Revision date: October 5, 2008

This essay and its companion piece need to be left pretty much as-is, even if quite a bit of the reasoning in it turned out to have been proved wrong. Of course a fair amount of it turned out to be right, too.

A much earlier iteration of this pair of essays was featured in the printed collection; ‘Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?’ and it seems only proper to retain the connection, even though the online version of the essay has been somewhat further developed after the book was released. There will probably also be a degree of annotation in light of DHs. Although not a lot of it.

But the overall point of this pair of essays has always been to examine the range of possibilities as they presented themselves at the end of HBP.

Once examined, there turned out to be quite a range.

****

Of course, Rowling also turned out to have done it again. Back in 2005 I had put together what I thought was a very clever theory of ‘the Sorting Hat Horcrux’ which finally made sense of the grossly unbalanced view of the whole Gryffindor/Slytherin conflict which we have been fed over the course of the series. She shot it down for Christmas.

In the spring of 2006 I had belatedly jumped onto the Dumbledore-isn’t-Dead bandwagon and crafted what I thought was nice, logical, canon supported interpretation of the events of HBP which explained the multiple screwinesses on display in “the murder of Albus Dumbledore — not!” as it was presented in the book, which she shot down a few days before my birthday.

Since I’d only been riding that particular bandwagon for about 3 months, being tossed summarily onto the roadbed was injurious mostly to my dignity, but it was a shock, nevertheless. Because the account we were given of that death, as it is presented, just plain doesn’t add up.

This second upset was all the more of an embarrassment since the above-mentioned collection of essays that a previous iteration of this pair were rewritten for (‘Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?’ Zossima Press, November 2006) was all but ready to go to press when she made her announcement, and sent all of us collaborators all scrambling to apply emergency patches.

This essay and its companion are a subsequent rewrite, splitting and reworking the original for online posting. Consequently, this iteration no longer quite matches up to the one printed in the book.

I will not, however, be rolling those discredited portions of the original version into the 7th Son collection of exploded theories. The more so in that upon even a fairly cursory review, about 90% of the reasoning is still perfectly watertight. Neither will I be trumpeting the points upon which I turned out to be right. Or, not usually.

And even downstream of DHs a great deal more of it still plays than doesn’t.

****

But I am going to have to admit that I sat there in stunned disbelief reading the relevant passage of HBP. Not, mind you, in disbelief that Severus Snape, to all appearances, had murdered Albus Dumbledore, but that Rowling actually chose to go there.

Y’see, over on the behemoth Yahoo group, HPforGrownups, back toward the end of the 3-year summer, I, myself, had come out and proposed that Severus Snape would be forced to murder Albus Dumbledore in order to pacify Voldemort. And that Albus might well agree to it! That was all the way back in 2002!

That particular posting was also some weeks or months before my 11th-hour realization that Snape probably had been at the graveyard meeting in Little Hangleton (a realization now proven to be wrong) and that nobody in charge of either side was suspecting Snape of anything (a conclusion now shown to be correct), which seemed to me to eliminate any need for the justification of such melodramatic shows of fanatic loyalty. I’m afraid that once I’ve thoroughly dismissed a possibility it’s sometimes extremely difficult for me to ever take it seriously again.

I’m sure the posts are still in the archives over there, but it would probably be a waste of your time to dig them out.

So, what on earth have we got now? Apart from a royal mess.

****

Well: first off, we really did have to ask ourselves whether Albus was actually dead. At least until Rowling clarified the matter publicly. Which wasn’t until more than a year after OotP was released.

It was not all that difficult to get the impression that he wasn’t. The account of his death was just... wrong.

In addition; let me point out, once again, that once an element gets used in the course of this series, it seems exponentially more likely than not to be used again. Typically more than once. Neither can it escape anyone’s recollection that one of the major plot elements of PoA was the discovery that Peter Pettigrew had faked his own death (twice, in fact). And so, for that matter, had Barty Crouch Jr, with his parents’ assistance, one book later in GoF.

So another faked death certainly appeared to be liable to be on the menu for Book 6 or Book 7. In fact, one was even waved under our noses. Slughorn’s little welcome tableau when he was overtaken by magical intruders makes a very nice echo of Scabbers’s second faked death in Gryffindor Tower. It doesn’t serve to balance Pettigrew’s publicly faked — and far more significant — death back in ’81. But it did certainly serve to put us on our guard for the possibility of a reprise.

And we had a very short list of really viable candidates for characters who were central enough to the main issues to serve as potential subjects for such a faked death. At a glance, these were only Albus Dumbledore and Regulus Black. Either of whom had custody of information of which we appeared to be in some need.

And then, just to make sure that we clueless Yanks didn’t overlook the possibility; we were also handed a very heavy hint from the U.S. publishers that we really ought to be suspecting that a faked death, or that a death which may be believed to have been faked would figure somewhere in the series conclusion. Just compare the two versions of the following from the chapter of ‘The Lightning-Struck Tower’:

U.K. version (page 552–553):

“No, you can’t,” said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. “Nobody can. He told me to do it or he’ll kill me. I’ve got no choice.”

“Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Your father is safe at the moment..”

U.S. version (page 591–592):

“No, you can’t,” said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. “Nobody can. He told me to do it or he’ll kill me. I’ve got no choice.”

“He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Nobody would be surprised that you had died in your attempt to kill me — forgive me, but Lord Voldemort probably expects it. Nor would Death Eaters be surprised that we had captured and killed your mother — it is what they would do themselves, after all. Your father is safe at the moment.”

Rowling is reported to have authorized that addition to Scholastic’s. edition of the hardcover HBP. (Although it should be noted that the added statements were excised from the U.S. paperback edition of the work.) If nothing else, it appears to be a pretty strong indication that we are dealing with a milieu in which faked deaths are to be considered a hot possibility. Particularly after such twists had already played major roles in the resolutions of both Book 3, and Book 4.

(ETA: as it turns out, Malfoy Manor was probably DE Central all through Book 6, and Narcissa was effectively a hostage in her own home for the entire year. Had Draco accepted Albus’s offer, and Albus sent anyone from the Order to retrieve her, they would have likely got a nasty surprise.)

****

Added to which, there was something very obviously screwy about the AK which is supposed to have actually killed Dumbledore.

Harry had his eyes tight shut from the pain in his scar when Cedric Diggory was murdered, but I still think he might have registered the difference in the sound of a body simply dropping down from a standing position and one being tossed into the air and dropped from a great height. And he doesn’t seem to have.

Or did he? I’ll be taking a closer look at that particular sequence later on.

With Albus, on the other hand:

“A jet of green light shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest. Harry’s scream of horror never left him; silent and unmoving, he was forced to watch as Dumbledore was blasted into the air. For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the shining skull, and then he slowly fell backward, like a great rag doll, over the battlements and out of sight.”
U.S. Edition (page 596)

All things considered: that is just plain weird.

Still... for months after the release of HBP I thought our best candidate for the “I’m not dead yet” sweeps was Regulus Black. His death was more to the pattern set by Pettigrew’s (i.e., it happened years ago). Plus, we’d all sorts of other sources for discovering Albus’s secrets: there’s the Pensieve, into which we’ve seen a lot of memories placed, but very few removed. There is his Portrait, and there is Aberforth. For that matter, there are also Mad-Eye Moody, Horace Slughorn, Professor Flitwick and Minerva McGonagall, all of whom worked with the man for decades. There is even old Griselda Marchbanks, and Neville’s Gran. On the other hand, if Reggie’s true tale was to be told, he would probably have to tell it himself. Because there didn’t seem to be anyone else around to do it for him.

We did still need to find out whether or not he managed to destroy the stolen Horcrux, at least. And whether his really was the Locket.

So, for several months I suspected that a visit to Ms Doris Purkiss in Little Norton might be in order. Stubby Boardman’s retirement from public life (and the popular singing group, The Hobgoblins), a convenient 15 years before the Quibbler article which “outed” him coincided very nicely with the date of Reggie’s purported death.

Of course, given that Doris was claiming that Sirius Black/Stubby Boardman had to be innocent of the murders in ’81 because he had been with her at the time, it seemed a good chance that she hasn’t seen him in a while...

But by the time the 6th book was pending, I was no longer so convinced that Reggie’s full tale really did need to be told. (And Rowling had shot down the Stubby Boardman line of inquiry in one of her interviews, in any case.)

Nor was I still convinced that the function of any revelation of a faked death in Book 7 was likely to be for the purpose of giving us an additional source of information. Instead, I had come to the conclusion that the whole issue of Regulus Black was a smokescreen, and that like that street full of Muggles back in 1981, we may have watched Albus and Snape fake Albus’s death right before our eyes. For there was certainly something more going on atop the Astronomy tower than anyone was admitting.

****

Well, Rowling told us; no, he really was dead.

Rowling has admited in some older interviews that she enjoys the theories that fans come up with concerning her characters and the actions taking place off the radar over the course of her series. She claims that she only takes the trouble to shoot them down when they are leading into a completely blind alley. So if she is announcing to all viewers on a worldwide broadcast that Albus Dumbledore is dead, then it behooves us to take that statement under strong consideration.

Not that she hadn’t lied to us in interviews before, of course. Or since.

But for all that she had now supposedly given us the final word on this issue, she still was being mighty blooming evasive about it.

In her statement of August, 2006 she tells us all that Dumbledore is “definitely dead”. I was sure that by August of 2006, he was. She states that he is “not going to pull a Gandalf”. Well, no, I didn’t think that he was going to show up on a white horse and lead the troops into battle either. But neither of these statements throws any light on the sheer weirdness that she purposely wrote into the scene of his supposed murder.

And for that matter even her supposedly clear statement of August 2006 turns out not to be anywhere near as clear as the newsbites would have had us believe. The following is from a partial transcript posted on the LiveJournal of a fan, as to the actual wording of that statement:

Child: How could Albus Dumbledore really be dead? Harry is so loyal to him and Dumbledore’s the most powerful wizard.

JKR (looking a little emo): “I really can’t answer that question, but... you shouldn’t expect Dumbledore to do a Gandalf.”

“Really can’t answer that”, indeed. If, even then, J.K. Rowling still couldn’t come straight out and say that Albus was dead because Snape killed him, she was probably up to her tricks again.

And it certainly does not make his death, as it was presented to us any more credible. There is still something distinctly “off” about that death.

It finally registered that the real issue isn’t one of whether or not his death might have been “faked”; but the fact that it was unquestionably staged.

****

The whole run-up to the murder of Albus Dumbledore, from the Seer Overheard chapter, through the adventure of The Cave, to the Lightning-Struck Tower, and the Flight of the Prince (U.S. edition, pages 544–610) are Rowling at her most dramatic. In fact this sequence was probably the longest stretch of sustained “drama” in the series up to that date. And, with all due respect; drama is no more Rowling’s OTG (one-true-genre) than romance is. Indeed, while the sequence is more-or-less effectively presented, it does manage to tip well over the edge, and pitches us right into melodrama. In fact, a rather cheesy melodrama.

But the series as a whole is not really a melodrama, is it?

We certainly didn’t think so up through GoF.

I finally had to step back and consider that if this was a conspiracy to falsify the circumstances of Albus Dumbledore’s death, then we have to admit to the possibility that for at least part of the time, everyone actually engaged in the conspiracy was acting. And some of them may just not be all that good at it.

Which raises a lot of questions and drags in all sorts of related matters. Such as:

We not only needed to ask whether or not Albus was really dead — and we did need to at least ask that — but whether, and by just how much was he taken by surprise by the events that overtook him on the night of his murder. And by which ones, exactly? How much of that performance was under his own control?

Just where does that overheard argument with Snape, that Hagrid reported fit into the picture? That wasn’t a part of the public performance. What were they arguing about?

For that matter where does the Unbreakable Vow fit into this? How much was Snape taken by surprise by the terms of that? Or was he taken by surprise at all? And did he really know what Draco’s mission was, or did he just pretend to, in order to lure the sisters into being indiscrete? But, if that was the case, why didn’t he even let them discuss it!

And just what exactly was Malfoy’s mission and what did his conduct contribute to the equation? Because the mission, and the Vow, and the murder are all so closely interrelated that you can hardly discuss any one of them without having to discuss both the others as well.

So where does the sea cave adventure come into it? Because the sea cave junket is also intrinsic to this puzzle. That wasn’t just an irrelevant side trip, either.

We also need to consider the likelihood of there being at least a “third man” (to deal with the body?) involved in any suspected conspiracy regarding the murder of Albus Dumbledore, because Snape and Albus couldn’t have managed the wrap-up of their performance between only the two of them. In fact there may have been more than one additional conspirator. Or at least a facilitator.

And, right off the top, we need to ask just why they did it at all? Why not just keep dodging that particular bullet as long as they could?

****

Well, once again we need to remind ourselves of one of our main axioms.

Remember: the villain is the story.

We lost track of one of our main players over the course of HBP. We were so wrapped up in following the trajectory of young Tom Riddle that we completely lost sight of the present day Lord Voldemort. What was he up to after he dropped Malfoy into the soup at the opening of the book, and boogied off?

We don’t know, do we?

Was there any purpose, any purpose at all, to that stream of reports in the Daily Prophet of DE raids, Imperius attacks, Dementor attacks, and random violence? Beyond the obvious purpose of keeping people frightened, that is?

It sure doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing. That was all just keeping the pot well stirred.

And, for that matter, after his presumably public ultimatum to Fudge at the beginning of July, and his suspected “personal” murder of Amelia Bones around the same time, was there any report of anyone having caught even a glimpse of him all year long?

Not that I noticed.

At a guess, I’d say he had another one of his Byzantine plots in the pipeline. Probably a big one, too. And it wasn’t ready to be launched over the course of HBP. (Note: Rowling hinted as much in her public statement after Lord Voldemort won the popular vote as most frightening villain in September’s Big Bad Read of 2006.)

And, at a guess: first, he needed a lot more Dementors.

Second: Albus Dumbledore needed to be out of the way. It didn’t need to happen right that moment, because his main operation had any number of other components that were going to take time to develop, and it was going to take him several months to a year to get his ducks in a row before he could launch whatever it was. But it needed to happen. And it needed to happen by the end of the academic year.

That sudden shift of Tom’s attention from Potter to Dumbledore is the kind of thing that ought to make Albus and Severus sit up and take notice. Which I think it did.

In the first place this was a warning that Tom may have figured out that the kid was his final Horcrux (he hadn’t, fortunately). At the very least, it was a heavy hint that he really might have eavesdropped on Harry’s debriefing after the raid on the DoM, and now knows that he has to kill the boy himself (which does seem to be the case). In the meantime, he has returned to Plan A. Kill Dumbledore. In fact he has bumped that item to the head of his to-do list.

Lord Voldemort wants Albus Dumbledore dead. Within the coming year.

****

This forces Snape and Albus to consider their options. On matters like the life or death of an individual wizard, Lord Voldemort generally does get what he wants. Eventually. This factor throws an unacceptable level of uncertainty into their long-range plans. They know that sooner or later Tom Riddle is going to succeed in removing Albus from his path.

For that matter, it seems evident that by the time the Black sisters showed up on his doorstep, Snape was already under orders regarding the Headmaster’s death. He had certainly already been ordered to stand aside and let young Malfoy have a go at him, first.

Snape was probably not told the details of Malfoy’s orders, but he certainly knew his own. He claims to be one of the few who knows of the plan (very little of it, I suspect, at least officially). And his statement that “He intends me to do it in the end, I think” may be no less than the truth. So even before the Unbreakable Vow entered the equation, Snape may have already been cast as Second Murderer. And he would have reported as much to Albus.

So, consider. Was it likely to be a bigger risk to openly thwart Lord Voldemort for as long as they are able, or to let him think he’s got what he wants?

Or to give him what he thinks he wants? Hold that thought, too.

Are they more likely to be able to benefit from openly thwarting him for as long as they are able, or from letting him think he’s got what he wants?

Have they also got something to gain from the death (in this year) of Albus Dumbledore?

Let’s explore the concept, as a concept, for a few moments.

Whatever it is that Riddle has planned — and it is most unlikely that Snape has any details on whatever is planned — are they going to be in a stronger position to derail whatever it is, by trying to keep Riddle delaying the launching of it by openly thwarting him (and will that even put the launching of his plan off, and how long is Snape’s cover going to hold under those circumstances?) or to let him think that he is the one in control, opposed by only a headless Order and an ineffectual Ministry — with Albus off the radar, and Snape in a position to perform sabotage from deep cover?

In the handful of weeks since Voldemort was forced into the open, the progress of the war has drastically shifted. Snape can now do Voldemort far more damage from inside the DEs than he can from the periphery at Hogwarts. Voldemort is down to about 3 dozen human followers and one saboteur can make a big difference in a group of that size. Albus was in a position to watch that kind of thing take place in his Order, over the last year of the first war, thanks to Pettigrew.

This is also probably one of the main reasons that Albus finally gave Snape the D.A.D.A. position; so Snape would have to leave the school before the year was out and Voldemort would not be in any position to raise objections, since he set that situation up himself by cursing the post in the first place. Therefore, Albus used Voldemort’s demand for his own death as a way to facilitate Snape’s removal from the school; abandoning his post before the jinx got out of control and bit him in some undetermined manner.

And I’d say that if this was the case, they left it pretty late — for now that we know that the jinx is real we have to take its possible actions into account in any of our calculations, too. We’ve scarcely seen a D.A.D.A. instructor make it past the 2nd week of June. (Lockhart didn’t make it all the way through May.) Eventually something was going to blow up that would send Snape packing.

— Unless Albus finally took the opportunity to lift the jinx, and get it out of their way. So that Snape’s flight only looked like the jinx leaping into action.

And what kind of a backlash might lifting that jinx have produced? We know that the jinx has killed at least one man already. Could that be what really finally doomed Albus? Is that what it required to lift the jinx? That Albus should take it on himself?

Could the jinx have been tied to Albus’s tenure as Headmaster in the first place? Will his successors even need to deal with it?

(Well, as Rowling informs us, no. It was tied to Tom Riddle’s own life. Once he was most sincerely dead the jinx ended. Of course that information isn’t actually in the books...)

For that matter; was Snape really the D.A.D.A. instructor that year at all? Or did Albus officially reinstate himself as the instructor of record that year? With Snape merely deputized to teach the open classes.

You could make a passable argument that Albus was teaching D.A.D.A. that year, even if to only one student, part time, and the announcement at the opening feast was that Snape would be “taking over” the position of D.A.D.A. teacher. He’s substituted as D.A.D.A. instructor before without ill effect. (Unless getting knocked out in the Shrieking Shack by three of his own students was actually the jinx taking a swipe at him in passing.)

****

Once considered, Snape and Albus may have had a lot to gain by letting Albus “die” on his own terms, and at a date of his own choosing rather than Voldemort’s. There is more going on in this war than just a hunt for Tom Riddle’s Horcruxes, after all.

Speaking of which; Harry is going to need to be assigned his mission a year early. Because Dumbledore simply isn’t going to be around to do it next year.

And, we can see that at the end of Year 6, Harry is still missing crucial information concerning that mission. Information that I suspect Albus was too cagey to share with anyone else, and now there isn’t time. Albus had no choice but to retire to the sidelines and work indirectly if at all. (Would the Albus we thought we were dealing with really have withheld information likely to be so vital as that; “Yes Harry, you can trust Snape, and here is why”, unless he was confident of the information getting to the boy by the time he really needed it?)

And, besides, if Potter does take his mission up now, and does not return to Hogwarts for his final year of school, Albus will not be in the best position to protect him from the vantage point of his position as Headmaster. Any way you slice it, it is time for Albus to leave his nice tower office in the fastness of Hogwarts Castle and do the job he has been putting off ever since Tom Riddle returned from his first exile and started kicking up larks.

Harry is also going to need to have Voldemort’s attention diverted from him, and Albus would probably be able to do a better job of that from behind the scenes, NOT hampered by his high-profile position or his duties as Headmaster of a school. That’s the main thing Albus really sacrificed; his position as Headmaster. And it WAS a sacrifice. He really enjoyed that job. Tom was certainly not the first unhappy, fatherless boy to regard Hogwarts as his “real” home.

And, besides, Albus didn’t know that he was a fictional character in a series that has only one more book to run. He didn’t know that there was only one more year until the conclusion of this war. He had all of his eggs in one basket with Harry Potter’s name on it and he needed to protect his investment.

He can no longer do it directly. He’s got to distract Voldemort’s attention to somewhere else and let Harry get on with it. He really can’t micro-manage the hunt for the Horcruxes. Back when we still had hopes of a plausible conclusion to this series, we expected that between Albus (or the memory of Albus) and Snape they probably hoped to keep Voldemort busy and distracted, and that if they could manage to encourage dissension in the DE’s ranks and whittle down those ranks a bit further that would be all to the good. (Snape would at the very least be in a position to learn some of the remaining DE’s names that aren’t already known, which would come in handy in the final mop-up stage after Voldemort falls.)

****

Well, okay. As a concept it makes a certain kind of sense. Enough to have made the possibility of a faked death a viable plot option. But Rowling assures us it isn’t the option she took.

And even if she had, we were not going to be in the best position to witness it.

Because, I was sure that regardless of whether Albus Dumbledore was alive or dead, so long as we were viewing the action through the Harry filter, Albus was going to stay quite thoroughly off the radar. We could not reasonably expect to come face to face with him again, as himself, in any form (other than perhaps his portrait), until after the threat of Voldemort was settled. (ETA: In the event, this statement was almost correct. We did not see Albus Dumbledore face to face until the threat of Voldemort’s extra Horcrux was settled.)

****

By the way, Rowling was quite right when she speaks of the requirements of the sort of story she claimed to be telling us. In a coming-of-age, Heroic quest, the old wizard with the long white beard is never going to settle the central problem on the young hero’s behalf. That is something the young hero has got to do for himself. But the old man can do any number of things behind the scenes to smooth the way.

Young heroes on a coming-of-age quest, just about always have to go the last stretch on their own. On the other hand, traditional heroes in just about every fairy tale you care to mention always are given help that they have earned by means of kindness or courtesy to others. Harry will be eligible to receive help and advice for quite a while yet along his Hero’s Journey. And he is likely to need every bit of it.

ETA: The only real problem with this reasoning is that in the wake of DHs, we can see that the story of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord was not a coming-of-age quest at all. It just played one in the movies.

And unlike in traditional tales, 90% of the help and advice Harry was given along the way was not earned. It was delivered to him by the universe, unasked. This was highly unsatisfactory. But that is an issue for a different essay, on a different day.

****

We also have the faint, rather unpleasant possibility that Albus could not see any way in which Harry could to get out of this tangle alive. I think it is clear that Albus was very much aware that the boy was Tom’s 6th Horcrux. And he may not have known of any certain manner in which the Horcrux might be disarmed without killing Harry. His exhortations on Death being no more than the next great adventure, his repeated affirmations that Harry’s greatest strength is his ability to love others — and that he is forever marked by his mother’s loving sacrifice; even the forced witnessing of the demonstration of his own murder may have been in the way of forcing the concept of a possible self-sacrifice into Harry’s head, should such a thing prove necessary.

But I nevertheless suspected that if the Order of the Phoenix was still even a relevant element in this story, the Order knew that Albus was still with them. He sent his message out at his funeral. He still had his organization, and the organization knew it still had its Leader. After a fashion, anyway.

(ETA: Well, that theory didn’t work out.)

Although, at the end of the book, you don’t really get the feeling that Harry regards the Order as particularly relevant, do you? And we are going to be getting the rest of the story from his PoV.

****

Albus was not immortal, nor did he particularly wish to be. To die, or to depart peacefully after seeing his “great work” accomplished, and to pass the torch to others would be perfectly in keeping with tradition. But the fact is that his great work is not yet accomplished.

Still, IF Snape and Albus engaged in a conspiracy to make an all-star production out of Albus’s murder, they certainly did not do it on the spur of the moment, and they did not do it at all unless they felt they had no other, or no better choice.

They certainly took all year to set it up. Nor would they have left anything more to chance than they had to. They had to have gone over every new detail, as it came up, to see how it could be turned to their advantage. At least insofar as they hoped to be able to finish off this phase of the war in a controlled descent rather than an ignominious rout.

Nor is an elaborate set-up leading to a staged death beyond Albus’s capabilities. It isn’t even slightly out of character. In the course of the series as it already stood we had watched Albus Dumbledore orchestrate two elaborate year-long scams which ran over the entire course of both Book 1 and Book 5. (Each of which resulted in a death, if you stop to recall. Even though neither death had been planned.) It is not too much to consider that he may have done so over the course of Book 6 as well, even if this was not a reflection of anything that we had encountered back in Book 2. And, for that matter, there may be another such scam running behind the scenes in Book 7.

Throughout the course of HBP Dumbledore was continually giving out statements that he is old, he is slowing down, he is expendable. His request all the way back in Chapter 3, that the Dursleys continue to give Harry house room for as long as the protection on him lasts has all the ring of a “last request”. He has put his affairs in order. His exit this year, genuine or otherwise, is planned.

****

Most of Act I, Scene I of the set-up period took place during the hectic first couple of weeks of the summer. Completely off Harry’s radar.

And just how hectic was it? Well, read on. This chronology has been tweaked a few times and I think that I have most of the events accounted for, in pretty much the proper order. But I can’t be altogether certain. It looks like the interval of time between Harry’s raid on the DoM and his arrival at the Burrow was one of the busiest periods in the whole series for the rest of the wizarding world.

It sounds like the first thing Scrimgeour did when he got the post of Minister for Magic was to hold his unsuccessful meeting with Dumbledore. This must have taken place only a day or so before his meeting with the Muggle Prime Minister. We only saw the first couple of paragraphs of the article reporting their meeting in the Prophet, but there was no mention made of Dumbledore having a blasted hand in what we could see of the Prophet’s report, and I suspect that there was none in the rest of the article either, or Snape would have hardly needed to feed that information to the two sisters when they showed up at Spinner’s End.

The wording of the chapter opening for the meeting at Spinner’s End strongly suggests that it is taking place later the same day as Fudge and Scrimgeour’s meeting with the Muggle PM. By which time Dumbledore was already injured.

The events which we know to have taken place during this interval are:

Phase I: taking place after the conclusion of the O.W.L.s in mid-June:

1. The raid(s) on the DoM /Ministry finally admits Voldemort has returned /VoldWar II officially begins.

2. Last two weeks or so of school /calls for Fudge’s resignation begin /recovery of those injured in the raid /school breaks up for the summer.

Phase II: first week of July, approximate:

3. Voldemort’s public ultimatum that Fudge step aside in his favor /Fudge’s refusal.

4. Murder of Amelia Bones /bridge collapse /Giant attack in West Country /attempt made to put Muggle Junior Minister under Imperius /murder of Emmeline Vance in vicinity of Muggle PM’s office.

5. Fudge’s resignation; Scrimgeour’s appointment as Minister /meeting between Scrimgeour and Dumbledore /Kingsley Shacklebolt goes undercover in Muggle PM’s office /mass Dementor attacks.

6. Albus vs. Horcrux — alleged Snape intervention /Scrimgeour’s meeting with Muggle Prime Minister /Malfoy is assigned his mission /Spinner’s End meeting, later the same day.

7. Two weeks after end of term; Albus collects Harry from the Dursleys’ /visit to Horace Slughorn /Harry arrives at the Burrow for the summer.

One could wish that Rowling, who can be pretty good at plotting, were a little more dependable with timelines. Her shaky grasp of numbers erodes our confidence, even when there are no obvious contradictions. Snape and Albus’s presumed actions are tucked in around the edges of the above to the point that it is almost as difficult to trace them as it is to trace Hagrid’s and Harry’s movements during the infamously “missing” 24 hours.

We also do not know just what actually happened to Emmeline Vance. Given that the first chapter of HBP opens to discover the Muggle PM reflecting on the week past which had seen the bridge collapse, the ‘“hurricane” in the West Country, the peculiar behavior of a Junior Minister, and two highly publicized murders, and we later are told that Fudge was replaced as Minister for Magic only three days before he shows up in the PM’s office, the whole of the list of events under item #4 seem to have taken place over the course of no more than about four days.

Fudge also tells us that his own constituency had been howling for his replacement for the previous fortnight. Presumably as part of the fallout from the raid on the DoM, which took place immediately following the O.W.L.s in mid-June, which was paired with the wizarding public’s discovery that the Ministry had been falsely denying Voldemort’s return, which was reported in the Daily Prophet immediately afterward, a week or two before Voldemort delivered his ultimatum.

Indeed, given the rising public demand for Fudge’s resignation, one wonders just what Tom had to gain by that silly ultimatum. Just as with the D.A.D.A. post, he cannot have seriously expected to be given what he claimed to be asking for.

What I think may have been going on, is that Fudge was regarded by Tom to be too potentially useful (he had already unwittingly been very useful) to be thrown into the obscurity which seemed all too likely to soon be the result of Tom’s unmasking. Particularly since Tom still had links to Umbridge through which to manipulate her, and Fudge along with her.

We can see that by the nonsensical ultimatum Tom produced the end result of making Fudge look very good at the end of his reign. And, indeed, Fudge was not even dismissed from the Minister’s office, he has merely been demoted, and I honestly thought that we hadn’t seen the last of him. I was sure Tom still had moles in the Ministry (which turned out to be the case. At the very least he had Yaxley), and that Fudge might end up reinstated. He was too useful a puppet to be completely dispensed with. This reasoning, of course, went nowhere.

It is also clear that the DEs were very active in the vicinity of the Muggle government offices over that week. By the opening of the story, from the general level of DE activity, not to mention Kingsley Shacklebolt’s current assignment, it seemed that not only the Ministry’s Aurors, but the Order of the Phoenix as well was involved in a concerted effort to engage with them. Since we know nothing of Madam Vance but her name, it is uncertain whether her involvement in the events of that week were due to her membership in the Order of the Phoenix, or as a result of her capacity as a Ministry employee. But the location that her death appeared to have taken place, (around the corner from the PM’s office) strongly suggests that she was probably engaged in some official activity to do with the war. Madam Vance was one of the original Members of the Order. I contend that most of the core of the original Order were people who were known to have engaged in an active resistance to Lord Voldemort. In other words, she was already on the “most wanted dead” list.

What seems most likely, if we agree that Snape is a White Hat, is that Snape had indeed passed information regarding Vance to the DEs. Information that the Order, or Albus at any rate, probably knew that he had passed, or had even designed for him to pass as a part of setting up a sting, and that Madam Vance was unlucky enough to have been captured and killed in the confrontation. We do not know whether the DEs also took losses.

Snape, who was probably still in the north at that time, took what advantage he could of the situation by claiming credit for the information leading to her capture. That he claims credit only for passing information suggests that he was not present himself during whatever the operation was.

One might suppose that Snape would have had to have still been at Hogwarts when Albus made his raid on the Horcrux. But this seems not to have been the case. Dumbledore claims to have summoned Snape to Hogwarts upon his return, after destroying — or acquiring — the Peverill Ring. Since Snape is known by the DEs to be a double-agent, it would not compromise his cover to receive and respond to such a summons.

We do not know how much Voldemort was told of Dumbledore’s injury, but, even if Snape knows about the Horcruxes (which I suspected), he does not “officially” know of them, so what Voldemort was probably told was that Dumbledore had tangled with something that he could not counter, and had sustained permanent injury to his wand hand.

Snape is unquestionably in his own home at Spinner’s End the evening of the day that Draco was formally assigned his mission. Dumbledore had already been injured by that point. At some point before this date Snape has already been in contact with Voldemort and been given a kernel of information which at the very least enabled him to make his claim of having known what Malfoy was ordered to do, and incidentally to find himself lumbered with Pettigrew in his own household. He seems clearly not to have been at the meeting in which Voldemort actually gave Malfoy his assignment, which is likely to have been earlier the same day that Narcissa and Bellatrix showed up on his doorstep, at dusk. I can not imagine that upon learning of this assignment, that Narcissa — in the state she was in — would have waited even overnight before attempting to enlist help and protection for her son.

So, following the Snape thread in all this:

Snape finishes his duties at Hogwarts, perhaps a day or so after the students leave and returns to Spinner’s End. He reports to Voldemort, accounts for his actions regarding the raid on the DoM (probably claims to have been off in the forbidden forest searching for Umbridge, Granger and Potter who had all gone missing), and gets debriefed regarding his dealings with Dolores, and Dumbledore’s return to the school. He may also pass along the information related to Emmeline Vance.

In return, he is warned not to get in Malfoy’s way over the coming year, and sent home with Pettigrew.

****

It was only, in the week of August 14-20, 2006 that it dawned on me that I had managed to lose track of the villain. This is always a mistake. In this case the oversight had deflected me from recognizing what, at first glance, appeared to be the probable event that drove just about the whole action of the ensuing book!

But, really, I can’t see that I was alone in that error. I’d not seen the matter posted anywhere else online, either.

And even though my reading of the situation turns out to have been canonically wrong, the business deserves some closer examination.

First, my false epiphany:

Yes, I agree, the conclusion really is all but unconceivable.

But, it really did seem to be boiling down to the likelihood that nobody — nobody at all — over the previous two years — had ever told Voldemort about the loss of the Basilisk and the Diary!

Yes, I know. How could he NOT know?

But, he didn’t. From all of his behavior it is obvious, he just didn’t. And his behavior, in canon, still contradicts Albus’s later statement that he did.

Look at his actions and behavior, and — more to the point — look at Lucius Malfoy’s actions and behavior over the course of OotP after Voldemort had already returned and was back in command. Does it seem even remotely plausible that Malfoy would have been walking about loose if Voldemort is supposed to have known that Lucius had managed to get his Diary taken out of the equation? Particularly now that we know what that Diary was?

Particularly when you compare it to Voldemort’s utter fury and his extraordinary level of determination to wipe the whole Malfoy line out, root and branch, by the opening chapters of HBP, allegedly over the failure to retrieve the Prophecy record.

I’m sorry, that fury is just not about Malfoy’s failure to retrieve the Prophecy record. Bellatrix was also a part of that failure to retrieve the Prophecy record, and Tom is merely “not speaking” to her.

So what other explanation could there be?

It is all too easy for the reader to assume that whatever the Diary revenant knew or learned is something that Voldemort knows as well. But it isn’t. There was never an open connection between the Diary revenant and Vapormort.

Given how the matter of Lucius’s actions were handled over the course of OotP, I suddenly realized that what must have happened was that once the term broke up and Snape reported for his debriefing, now that Lucius had been packed off to Azkaban Voldemort had demanded that Snape, in his character as a Malfoy family friend, fetch his Diary back. Tom hadn’t entrusted it to Narcissa, after all. And Draco was just a kid.

Having to explain what had happened to it must have been the worst spot Snape had found himself in since having to explain to Albus why he hadn’t kept Fudge from summoning a Dementor, and keep Barty Crouch Jr from being Kissed before his testimony could become official the year before.

And the resulting explosion did get reported to Albus. Albus tells us about it.

That’s how Albus could say with such confidence that when Voldemort learned of the destruction of the Diary his anger was “terrible to behold”. He had been given an eyewitness account. Indeed I wouldn’t be astonished to learn that the discovery threw Voldemort into such a rage that the whole hideous 4 days that the Muggle PM and Fudge were mulling over in Chapter 1 were the direct result of a 4-day, Tom Riddle tantrum.

And who would have dared to volunteer that information? Particularly if Tom wasn’t asking for it? For that matter, who could have volunteered the information?

The student body was never told the details. They knew only that the monster had been killed, but not what kind of monster it had been — and Hermione had torn the page out of the library’s copy of the book that referenced it. I don’t think the students were ever told that one of their fellows had been taken over by Lord Voldemort either — and they certainly knew nothing about the Diary. So, wild tales from school wouldn’t have seemed relevant enough for any DE daddies to be passing on. Particularly not tales from a couple of years earlier.

The only adults present when Harry related his version of the story were Minerva, Albus, Molly and Arthur — and Lockhart who was completely out of it. (The conversation wasn’t about him after all.) The rest of the Staff seems to have been filled in on the basics later, since Minerva was able to refer back to the matter at the end of HBP without feeling the need to give an explanation, but the Hogwarts staff was hardly going to run tattling to Voldemort. Nor were Harry and his friends. (Although it suddenly sounds like they had a lucky escape in Year 5 when Ginny threw the subject in Harry’s teeth during Christmas break. Tom must not have been listening in at the time.)

Which leaves Lucius himself. Fat chance of him volunteering it. Narcissa may have known something as well. Dobby did claim to have heard Lucius discussing the matter with somebody. But Narcissa, along with Bellatrix, does seem to think that the Dark Lord’s rage is all due to the failure to retrieve the Prophecy record (or she is putting on a fairly convincing act of believing so), so I doubt she has been approached regarding the matter herself. And Snape would have been ordered not to discuss it with her.

So Snape would have been forced to tap dance his way out of knowing about Lucius having deployed the Diary without “officially” knowing about the existence of the Diary itself.

If Voldemort had mentioned the Chamber of Secrets or the Basilisk, Snape would have had an opening and could have gone; “But Master, the school was under attack by a Basilisk three years ago. Potter killed it. There was something about a cursed book, but I was never able to discover the details.” He can also honestly claim that he never actually saw the ruined Diary himself. Harry had given it back to Lucius before Albus could show it to Snape.

And... Peter Pettigrew.

Right. Him again.

The little man upon the stair, whom everyone forgets is there.

Peter certainly could have told Tom about it. He has to have heard the story himself — probably when Ron and Harry filled Hermione in on what she had missed while petrified. After all, where else did Peter get the information that Voldemort was haunting a forest in Albania (which Harry was told by Albus at the end of CoS)? And he could certainly back up Snape’s story once anyone thought to ask him. But he was totally out of the loop where anything to do with the Horcruxes was concerned. He was never one of the Dark Lord’s lieutenants during the first war.

And, besides, when you stop and consider it, Peter is a veritable black hole where it comes to information. You can never be altogether sure just what has gotten into his head, but none of it ever comes back out. Not unless harvesting that particular crop of information has been represented to him as his assignment. Anything beyond what he has already agreed to tell you has to be forced out of him. So, no, on reflection, I don’t think that Peter would have told Lord Voldemort about what happened to his Diary. After all, if Peter waited long enough somebody else would do that.

****

Well, it turns out, I was apparantly wrong.

From the suggestions we get around the edges, Tom had evidently intended to deploy the Diary over Year 5 himself, and raise some hell on Albus’s turf at long-distance, without any personal risk.

Because, according to Albus, Voldemort did get the story of the ruined Diary out of Lucius.

Say what?

And Voldemort let him live?

Which is just plain weird. In the first place, if that’s what happened, it had to have happened well before the raid on the DoM.

In fact, in order for Albus to have gotten an eyewitness report of it, it had to have taken place at a time that Severus could witness it. i.e., NOT at any point during the school year. As a Head of House Snape spends every Christmas and Easter break at the school and is only out and about during the summer.

Which means the revelation had to have taken place all the way back before the pervious school year commenced. A full year earlier.

While Harry’s connection to Voldemort was still wide open.

I mean, what are the odds that something like that could have gone off without Harry feeling a reaction?

Well, it seems he did.

We never were given an explanation in canon of the scar attack Harry had the night before the kids all boarded the Hogwarts Express and left for Year 5. And that attack was a bad one. One of the worst of the attacks he ever caught from long distance. But there was so little attention paid to it that it is hard to believe that it was truly relevant. Unless Rowling had intended to follow up on it, and the book just got so long that she dropped it.

The only possible explanation I can come up with is that by that time Voldemort needed Malfoy for the sake of his connections to Fudge too much to be able to give him the punishment he deserved. And it makes you finally wonder whether when Malfoy saw the DoM mission going pear-shaped he didn’t opt out and get himself captured on purpose.

But I still think my first interpretation, that the whole business only surfaced after Lucius had been locked up, would have given us a better explanation for the behavior we were actually told about, which was reported to us at the opening of HBP.

And, frankly, by this time, to deliberately overlook Albus’s statement that it was Lucius who told Tom the story of what happened to his Diary is embarrassingly easy. In fact, I’m sure Rowling has completely forgotten that she ever wrote anything of the sort.

****

So. Snape returns to Spinner’s End lumbered with Pettigrew. Snape cannot help but smell some kind of a trap at this development. And for that matter he cannot help but know that Voldemort’s wrath is about to descend upon the Malfoys. Which certainly explains how Snape could claim to know about Malfoy’s assignment by the same day Malfoy was actually given it. Even if he wasn’t there.

With Pettigrew underfoot, communications between Snape and Albus must have been a bit strained. At the very least, Pettigrew would have recognized a Patronus Messenger for what it was, so they needed to be sparing of any such communications.

But I think that this development was important enough that Snape managed somehow to get the message out. And that may have been what made Albus decide to finally take the Ring (and the Locket?) out of the picture.

With such results and repercussions that resulted in his decision to make a production of his own death at the end of the year.

Or, in short: we have just been handed yet another Book 6 = Book 2 parallel. The entire central issue of the book appeared to have been precipitated by Lucius Malfoy having deployed the Riddle Diary without permission.

****

By the time Scrimgeour was having his interview with the PM — with whom he spoke a couple of days after his altercation with Dumbledore — Dumbledore had dealt with the Ring, which I suspect he had almost certainly located earlier, but left in place in case Voldemort decided to check on it after his return. Dumbledore may also have intended to finally deal with the Locket from #12, and only now discovered that it had been discarded on Sirius Black’s authority. It is possible that the discovery that the Locket had gone walkabout is what prompted him to finally deal with the Ring — before it wandered off to parts unknown, as well.

In any case: Dumbledore makes his raid on the Ring, and allegedly is gravely injured. He manages to return to Hogwarts and to summon Snape. Even if Peter saw Albus’s Patronus at that point, the summons was something that could be explained by Snape’s function as a double-agent.

Snape responds to the summons, manages to save Dumbledore’s life — assuming there really was a deadly curse on the Ring. If we are dealing with falsified information, we need to keep in mind the possibility of intentional misdirection on the part of the conspirators. But it seems most likely that the Ring was indeed cursed.

However, if there was no conspiracy to stage a murder before this date, this is probably the point at which the issue came up. They had to adjust their plans for the upcoming year in consideration of the likelihood that Dumbledore was now on borrowed time. If Albus had only a year or so to live anyway, it is time to take some risks.

And in light of Voldemort’s new demands, to ultimately give Tom exactly what he is asking for may be no longer all that much of a hardship. Albus has certainly more in the long run to gain from orchestrating his own murder than he has from peacefully dying in his own bed.

Snape had already been given some warning that he is being called off the ever-pending job of assassinating Dumbledore. Reassignment will certainly go to Draco Malfoy (who else, after all, is likely to be at the school and in a position to do it?). Snape definitely has to have been warned against interference at some point.

It is possible that an earlier plan to fake Albus’s death in 1981 (which I suspect is why Snape was sent into Hogwarts in the first place; to assassinate Dumbledore on Voldemort’s signal) are re-examined and revised. By the end of the academic year Albus will indeed be dead.

Snape also fills Albus in more thoroughly on the fact that he now has Pettigrew underfoot and expects some form of “test” to be thrown his way.

It is possible that Albus’s plan to recall Slughorn and finally give Snape the D.A.D.A. position is also discussed at this point, but Albus may have made that decision on his own and not told Snape about it until after he had Slughorn’s agreement. Or that may have been a further development after the Unbreakable Vow was put in play. Snape certainly gives every appearance of being unaware of such a plan the evening the Black sisters showed up on his doorstep. Although that in itself is hardly conclusive.

In any case, Snape returns to Spinner’s End; reports Dumbledore’s injury, probably by Floo in Pettigrew’s hearing. He may even exaggerate its extent. He can truthfully say that he does not know the cause, beyond the fact that Albus tangled with a curse that he could not fully counter. It should be noted that the news of Dumbledore’s injury soon is also deliberately fed to Narcissa, Bellatrix and the DEs. It is later put on public display at the Start-of-Term feast as well. Snape & Albus clearly want the DEs (and everyone else) to believe that Albus has been weakened.

When Narcissa turns up on his doorstep, perhaps as quickly as the following evening, Snape knows that the assassination of Albus Dumbledore has indeed been reassigned. He also realizes that Narcissa’s visit explains Pettigrew’s presence in his house.

****

Before we get any further ahead of ourselves, however:

We need to take a step back at this point and reconsider a few peripheral details which we have been taking a bit too much for granted, and which are fundamental to whatever the motivation underpinning their whole production was.

We also need to take a second look at one of those contributing factors which is routinely brought up whenever we postulate that Albus’s death was both genuine, and voluntary.

Namely, the blasted hand. I am going to have to admit that I was not at all satisfied regarding that blasted hand. Albus never gave us a satisfactory answer regarding what happened to his hand, and the explanation that he finally did give us was all too much in keeping with some of his other “likely stories”.

Plus, for all that it must have looked terrible, after the first evening we saw it, we never really got the feeling that he had a problem with using it. It was his wand hand, for heaven’s sake! If he had blasted it beyond recovery, you would think that it might have slowed him down at least a little. Instead, apart from one comment to Harry in Chapter 3 that it was “a little fragile”, and some clumsiness opening a bottle the same evening, the injury didn’t seem to inconvenience him at all. And back in Chapter 3 the injury would have still been quite fresh.

I do still tend to think that it is more likely than not that he did have a curse blow up in his face when he destroyed (or got hold of) the Ring (or lifted the jinx on the D.A.D.A. post) than that he injured his own hand on purpose — although given the way that once an element has been used in the series it generally gets used again, we can’t automatically dismiss the possibility. Pettigrew certainly injured his hand on purpose (twice).

IF the injury was sustained acquiring or destroying a Horcrux, Albus may even have come very close to dying from it at the time. And it may very well have only been Snape’s timely intervention which saved his life at that juncture. But I am not convinced that his injuries were permanent.

And he certainly seems to have intended that the news of his “disabling injury” be circulated within the DE circles as quickly and as widely as possible.

In retrospect, IF we are dealing with a staged death here, and a build-up of several months of intermittent acting, by the start of the school term, the blasted hand may have been suffering from not much more than purely cosmetic damage. It may, in fact, have been a piece of “performance art”.

Yes, in other words, I have finally come around to accepting that some variant of the “Stoppered Death” theory which has been floating around the fandom since HBP came out may well be in play here. At this point the basics of that particular theory seems to fit all of the requirements. And Albus’s tower statement of; “Well, I certainly did have a drink... and I came back... after a fashion,” is an anvil-sized hint that Rowling has just handed us a clue to something. Although we can’t be altogether certain just what.

I am inclined to think that Albus was well aware that he was in the process of dying before he left the castle that last evening. For that matter, I am inclined to think that by that evening he had already arranged everything that he possibly could about the timing of his exit.

To that point, his death had been “stoppered”. It wasn’t any longer.

But it wasn’t Snape who had stoppered it.

It was his late partner, Nicholas Flamel.

****

At the end of PS/SS we were told that Flamel and his wife had enough of the Elixir of Life stored to put their affairs in order before they died, and Rowling stated in one of her interviews a few years later that the Flamels are dead now. But c’mon, they’d been without the Stone since the previous summer, when they agreed to let Albus use it for bait. How often do you need to take the stuff?

They must have made sure to have had a considerable stock of the stuff put away before they turned the Stone over to Albus. And at that, there was always the risk that Voldemort would somehow manage to steal it. So they couldn’t have been absolutely certain of getting it back.

I also think that the Flamels must have done a lot of thinking and discussing the matter between themselves over the year that the Stone was at Hogwarts.

I think that perhaps they ultimately came to the conclusion that their lives had devolved into a matter of habit, and that perhaps two-thirds of a millennium was quite long enough. I think their affairs were already in order when Albus finally went to beg them to permit it to be destroyed. And it may have been the Flamels themselves who were the ones to suggest that particular solution to the problem.

And, if that is the case, they didn’t greedily hang around to polish off their final batch of Elixir, to the last drop. They left it to Albus, to be used as emergency “insurance”.

If Albus was being straight with us about the curse on that Ring, then Snape slowed the progress of the curse long enough (as he did later, with Katie Bell) to keep Albus alive until he could take his first dose of the Elixer.

Rowling even *makes a point* of bringing the subject of the Elixir of Life back up in this very book and having Albus explain how it works and what the disadvantages of using it are. The connection is just sitting there waiting to be made.

But no one seems to have done so until Rowling assured us that Albus was dead.

Of course I also really do tend to think that the fans may be making rather more of the phrase “stoppered death” than the canon reference really warrants.

After all, Snape is not the kind of blowhard who has a track record of making empty boasts.

If he tells his First years that he can teach them to “put a stopper in death”, then it stands to reason that something which conforms to this description is a part of the standard Hogwarts curriculum. Even if only once they get to NEWT-level (“— if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.”)

Brewing fame and bottling glory are descriptions that can probably also be stretched to apply to some of the more advanced potions taught at Hogwarts as well. Again, we only seem to have gotten a glimmer of that sort of thing once we reached NEWT-level. But then I think that teaching teenagers the art and science of brewing fame and bottling glory would be right up Slughorn’s alley, too. Every bit as much as Snape’s. More so, even.

So what puts a stopper in death?

Well, what is one of the first things that 6th year potions students find themselves learning to brew?

Antidotes.

We didn’t come up against anything like antidotes in the lower grades. Or, at any rate, we never came up against antidotes with the kind of complexity that Golpalott’s law entails. And I suspect that what “putting a stopper in death” refers to is exactly this specific skill.

So the truly ornate fan theories regarding “stoppered death” (and some of them get very baroque) are probably superfluous to the requirements of Rowling’s story. The concept still looks pretty sound, but the details need a lot of scaling back.

Albus’s behavior, and his statements over the course of Book 6 were a perpetual reminder to everyone of his own mortality, and I have finally settled into the camp which is convinced that his death had been “stoppered” by some means, at least temporarily. And that he knew that it was temporary.

Which makes any theorizing over the staging of his actual death rather simpler upon the whole. It also makes the whole issue of the timing of events over the year a lot less random, since it was all more directly under Albus’s control. In fact, the timing of the big event was entirely under Albus’s control.

Yes. HIS control. Entirely. Or at any rate there are enough links (or potential links) in place to read it that way. Just watch:

****

By that point in the series, 6 books into a series of 7, serious theorists were pretty much obligated to cut their cloak to fit the cloth, and to strictly work with what Rowling had given us over the course of the series. At 3300 pages that ought to be no hardship.

Even the certainty that she had deliberately held back at least a few crucial pieces of information for Book 7 was no longer sufficient justification to theorize magic that had not already been explained, or at least introduced to us in passing.

There are a limited number of methods of forestalling death that had been brought up and explained to us in the series to date:

There was the drinking of unicorn blood, which will preserve the life of the body at the cost of harm to an innocent, and which caries the price of cursing the life so saved ever after. I think we can all agree that Dumbledore would have found this an unacceptable option.

There is the creation of a Horcrux, which prevents true death, even though it does not necessarily preserve the body itself. It does this at the cost of the death of another person and the mutilation of one’s immortal soul. Dumbledore would have found this option even less acceptable.

And, finally, there is the Elixir of Life, produced with the aid of the Philosopher’s Stone which will extend one’s physical life and well-being indefinitely, for as long as you continue to drink it. The cost here is the monumental effort of acquiring the wealth of knowledge, and the purification of spirit which one must undergo in order to create the Philosopher’s Stone from which the Elixir is generated, and moreover a dependency upon the Elixir itself once one begins to drink it. For once you start to do so, when you stop, you die. Of the three methods, this is the only one which Albus would have considered acceptable for delaying his own impending death.

Which means that he and Snape did deliberately plan for Snape to be the one to actually kill him. The Unbreakable Vow was almost certainly an intrinsic part of the plan. Snape did lead Narcissa to demand it, and he would have done that anyway. The Plan required that Albus be murdered, before witnesses.

But you cannot time the failure of something like the Elixir to the minute. Whoever killed Albus had to be prepared to cover the possibility that their timing might be off, and he might die too soon.

It also means that even though Albus could not time his demise to the exact day, from the beginning of the previous July Albus had had a ballpark figure of about how much time he had left.

And he messed with Draco’s mission to ensure that the attempt would take place on his signal, and not one minute before.

Oh.

Yes.

He also knew that facilitating an invasion was part of Malfoy’s assignment.

****

The next major item to crop up in our chronology is Malfoy being assigned his mission. And this particular item requires a considerable digression. Please forgive the delay; we will be working our way back around to Snape and his part in the matter, eventually. (I know that’s all some of you are really interested in.)

Snape was clearly not present when the assignment was given to Malfoy. For that matter we do not know for certain whether Narcissa was present at that assignment, either. Draco may have been privately escorted to the Dark Lord by his aunt Bellatrix, and boasted of it to his mother afterward. Voldemort is bound to be in hiding somewhere. His “striking” appearance must limit his movements considerably, and young Malfoy cannot Apparate on his own yet.

It is, of course, also possible that Voldemort was hiding in Malfoy Manor itself throughout Year 6, he certainly was the summer following. Nor did we know for certain whether Narcissa was officially a Death Eater herself, or whether she was only a supporter and the wife of a Death Eater.

Rowling claims that Narcissa was not a DE herself. Of course she didn’t tell us this in the books.

Which raises the question of whether Draco, himself, was officially a Death Eater by the opening of HBP.

I agree that it is certainly possible that Voldemort made an exception in Malfoy’s case. The whole business of Malfoy and his mission is exceptional. But Harry has a tendency to see Death Eaters under the bed whenever he is dealing with people he dislikes. And I’m not sure we can take Harry’s reading of the matter at face value.

My own suspicion is that over the course of HBP Malfoy was not officially a Death Eater yet, and at the time I speculated that he may not ever be forced into/given the opportunity to become one. Voldemort understands the uses of carrots as well as sticks. And, besides; why should he go to the trouble of marking the kid, when a mark would make it easier to expose him and see him safely off to Azkaban before he manages to get anything accomplished?

Voldemort also expected the kid to fail. Indeed he intended the kid to fail. So why mark him? The mark is a summoning device. This kid hasn’t learned to A