The Prophecy From Voldemort’s POV (long)

[nkafkafi]

It's pretty amazing how many meanings we can read into these seven
lines, but in the last few days I've been thinking about a slightly
different angle. Lets look at the prophecy from Voldy's POV. Try to
forget for a moment that you know the second half, and look only at
the part that HE knows:

"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..."

To focus things even more, I'll make the (admittedly dangerous)
assumption that the two last subparts of the above are merely
identifiers of "the one". So assuming for a moment both Voldy and DD
correctly identified Harry, the part that Voldy knows all boils down,
in the end, to: 

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches".

Read that again. ALL of Voldemort's strategy since before GH and
throughout the series has been based on this single sentence. And of
course on his guess regarding the part that he doesn't know, which
apparently wasn't a very good guess. 

If we are ready to take DD's word, he tells us several additional
things about Voldemort's view of the prophecy. First, it seems that
before GH Voldy didn't see the prophecy as a threat at all. DD words
are: "He set out to kill you when you were still a baby, believing he
was fulfilling the terms of the prophecy. He discovered, to his cost,
that he was mistaken, when the curse intended to kill you backfired."

Several paragraphs later DD stresses again that, until GH, Voldy
didn't realize that baby Harry could be dangerous: "He <the
eavesdropper> heard only the beginning, the part foretelling the birth
of a boy in July to parents who had thrice defied Voldemort.
Consequently, he could not warn his master that to attack you would be
to risk transferring power to you, and marking you as his equal. So
Voldemort never knew that there might be danger in attacking you, that
it might be wise to wait, to learn more. He did not know that you
would have power the Dark Lord knows not." 

DD also tells us about Voldemort's current guess regarding the second
half of the prophecy: "And so, since his return to his body, and
particularly since your extraordinary escape from him last year, he
has been determined to hear that prophecy in its entirety. This is the
weapon he has been seeking so assiduously since his return: the
knowledge of how to destroy you."

I know I'm not the only member who has a problem with these words of
DD, "the knowledge of how to destroy you." The second half doesn't
seem to contain any special knowledge how to destroy Harry. But Voldy
thinks it does.

To summarize the above, it seems that Voldy first treated the prophecy
as a chance rather than a threat. He didn't imagine that "the power"
is something he doesn't know. When he went to GH he believed that he
was actually "fulfilling the terms of the prophecy". He seemed to
think that the other half, the part that he didn't hear, says that the
Dark Lord will kill Harry. After GH and even after the graveyard this
view didn't change much. The difference is only that now he thinks the
other part contains special instructions how to kill Harry, and that
he failed several times just because he didn't follow these instructions.

Now, why would Voldy think that the prophecy is a chance rather than a
threat? There aren't many possibilities here. We're talking about a
single sentence. Look at it again with my added emphasis:

"The ONE with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches".

Of course this is a chance rather than a threat. This is wonderful. We
are talking about a person that his greatest ambition in life is to
become immortal, and now he's told that the only one who can kill him
is a mere baby. Get rid of this single baby, and no one (not even "the
only one he ever feared") will be able to kill him. To Voldy this
prophecy must have sounded like the greatest Christmas present ever.  

But wait a minute. This is too much of a coincidence for me. A man
with a great dream to become immortal, and no qualms about killing
people since he was sixteen, suddenly receives a notice that he can
become immortal if he just kills one additional baby. Nope, this is a
bit too good to happen by chance, or even by the author's hand.
Someone must have made it happen, and the one with the motive is Voldy
himself.

Besides, he seems to rely too much on this single "one". If it said
"the ONLY one with the power" I could understand why he's so sure. But
remember Voldy never heard the part about "either must die by the hand
of the other". So how can he be so certain that only Harry can kill
him? Perhaps because the prophecy didn't come as a great surprise to
him. Because he made it happen. What, after all, were all these
experiments about?

In the Edinburgh Book Festival, 
http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/news_view.cfm?id=80
when JKR presented her famous question why Voldemort didn't die in GH,
she said: 
 
"At the end of Goblet of Fire he says that one or more of the steps
that he took enabled him to survive. You should be wondering what he
did to make sure that he did not die — I will put it that way. I don't
think that it is guessable. It may be — someone could guess it — but
you should be asking yourself that question, particularly now that you
know about the prophecy. I'd better stop there or I will really
incriminate myself."

Note this subtle nuance. She didn't say "particularly now that you
know the prophecy" but "now that you know ABOUT the prophecy" I've
been suspecting for some time before the Edinburgh Book Festival that
the important thing about the prophecy is not so much the words
themselves, but what Voldy thinks they are.

So maybe Voldemort's experiments were about binding his death to
people. This can be a way to avoid death: bind your death to a certain
person, so he's the only one who can kill you, then make sure he can't
kill you. Maybe the DEs were Voldemort's first guinea pigs. He binds
his death to one of them, then he makes them unable to kill him, by
installing them with great fear and reverence to the Dark Lord. But
there must have been problems with these early experiments. He
probably found that this binding didn't survive the death of the bound
person (or he would have no qualms killing a DE to ensure his own
immortality). Perhaps these bindings were limited in time. Voldy
needed to find out how to bind his death to a person for good, so that
once he kills this person, he can't die anymore. And perhaps he found
that the only way to do it is to bind his death to a certain unknown
person. Perhaps only to a yet unborn person. The BIG spells always
come with these small, annoying clauses. 

So Voldy conducts this big binding spell that will finally make him
death proof, and the spell succeeds, only he doesn't know who the
bound person is. Until he hears the first half of the prophecy, and
everything becomes clear. Or so he thinks.   

But if Harry is the only person who can kill Voldemort, and this was a
result of an experiment Voldemort had done, why indeed didn't
Voldemort die in GH?

Because the terms of the prophecy (and probably the terms of the
original binding spell) say the Dark Lord can only die by Harry's
hand. Had Voldemort died in GH it would have been by his own hand. So
he didn't.   

Am I making sense?


Neri