The main thing is; ever since I disentangled the underlying concept (which is not unsound) from the generally recieved Snape-loved-Lily theory (which I cannot seriously entertain. I just can’t, not the way it is generally presented.) I’ve had the conviction in the back of my mind that to establish that Snape and Lily were involved in some sort of a magical partnership would pay dividends in an area that is a LOT more important to the central issue of the story than just who originally owned that bloody Potions book.
As I say, I realized I could be off on the Martian cannals again. But I couldn’t really shake the idea. And I wasn’t wrong, in the essentials. What was between Snape and Lily was a great deal more significant than a stupid teenaged crush. And for some years it did function as a partnership between them. At least until Lily bought the package that if she continued to hang out with losers, she would be a loser. Then she started brushing Snape off until he finally gave her an excuse to drop him completely. We are certainly invited to believe that she never gave him the time of day after she blew him off outside the door to the Gryffindor common room.
We cannot necessarily say the same for him.
He begged Tom for her life. He begged Albus as well.
Mightn’t he have tried to warn her?
For example: where did Lily get the idea that she could save Harry by offering her own life in exchange?
That isn’t an obvious leap of logic. And she couldn’t have known that it would work, but she gave Voldemort her life, and it did work. She completely derailed the curse he had thrown — so completely that it blew up in his own face and would have killed him if he hadn’t made himself a handful of Horcruxes already.
She didn’t get that out of a book, it hadn’t ever been done before — so far as anyone seems to know — it’s not an obvious variant on an Unbreakable Vow. It doesn’t seem to have been a standard spell at all. It was a chaotic exchange of her own life, upon which Voldemort had laid no claim, for her son’s, magically affecting all three parties.
Well, hey, we all know what branch of magic is fueled by the powers of chaos, don’t we?
That’s the Dark Arts, loud and clear.
And once the possibility finally introduces itself, the more it seemed that Rowling had some kind of payoff in store for us regarding the issue of Light vs. Dark Magic. (ETA: no such luck.)
But the Dark Arts are not taught at Hogwarts. And James Potter and his crowd was loud in claiming to abhor them.
So where did Lily learn about it?
Somewhere she seems to have picked up enough of the underlying principles of the Dark Arts (or possibly just the underlying theory of the Horcrux-creating curse) to have been able to dare to take that risk. Otherwise it all dwindles into a wimped out “No, no, I can’t watch you kill my baby, You’ll have to kill me first. Boo-hoo!”
She must have had some reason to believe that she might be able to save Harry by throwing her own life at Voldemort’s feet in exchange.
****
Well, having established a working magical — possibly a professional— partnership with what seems to have been a very talented young Dark wizard might go some way towards explaining it, mightn’t it? Particularly if — back when they were still speaking to each other and being best friends, banded against James and his pack of bullies — Severus got enough of a clue to not identify the magical theory he was discussing as being the Dark Arts. Just as magical theory.
You don’t need to be a wealthy, prominent pureblood of ancient lineage to have access to esoteric information. All you need is access to the right books. There isn’t any shortage of books at that house in Spinner’s End. Old books. Books that probably predate the ban on the subject of Horcruxes at Hogwarts.
And, at the Snape end of the equation: if if he was despreate enough to plead for her life from both Tom and Albus — would’t he have tried to explain to her what she was up against? Even if only in an anonymous letter?
Albus certainly encouraged Harry to entrust Ron and Hermione with highly sensitive information on the matter. And Snape may have shared sensitive information with Lily without asking Albus’s permission. Particularly since it concerned her.
Snape may not have ever known the whole Propecy, but he knows what he reported to Voldemort. He may have told Lily what Voldemort was going to try to acomplish by killing Harry. He is certainly sharp enough to have guessed.
And by the time she went under the Fidelius, Lily may have known it also.
****
And now: everybody hang on and brace yourself for a paradigm shift.
And a flury of theories that would have been rather nice to see play out.
Waaaay back around 1999 or 2000 Rowling dropped the bomb in an interview that we would find that what Harry’s parents did for a living was “important”. (ETA: Well that certainly played out, didn’t it? As if.)
Not one further hint did we get in the whole series on that issue. Nor in any of Rowling’s pre DHs interviews, either, apart from a repeat of the information that James had enough money that he didn’t really need a well-paying job. By the summer HBP came ut I’d finally relegated the whole issue to the “abandoned intentions” bin with the Weasley cousin and the Granger sister.
Well, post-HBP I had to drag it back out and dust it off, and take another look at it. I thought then that we finally may have been handed a hint, and we didn’t recognize it for what it was until we’d had it a while.
Voldemort offered Lily Potter a choice to save herself, right? The only person in the nearly 25 years of his first rise that he ever actually offered a choice to save herself.
Why?
So he could toss her to one of his followers as a reward? Oh really? He’d do that? He’s just a twinkly, red-eyed champion of twoo wuv, is he?
Fish fuzz.
Well, maybe in a fanfic near you.
Doesn’t it sound a lot more plausible that maybe he offered her that choice because she was potentially valuable enough in herself that even he hesitated to just whack her?
Horace Slughorn spent a whole book rhapsodising about the Potions miracle that was young Lily Evans. And he’s such an old blowhard that it blew right past us.
What if he was right?
What if — brilliant as the “Half-Blood Prince” clearly seems to have been — he still came in at 2nd place. That Slughorn overlooked Snape because Lily really was even better?
20 years down the track he compares Harry’s work to his mother’s, rather than Snape’s — whose results Harry’s can’t help but be more consistent with, since he is following Snape’s instructions — because the distinctions have blurred with time. Besides, Harry’s results shine like a star amid a classroom of (Snape-trained) students who have just spent five years being programed to produce perfect textbook examples, rather than to attempt to innovate.
But I really did think that Rowling may have just given us a hint that Lily herself mattered for more and far better reason than just that a whole lot of different boys fancied her.
Oh, sure, we have always been willing to accept that she was smart. You can’t hang around with Hermione Granger for six years and be unwilling to admit that girls can be smart. But we seem to have been all too willing to accept the assumption that girls are primarily only important because they attract boys. We seem to have encountered some difficulty wrapping our heads around the concept that some girls may just possibly be inherently more important for reasons that have nothing to do with their function as a mere boy magnet. Maybe with Lily Potter’s death the whole wizarding world was deprived of the greatest Potions genius of her generation.
So why haven’t we ever heard anything in canon to suggest it?
Well, was Harry listening? He didn’t even listen to Slughorn. Besides, in all fairness, she was only 21 when she died. However bright the promise, that isn’t really much time to have broken any records yet. But you will notice that even on day after they were killed, everybody in the WW seems to have been in no doubt as to just who the Potters were.
And, maybe, just maybe, that had absolutely squat to do with James.
Maybe it was Lily who was the one that was universally beloved. Maybe most people (other than Sirius and Pettigrew) regarded James as a bit of a jerk that they were willing to welcome for her sake.
And, that’s also an idea; IF Lily Evans Potter was acknowledged to be the most brilliant Potions genius of her generation, (grumpily vouched for by Severus Snape, who was almost certainly the best up-and-coming Potions geek inside the DE organization) to the point that Voldemort would actually be willing to spare her because she was potentially valuable in herself; rather than over some half-arsed theory that she was to be a bad conduct prize for one of his followers; finally her son shows up in Snape’s classroom a decade later, and to Severus’s disgust, the boy knows NOTHING. Nothing At All.
All of that potential legacy, lost. And the brat doesn’t seem to even care. All he wants to do is play Quidditch like his useless tosser of a father. Everything to that brat is about his father. He doesn’t even value the mother who saved him.
It might not be right; but it could be another brick in the wall for Snape’s contempt of Harry. And it doesn’t require that Snape have been in love with the girl in order to deplore the utter, utter waste.
****
Which raises another question: just what exactly are we supposed to make of Tom’s remark that Lily “needn’t” have died?
This is the former Tom Riddle speaking.
And, no, I do NOT believe he was intending to “give” her to a follower who had begged him for her life. If Rowling had the guts to set up consistent characterizations and stick to them, instead of jerking them around to fit the plot, she wouldn’t say so either. The Tom Riddle who we saw up to the end of OotP, and watched develop over the course of HBP would have treated any such soppiness with all the contempt it deserves. From any rational standpoint that script is not even in the running.
He’d not have expected to recruit her, either. Even he isn’t deranged enough to think that there would be a chance of that after killing her husband and son.
And whatever his reason was, it would have been something that benefitted him, not anyone else.
Well I can come up with a couple of possibilities. One of them is rather sweet. The other is not nice at all.
****
For the nice one, a lot depends upon just what Lily did do for a living. And, for that matter, possibly what Snape did for a living before Voldemort ordered him into Hogwarts, too. What if they really were professional partners. Or at least co-workers. (Ignore the snotty brush-off scene outside the Gryffindor common room, we’re playing around with theories which could actually hang together, here. And besides, what youngster just starting out gets to pick and choose just who they have to share professional workspace with?) Given their talents and Slughorn’s contacts it isn’t hard at all to imagine that they may have both been employed at St Mungo’s or some major commercial potions suplier. Or the Minisry research labs.
So just what was the situation?
Well, timing, timing, timing. Voldemort had just sent his potions specialist into Hogwarts.
And rather than be stuck in the cursed DADA position which would send him right back out by the end of the school year, he was now established in the Potions position. Which had no built-in sell-by date.
Having a permanent agent inside the school was all kinds of useful for Tom’s long-term takeover plans, but it meant he couldn’t utilize him. Doing without his potions specialist for a year might have been regarded as a necessary sacrifice, but as things now stand, he isn’t going to be getting him back at the end of the year, and needs to make other arrangements. Sooner rather than later.
I don’t think that Voldemort has a large ongoing need of illegal potions, but he probably has an ongoing need of healing ones for his followers’ use. Also for some slightly dodgy things like Veritiserum or Polyjuice. Probably some other things as well that we don’t necessarily know about. And some of these are tricky to make and he probably doesn’t trust the Knockturn alley suppliers. Nor does he want any of the commercial suppliers to notice onoing bulk orders that aren’t obviously going to the Ministry or St Mungo’s. Thse would be far too easy to trace.
Ergo: he needs a private suplier. One with access to a commercial-grade set-up. One whose work is of a quality he trusts.
Well, Snape being inside means that Slughorn is out where people could get at him, and he’s a pushover. But Slughorn may not have a set-up which is up to Voldemort’s ongoing demands. He’s retired, he probably just dabbles.
Well, even Snape probably admitted that Lily was as good at potions as he was. And while there was no chance of enlisting her, it might be possible to trick her into making herself useful.
By using Slughorn.
We don’t know whether Imperius takes the edge off of one’s magical performance. Rowling has made so much of a botch with explaining Imperius that we can’t tell.
But lean on Sluggy a bit, and give him a reason to cooperate, and he would.
One of his most favorite recent students has just had her life spared. Co-operate and she’ll come to no further harm. In fact Sluggy might have eventually been encouraged to take her on as an assistant to “keep her safe”. And incidentally, to assist him in producing what was demanded.
Would Lily have suspected such an offer from her old professor? Particularly when the kindness was quite genuine? How long before she might begin to wonder about the orders they were filling. How long before she realized that they were trapped? Because Slughorn’s life would be as much held hostage for her good behavior as hers was for his.
And as for Snape; I really can’t see him playing a uselss “Oh Master spare my twoo wuv, give her to me!” bit. Not even at the age of 20. But I could see him coming up with a “cunning plan” such as the above to suggest to Tom which would keep a couple of (other) Potions specialists busy and out of the direct line of fire.
****
Which brings us to the possibility that isn’t nice at all.
Sometimes you just have to keep asking yourself: “What would Tom Riddle do?”
And perhaps take it a bit farther and ask; “What has Tom Riddle done?”
Tom never tells Harry that he was willing to spare Lily. He says that she “needn’t have died.”
Well, it — long belatedly — occus to me that neither did Morfin Gaunt.
Is that what his game was? That Lily was supposed to take the fall for murdering her husband and son? With HIS memory of having done it to take off to Azkaban with her?
And for her, incidentally, to retroactively be identified as the spy in the Order, by default, leaving a shocked and grieving Peter in place to carry on the good work?
I’ll have to admit that Tom fitting Lily up for a life in Azkaban is just way too hard to overlook now that the possibility has finally occured to me. With a faked memory grafted on, she wouldn’t have even had Sirius’s cold comfort that she was innocent.
Never mind that he probably wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in Hell of pulling it off. He probably didn’t know that Albus was onto his little exercises in memory management.
And for that matter it isn’t by any means a done deal, since it had been a long time since he felt much need to provide a fall guy to conceal his own murders. I suspect it all depends upon just how important Pettigrew’s ongoing information on the Order’s movements was.
Peter pulled off framing Sirius Black because he didn’t try to get excessively clever about it, and Sirius had already laid most of the groundwork for him. Tom doesn’t have Peter’s common sense and knack for keeping things in scale. We really ought to be a lot more impressed by Peter than we are. He really is far too competent to keep overlooking.
But where the whole ww seems to have turned on a dime in their reading of Sirius Black’s character and motives on the Ministry’s say-so, and Albus didn’t make any attempt to contradict it, there isn’t any indication that it, or Albus, would have done the same to Lily, had Peter “discovered” her alive after presumably killing her husband and son.
And Sirius of course.
Maybe we ought to pay a little more attention when people tell us things. Sirius had made arangements to check on Peter that evening, and finding him gone, rather than telling anyone about his misgivings, he ran straight off to Godric’s Hollow to investigate.
And right into an ambush, had things not already gone belly-up.
I’m sure Lily would have remembered killing him, too.
****
And I've tripped over another missed oportunity here, as well.
This one is DHs-compliant.
We could have had a very nice, tidy bit of closing the circle if Rowling’s apparant blind spot about the worth of Severus Snape hadn’t gotten in the way.
In its place we got an excessive load of gibberish about the true ownership of the Deathstick. Which in a severe lapse of judgement ended up being handled in a manner in which it had to be applied to all wands, rather than the unique one in order to make it play at all, which rendered the whole premise into balognium.
Of course this one requires absolutely rejecting what the Harry-centric narriator and Harry himself have to say about what is going on. But since when is Harry so all-knowing, and unfailingly right about everything?
Oh, that’s right. Not until DHs. And I’m not sure I believe it there either.
We’ve already established that the only reason that Lily was able to give Harry that “super-special” blood protection was because she was given a legitimate choice to save herself.
Rowling isn’t making an open statements admitting as much but it looks perilously close to being established in canon that the only reason she was given that choice is that Severus abased himself to Tom and begged for her life (and you know it would have taken that. No one petitions Tom Riddle from a position of superority, or anything even aproaching equality).
Ergo: in the end, Harry owes his mother’s blood protection to Snape.
And had the matter been handed only slightly differently, that wouldn’t have been the end. And it wouldn’t just end with Harry, either.
Let’s give a bit of consideration to the issue of blood protection.
To recap:
Harry claims that his marching off to let Tom kill him gave protection to everyone in the school, so that Tom's curses didn't stick.
Well, excuuuuuse me, but if Snape IS dead, we might just have another Harry and the Prince's Potions book moment here.
Whose death is more likely to protect all the people loyal to Hogwarts, a famous ex-student's, or the Headmaster who has personally promised his predecessor to protect them all?
After all, which one of the two is even dead?
On the face of it Snape died to preserve his cover. He was under tacit orders from Tom to stand there and permit himself to be murdered without defending himself. He was also under continuing orders from Albus not to give away his own true position.
It was nowhere near as clear cut as Lily's choice, because there is no certainty that he actually had the information which would have enabled him to talk his way out of the situation and save himself. (The reader is aware of it, but we do not know that he is.) But he chose to permit his own murder just as surely as Harry did. Just as surely as Lily did. And he fully expected to die.
Arthur Weasley was bitten by that same snake, with multiple bites, had broken ribs, and lay on the floor of the Ministry for at least a half hour before he was even found, and he survived. Snape may have thought he had at least a little time. Yes, he knew that he was dying when Tom and Nagini swept out of the Shack but he was not dead yet, and he was tryng to stop the flow of blood from the wound. He had a message still to pass on, and he may have been tryng to survive long enough and muster the strength to send it.
Only; Harry was suddenly right there, and Snape shifted all of his efforts not to hang onto his life, but to make sure that Harry not only got Albus’s last message, but that he understood what had led up to it.
I think we really ought to consider that, if Snape is dead, it was the effort of pouring out those memories that actually killed him. Letting go of any chance or even hope of survival, to pour out his blood and his memories for Harry’s sake was certainly choosing to die for Harry and for his cause. He didn’t just give Harry a few memories, he gave him his life’s blood. Literally.
Tom had already bypassed Lily’s original blood protection at least partially (it is doubtful that he had bypassed it entirely. Harry was still pretty bullet-proof, even after GoF), but if Snape’s death, giving Harry the information he needed, along with his own life’s blood — rather than attempting to save his own life, had added a new level of it or recharged Lily’s original protection, which Lily owed to Snape in the first place...
That could have contributed majorly to Harry’s survival at “Kings Cross”.
That Snape was effectively dying for the sake of Lily’s blood very well may have recharged her inital protection, even if with somewhat diminished strength, since it now came at one remove, and Snape was no blood kin of Lily’s (if that even matters. Why would dying for a fellow soldier who shares your mission count for less than dying for your child? Dead is dead. Sacrifice is sacrifice).
Harry by then was no longer even a student of the school. His death, regardless of how willing, should have had no effect upon it. But Snape’s as well as Harry’s? That’s worth considering.
****
And as Snape’s sacrifice regards Harry: what would be the result if Snape’s death had been spun into a renewed blood protection upon Harry which Tom didn’t know about and hadn’t yet figured a way around?
The whole scene hangs together and flows much more smoothly than the Elder wand gibberish, doesn't it?
Because what took place in Aragog’s clearing really did echo what took place in Godric’s Hollow to quite a startling degree.
Tom was knocked out by the backwash of his own curse even if it appeared that he had managed to kill Harry. That was not the soul fragment whimpering under a bench in that station. That was Tom himself. The soul fragment had already been destroyed. And we already know that merely destroying his Horcruxes has no effect upon him. He isn't even aware of it happening. And I would guarantee that he never before cursed anyone and got knocked out from it.
Except that once, at Godric’s Hollow. And that time the effect was several magnitudes worse. Enough so that he may not have recognized that the similarlty could mean something.
And we don’t even need to take the Elder wand into consideration here. Without the hawthorn wand to intercede, the Elder wand, going through the motions, casting a curse from a user who was not its Master, wouldn’t know Harry from Adam. The wand wasn’t trying, it was offered a choice of targets and took the one that was unprotected. The AK was miraculously blocked from the other side. This was a flat-out, blood-protection rebound effect, just like the one in Godric’s Hollow, even if, this time, the effect was less devastating.
Add the hawthorn wand to the equation and we get the final confrontation in the Great Hall. We do need it there. Tom’s AK in the Great Hall had to plow through the Expeliarmus that Harry cast to get to him. It recognised him as the one that it had chosen as its master in the forest. It also picked up some sense of the hawthorn stick that had blasted it out of an earlier holder’s hand. Between them, the two-pronged defense of the Elder wand’s recognition of the hawthorn wand that had defeated it and Lily — and Snape’s — renewed blood protection on Harry, created a total rebound of Tom’s curse which finally killed him.
And not a single piece of the action related to these events changes from what Rowling has already given us.
Just the explanation of what was going on underneath it.
Of course a complete rewrite of KC!Albus's pronouncements (which are already questionable) would be in order too. Maybe someone ought to hold a contest to rewrite the whole King's Cross chapter.
