The Liar, The Witch and The Werewolf
justcarol67
justcarol67 at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 4 14:47:09 UTC 2007
No: HPFGUIDX 169769
Pippin wrote:
>
> I was re-reading the first chapter of GoF yesterday, and I wondered
what Peter Pettigrew would have been doing in the wayside inn where he
supposedly met the Ministry witch Bertha Jorkins. Voldemort says he
stopped there because he was hungry.
>
> But Peter can steal all the food he needs as a rat! Why risk taking
human form just for that? It would have been most foolish. Even
Peter's not that stupid. <snip>
Carol responds:
Clever and entertaining as always, Pippin, but I can't argue with a
hypothethetical explanation based on the assumption that Lupin is ESE.
I agree that it's odd that Pettigrew would stop at a wayside inn, but
the inn was in Albania, where Bertha had just visited her great aunt,
IIRC, and maybe Wormtail assumed that an English wizard who had been
"murdered" thirteen years before wouldn't be recognized by rural
Albanians. (I certainly wouldn't recognize a murder victim I'd seen on
the news thirteen years ago if that person showed up in, say, a
Starbucks where I was having coffee.) And wizards seem to have a habit
of wearing their heads low over their faces if they don't want to be
recognized. If the light is dim and he's hooded, what likelihood would
there be that Memory-charmed Bertha would recognize him? But Wormtail,
it seems, is smarter and more talented than his former friends and
teachers think--not only did he learn to become an Animagus (and
escape cleverly when Lupin turned into a werewolf (though it wasn't
nice to Stun Ron and Crookshanks, Wormtail, not nice at all), but he
made the potions that restored Voldemort first to fetal form and then
to his old body somehow magically restored. (He even cut off his own
hand--something not everyone could do--out of loyalty to, or fear of,
Voldie. I don't see how you can blame *that* on ESE!Lupin.) Anyway,
Wormtail doesn't deny being the spy who ratted on the whole Order, and
we know he was the SK who betrayed the Potters, not to mention that he
has a Dark Mark burned into his arm (and Harry saw him, the short
hooded man, kill Cedric).
At any rate, I can see Wormtail, tired of living as a rat, craving
"people food" and taking what he saw as the very small risk of being
recognized in order to have a real meal for a change. (Remember how he
sniffed the air at a Halloween feast, perhaps our first clue that
there's something "human" about this rat?) And, based on what we've
seen, I think he'd have been clever enough to talk poor dim-witted
Bertha into taking a walk in the moonlight. (Maybe she was desperate
for male companionship!)
At any rate, I don't think we need to bring ESE!Lupin and more Memory
Charms into this part of the story to find an explanation for
Wormtail's stopping at a wayside inn. (Don't get me wrong; I think
that Lupin is *weak* and Snape, for one, knows it. But I think it's
stretching canon to bring him in here.)
Regarding Wormtail as a cringing hunchback in HBP--I think that
Voldemort has been treating Wormtail very badly now that he has no
more use for him (he no longer needs an able-bodied servant to make
potions, milk Nagini, and murder teenage boys), which explains not
only why Wormtail is hunchbacked (too many Crucios) but why he prefers
"assisting" and spying on the tart-tongued, sarcastic, contemptuous
Snape to returning to Voldemort to ask for a new assignment.
Carol, whose only problem with her own hypothesis is the question of
where Wormtail found the wizard money to buy his meal at the inn
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