Dumbledore's and Ron's watches (Was: Harry can still contact Dumbledore ?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 168831

JW wrote:
> Maybe, maybe not... only time will tell, so to speak.

Carol:
LOL.
> 
JW:
> I recall the gift to Ron.  Who was the giver?  And how does it work?
With its bizarre configuration, does it even tell time?  And think of
it - soooo unique, yet now there are two of them? Go back to DD's last
scenes in the cave and on the tower.  Any mention of his watch? Such
an unusual instrument, such a detailed description, but no
explanations... yet.  I recall a very unusual gift HP once received,
without much explanation - turned out to be very useful, and it turned
out to be from DD...
> 
> In any case, we DO KNOW that DD is an experienced time-traveler,
from  the instructions he gave Hermione in the hospital ward near the
end of PoA... "three turns should do it."

Carol responds:
First, Ron's watch and Dumbledore's may be similar, but they're not
the same watch. Ron's is presumably a wristwatch (why do wizards wear
wristwatches? They're so--Muggle) and DD's, naturally, is a pocketwatch:

"Dumbledore . . . took a golden watch from his pocket and examined it.
nIt was a very odd watch. It had twelve hands but no numbers; instead,
little planets were moving around the edge" (SS Am. ed. 12). DD uses
it to tell time, apparently; he consults it, says "Hagrid's late," and
puts it back in his pocket. Whether it has other powers is unclear,
but it reminds me of Mrs. Weasley's clock, which has a hand for each
member of the family, more than of a Time Turner. (Twelve planets?
Maybe wizards count Pluto and the moon as planets and presciently knew
about Eris, but that's still only eleven. The sun as a planet???)

In contrast, Ron's watch, which is given to him by his parents for his
seventeenth birthday, is "a heavy gold watch with odd symbols around
the edge and tiny moving stars instead of hands" (HBP Am. ed. 390).
Evidently, he knows how to tell time with it and doesn't think it's
all that unusual though he likes it. All he says, is "See what Mum and
Dad gave me? Blimey! i think I'll come of age next year too" (390).
Harry, of course, is too obsessed with finding Draco on the map to
give a thought to the watch so we're forced to look beyond the Harry
filter and draw our own conclusions.

Since JKR likes to sneak in references to objects that will be
significant, or at least useful, later, there's a good chance that
we'll see Ron's watch again. And, yet, we also hear--once--about DD's
scar that's shaped like the London Underground and it never appears
again, so maybe it's just a passing reference to show that the
Weasleys considered Ron's birthday significant enough to buy him a
gold watch. (Maybe he'll give his old one to Harry, who ruined his in
the Second Task. Or does Harry have a new old one by now, meaning a
"new" cast-off of Dudley's?) At any rate, it seems unlikely (to me)
that Ron's parents would give him a time-traveling watch even if they
could afford one.

As for DD's remark indicating that he's time-traveled, all it really
indicates is that he's familiar with the use of a Time Turner. One
turn equals one hour. Not that difficult unless you try to use a
Time-Turner calibrated in hours to go back a decade, or a Time-Turner
calibrated in years (if such a thing exists) to go back to a date that
isn't precisely the same date as the current date but in a different
year. There's got to be a better way, and maybe the watches are that
method, but we haven't yet seen any indication that they are. 

It's possible that DD has Time-Traveled, of course. Maybe that's what
he's been doing during all his absences from Hogwarts. Then, again, if
he returned at precisely the same time he left, no one would know his
was gone. But could he have gone back in time to retrieve the memories
from Hokey, Bob Ogden, Morfin, et al.? I don't think that's what
happened, though, because he tried to use Morfin's memory to prove
that Morfin was innocent, which suggests that he did so just before
Morfin's death, at a time when DD was considerably younger and
auburn-haired. A silver-bearded Dumbledore would have been regarded
with great suspicion. At any rate, I'm inclined to think that DD not
only suspected Tom Riddle of various murders at the time they were
committed, he even suspected him of having multiple Horcruxes long
before the diary confirmed his theory.

So did DD time-travel to obtain the memories? I don't think so. Has he
time-traveled for other reasons? Hard to say. Could he have been an
invisible witness to his own death? Was that what he was doing when he
sent Harry away to fetch the Invisibility Cloak that he'd already told
Harry to keep with him at all times? I'd like to see him show up as a
time-traveler to talk to Harry about Snape, to explain everything
about the twoer scene and the argument in the forest that Harry and
the readers need to know, and I can't think of a better way to do it.
So I guess I'm hoping that DD had his watch with him on the day he
died and chose *not* to use it to escape his own death on the tower.
After all, he was in no shape to go on living without Snape's help.

Carol, certain only that Ron's watch is not Dumbledore's