GoF CH 27-29 Post DH look/ Snape and Harry redux

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182248


> Carol:
> <SNIP>
> Not one of those people
> was killed because of the Prophecy. They were killed because the Order
> members were being targeted. the Potters were being targeted for the
> same reason. And had it not been for the Prophecy (and Snape's going
> to DD for help), they would not have had the protection of the
> Fidelius Charm (breached because of sirius Black's bad advice and
> Peter Pettigrew's perfidy).
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Oh, I see, so are you suggesting that Snape telling the prophecy is a 
> GOOD thing now that increased Potters chances for survival? No, 
> seriously, I do not want to develop straw man, but what you just 
> argued reads to me exactly as I described.

Carol responds:
Please don't misunderstand me. Of course, the Prophecy was not a good
thing for the Potters. However, I do think that their chances for
survival would have increased if they had followed Dumbledore's
suggestion of making him (rather than sirius, much less Pettigrew, who
wasnhadn't yet been suggested) their secret Keeper. It's a chain of
unintended events, for which neither Snape nor any other one person is
responsible. Had it not been for the Prophecy (and Snape's coming to
Dumbledore to ask DD to protect Lily, who was in danger because of
his--Snape's--actions), the Potters's chances for survival would have
been no better and no worse than those of other Order members. 

However, because of the events at Godric's Hollow, which occurred as
the result of many people's choices and actions, not Snape's alone,
the killing of the Order members stopped. Why? Because the person
ordering the killings was apparently dead, and the leaderless DEs
(except for Bellatrix and her little gang) were more concerned with
keeping themselves out of prison than with continuing their career of
murder, torture, and coercion.


> 
> I snipped the people who were killed because they were order members, 
> but I also brought the names alive order members. I submit that 
> telling the prophecy was what tipped the scales and made Potters 
> **primary targets**. They IMO would not have needed that extra 
> protection and secret keeper or not, would have at least a chance to 
> live.

CaroL
And I submit that those people were killed before the Potters but
after the Prophecy was known. All of the people named, including the
Potters, were killed within a short time after the photograph was
taken, and the Prophecy had been revealed considerably more than
fifteen months before the Potters' deaths. (It could have been as much
as nine months before Harry was born, but, of course, LV didn't know
until Harry and Neville were born who the potential Prophecy boys
were.) Meanwhile, according to Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew had been
giving information about the Order members for a year, and all those
people were killed *because they were Order members* at nearly the
same time that the Potters were killed, or perhaps at about the same
time that they went into hiding. The McKinnons and all those others
had no chance. Why should the Potters do better than the Prewitt
brothers, who between them took five DEs to kill?

You don't seem to understand that Voldemort was to all intents and
purposes immortal because of the Horcruxes. If he hadn't been stopped
by the backfiring AK, he would have kept on killing Order members, or
having them killed by his DEs, until they were all dead. He was
determined to take over the WW, and he would not have let them stand
in his way.


> 
> Carol:
> <SNIP>
> And how the war could have been won
> and Voldie defeated without Voldie creating his own nemesis, I don't
> know. Dumbledore could not have done it, and if he couldn't, who
> could? <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Dumbledore could not do it, is not a fact to me at all, but only 
> speculation. I so do not want to jump to HBP now, but I will take a 
> look and find it if nobody could.
> 
> I am under very strong impression that Dumbledore CAN speaks 
> Parseltongue from HBP. I aso seem to remember that Ron was able to 
> mimic Parseltongue words, no? Or are there other reasons you suggest 
> that Dumbledore could not do it? Because the fact that he did not do 
> it, does not suggest to me that he could not.

Carol responds:
Dumbledore had fifty years to find the Chamber of Secrets. He knew who
had done it. If he did not search for it, he would have been utterly
irresponsible, especially once he became headmaster. Professor Binns
says that it had been searched for many times and had not been found. 

You are probably recalling the scene in HBP in which Harry hears
Morfin Gaunt speaking Parseltongue and DD says, "You understand what
he's saying Harry, don't you?" or something like that. At that point,
Harry realizes tha Morfin is speaking Parseltongue, which Bob Ogden
clearly doesn't undersatnd. Dumbledore never states that *he*
understands Parseltongue. He does, however, have a clear grasp of the
situation and can have no difficulty guessing that Morfin is saying
something along the lines of "You're not welcome [here]" (or "Get off
our property" or some similar order or threat.

We're never told that Dumbledore speaks Parseltongue. It seems to be
an inherited trait, not an acquired skill. Harry speaks Parseltongue
because Voldemort does. He doesn't learn it. It's in the soul bit. Nor
does Tom Riddle learn it. He and the Gaunts simply know it, either
from birth or from the time they can speak or from their first
encounter with a snake. It seems more like an instinctive response
than a language (except that the Gaunts use it to communicate without
being understood by outsiders). Who could possibly have taught
Dumbldeore to speak Parseltongue? Apparently, no previous Heir of
Slytherin appeared at Hogwarts (I doubt that the Gaunts attended). And
there wouldn't be any books teaching the grammar and basic vocabulary
of Parseltongue. I'm not even sure that the hisses could have been
rendered in a written language.

> 
> So, yeah, I think somebody could do it, I really do not think that it 
> matters who. IMO.

Carol responds:
And there we differ. Harry is the hero of the books because he can do
what no one else, not even the greatest Wizard of the age, Dumbledore,
could do. As Dumbledore says in "King's Cross," "You're a better man
than I am." Dumbledore yielded to the temptation of the Resurrection
Stone and even borrowed the Invisibility Cloak, knowing that it was a
Hallow and not telling the Potters. He was, as he says, worthy only to
use the Elder Wand, but not to kill with it. So when he dueled
Voldemort, whom he knew to be kept alive by Horcruxes in any case, he
didn't kill him. Had he not heard the Prophecy and attempted to kill
Voldemort, with or without the Elder Wand, he would probably have
vaporized him, but he could not have killed him. It would only have
been a matter of time before he returned. And he might have figured
out that there was at least one Horcrux, but without Harry and the
diary, he would never have known that there were six. (It's not just
Parseltongue; it's the scar, created through Lily's self-sacrifice,
that allows Harry access to Voldemort's thoughts and makes Harry the
Chosen One, "the one with the power to destroy the Dark Lord." And
Dumbledore, for all his power and intellect, does not have that gift.
Nor does his self-sacrifice have the same power as Harry's. Harry
faces Voldemort knowing that he must die for the soul bit in him to be
destroyed, and his self-sacrifice, combined with the drop of blood
that he shares with Voldemort, gives his self-sacrifice a power beyond
that of Dumbledore or or Lily. No one else in the WW has those powers.
To argue otherwise is to take away from harry's heroism, to say that
anyone could have done it.

I don't thinks so. The books are about Harry Potter, who, thanks to
events that happened when he was a child and the choices of seven
people (Snape, Dumbledore, the Potters, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew,
and, of course, Voldemort). Dumbledore could not have done what Harry
did even if he had somehow found and destroyed all the Horcruxes. No
one but Harry could have done it, not Neville, not the greatest
Wizards of the age (Amelia Bones and Mr. Crouch, for example, were
talented and powerful, but neither was a match for Voldemort. Only
Dumbledore could match his power and far outmatched his wisdom, but
Dumbledore, too, failed. He needed Harry. Could he have defeated LV by
himself, surely he would not have groomed and trained Harry and placed
him in grave danger for six years. 

> 
> 
> Carol:
> <SNIP>
> 
> The Prophecy would have to have been fulfilled in some other way,
perhaps with an adult Harry, but how he could have acquired special
powers and a soul bit without Lily's sacrifice, which depends
> on Snape's request to spare her, I don't know. it seems to me that
> events transpired in the only way they could have don to create "the
> one with the power to defeat the Dark Lord." <SNIP>
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Isn't divination a very imprecise branch of magic? Isn't it possible
that prophecy did not have to come true at all and somebody would 
have just discovered how to destroy horcruxes and that's it.

Carol:
I don't think so. If that were all it took, DD would no doubt have
sent Snape, his Dark Arts expert who had promised to do "anything," to
look for the Horcruxes. Instead, he counted on a boy who was not yet
seventeen when Dumbledore died. (Dumbledore had been looking for
years, at least since he figured out his multiple Horcrux theory after
the diary was destroyed, and managed to locate only one and a half (a
real one that shortened his life and a fake one whose protections
weakened him to the point of defenselessness). It took Harry's special
link with Voldemort to find most of the Horcruxes, and even to provide
a weapon capable of destroying them. (The only reason that the Sword
of Gryffindor could destroy the Horcruxes was that, because of Harry,
it had absorbed Basilisk venom.)

If there had been no Prophecy or no eavesdropper, Voldemort wouldn't
have gone to Godric's Hollow to thwart it and created his own nemesis.
Had the eavesdropper been anyone other than Snape, Lily would not have
been given a chance to live, imbuing her choice to die with the power
of ancient love magic. If Voldemort had heard the (partial) Prophecy
and chosen not to act, waiting for the "one with the power" to show
himself as an adult, or dismissing the whole thing as nonsense, there
would have been no Chosen One created by Voldemort himself. Voldemort
would have continued to wreak havoc until he was at least as powerful
as Grindelwald had been. With or without the Elder Wand, Dumbledore
couldn't stop him. I really don't see how anyone could. Which is why
Harry is so special and so important and the hero of the books.

Carol, giving the Chosen One credit for his unique abilities even
though he acquired them by accident from Voldemort as an unintended
consequence of many people's choices