Professor Trelawney

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 189562

Allan wrote:
>
> She only got it right twice in her life. I think Professor Dumbledore kept her at Hogwarts to protect her... if she were living outside she would have been killed by Voldemort.  He would have believed she was the real thing and consider her a threat.  But she was not. Dumbledore knew that and that is why she was not allowed to leave Hogwarts in HP OP.  That is what I think.  Any thoughts.

Carol responds:
I'm guessing that you mean the two prophecies, which she didn't know that she made. I think, though, that she really could "see," at least some of the time; she just couldn't interpret what she saw. For example, she saw a big black dog in the tea leaves and interpreted it as a Grim, but (as you say in another post), it was really Sirius. Nevertheless, she "saw" the dog (which Ron, IIRC, thought was a hippo). More important, she saw death and disaster coming nearer and nearer as she read the cards in HBP, but she rejected her own interpretation. Maybe she's the Neville of the faculty: all she needs is confidence and the courage of her convictions (and a little common sense). Otherwise, she appears to be another Lockhart--a failure and a phony--the difference being that she never deliberately hurts another person (or being), not even "the usurping nag" she hopes that DD will fire.

BTW, for what it's worth (probably nothing), Trelawny (or Trelawney) is a Cornish name, the only one I'm aware of in the book. (I know because one of the poet Shelley's friends and "biographers" was a Cornish adventurer with that surname.)

I agree that Voldemort would have killed Trelawney (after first invading her mind as driving her mad) had DD not kept her at Hogwarts even after Umbridge fired her. Despite wishing at one point to remove Divination from the curriculum, he was protecting not one but two Divination teachers in HBP!

Carol, who likes JKR's joke of making Trelawney literally farsighted