Another thing (was JKR, the female and facism)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 179146


Lealess wrote: 
> Trelawney... we speculated for years about her being at Hogwarts as
Dumbledore's way of protecting her.  Then she's at Hogwarts under the
management of the Death Eaters for a whole school year, seemingly
untouched by them.  

Carol responds:
Under the management of Severus Snape, rather. I expect he made sure
that the classes other than those run by the Carrows (who probably
didn't know about the connection between Trelawney and the Prophecy as
they weren't at the MoM and Snape's not about to tell them) ran as
normally as possible. McGonagall would probably have kept an eye on
Trelawney, too. At any rate, Snape can't do anything about the DE-run
MoM's decision to put the Carrows in charge of discipline, but I
expect he ran a tight ship otherwise, doing whatever he could to
prevent the Carrows from taking over completely and keeping out any
other DEs via sealed-up passages and so on. Dumbledore expects Snape
to protect the students (not completely, but to minimize the damage).
I suspect he protected Trelawney as well, considering that she's alive
and well and tossing crystal balls at the end of the book. (How much
does one of those things weigh, anyway?)

Lealess:
At the end, she's lobbing crystal balls at them (are crystal balls
that easy to find, and that incidental to her?  I would have gone with
full sherry bottles, myself).

Carol responds:

Ah. That one I can answer canonically. Her shelves were filled with
them (along with hundreds of teacups):  "The shelves running around
the circular walls [of Trelawney's classroom] were crammed with
dusty-looking feathers, stubs of candles, many packs of tattered
playing cards, countless silvery crystal balls, and a huge array of
teacups" (PoA 102 Am. ed.). It's in "Talons and Tea Leaves" if you
have the Bloomsbury edition. 
> 
Lealess:
> I guess that Voldemort just dropped the idea of finding out the
contents of the Prophecy because he had a new obsession, which none of
his Death Eaters even had a clue about, even though they had the
wandmaker captive in the Malfoy dungeon for ... how long?
><snip>

Carol responds:
I agree that he had a new obsession, but also, he'd rid himself of
"the only one he ever feared," whom he believes has been killed on his
orders, and he's ready to take over the MoM and presumably, from
there, the WW, when the little detail of Harry's wand attacking him on
its own returns his focus to Ollivander and the problem of the brother
wands (which he thought would be solved by using Lucius Malfoy's wand
against Harry's). The Prophecy can presumably wait until he has the
proper wand, and when he learns about the "unbeatable" Elder Wand, the
Prophecy apparently ceases to matter (or else it can wait--the
stealing of his Horcruxes puts another crimp in his plans, making it
necessary to kill Harry sooner rather than later, in his view).

As for how long he's had Ollivander captive, that we can answer. He
disappears at about the same time as Florean Fortescue (another loose
plot thread), between the end of OoP and the beginning of HBP (the
night of the second Friday in July for all four opening chapters if my
calculations are correct) and "Malfoy Manor" occurs during Easter
vacation (it appears to be a March Easter). So Ollivander is
Voldemort's captive for a little more than a year and nine months
(early to mid-July 1996 to late March 1998). (In RL, Easter fell on
April 12 in 1998, but JKR seems not to have looked up that bit of
information.) Of that time, Ollivander spends at least nine months
(mid-to late July 1997, the time frame of "The Rise of Lord
Voldemort") to late March 1998 in the Malfoys' secret chamber beneath
the drawing room (mentioned by Draco back in CoS and apparently not
discovered by Mr. Weasley either time that he searched the house for
Dark artifacts because Harry forgot to mention it. At least *that*
detail found its way into DH!)

Carol, who thinks that, all in all, Trelawney was a lot better off
with Snape as headmaster than she was under Umbridge and no worse off
than she was under Dumbledore