Prophecies and Chosen Ones

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186811

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius@> wrote:
> >
> > > Alla:
Zara wrote:
> > <snip> But Rowling did try to fool us and throw in a twist. Did you know Harry was not going to die? The Prophecy, after all, does not state that Harry is the one who WILL defeat Voldemort, just that he has the power to do so. Perhaps it was by letting Voldemort kill him, his final Horcrux. ;-)
> > 
> > It did not fool me, but I did not worry much about the Prophecy and it was not the source of my certainty.
> 
Montavilla47 responded:
> 
> The whole fun of having a prophecy in a story is having it come true in an unexpected way.  For example, the prophecies about Macbeth promised that he was safe until Birnum Wood came to Dunsinane (I apologize if I'm misspelling any of that), and that "none of woman born" could harm him.
> 
> Of course, we get the wood coming to Dunsinane in an entirely unexpected way, and we have Macduff's story of being "untimely ripped" from his mother's womb.
> 
> And then there's Oedipus, whose parents try to kill him to avoid his prophecy, only to create the conditions for the prediction to come true.
> 
Carol responds:
In a sense, JKR is following this tradition. The Prophecy is certainly ambiguous and it's activated by someone trying to thwart it (in this case, Voldemort). I'm not sure that she succeeded in making it come true in an unexpected way, though, at least not as successfully as Shakespeare and Sophocles did. (Sophocles, in any case, was working with traditional material; I'm not sure how much he changed or added with regard to that prophecy.) JKR's Prophecy is longer and more complex. I'm not sure what model, if any, she was working from, but in any case, she subverts the tradition by having Dumbledore treat the Prophecy with skepticism (while nevertheless taking care to protect and teach the Prophecy Boy until it was time for him to fulfill it).

As someone coming to the HP books after a lifetime of reading and rereading LOTR, I found his skepticism disconcerting at best. Of course, I didn't want events to be predetermined. What fun is that? The characters become mere puppets. But a prophecy should be a prophecy, and words should have power (IOW, there should be a good reason not to say Voldemort's name, as there finally is in DH). JKR is clearly trying to subvert that tradition, yet she also wants the Prophecy to come true. Trying to have her cake and eat it, too, apparently.

Montavilla47:
> I would have liked to have an explanation for the prophecy--

Carol responds:
We do get an explanation for some of its elements. I think we need to look at the whole thing again, not just the single line that Harry reduces it to.

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies..."

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord" is clearly Harry (once Voldemort has chosen him and activated the Prophecy). Parents who have "thrice defied him" is, admittedly, not explained, but merely joining the Order would have constituted one defiance and we can suppose for the sake of argument that they actively battled Death Eaters twice before Harry was conceived and/or born. "Born as the seventh month dies" is, of course, the basis for narrowing down the Prophecy child to Harry and Neville and perhaps ultimately Harry. (I know that DD says LV chose the Half-Blood over the Pure-blood as having more in common with him, but July 31 is also a shade closer than July 30 to the "death" of the seventh month.

"The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal" is also explained. LV literally marks Harry with the scar, identifying him to all and sundry in the WW as "the Boy Who Lived" but also "marks" him as his "equal" in a figurative sense by giving him the powers from the soul fragment, Parseltongue and a window into LV's soul and mind, powers without which Harry probably could not have defeated him. (After hearing the Prophecy, Harry regards himself as a "marked man" in another sense, that of someone marked for death, as he certainly has been by Voldemort since before he was born.) "He will have power the Dark Lord knows not" has probably been clear from the beginning and becomes more so when Harry drives Voldemort from his mind through the power of love. We've had the motif of love as ancient magic and the power of self-sacrificial love since SS/PS, and, of course, it's the power of love that, in complicated ways, enables Harry to destroy the soul bit in the scar and survive the ordeal.

Since the last lines repeat the first, that leaves only the two crucial lines, one of which tends to be forgotten because Harry himself never repeats it (probably thinking that it's self-evident but possibly just considering it too painful to think about), "Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives."

Montavilla 47:
["Neither can live while the other survives"] only works if you use the word "live" to mean "live a full, happy life." And it only works for Harry, because Harry's the one who has to get rid of Voldemort before he can start enjoying things like snogging. 

Carol responds:
I used to think that, but now I'm pretty sure that the line had nothing to do with living or surviving in daily life. We can't ignore the previous line, "Either must die at the hand of the other," which obviously refers to the final confrontation though "either" is ambiguous and could mean either "one" or "both." This line allows three possible outcomes: both can die, somehow killing each other, which might well have happened if Harry had fought back rather than allowing Voldemort to "kill" him; Voldemort can die at Harry's hand (which sort of happened though Harry didn't kill him; he died from his own rebounding curse); or Harry can die and Voldemort can survive (which would have happened, I think, if Nagini hadn't still been alive when Harry sacrificed himself). The only impossible outcome is for both to survive the final battle "*for* neither can live while the other survives." IOW, "neither can live while the other survives" is linked to "either must did at the hand of the other" by the conjunction "for" indicating a cause/effect relationship between them. Put in simple English, one must kill the other (or both must kill each other) *because* "neither can live while the other survives" the final battle. IOW, only one (or neither) can survive. Once the Horcruxes are destroyed, there can be only one survivor.

Maybe that's not what JKR intended, but it's the only interpretation I can come up with that makes sense (despite its meaning apparently being crystal clear to Harry, who said after hearing the Prophecy the first time," "It means one of us will have to kill the other, doesn't it?" (quoted from memory) and from that point until his trip into Snape's memories thought it meant that he must either murder or be murdered.

The only hard part for JKR was how to have Harry survive the destruction of his soul bit and come back to have LV die by his hand without being "murdered." He needed to be hoist with his own petard again, this time for good.

Montavilla47: 
> Except for getting paged all the time by his Death Eaters, Voldemort's existence post-GoF would have been much the same whether or not Harry was alive.  He was having a high time killing people and taking over the world.

Carol responds:

I disagree. Killing Harry was still his top priority, and had he succeeded in GoF or DH, *then* he would have had a "high time killing people and taking over the world." The Priori Incantatem in GoF didn't matter quite as much as we expected because he first thought that the Prophecy would tell him how to kill Harry, and when that failed, he kidnapped Ollivander, found out about the twin cores, and tried to get around the problem by borrowing Lucius's wand. Had he not found the "right" Harry and chased after him, triggering the holly wand's attack on him, he probably wouldn't have gone all over Europe trying to find the Elder Wand. He would have tried to lay yet another trap for Harry while continuing his plans for the Ministry takeover. But Harry's wand's spell triggered yet another inquisition of Ollivander, leading him on the Elder Wand quest, which distracted him from his quest for world dominance in the search for an instrument with which to do it (and, of course, to kill Harry as well). Had it not been for Harry's wand's attack on him, he would never have questioned the power of his own. (And if Harry hadn't dropped the photo of Grindelwald at Godric's Hollow, or had never gone there, LV might still have been searching for the Elder Wand when he discovered that Harry had stolen a Horcrux.)

At any rate, only if he'd succeeded in killing Harry on one of those occasions or if he'd never heard of the Elder Wand (IMO) would he have sat down to enjoy the Ministry takeover and begun the sort of rule we see him contemplating in "The Dark Lord Rising." Instead, he lets the DEs enjoy their takeover while he searches for the Elder Wand, killing about five people on the way (including an innocent woman and, presumably, her children) wanting to be interrupted only if they caught Harry Potter and not for mundane Ministry matters.

Carol, who supposes that Britain was just as well off with LV out of the country and preoccupied but still wishing that JKR had found some other way than the Elder Wand for Harry to defeat LV