Some questions on the series as a whole ...
Carol
justcarol67 at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 5 21:17:45 UTC 2008
No: HPFGUIDX 181906
Shelley wrote:
> In Deathly Hallows, we get a further answer. (I don't have my book
handy for the chapter and exact quote.) In Voldemort's memory of the
killing night, he says something to the effect of "he knew he couldn't
stay in that home in the broken state he was in", and so that answer
is correct- there was no "body" to be found could verify that
Voldemort died, because Voldemort himself decided to leave the house
before he was discovered to be broken. This was the basis for people
saying that he wasn't dead, but would be back one day. But, everyone
knew that his reign of terror had stopped, and those who were spying
on the faithful Death Eaters knew even they were searching for their
leader, with no luck. Even they didn't know where he went. They were
confused, because they were now leaderless.
>
Carol:
If you mean that he left the scene in his own body, I don't think so.
I mean, I think that Vapromort left his body at Godric's Hollow. His
soul was, in his own words (GoF), *ripped* from his body.
The quote you're looking for in in "Bathilda's Secret":
"And then he broke. He was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and
he must hide himself, not here in the rubble of the ruined house,
where the child was trapped and screaming, but far away" (DH Am. ed. 345).
I take his inability to stay there to mean that he couldn't return to
his *broken* body and had to seek refuge somewhere that had available
bodies (snakes and small animals) to possess. We know that he has no
body when Quirrell encounters him, and he's revaporized when he leaves
Quirrell's body. He remains in that state, strong enough to possess
snakes and small animals but otherwise helpless, until Wormtail finds him.
The Death Eaters, as we learn in the graveyard scene in GoF, knew that
Voldemort had taken measures to make himself immortal (measures which,
the older DEs would know, altered his appearance greatly). But only
Bellatrix and her team (the Lestrange brothers and Rabastan) seem to
have believed that those measures succeeded. Until informed otherwise
by DD, the young Snape thinks him dead. In "Spinner's End," Snape
lists a group of others, including Lucius Malfoy, Yaxley, the Carrows,
and the quasi-DE Greyback, who also believed LV to be dead.)
I can't imagine the whole WW (other than the loyal DEs) celebrating
the seeming death of Voldemort unless they had an identifiable body as
evidence of his destruction, or the DEs believing him dead without
similar evidence. (It's not clear to what extent their Dark Marks
faded, but the fading must have been significant if not complete.) Had
his body not been at Godric's Hollow, the MoM would have only DD's
word that Voldemort himself had killed the Potters and tried to kill
Harry. (The only other indication would be the absence of a Dark Mark,
which would have meant that DEs did it, hardly sufficient evidence
that baby Harry had somehow thwarted the Dark Lord himself.)
My own reading is that the repelled AK burst out of Harry's forehead,
creating the lightning-shaped cut, and its renewed force ripped
Voldemort to pieces, leaving him with no inhabitable body, including
his own corpse. (He seems not to have even considered possessing
Baby!Harry. Had he done so, he would probably have encountered the
piece of his own soul that had entered, as I read now read it, through
the cut on Harry's forehead).
The problem is, of course, how DD could convince anyone that
Voldemort, despite evidence to the contrary, wasn't dead (without
going into the matter of Horcruxes, that is). Slughorn would have
suspected it, and Hagrid seems to have concluded that "there wasn't
enough human in him to die," but despite Hagrid's claim that "most
people" didn't think LV was dead, I think he's mistaken. The original
Order members (those who still survived) would be among the few to
hold that belief, IMO. Fudge only believes (or half-believes, given
his unwillingness to believe that LV has returned) that Voldemort is
still alive because "Dumbledore says he is" (HBP Am. ed. 8).
Note that Harry is the only Wizard who's ever survived an AK;
Voldemort is never given credit for doing so, which suggests to me
that his body was destroyed, "broken" by the force of the rebounded
AK, which seems also to have partially blown up the house. (the
alternative is that his body was vaporized, but how would anyone know
that he had killed the Potters if that were the case? Wormtail wasn't
about to report it. And how would anyone know that he hadn't just
walked away, whole and unharmed, when he failed to kill Harry? How
would they even know that the scar on Harry's forehead was from an AK
that failed to kill him? Why would anyone believe DD, the only person
who could provide that information, if there were no body to identify?
Carol, noting that the SS/PS evidence seems to suggest that LV has
merely disappeared (McGonagall's word), but the later evidence,
notably GoF and DH, suggests that he appeared to be dead
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