Dumbledore's Unspeakable Word.

[GulPlum]

A short one from me (for a change) to start the day :-)

At 08:47 13/06/05 , Eloise wrote:

<snip>

>I have to say, though, that it does seem very strange that no-one
>else in the WW ever threw themself in front of someone they wanted to
>save and that the protective power of such a sacrifice hadn't been
>noted before. I mean, James presumably essentially did the same
>thing, yet sacrificing himself didn't save Lily.

The crux for me is the "stand aside" bit. As his attitude towards Cedric 
showed, when Voldy's on the warpath to get an individual, he doesn't care 
about collateral damage. So why the hell didn't he simply blast Lily out of 
existence instead of giving her the *chance* to sacrifice herself? JKR is 
going to have to pull an extremely huge (and hopefully unfluffy) rabbit out 
of her hat to cover that discrepancy without it sounding ridiculous.

On the general point, however, I doubt that Voldy's ever gone after many 
kids in their parents' presence to give them a chance to sacrifice themselves.

<snip>

>BTW, are we assuming that we are going to *see* behind the door at
>some point? Because if we do, then we are going to have to see some
>kind of embodiment of whatever the power is and my betting is that
>cliche or not, it's going to have something to do with Lily.

As I implied last time, I consider an objective view of what happened that 
night to be as essential as a return the The Prank (TM) for the same 
reasons I proposed in that thread. JKR has deliberately kept the details 
away from us, and I personally don't spend too much time wondering about 
it: we'll all find out in due course.

This doesn't mean to say that I've not spent *any* time thinking about it, 
and I am convinced that Snape was there. Whether as a goodie or a baddie, I 
don't know, although I have a suspicion that events at GH are at least part 
of the reason that Dumbledore is so certain of Sevvie's loyalty. I like to 
think that for one reason or another, Snape turned up to repay his 
life-debt and failed. Which, given his slightly twisted sense of his 
position in the world, only increased his animus towards anyone answering 
to "Potter" as their surname...

--
Richard AKA GulPlum, who doesn't