James and Intent

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187039

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "kleroy33" <kleroy33 at ...> wrote:
>
> > --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "jkoney65" <jkoney65@> wrote:
> >
> > > Lupin tells us that "Snape was a special case, I mean he
> > > never lost an opportunity to curse James, so you couldn't
> > > really expect James to take that lying down, could you?"
> >
> > > So we know that Snape was also a bully.
> 
> 
> I think it was a tit for tat battle.  It started on the train to Hogwarts the 1st year and escalated from there.
> 
> Initially Snape probably had the upper hand over James (we are told Snape came into Hogwarts with a lot of dark magic.)  I would think that over the course of their school life the battle between these two just continued to rise.
> 
> 
> kleroy33
>
Carol responds:

Sirius Black, not exactly an objective witness, says that Severus Snape came to school knowing more curses than half the seventh years, but I suspect that's an exaggeration given what he said to Lily about not being able to do magic outside school once they turned eleven. In any case, the "curses" were most likely jinxes and hexes of the type that we see in his sixth-year Potions book (which he must have been writing in before sixth year since he had already invented Levicorpus as of SWM). With the exception of Sectumsempra, which he certainly had not yet invented at age eleven, none of the spells we see in that book (Levicorpus and its countercurse, Muffliato, Langlock, the toenail hex) is Dark magic.

However, I agree that he and James were evenly matched--in a fair fight, one-on-one. And I don't think that changed around the time of SWM. (Look at the adult Snape's duelling skills.) Sirius Black says that "he gave as good as he got" in encounters with James after SWM, presumably in sixth or seventh year.

Carol, who seriously doubts that Severus was practicing Dark magic at age eleven