Lily's Patronus (WAS: Re: Patronus question again)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187206

Magpie wrote:
> 
> > I think it's obviously a slight mistake of wording from Harry and JKR. 
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> Well, if you trust JKR's interviews :-), she *did* say that Lily's Patronus was a doe. Unfortunately, I must run now and can't get you a quote, but I'll do it in the evening :-).
>
Carol responds:
Actually, the kid asking the question spoke about Lily's and James's Patronus being a doe and a stag, but JKR's answer relates to Patronuses sometimes changing to reflect the person you love. IOW, she didn't bother to correct the kid since *Harry's* stag = James and *Snape's* doe = Lily. I quoted the interview somewhere upthread, but I'm not about to try to trace it using this forum's search engine!

But JKR does, occasionally, seem to get Patronuses and Animagi confused.

BTW, someone said that DEs don't use Patronuses and they're not taught at Hogwarts, but I think that should be revised to DEs don't use Patronuses *to communicate* (they use their Dark Marks). For all we know, they might use them for protection against Dementors, which had not yet gone over to Voldemort's side at the time of his return. And Umbridge, a DE associate, could cast one (albeit not as powerful as Harry's). Lupin says that the Patronus charm is advanced magic "well above the Ordinary Wizarding level," but that doesn't mean it's not taught to, say, seventh-year NEWT-level DADA students.

Side note: If Dumbledore actually taught Snape to communicate using a Patronus, he would have seen that it was a doe unless he did so before Lily died. And since DD knew about Snape's love for Lily, Snape had no reason *not* to use it to communicate with him.

And I don't think that Sirius Black would have laughed at Snape's Patronus, which was powerful and beautiful, which Snape must have used to communicate with him both before and after he realized that Harry must have gone to the MoM. You'd think that Lupin, of all people, would figure out its significance, but clearly he didn't. Both in HBP and DH, he thinks that Snape hated both Potters and murdered Dumbledore.

Anyway, I agree with Magpie that Harry's reference to the doe as his mother's Patronus is a slip of some kind, whether on Harry's part or JKR's. He couldn't have known what his mother's Patronus was, and a Patronus is a spirit guardian that sometimes takes a symbolic form representing a loved one but with the possible exception of McGonagall, never represents the person himself.

Carol, thinking that "mother's" for "mother" could be a copyediting error even if it appears in both books because it's the type of correction a copyeditor would make thinking of grammar rather than the sense of the passage--or a correction suggested by a word-processing program that JKR unthinkingly accepted