Dumbledore's age

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 176782

Zanooda wrote:
> <snip> Somehow I never thought that LV and GG dueled only five 
years after they parted ways.  They were both only seventeen when 
they met, and it seems unlikely that by age twenty-two GG already had
 so much power, and built an army, and made bad things happen in 
Europe :-). Besides, first he spent some time looking for the Elder
wand, I suppose.
> 
> DD didn't say anything to Harry about "five years", it's from Rita's
book: "... Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, 
fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald"
(p.359). I take it that they were five years after GG made his move 
against continental wizarding society, not five years after Ariana's 
death.
<snip canon support>
> That's why I believe that "five years" were the years the wizarding
society spent "pleading" with DD, according to Rita, and not the 
years that passed between Ariana's death and the duel.

Carol responds:

I agree completely, but since you've covered the canon, I'd like to
approach the subject from a different angle.

I think that the "five years" are supposed to coincide roughly with
World War II, which began in Europe in 1939, Perhaps the pleas to DD
to do something about Grindelwald began shortly after that, in or
around 1940. And if we consider Hitler's rise to power as analogous
with Grindelwald's (I'm not looking for exact parallels here), Hitler
began his political career with speech-making in 1921 and by 1933 was
Chancellor of Germany. Perhaps the young Grindelwald, after obtaining
the Elder Wand and presumably becoming its master, was sidetracked for
awhile by a futile search for the other two Hallows. 

Once GG realized that he was not going to find them, perhaps he used
his considerable charisma to obtain a following and rose to power in
the continental European WW in a way similar to Hitler's rise to power
(which began in his early thirties). We know that Grindelwald
eventually built prisons, which must mean that he had seized power of
some sort of wizarding government (the German MoM?). By that time, he
would have been enough of a threat for the British WW to fear that his
power would expand to Britain and begin to appeal to DD for help.  

If we compare his rise to power with Voldemort's, Voldie disappeared
for a long time (IIRC, it's ten year from Hepzibah Smith's murder to
his application for the DADA position), during which time he was
apparently making Horcruxes and gathering his old school chums to
become the first DEs. What else he did (consorting with the worst of
our kind, DD says somewhere) is unclear. Clearly, he wasn't
apprenticing himself to Grindelwald, who was already in prison. In any
case, it took another dozen years or so for him to show himself and
openly recruit a new generation of DEs. He left school in 1945 and VW1
didn't begin until ca. 1970. That's thirty-five years of
power-building and Dark magic practice and whatever else Voldie did to
prepare himself to take over the WW (or at least, the British WW).

Although Grindelwald wasn't preoccupied with his own immortality and
Horcrux-making, he could have spent a similar amount of time preparing
his own rise to power, practicing Dark magic, gathering followers,
making speeches, getting himself elected to a powerful position,
before making his bid to control the European WW and building those
prisons. I assume that, like Hitler, he'd been in power quite a while
before the British WW began to feel the threat and pressure DD to do
something about it. Whether Dumbledore hesitated because of his former
friendship or for some other reason is unclear, but that hesitation
was certainly during the last years of Grindelwald's reign of terror
and not from anything related to Ariana's death.

All speculation, of course.

Carol, who sees *lots* of annoying mathematical errors and
inconsistencies in JKR's books, especially DH, but does not consider
the five-year wait to fight Grindelwald to be one of them