Upload date: June 10, 2008

Well we’ve all been clamoring for one good Slytherin since about Book 2, haven’t we? It looks like Rowling finally listened to us.

Of course if we had wanted one who we would universally like we should have said so.

And we’d still be waiting for him, too.

But, for the record: I do like Sluggy. I like him very much.

All the more so in that I don’t have to deal with him. I suspect that would get very old, very fast. He is an unconscionable bore.

But at the end of the series he is our token “one good Slytherin”. Or at any rate, the only one still standing.

I very much doubted that we would get another. Although one could make a case for the “official version” of Regulus Black. Even if it doesn't add up.

Of course, this all comes with the usual rider that by the end of HBP, I was convinced that Snape was a White Hat. But that doesn’t mean I thought that Snape was ever going to “make friends with the children,” any more than the blackbeetles in the cupboard back in E. Nesbit’s stories did, and for very much the same reason. The children wouldn’t.

And I will go on record as stating that I think Horace Slughorn is a very good Slytherin. Not the least because he is so demonstrably a good Slytherin.

It is now transparently clear that until Tom Riddle showed up and set his stamp on Slytherin House, Horace Slughorn was a shining example of what, in the general preview of the wizarding world, one of the most recognizable “types” of “a Slytherin” was.

And a society, particularly such a society as the wizarding world has been set up as — which we know runs solidly on a principle of “Old-Boys’ Club” cronyism and by means of myriad interlocking patronage networks — needs a few Horace Slughorns to keep the wheels greased, the machinery moving smoothly, and to make sure that the System serves everyone, not just those in the drivers’ seat.

Gryffindor House produces Leaders, Lieutenants, and Lone Operators.

Slytherin House traditionally produces Politicians, Power Brokers, and Publicists.

And a functioning society needs both.

Of course the Leaders and the Politicians both tend to be vying for the same constituency, so there is a considerable potential for rivalry there. And it sometimes gets a bit heated.

But of course Tom Riddle didn’t care about any of that.

Tom Riddle landed in Slytherin quite legitimately. He was more than clever enough for Ravenclaw, but Ravenclaw is all about cleverness for its own sake. Tom wanted to use his. Ambition was what Tom Riddle was all about. There really wasn’t anywhere else for the Hat to have put him.

It is obvious now that Tom waltzed in, managed to enthrall all of his classmates, most of the staff and stole poor Sluggy’s House right out from under him. And Sluggy didn’t even notice. Lily Evans was probably quite truthfully one of Slughorn’s favorite students of all time. But so was Tom Riddle, back in the day. Or he was until Tom frightened Sluggy out of his wits by discussing the merits of creating seven Horcruxes. I rather suspect that Slughorn’s partiality for Tom cooled rapidly after that.

And Albus may have noticed as much, and later started asking uncomfortable questions.

How long was it, I wonder, before Slughorn discovered what Tom had become? Was that when he started fostering the careers of Muggle-borns and children from other Houses? For he had certainly been doing it for a while by the time of his retirement.

I’ll admit that I feel distinctly sorry for Slughorn, as I do not feel particularly sorry for Cornelius Fudge — another wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Slughorn is a reasonably clever, competent wizard, and not merely a bumbling fool. But he is essentially a trusting soul and his trust has been cruelly abused.

I will also admit that I am frankly offended by the fanon response which is determined to read Slughorn as a slimy old pedophile. Even though I have to admit that Rowling’s presentation would certainly give one some excuse for drawing that conclusion. As of HBP Albus suddenly started “reading” as a pedophile too, and I doubt that she really intended that either. (Fenrir Greyback, on the other hand...)

But, to me, if anything Sluggy is more on the order of a very big, rather clever baby.

For all that Albus was careful to put Harry on his guard against Slughorn’s anticipated attempt to “collect” him (which could just as easily have been intended as a blanket explanation for Slughorn’s manner which was calculated to keep Harry from taking the man in even greater dislike than he did) he introduced Slughorn not only as a colleague, but as a friend.

And I didn’t think he was lying. Or not altogether.

Albus clearly thought highly enough of Slughorn to be prepared to leave the Slytherins in his hands again, because he knew that by the end of Harry’s 6th year neither he nor Severus were likely to still be in the school.

And when you stop and think about it, Horace and Albus had a lot of common ground. And they went back a long way. We can take is as a given that Albus knew exactly what Horace Slughorn was. And he seems to have trusted him.

And Horace seems to have trusted Albus, too. According to his story, about five minutes after he learned that Albus Dumbledore was convinced that Lord Voldemort had returned — Horace bolted into hiding. He left his comfortable home (and you know that whatever place Horace had settled into would have been very comfortable) and claims to have spent the following year dodging anticipated Death Eaters, squatting in Muggle houses, never staying anywhere longer than a week. Despite the Ministry’s denials, despite the Prophet’s smear campaign, despite the fact that it was a year before there was the slightest evidence that Albus was right, if Albus Dumbledore believed that Lord Voldemort was back, then that was more than good enough for Horace Slughorn.

And that might be a clue to a few other things as well.

****

From a meta standpoint Sluggy is a marvelous piece of work. He is the missing piece to so many puzzles, and offers such a perfect subject for games of “compare and contrast” vis-a-vis the other characters we’ve met in the course of the series, (Fudge, Riddle, Dumbledore, Snape, Pettigrew, even Dudley). And he is also a perfect confirmation of so many of the convictions that a reader will have developed by the time Sluggy made his entrance regarding the way things work in the wizarding world.

He certainly serves as the absolute, quintessential example of the person who will typically do what is easy rather than what is right.

He is a shining, larger-than-life portrait of both the traditional faults and the traditional virtues of Slytherin House.

He is a virtual demonstration of the besetting failure of the whole wizarding world at large; in that here is a man with what is clearly intended to represent a basically sound moral compass and Not A Clue regarding any kind of functioning ethics. Morals without ethics are practically the motto of the whole bedamned wizarding culture.

And yet he does not read as something that was assembled from a checklist. He reads as very human. And very flawed.

And, yet, many fans look at his blatant favoritism, despite his, supposedly neutral, position as a teacher, turn up their noses in disapproval, and ask “but is he really a good man?” To these I have to answer; Yes.

Horace Slughorn is a good man. In fact he is a very good one.

But he is a weak man. Very, very weak.

And is it really fair to blame a character for not being strong?

Yes, Slughorn is vain, he is boastful, he is indolent and extravagantly self-indulgent, and yes, he is a shameless opportunist, too. He is glib, facile, a flatterer, openly manipulative, and, yes, despite his denials, he is prejudiced (although far less so, I think, than Hagrid). But he is not an incorrigible bigot. He doesn’t deny excellence when it calls attention to itself, regardless of who possesses it. Indeed, he goes looking for it, and is happy to promote it once he finds it. And he is not mean-spirited. He is not a liar. And if his values are shallow, they are still the preeminent values of his whole society.

And over the course of an entire book we did not see one act of malice from the man.

We did not even see an act of petty spite.

No. That apple may not have fallen far from the tree, but he is NOT a rotten apple.

The worst that can be held against him is that he is a bit too quick and too willing to dismiss the apparently “ordinary” from his considerations.

He arbitrarily chooses to overlook people that we have been accustomed to thinking well of. They didn’t make the cut to be invited into the Slug Club.

But, really, can you honestly suppose that either Ron Weasly or Neville Longbottom had the social nous to have actually benefited from an inclusion in Sluggy’s little band of favorites at 16? The ballots aren’t in on Neville, who has a good deal more social maturity than either Ron or Harry (or Hermione, truth to tell) but Ron certainly hadn’t. And being included or not would make no difference whatsoever to Luna.

****

But Slughorn is essentially a timid soul. And it is not just physical timidity.

With all of his gifts, and his skills, you would think that if he had ever possessed even a scrap of courage he would have been off to scale the heights himself, to one day finish up as the eminence grise of some highly exclusive sector of wizarding society. He has the skills to do it, and he knew how to pull the right strings. But, instead, he settled into Hogwarts, much like Albus, to spend the prime of his life impressing an endless string of schoolchildren.

We were originally led to believe that Albus had gone out in the world and done something with himself first. But that turns out not to be the case at all. He was probably teaching by the time Aberforth left school forever (probably soon after sitting his OWLs. I cannot see ’Forth sticking around to cram for the NEWTs). I rather get the impression that Slughorn also started teaching as quite a young man. Indeed, one is tempted to conclude that the day he took his first dose of Felix Felicis potion, which he tells us was at the age of 24, was the day he had his job interview — possibly with Headmaster Black.

And while Albus may prefer to use different methods, himself; he was more than content to sit back and let Horace do his thing. For he recognized that Horace was serving a legitimate need. Albus, after all, was also a product of the wizarding world as it is.

I think that Slughorn is probably a more inspiring teacher to a wider range of students than Severus Snape. Even if he does use an inferior textbook, and tends to overlook the students that he regards as ordinary. I suspect Slughorn may have chosen Borage over Jigger for its clarity in presentation, despite the plodding mediocrity of the recommended methods. And he has probably always encouraged the student’s attempts to improve on those methods. Snape is clearly able to challenge his students, and there are students who respond well to a challenge, but he does not inspire them. Damocles Belby, the developer of the wolfsbane potion was one of Sluggy’s pets, and I suspect he may not be the only one of such to have made a contribution to the ongoing technology of Potions research. How many ground-breaking Potions researchers do you expect can be traced back to Snape’s tenure at Hogwarts?

What is more, Slughorn takes the trouble to establish that he appreciates innovation more than he demands a rigorous adherence to a strict protocol, and he sends the students a loud and clear message attesting to that fact. His students were getting perpetual reinforcement of the message that Slughorn considers innovation a Good Thing.

Snape tells them what to do, puts the directions on the board and starts prowling through the lab to catch anyone doing it dangerously wrong.

And Slughorn’s pep talks weren’t just for the purposes of flattery to Harry Potter, either. Ginny Weasley was invited into the Slug Club solely on the grounds of one chance-observed clever hex. At that point Slughorn knew nothing of Ginny Weasley. He hadn’t encountered a Weasley since Arthur and his brothers finished school. And he had no particular memories of Arthur. Arthur wasn’t one of his protégés. Slughorn simply admires cleverness, and he loves novelty. Oooh, shiny!

And, of course, pretty. Sluggy does have a tremendous appreciation of pretty. Quite innocently, I believe, or Albus would have been aware of it. And if it had been anything other than innocent I doubt that he would have tolerated it in his school. As he did, for over 20 years.

Indeed, given that Albus would have been perfectly capable of calling Headmaster Dippett(or Headmaster Phineas Nigellus Black)’s attention to anything over the line in the conduct of a colleague, I think we would be safe in assuming that Albus tolerated Slughorn’s open appreciation of pretty for something more like 50 years, or longer. Molly tells us that Albus and Horace started teaching at about the same time.

Not that we can really count on that piece of information. This would have been decades before Molly was born. But a — presumably rich — uncle of hers had married into the Black family, and I very much suspect that Phineas was the Headmaster who hired both, so she might have known about it from family stories. This would put their dates of hire at almost any point between Albus’s finishing school around 1899 and before Phineas’s death in 1926.

I’d say that Snape also comes off the worst in a comparison of their respective performances as Head of House, despite Slytherin’s seven-year winning streak with the House Cup and the Quidditch Cup during Snape’s tenure. In a perfect world, Snape would have gone straight from Hogwarts into the R&D division of St. Mungo’s. By now he would be in charge of a half the wards on the Curse damage floor, and he might be running the whole place by the time he was 60. And his portrait eventually would fit right in with the those of his bloody-minded peers on the central staircase. He would not be stuck off in a school dealing with dunderheads. Or at least not underaged dunderheads.

****

Which brings us back to the sticky issue of the Slug Club.

A lot of readers really, really dislike like the whole concept of the Slug Club. It just plain gets up their noses. And they are absolutely right that a blatant little “elitist” clique like the Slug Club ought to have no appropriate place in a truly just and virtuous society.

But since when is the wizarding world one of those?

Hermione may have downplayed it to the boys, but I think that she was very chuffed indeed to be invited into the Slug Club. And Sluggy was happy to have her, for her own sake, not merely as a favor and a possible inducement to attracting Harry Potter. He recognizes drive when he sees it.

And she is far from the first clever and talented “outsider” to have been adopted by Horace Slughorn and ultimately helped along the way to finding her own comfortable niche in the Old-Boy’s (and Old-Girl’s) Club of wizarding Britain. Slughorn looks for such promising youngsters from obscure backgrounds to speed along their way.

And all he really asks is that they not forget him.

And for those who sniff and mutter yes, but that for every clever Muggle-born or known halfblood that Horace ever adopted, there were probably a dozen high-status brats with nothing to recommend them but their family names, I answer; yes, That is the whole point of the Slug Club. Those are the kids who really need that Club. And throughout Snape’s term in the office they haven’t been getting it.

Who else is going to teach those little “scions” the responsibilities that their place in the pecking order entails. Their families? They are only with their families for a couple of months of the year. You don’t turn out any kind of a viable future “ruling class” without giving it a solid grounding in the duties of their high position, as well as the benefits.

The “System” only works as long as the bulk of society supports it. And it will only do that as long as those in control keep giving enough back to those who let them control it, for the masses to be willing to let them keep doing it! And the Slug Club, and its judicious sprinkling of talented incomers are the way Slughorn shows them how it’s done.

Those interlocking patronage networks that run the wizarding world are there for a purpose. He is demonstrating that purpose. Teaching the children in favored positions to recognize merit when they see it, and showing them how to cultivate it, how to manipulate the System and — even if rather crudely — something of what the rewards are.

It’s called noblesse oblige. “Passing the torch” and explaining this has probably always traditionally been one of the unwritten duties of the Head of Slytherin House. One in which Severus Snape has been conspicuously derelict.

But then Snape’s hardly qualified, is he? And I rather doubt that there has ever been a whole lot of noblesse “obliging” him. Although one of the Malfoys probably got him his job. “Officially”, that is. Lucius was one of Sluggy’s favorites, after all. And he seems to have been an apt student, in that much at least.

For the talented outsiders, Sluggy’s attention, for the lucky few who catch his attention, can make all the difference in the world to their futures. And it is a bargain at the price. Even if the old bore sometimes has perfectly appalling judgement of just what qualities truly merit cultivation.

Although he really ought not to be blamed too harshly for being taken in by a dirty dish like Tom Riddle. He was certainly not the only one to have been taken in by that nasty little piece of work. But it has to be admitted that Riddle seems to have learned an awful lot of very dangerous tricks from Slughorn.

And Sluggy really ought to have turned that memory over to Albus as soon as Albus asked for it. It doesn’t matter how ashamed of it he was. He is clever enough to have known what was at stake.

****

But then that’s the real issue, isn’t it?

Horace Slughorn is rather more than just a timid soul, isn’t he?

He is in fact, an abject coward.

And by the time we met him he may very well have had good reason to be.

Let’s take another look at the facts, shall we? Or what we have been told are the facts. Five minutes after he learned that Albus Dumbledore believed that Lord Voldemort had returned — he went into hiding. As stated above, he abandoned his home and spent the following year dodging anticipated Death Eaters, squatting in Muggle houses, never staying anywhere longer than a week. Despite the Ministry’s denials, despite the Prophet’s smear campaign, despite all lack of any evidence.

Now let’s remember that Slughorn can never really have looked like a good prospect for legitimate recruitment by Lord Voldemort. Right off the top: he’s a member of an older generation. Riddle didn’t recruit the older generation. He never sent out lures to anyone who was significantly older than himself. And certainly not Slughorn, with, by the time he retired, 40 years of openly cultivating talented Muggle-borns and half-bloods behind him. We don’t know how long Slughorn was actually at Hogwarts, even if he did start about the same time as Albus, since we don’t know how long Albus was an instructor before he became Headmaster, but Slughorn was certainly there in Riddle’s day in the early ’40s, and he was still there in Lily’s day in the mid-’70s. We assume that he was there right up to the point that Snape took over in ’81.

But Horace does seem to have been from the same pureblood, “insider” sector of society that produced most of Voldemort’s original followers. Slughorn knew Abraxis Malfoy. He remained a friend of Theodore Nott’s father, who was a former student — although he doesn’t seem to have known that his friend Nott was a Death Eater. Nott’s arrest in Year 5 wasn’t brought to Slughorn’s attention until he started talking to students on the Hogwarts Express in the year he returned to teach. And by then he’d been in hiding for a year.

And despite his waffling over the possibility that to return to the school would be tantamount to a declaration of allegiance to the Order of the Phoenix (pretty good supporting evidence for my contention that in its original iteration the Order had NOT been any kind of a “secret society”, btw) he made a point of conspicuously avoiding known all Death Eaters’ kids once he got there.

But, back in the day, he hadn’t avoided them. He had taught all of them. And they knew him. I repeat: Horace Slughorn personally taught every single British Death Eater that Tom Riddle ever enlisted. And they knew where to find him. And they would have had no difficulty approaching him.

Slughorn is an affable, and highly competent wizard, for all his weakness of character. And he really does have excellent contacts. And he boasts about how useful he can be to people. That’s just asking for it, isn’t it?

He could have announced his retirement as early as the end of June of 1981 (although it is more likely that he did so during the summer). This was at the very height of Voldemort’s first rise. And there is some reason to suspect that he may have been encouraged, or even asked to make way for Severus Snape, in order to avoid putting Snape into the DADA position. Voldemort did not fall until the end of October, four months later. And it would have taken several months more to round up all of his followers that were ultimately identified.

And it would take even longer to sort out the volunteers from those who were coerced or magically constrained. Malfoy and Avery managed to get off on Imperius defenses, which we know in their cases was completely bogus.

But in most cases it wasn’t.

The false Professor Moody told us very clearly that the Imperius Curse had given the Ministry a lot of trouble once upon a time.

And if the Death Eaters’ tactics were anything then like they are now, we have seen that they have no compunction about creating Inperiused puppets. A lot of them.

I have a terrible suspicion that one of those puppets may have been Horace Slughorn.

****

Which brings us to the Battle of Hogwarts and the end of the series.

Rowling seriously let us down on the issue of House unity. After flirting with the whole business of even having the Sorting Hat claiming to be unsure as to whether the whole Sorting process was really the right thing to do, she blew us a collective raspberry and had Minerva order the whole of Slytherin House out of the castle before the final battle started. And in that miserable excuse for an epilogue Rowling strongly implies that the whole business of Sorting the students is still “business as usual” (even though the Hat was set afire and no one took the time to put it out) and that Slytherin is still designated the house of “teh eeeevil”. We plowed through 4000 pages to validate that?

Why raise the issue if you don’t intend to deal with it? Or at least to come out and admit that you are not going to deal with it. And possibly to offer a reason why you are not going to deal with it? Otherwise you are deliberately leading people on.

Tom claimed in canon that the Slytherins all left the castle and joined him. Of course he was claiming that to taunt Lucius Malfoy and only doing it to say that all of them but Draco had checked in, so I doubt it’s a good idea to take a word of it seriously. Frankly, the way Rowling set the whole situation up there was no way that Tom would have even known that the castle was being evacuated, unless he had a clever little silver monitoring device like one of the ones in Dumbledore’s office. Which I suppose is possible. All he had to do would have been to ask Snape for one. Snape could have hardly refused to give him one. Snape certainly hadn’t been the one to tell Riddle that the students were being evacuated. He was driven out before the evacuation was even discussed, or the decision to make a stand against Riddle was even formalized. So how does Tom supposedly know this?

And at that it doesn’t explain how the Slyths could have got from the Hog’s Head into the forest without setting off the caterwauling curfew alarm that was superimposed on the village at sunset. You cannot Apparate without a clear desination, and the Forest remained off-limits even during Snape’s term as Headmaster.

Of course Tom also claims that Snape agreed that there were other, more worthy, fish in the sea when he turned up late to the muster in the graveyard at Little Hangleton and was questioned about his prior devotion to Lily Potter.

And I don’t believe a word of it. I’m just so convinced that the first thing that Snape would have found himself needing to justify after his tardy appearance when summoned was his love life — not.

I say that that claim was a classic “Yo mama!” exchange with Harry Potter, and probably something our Tom just fired off extemporaneously.

I don’t believe that Lily wore army boots, either.

The fact is that anything we hear from Tom Riddle should probably be taken with a very large grain of salt.

But it does raise the issue of what did happen to the Slytherins. And, for that matter, what happened to all of the underage students who were evacuated from the castle. Rowling doesn’t seem to give a damn. She certainly doesn’t seem to have spared a thought for the logistics of the situation.

Post-release she has tried to claim that she showed the Slyths returning to the castle with the villagers in the morning But until a new edition of DHs comes out with that added, that is a baldfaced lie. She wrote nothing of the sort. In fact she quite clearly wrote that Slughorn and Charlie Weasley returned at the head of a party of all the friends and family of all the students who had stayed at the castle to fight — along with the villagers of Hogsmeade.

Since all the Slytherins had been ejected from the castle before the fight started, that sounds like not a one of them returned but Slughorn — unless of course they had family members in another House who stayed, in which case they effectively snuck back incognito.

But then, the whole account of that stupid Battle of Hogwarts was haphazardly written and disorganized.

It was strongly suggested that the Muggle-born students had not been permitted back at all that year, and yet Minerva was heard to be chivying one of the Creevy brothers (who have been established as Muggle-borns since CoS — although Rowling might very well still decide to claim that it’s only their father who is a Muggle any time she takes it into her mind to do so) out of the castle with the underage students. This would be Dennis, the younger brother. Since Colin, the elder, at the end of his 6th year was probably already of age. He remained and was noted as having been killed in the fight.

A few others, like Luna Lovegood and Ginny had already either been taken hostage by DEs or had gone into hiding. But that still leaves anything from 200–450 students (depending upon whether or not you accept Rowling’s population numbers or more rational ones) in residence by the day of the battle.

Even if the whole of the Gryffindor 7th year and half of the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws stayed on to fight, that still only comes to about 20 students. (Rowling did tell us that she created 40 students in Harry’s year, and we’ve met most of them. And it never sounded like Ginny’s class was any larger.) Since it was the end of the school year all but those 6th year students who had birthdays during summer break would have probably been of age also. Perhaps another 10–15 of those stayed as well. Bringing us up to some 35 students who stayed. There are some dozen or so staff (Counting Snape and the Carrows) and there ware maybe another dozen ex-DA members and a couple of dozen Order members who also showed up. That comes to about 80 or so defenders, with a death count of 50 only four of whom seem to have been named.

Right. I’m not sure I believe Rowling’s numbers. Especially since so far as we know, only Tom and Bellatrix appear to have been killed on the attackers’ side.

But that still leaves all of the students from years 1–5 who needed to be evacuated, none of whom could Apparate. That’s anything from 150–350 students. And I don’t think they could all fit in the Hog’s Head. And, as I say, it is already established that there was a caterwauling curfew in the village, set to go off if anyone stepped outside a building before dawn. So what were they supposed to do. Huddle there like sardines (with the goats) until whoever won the battle decided to deal with them?

Somebody needed to get those children away to safety. And somebody needed to organize it. I really don’t get any impression that there were any pre-existing evacuation plans in place before they actually had to do it.

So I have my own ideas of what the Slytherins might have been doing that night. One that isn’t directly contradicted by anything in the text.

But first: if the Slytherins had just left through the tunnel and gone off to join the DEs don’t you think they would have told someone what was up, and Tom would have sent someone to the Hog’s Head to close down the escape and cut off the arrival of the castle’s defenders? We would have had the Battle of the Hog’s Head, with the younger students right in the middle of it. And we absolutely got nothing of the sort. Tom and his followers don’t seem to have had a clue. And no one really who could have given them one. Which still leaves the question of how the Slytherin students could have got from the Hog’s Head to the DE encampments (which they knew were where?) without setting off the curfew. I think it is much easier to believe that Tom was simply lying. The only Slytherin students who we know took part in the battle were Draco and his goons, and they merely snuck back into the castle through the tunnel. Assuming that they ever left in the first place.

The only adult who seems to have stayed on site at the Hog’s Head was Slughorn. Everyone else over the age of 17 was moving in the other direction; Order members Apparating directly into the bar to get into the castle to join the defenders, as well as underage students evacuated on Minerva’s orders. It must have been like Grand Central Station in there. Even Aberforth didn’t stay at the pub. He showed up at the castle along with the rest of the Order.

Sluggy and the Slytherins, were the first group though the tunnel, followed by the first through fifth years of the other three Houses (plus any 6th and 7th years who didn’t stay to fight).

I tend to doubt that it was left up to Aberforth to figure out what was to be done with them. And Sluggy, as the only teacher had the authority to take charge.

Sluggy had a crew of perhaps 30–40 students from all four Houses who were old enough to have Apparition licences (or at least training) and up to 300 children who needed to be taken to their parents, or someplace safe. I think that they spent the rest of the night doing it. Only those whose parents could be expected to already be on the battlefield, or who were Apparating in to take the tunnel to the castle were left to stay overnight in the Hog’s Head. It is probably big enough to house that many. And someone needed to organize that, too.

And in the morning, once the curfew went off-line, Sluggy rousted out the villagers, and led them back to the castle, along with Charlie Weasley, to finally duel with Tom, in his green silk pajamas.

In fact, we saw him do it.

****

In common with most wizards, Slughorn consistently demonstrates that he is deficient in common sense. As stated above, in HBP he waffled over returning to the school for fear that to do so would be to make a statement of alliance with the Order of the Phoenix. (It would not have.) And yet, once he got there he took care to snub every known Death Eater’s child in the place. Now, what kind of a statement was that?

Even better; once he returned to Hogwarts and was “safe” what does he do but spend the whole year inviting his former pets back onto campus for “little Friday night suppers” and Christmas parties? Despite the fact that he does not know where any of their real loyalties may lie, and the Prophet sends out daily reports of the actions of people put under Imperius. What on earth was the silly man thinking?

Clearly, his trust in Albus Dumbledore, and Dumbledore’s protection, was boundless.

And in such a story as we thought we had, in which the plot is not almost totally driven by coincidence, I thought that there was at least some plausibility to the theory that Horace could have taken a hand in a conspiracy to orchestrate the death of Albus Dumbledore. Even if that death was real, it certainly wasn’t random. And, most unlike the deaths of Cedric Diggory and Sirius Black, it was not arbitrary. That death was designed to serve a purpose.

At the very least, someone in the school had to have had been involved in the aftermath. Neither Albus nor Severus Snape were going to be in a position to cover the wrap-up stage of the proceedings. And Hagrid cannot not have been expected to do it all alone.

There was more than one early theory out there which postulated Slughorn’s involvement in the [faked] death of Albus Dumbledore. One of these can be found in the book which a number of other online theorists and I collaborated on with John Granger, over the summer of 2006; ‘Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?’ (Zossima Press, 2006)

I will have to say that I think that some of the extraneous material which had been unearthed in support of the theory is delightful. It follows the careers of a pair of historical stage magicians by the names of Horace Goldin and The Great Albini. These men were peers and rivals, and at some point in his career, Goldin even appeared on stage with a pet tigress named Lily.

Indeed, the historical material is so delightful that I think that if Rowling was aware of it she might have rolled it into her story just for the sheer fun of it, even if it doesn’t mean anything.

However, it has since been proven that even though we may still suspect that Albus’s death may have been “staged”, it was definitely not faked.

Which does not eliminate the possibility of additional conspirators or “stage managers” being involved in the matter.

Someone a little more subtle than Hagrid might have been brought in to assist this “Dumbledore’s Men” production to make sure that everything went as planned.

For example, given the potential for Albus’s full control of the timing of the events of that evening (gone into in the essays entitled ‘Exunt Albus’), isn’t it a little late in the proceedings to be leaving the issue of actually getting the (false) Horcrux into Harry’s hands altogether to chance?

What was the point of retrieving it from the Cave? To leave it in Albus’s pocket for Hagrid or Minerva to find? Hardly.

Hagrid probably couldn’t have managed something that was quite so finicking a detail, requiring deft spellwork. Hagrid is not even a qualified wizard. Horace could have easily managed that part of the business. And I also think that any hypothetical co-conspirator was not Minerva, who was not reported as being among the crowd at the foot of the tower (in all fairness, neither was Slughorn, but he was somewhere in the vicinity, or he would not have known of Albus’s death in order to have informed the Ministry of the situation, as he reported when we next saw him). Minerva is an obvious suspect for having had a part to play at some point in the evening’s events, but not that part. And she’s not any kind of an actress. Her response to learning of Dumbledore’s death would have been hard to fake. She nearly fainted. Had she been at the foot of the tower with the crowd, she would have already known that he was dead.

So. If there was an additional party involved in the conspiracy, it would have probably been someone who would not be expected to be running around the corridors battling DEs, and generally getting underfoot, but someone conveniently off the radar making sure that everything stayed properly coordinated, and performing the necessary stage direction and props management to make sure that the scene was properly set.

Well, Sluggy is certainly experienced at that. Death scenes to order on a two-minute warning in chapter 4 of HBP.

****

And, after all, do we know for a certainty that Albus did not stroll down to Slughorn’s office with a bottle of oak matured mead the evening after he had finally viewed Slughorn’s memory of his interview with Riddle, and assured his old friend Horace that, yes, a great deal of damage had been done by that conversation, but he was hardly the first person to have been hoodwinked by Riddle?

And also that there was a chance that they could finally put some of it right, perhaps? And that there was a very necessary part that Slughorn could help them with, a perfectly safe part, but very, very important?

I don’t think we do know otherwise. For that matter, silly as Slughorn can sometimes be, he is not stupid. And he won’t have forgotten that the poisoned mead in his room had been purchased as a gift for Dumbledore, and stated as such. He probably already suspected that someone was trying to kill the Headmaster.

We know that a Protean charm works between Hogsmeade and Hogwarts. Draco and Rosemerta had been communicating that way since at least the first Hogsmeade weekend. Do we know that Albus did not intend to tip Slughorn off that they were on their way back after Harry went running off for help when he staged his second collapse in Hogsmeade?

Well we know that he didn’t get the chance to do anything so complex at that point. Rosemerta was under instructions to be on the watch and point out the Dark mark to draw Albus back to the school. But Harry did hear Albus muttering on the flight back. Taking down the extra protections around the perimeter accounts for it. But we don’t know that was all he was doing. Albus can perform magic nonverbally. Just activating the charm to make the target coin warm up could be enough of a signal to alert Slughorn, or any other co-conspirators.

Once Slughorn got out of the castle and saw the Dark mark he would have been in no hurry to go back inside. He would have seen Albus and Harry fly to the tower and might have summoned Albus’s fallen wand, cast a cushioning charm, or otherwise softened Albus’s landing, the fall already having been slowed by Snape. Then he would have gotten to work.

First; banish the cushioning charms, make sure his old friend’s robes were decently covering his old skinny legs. Get the Horcrux out of his pocket. Albus only filled him in briefly, Horace wouldn’t have known it was a fake.

Then Slughorn lingers about disguised as a bush or something until Snape chivvies his party of invaders off the grounds and the defenders and Hufflepuffs follow them out of the castle. Then he mingles with the crowd (and what called that crowd away to go and look at the base of the tower while Hagrid’s hut was blazing merrily away in plain sight? Wouldn’t you have expected them to first go and assist Hagrid?). Then conjure the locket into place to make sure the still shocked Harry actually kneels on the locket, so he can’t miss it, and then hover in the background until Ginny takes Harry away and Hagrid takes charge of the body. Then Sluggy can go off to notify the Ministry.

Well, it does work. Even if Rowling doesn’t appear to intend to go anywhere near it. I’m not prepared to bet the farm on it, either. But it is a possibility which I think I’ll keep in mind.

It certainly works better than the roughed-in sketch Rowling gave us.

****

And, besides, Slughorn’s specialty suggests that his help was already deployed in a different field altogether, a good deal earlier in the year. Indeed, in the previous year, as well.

Rowling’s shakiness regarding anything to do with numbers is famous. And passing it off as “Oh. Maths.” is begging the question. Indeed Rowling’s ability to bollix anything that deals with numbers is absolutely notorious. Almost suspiciously so. The reader will just have to forgive me if I decline to follow that particular line of enquiry.

But, the fact remains that she does use numbers and she doesn’t always botch them. And sometimes they mean something.

We just cannot always be sure of when.

Rowling tossed us yet another irrational numerical clue in HBP. And this one is connected to Slughorn. We still do not have any clear idea regarding its relevant context. But it was so obviously flagged as a clue that it stands to reason that it had to mean something. Even if Rowling forgot about it later.

Horace Slughorn had allegedly been in hiding for a year by the time Albus and Harry caught up to him and talked him into returning to Hogwarts. By his own account, he had been out of touch, and on the move pretty much ever since Albus had made his announcement that Voldemort had returned. He claims that he had stayed no longer than a week in any one place before moving on.

About six weeks later, in his first Potions class he has a selection of complex advanced, potions set up as samples for the edification of his 6th-year NEWT-Level class. We had already encountered some of these over the course of the series, some of them more than once.

Veritiserum, Polyjuice, Amortensia, and Felix Felicis.

At this point we still know nothing about the brewing of Amortensia. But we have known since CoS that Polyjuice needs three weeks to stew. Towards the end of OotP Snape states that Veritiserum takes a month.

And when, after learning of its properties, Ron comments that brewing up a batch of Felix Felicis might be a good idea, Harry discovers and relays the information that Felix Felicis requires a full six months to brew.

Six months?

Slughorn had a finished batch of it in his first class of the year.

He must have started it no later than the previous March.

Why?

On the face of it, the answer seems fairly obvious. A man in hiding might reasonably want to stack the deck in his own favor, despite the fact that the stuff is highly toxic in large quantities. But he admits to having only taken the stuff twice in his life, and both times decades ago.

But then he also tells us that Felix is “desperately” tricky to make, and disastrous to get wrong. I doubt that such a delicate potion would improve by being packed up and relocated on a weekly basis during the brewing stage.

So where did he brew it? Was it even brewed fresh for this year, or was this the end of an older batch, decanted for a classroom demonstration?

If it was a fresh batch, he must have had a secure location to set it up, and check in on it at intervals. But that doesn’t really answer the question does it? Why did he suddenly decide he needed to brew a batch of Felix Felicis 8–9 months after he stared squatting in Muggle houses? What happened at the end of February or the beginning of March of Harry’s 5th year to motivate him? Do we know?

Well; Harry’s interview with Rita Skeeter was printed in the March issue of the Quibbler. But I don’t know whether that would have convinced him he needed to keep a bit of Felix on hand. We don’t even know if he was in a place where he would have seen the Quibbler.

So maybe we are barking up the wrong tree.

What he had in the classroom was a very small batch of the stuff. We don’t know how well it keeps. Given Slughorn’s general tendency for avariciousness, a controlled substance which probably would fetch a very pretty penny would be a very valuable thing to keep around. Particularly if you are on the move, and may need to raise money in a hurry, cut, and run. Maybe what he had in the classroom was the last of a batch brewed a couple of years earlier. But we cannot count on that.

So what are our options? (The safest option of course is simply to say; “We don’t know.”)

But, consider; Slughorn could have been asked to make it. By someone who could offer him a secure place to do it in.

What, during Harry’s 5th year is the securest place we know of? Outside of Hogwarts, that is? And who had control of accessing it?

And we hadn’t been back there since the previous Christmas, had we? Even if it has belonged to Harry since the beginning of last June.

Which was when the Order cleared out of it and Dumbledore discovered that the Locket had gone walkabout. (If he had ever known about the Locket, that is. Rowling seems to imply he didn’t. But then Rowling arbitrarily lowered everyone’s intelligence about 40 points when she sat down to write DHs. The damn thing was in a display case in the parlor when Albus was in and out of the place the previous summer for ghod’s sake.)

James Potter’s name never passes Slughorn’s lips, but Horace did speak well of Sirius Black. In his fashion.

What if he hadn’t been squatting in Muggle houses for the past year, but only since the Order cleared out of #12.

On the other hand, Slughorn isn’t a member of the Order and wasn’t willing to commit to beoming one.

For that matter, wouldn’t the Order have already had a Headquarters during VoldWar I? What happened to that one? Albus moved Headquarters to #12 in Year 5 because of his new scam of guarding the Prophecy record, in London. But wouldn’t the old Headquarters have been protected too? And we do not know where it was (unless it was the house in Godric’s Hollow. That one is still standing as a memorial. That could explain why they didn’t go back to it).

One also might wonder just who inherited the Flamels’ cottage. Albus could have hidden Sluggy anywhere. Once he caught up to him, himself. Which he demonstrably had done.

After the example of OotP it would be a bit silly of us to lose sight of the fact that a fair part of the action of this series is taking place off the pages that we and Harry have access to.

And Dumbledore collected Harry and took him directly to where Slughorn was with rather suspicious ease once you consider the matter, didn’t he?

And the two of them seemed to immediately take up an ongoing disagreement right in the middle, upon arrival, didn’t they?

And with a complex and dangerous conspiracy to stage his own death in the equation, I should think that Albus Dumbledore might have appreciated access to a little vial of Felix Felicis on one particular evening in the following June, himself, mightn’t he? Re-read the way Harry observed Albus “feeling his way” through that sea cave and compare it with the more subjective version of Harry’s experience while under the influence the night of Aragog’s funeral. I’d say the similarities are highly suggestive. And even though it was a small batch of Felix, I don’t think that two doses would have accounted for it all.

However. The safest option is still; “We don’t know.”

And since Rowling has relegated Felix Felicis to her ever-growing list of disposable plot devices, which were used once and discarded, despite their clear potential relevance to future developments, we’ll never find out.

Although, in retrospect, that whole sequence is still inclined to take on the look of another piece of performance art. The Albus and Horace Show.

****

But if Sluggy, who we know has tremendous faith in Albus Dumbledore, likes to work behind the scenes, and whose objection to returning to Hogwarts seems largely to have been based upon the appearance such an open association with Dumbledore and the School would present, was already working with Dumbledore — behind the scenes — by the spring of Harry’s 5th year, we suddenly have to ask ourselves a few more questions regarding some other events that we’ve been taking for granted.

Slughorn may be fat, but he is not exactly lazy. Nor is he stupid, however deficient he may be in common sense. And he’s a Slytherin, with an eye to making use of whatever advantages come to hand. And he does possess an alertness which is attuned to recognizing an advantage when it is under his nose.

So, the question really has to be asked: just how much did chance really have to do with Harry being given Snape’s old Potions text? Or was that yet another of Albus’s machinations?

Post-DHs, I was disgusted to discover that the whole issue of the Potions book was yet another of Rowling’s disposable plot devices, and that it was never necessary for Harry to have known that it had once been Snape’s book at all. (Which renders that whole discovery gratuitous and irrelevant.)

But the issue is still worth batting back and forth as if it had mattered. It certainly mattered that Harry should have had access to the book over the course of his 6th year. The only question is whether it was by accident or by design that he did have it. Having performed a frontal lobotomy upon the whole storyline, Rowling these days no doubt would like us to passively sit like lumps (very much like Harry) and accept that it all just happened by the will of providence. I, however, still think it plays much better if it happened by design.

Sluggy certainly palmed the book off onto Harry without the boy becoming suspicious. And if that was intentional he and Albus might readily have shared a grin when Harry returned the battered cover with the clean, fresh, new interior.

Because, by all rights, we ought not to have heard the last of that Potions text. And the fact that we have, frankly, stinks.

For, it gradually sinks in, that the whole “Half-Blood Prince” subplot of the book bearing his name, from where we are standing, was completely pointless!

It served absolutely no purpose to the story, as the story was presented in book 6. None. At all.

Not the Potions book, itself, mind you. It was absolutely crucial to the plot that Harry have access to the book. Without the information in that book he would not have been able to complete the task that Albus set him, and he and his friends would not have come out of that year intact.

But he didn’t need to know who had written the information in that book.

The only purpose served by discovering that the book had been Snape’s book, was to stand in as the punch line of a joke on Harry. And, incidentally, to underscore the fact that when the subject is Snape, Harry never seems to get it right.

So at the end of the book, the other shoe had yet to fall. And we never got one. There was no reason for Rowling to have been at such pains to establish that it had once been Snape’s book — unless there was going to come a point in the action that Harry would need to know that the information in that book came from Snape. Even if it was no more than that he would need to be able to recognize the handwriting. And we never got that reason. It’s pointless.

Ergo; it has since devolved into all apparently being a part of a lengthening string of unbelievable coincidences strung together by some never-named supreme being for reasons never revealed. This is not good storytelling.

Because if getting that Potions book to Harry was deliberate, then there should have probably been some information in that book that somebody wanted Harry to have access to. And it was probably not Sectumsempera. At the end of HBP Harry may just not have found whatever it was yet. But he still might have.

And, to pass the book to him by design would have been dead easy.

Minerva had probably passed