[HPforGrownups] alternative title

[k12listmomma]

No: HPFGUIDX 169246

Kati wrote:
The swedish HP publisher, Tiden frlag, reveals their translation of
the title for HP7, "Harry Potter och ddsrelikerna" (Harry Potter and
the Relics of Death). This alternative title was given to translators
by JK herself, as DH is very difficult to translate. Thoughts on the
alternative title? Are relics "only" referring to the horcruxes
(locket, cup)?


Shelley now:
I don't think this title is only referring to Horcruxes. If they were, then
why not simply put "Horcruxes" in the title itself, instead of this cryptic
language?

Instead, I think they are other "instruments of death" that we will see, in
that Lord Voldemort was obsessed with that whole "capturing life or soul"
for use later. We see in the graveyard scene LV using a bone of his father-
I think this is significant because there is still life in that bone- dried
DNA and red blood cells stored within the dried marrow within the center. I
think LV had many years to do significant research into grave digging to see
how to extract life from the graveyards, so that he could make use of it to
make spells to cheat death, even if the life one would lead would be a
"Frankenstein" type life- bits and pieces of life from various sources, even
if the end product meant that very little of the new living material was
once the real "you".

Even if some of the spells require some "fresh bits of life", again as we
see in that graveyard scene with Wormtail's hand and Harry's blood, still
there would be great advantage to the Dark Lord to keep himself alive, and
perhaps his loyal followers too, if he had perfected the technique for
later. I see him as sort of a "Jack Kevorkian"- a studier of death and
things surrounding it. People have often kidded about "capturing youth and
bottling some of it for use later in life", and I can really see Lord
Voldemort taking this idea seriously- capturing the life of that of his
victims that he would torture for information, so that their deaths could be
of some use to him later. I don't think the only items that we will see to
capture death are "horcruxes", for those are only the items that split his
own soul, but rather, I think there are many vessels still containing the
"life" of others he had murdered. Maybe one of those vessels even contain
bits of life from Lilly and James, for LV was at his height of power at the
time of those murders. If the process was automatically triggered, then it
would have gone off even if LV himself had been killed. I think we will see
Harry stumble upon a rather gruesome "lab" or "experimentation" location
hidden somewhere in his quest to get all the Horcruxes, a lab with "death
relics" all in various stages of effectiveness- from those that others had
created long, long ago in their studies, to new ones that LV had been
experimenting with.

Shelley