Secret Keeper: was:ChapDisc: DH 18, The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 182775

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jerri/Dan Chase" <danjerri at ...>
wrote:
>
> 
> This one I find a bit of a stretch.  After all, it isn't as if this 
> question was sprung on her in an interview.  She put the question on 
> her web site as one of three for people to vote on, then had time to 
> consider when it looked like it was going to win.
> 
> Of course, this is my pet, first problem with DH.  She put the
secret  keeper question on her web site and chose to answer it when
she could  have avoided it.  She either gave an intentionally
misleading answer  or couldn't keep her ideas straight on this very
important issue for a  year.

Pippin:

Oh, it was definitely misdirection. But misdirection is fair, being
misleading isn't. It's a beautiful job, too, IMO.

She talks strictly about what happens to the information the
secret-keeper himself has, "it dies with them" and "Everybody in whom
they confided will *continue* (emphasis mine) to know the hidden
information, but nobody else." 

One might infer carelessly that there's no new secret-keeper but did
she say that? 

Never.

As we know now, the new secret keepers could tell new people about the
secret. But those new people could not be said to  *continue* to know
 <veg>.

Then JKR changes the subject to how the spell works, and gives us
information that only now, in the light of DH, tells us something
useful -- why James and Lily did not want to be their own secret-keepers.

"Even if one of the Potters had been captured, force fed Veritaserum
or placed under the Imperius Curse, they would not have been able to
give away the whereabouts of the other two. The only people who ever
knew their precise location were those whom Wormtail had told
directly, but none of them would have been able to pass on the
information."

Even if James and Lily were captured, they could not have been forced
to  give Harry away -- unless one of them was the secret-keeper.  


Pippin