Snape and Marauders WAS :Draco and Intent

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186923

Lealess wrote:
> Dumbledore assumed that Voldemort would act on it, certainly.  Dumbledore assumes/projects that Snape knew that, as well.  But was it a reasonable expectation?  I don't think we have enough facts about Voldemort's actions at this time, or how Snape experienced them, to assume that. Yes, the people in the Order defied Voldemort. Yes, Death Eaters were killing Order members in overwhelming numbers. Snape would not necessarily have connected those things with the prophecy, however.  Fighting the Order and Aurors was business as usual.  The prophecy was something else entirely.

Carol responds:
Of course, Voldemort couldn't do anything at all (except worry and ponder and fidget and make other plans, maybe beefing up the DEs' attacks on Order members as a preventive measure) until the end of July when (if he was thinking rationally), he might have consulted the Daily Prophet. He might have spent all that time (nine months, if it really happened on October 31, 1979) contemplating the meaning of the Prophecy. He would certainly have given it more thought that young Snape did. But, assuming that he figured out the identity of the two possible Prophecy boys as soon as he read the birth announcements for the last week of July in the Daily Prophet, he must have spent quite some time trying to figure out which one to choose, and he may have delayed telling Snape even then. It looks like late fall or wintertime again when Snape and DD meet on the hillside--certainly not August (unless summer in England/Scotland is unlike summer in most countries!). So in all that time (about a year), unless Snape also read the birth announcements in the Daily Prophet and started fearing for Lily, he probably didn't give the Prophecy much thought. It was just a job that he had done for Lord Voldemort, much like the job he did later for Dumbledore, in which he reported that Draco Malfoy had been assigned to kill DD. His concern in the first instance would have been for his master, not for the unknown "one with the power" and his family. He could not have known who that "one" would be (though he might have guessed that it would be the child of Order members who were being targeted, anyway) and, being at that time a loyal Death Eater, he wouldn't have cared for anything except the potential danger--a long time in the future, he must have thought--from an as-yet-unborn enemy. Not being Voldemort--superstitious, afraid of death, obsessed with his own safety and power--I doubt that he gave it another thought until he found out that Voldemort intended to kill the Potters. Then it became real--and personal.

(Side note: It took Voldemort an inordinate amount of time even after he'd decided to target the Potters. Couldn't he have killed them at any time before they went into hiding? Or did DD send them to Godric's Hollow as soon as Snape told him they were in danger, perhaps a whole year before they were killed? And, if so, why didn't he suggest the Fidelius Charm right away? Or, if he did, why did it take them so long to perform it, regardless of who they chose as SK? Meanwhile, Snape was doing "anything," risking his life to provide information to Dumbledore, and Peter was doing the opposite, protecting his own life by providing information on the Order (everyone but the Potters, apparently--maybe he had a shred of loyalty left?) for a whole year before the Potters were killed. Why did it take so long? It would make more sense plotwise for the Potters to have been killed when Harry was five months old than fifteen. It's just one of those annoying gaps, like Voldemort's two disappearances, that I can't provide a logical explanation for.

Lealess: 
> Dumbledore in the Prince's Tale did not even seem surprised that Snape relayed the prophecy to Voldemort. He only asked how much Snape told.  

Carol:
Right. And that surprises me since no one else seems to know that Snape was a Death Eater at that time. I doubt that he showed up to talk to DD in Death Eater's robes. So DD knew, somehow, that young Snape was a Death Eater (or at least knew that his friends Avery and Mulciber had become DES--they would have made no secret of it--so that would make Snape at least a DE associate) and yet he didn't stop him from reporting the part of the Prophecy that he had heard. But Snape only says that he reported all that he heard--he doesn't say how much that was. DD must know at what point the disturbance outside the door occurred. Essentially, the most he (and LV) could know was that "the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord" had by that time been "born as the seventh month dies" to "those who have thrice defied [the Dark Lord]"--nothing about the powers that "the one" would have or "mark[ing] him as his equal." That much DD made sure that LV didn't know.

Now the question is, why would Dumbledore (who ostensibly doesn't believe in prophecies) want LV to have this incomplete information. As others have asked, why didn't he Stun or Obliviate Snape? (Obviously, he couldn't recruit him to his own side then; neither DD nor Snape knew that the Potters would be involved.) Snape may not have known or cared that LV would attack and try to kill a whole family of Order members, or if he suspected that LV would act to preempt the Prophecy, it was, as you said, business as usual for him. But DD, knowing Tom Riddle since his childhood, knowing how he thought, would certainly have known that LV would at least try to kill the child and ought to have cared. The only way I can account for his inaction is by thinking that he must have believed that LV's acting to thwart the part of the Prophecy that he knew about would bring the part he didn't know about to fruition--i.e., it would cause Voldemort to create his own nemesis. He could not have known who the Prophecy boy would be or how that would happen (he certainly could not have anticipated that Snape would plead for Lily's life and that Voldemort would break his promise, enabling Lily to give Harry blood protection through her sacrifice). He must have thought, though, that it was the only way to vanquish Voldemort (who, I think he already knew or guessed from his changed appearance, had created at least one Horcrux)--"the greater good"--the possible deaths of parents already marked for death as Order members to create the means of defeating Voldemort. It sounds cold-blooded and calculating, a calculated risk to someone other than himself, but *if* he knew that Snape was a DE and would report what he had heard to Voldemort, there's no other way to account for his failure to stop him. And, sad to say, I think that would have been true if the DE had been Mulciber or Avery or Lucius Malfoy or even Bellatrix. Or would it? Did he see potential for remorse and repentance in Snape that he would not have seen in some other DE? Did he think that the Prophecy depended in some way on this particular young DE? Again, he couldn't have known any more than Snape did that Lily would be involved, so I'm back to his having a vague hope that the prophecy would somehow backfire on LV (as prophecies in mythology tend to do) if LV tried to thwart it.

So we have Snape, as DD later says, doing his job, with no idea that Lily Potter will be involved, and only coming to regret his action when he finds that she's being targeted, and DD apparently knowing somehow that Snape is a DE (though no one else seems to know it) and letting him reveal the partial Prophecy in the hope that it will be LV's undoing, regardless of consequences to the child and his parents. In this view of events, Snape is merely the messenger, a pawn in DD's plan, even though he must have known that at some point, perhaps soon, perhaps not, LV would go after "the one with the power." As far as he or LV knows, he *already* has the power. Only DD knows that he can acquire the power only *if* LV goes after him. So Snape is far from innocent (though he did not, as Harry later puts it, send LV after his parents), but Dumbledore is knowingly manipulative, knowingly putting innocent people at risk for his own ends, the "greater good."

Does he save lives by doing so? I think he does, actually. The WW has a fourteen-year respite (at the expense of the Potters' lives and Harry's messed-up childhood). But LV is vaporized, the DEs are arrested or go into hiding or claim the Imperius Curse, and no one else except the Longbottoms suffers from their cruelty for a long time. Voldie War I ends, and LV does not take over the MoM or the (British) WW; instead, he goes off to possess rats and snakes in Albania. Good, in short, comes out of evil, at least for the majority of witches and wizards, not to mention Muggles, and at least for the short term, while Harry grows up and LV recoups his strength.

DD (who claims not to understand or believe in divination despite having heard a real prophecy and despite acting as if he does believe it) could not have known exactly how events would fall out. He could only know (as Snape and LV did not) that "the Dark Lord would mark [the Prophecy Boy} as his equal" and that he would "have the power the Dark Lord knows not," which DD would know meant Love. He could not have anticipated coming to love the Prophecy Boy himself. He, like Snape, would only be an instrument for "the greater good."

Lealess wrote:
Dumbledore in The Lost Prophecy tell us that Snape only knew part of the prophecy, "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches..."  Vanquish merely means defeat.  Had Snape heard the bit about "either must die at the hand of the other," he might have been quicker to realize how Voldemort would have acted on the information.

Carol responds:
True, but LV didn't hear that part, either. Maybe, in LV's view, the only way to be "vanquished" was to be killed--which seems odd given that he'd already made all but one of his Horcruxes. Why not think that he was already (to borrow a phrase) the Master of Death and just ignore the Prophecy? Apparently, DD was counting on his paranoia and lack of logic. (What the logically-minded Snape thought, we can't know. Had it been me, I think I would have expected less panic and clearer thinking from the brilliant Lord Voldemort, who had already, as the DEs knew (though they didn't know how), gone farther toward defeating death than anyone before him had done.)

Lealess, quoting: 
> "You have no idea of the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realized how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy, Harry.  I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned --"
> 
> So, I think there's room for speculation on how Snape thought Voldemort would interpret the prophecy, if he thought about it at all.  I can imagine scenarios where he thought giving the information was a good thing, but those are speculation only.

Carol responds:
Ditto. I'm sure he thought that he was doing his duty as a loyal DE, just as he was doing his duty as Dumbledore's man to report that Draco Malfoy had orders to kill DD. The only difference is that he was concerned with the consequences to Draco as well as DD, whereas the unknown, unborn Prophecy child was a mere abstraction. What did it matter to young DE Snape if nameless, faceless people died if the result was a triumph for the Dark Lord and his servants? It's very different when one of the people facing danger has the name and face of the woman he loves. It's a wake-up call, and he spends the rest of his life atoning for that mistaken loyalty, that cold lack of forethought, that blindness to consequences, that indifference to the lives of nameless, faceless people that caused him to endanger the woman he loved--and to protect her son and continue to oppose Voldemort even when his and DD's efforts to protect Lily herself prove vain. 

Lealess: 
> We really don't know Snape's motivations for relaying the prophecy.

Carol responds:
Yes and no. I think we can take it on faith that, as DD said, he was a loyal DE reporting a matter that greatly concerned his master. But what he thought LV would do with that information, we don't know. As I said, I doubt that he gave it much thought until he found out that LV intended to kill the Potters, at which point it ceased to be a matter of no concern to him.

Lealess:
>  We do know that Dumbledore was not surprised.  Dumbledore tells Harry that Snape was essentially just doing his job as a Death Eater.  Let's assume, then, that Dumbledore was correct and did not blame Snape for doing his job, much as he wouldn't blame Snape for informing on the Death Eaters later, leading to the frustration of Voldemort's plans to grab the prophecy (until Harry stepped in), or failing to overcome his shortcomings to teach Harry Occlumency.  Expectations of human failings are all part of the game Dumbledore plays, and part of life.
> 
> Snape did not realize that Voldemort would target the Potters for death.  When Snape realized this, he took action with Voldemort to protect at least Lily, and then went to Dumbledore and swore his life in service to protect Lily and the rest of her family.  The only thing that disgusts Dumbledore is that Snape at the time was shortsighted, thinking only of saving Lily.  He doesn't blame Snape for telling the Prophecy.  Snape blames himself enough for that.

Carol responds:
Agreed, except that I wouldn't consider doing his job a human failing. The human failing was choosing the wrong job and giving his loyalty to the wrong person.

Lealess: 
> This is the biggest question for me: why did Dumbledore let Snape leave the Hogs Head without questioning or Obliviating him?  In The Lost Prophecy, Dumbledore seems to almost rub his hands together about the Special Powers bit of the prophecy, that "to attack you [Harry] would be to risk transferring power to you -- again marking you as his equal."  I guess we are back to Chess Master Dumbledore, selling out one generation for the promise of a champion in the next, a champion he didn't want to care about, moreover.

Carol:
Yes, that's how it sounds to me, too. Unless we consider them all just as pawns in JKR's plot, and I don't like that approach at all.

Carol, who does think that the events at Godric's Hollow made the WW a better place, not only during the fourteen years' respite but ultimately with the creation of "the Chosen One," but still finds the celebration of those events after the Potters' deaths disturbing