly convinced that the Prince is
male from both his personality and his nickname) and a teasing hint at
Snape's background (for which we received other hints in the
Occlumency lessons and Spinner's End itself). 

Professor Snape recognizes the Potions book in Harry's mind and knows
perfectly well that Harry is using and taking credit for *his* Potions
improvements. He later yells at him for trying to use his own spells
against him and identifies himself definitively as the Half-Blood
Prince. Two chapter titles, "Flight of the Prince" in HBP and "The
Prince's Tale" in DH reinforce his identity. There is only one
Half-Blood Prince, inventor of Muffliato and Levicorpus and, alas,
Sectumsempra, and improver of the potions recipes in his sixth-year
Potions book (though he must have been studying the book and improving
the Potions, perhaps over the holidays, before sixth year unless
Levicorpus in the SWM is a Flint). 

We've known for ages that Snape is a Potions genius who knows exactly
which step or steps have been performed incorrectly by his students;
who writes his improved recipes on the board with his wand rather than
assigning potions from the book as Slughorn does; who is one of the
few wizards in the WW who can make Wolfsbane Potion. It could serve no
purpose for the plot to give the credit for young Severus's potions
improvements to his mother and would take away all the delicious irony
of Harry learning from and identifying with Snape if both the spells
and the Potions hints were not his.

As for the age of the book, that's Slughorn's fault. He seems to have
used the same sixth-year Potions book during Eileen Prince's time as
Severus Snape's, which explains why he would have and be writing in
her old book, and again in Harry's time. The man is old, lazy, and set
in his ways. But the handwriting is teen!Snape's, the bezoar hint is
written in his voice, and there's no indication whatever that Eileen
Prince, the gobstones champion cowed by her Muggle husband, was a
Potions genius like her son.

Snape is the Half-Blood Prince; it's his book; the spells are his; the
potions hints are his. That mystery was solved in HBP. And I really
liked having his shortened title used again in "The Prince's Tale." It
was like a little gesture of affection from JKR to her "gift of a
character." I also liked having him simultaneously point his wand at
DD's injured hand, muttering incantations, and pouring a golden potion
down his throat with his other hand. Healer!Snape, the DADA *and*
Potions genius, in a nutshell.

Carol, wondering why people are still pondering an officially solved
mystery and/or doubting his manifest talents at this point