The main thing that everyone who was there seemed to agree upon was that the hostilities between James Potter and Severus Snape had been ongoing from the beginning of their Hogwarts “careers”.

Another which enjoys a general consensus among the readers — who follow Harry’s lead in the matter — is that neither James nor Remus knew of the werewolf “trick” before it actually took place. It was Harry who lept to that conclusion. No one else actually made that claim.

So far we’ve been given no reason to suppose that Harry’s informants were deliberately lying, but Lupin neither confirmed nor refuted Harry’s stated conviction that Remus had not known of the plan, and neither did Sirius Black.

But at that point in the series, it was simply too difficult for any of us to imagine any variation of the incident wherein Remus would have agreed to make such a use of his “condition”. Even this far down the road, given the information available at that time, the idea seems far too difficult to entertain.

But it is no longer impossible. Not now that we’ve seen what a lot of dirty little curs the Marauders actually were.

The third thing that we were told regarding the matter is that the whole affair was completely hushed up, and only those persons actually involved in it, probably their families, the Headmaster (and presumably the Hogwarts staff) ever knew about it. The rest of the student body never found out. And for some eight years we assumed that this included Lily Evans. Until Rowling told us differently. And it makes a difference, too.

Possibly all the difference in the world.

The fourth detail that everybody agreed upon was that Sirius Black definitely set the situation up. We did not know how, and we did not know why. We did not even know for certain whether he did it alone.

We were, however, willing to take a stab as to when.

However erroneously.

****

Before getting properly into that business, however, I probably need to add a couple of riders.

First; this is a trip down memory lane and covers the development of theories past, in a number of stages, even though most of these iterations have turned out to be wrong.

Second; I probably first need to summarize another theory which is gone into in detail in the companion piece entitled ‘The Malfoy Connection’. For it is relevant to the development of my earlier theories of what else was going on at that time. And that particular element was not disallowed by Rowling’s big reveal in DHs. It’s still on the table, even if not quite in its original form. For that possibility to work, we need only to be willing to consider that Lucius Malfoy, even while at Hogwarts had a clue about the proper way to build or to maintain a following (he was one of Slughorn’s favorites, after all).

In the first place, you don’t limit your potential followers to your own year group. And indeed we’ve been given some confirmation since, suggesting that kids from the same general social backgrounds tend to group together in Slytherin House, possibly without regard to their exact year, which increases the overall influence of the group. In the lower years, Draco has often tagged along after the rest of the Quidditch team, all of whom were older than he. (Harry, by contrast, only seems to have interacted with his other team members during practice sessions, although he remained on good terms with the Weasley twins.)

Under this scenario, according to Sirius Black; Severus Snape, who showed up at Hogwarts with a predilection for the Dark Arts and a remarkable stock of homemade hexes and curses, seems (according to Sirius Black) to have been “taken up” by the Black/Lestrange circle of “cool kids”.

Since we have seen no indication of any residual friendship between Snape and Bellatrix, or between Bellatrix and Malfoy, and do get heavy hints that there is a long-standing association between Snape and Malfoy, the simplest conclusion to draw is that there was at some point a cooling-off or a falling out between Snape and the Black/Lestrange crowd and a transfer of Snape’s affiliation to Malfoy. What now seems likely is that Malfoy’s circle was to some degree a rival of Bellatrix’s, and replaced hers in influence once she and her contemporaries had finished school. Rowling’s subsequent endorsement of the Lexicon’s 1960 birth date for the whole Marauder cohort makes this reading more difficult to support, but not impossible. (The difficulty is placing Bellatrix in the school at the same time as Snape at all. It is stated in canon that she was, but it can only be done by dismissing the dates on the dodgy Black family tapestry sketch.)

I also suspect that Severus Snape, like Hermione Granger, probably was better at projecting a favorable image to people older than himself than he was at relating to his own immediate peers. Once he was accepted by Bellatrix’s “junior DE’s” circle, he didn’t bother to build additional alliances with members of his own year group and ended up being considered stuck up, and consequently unpopular. Even in Slytherin.

This is even more likely to be the case since his own background was hardly out of the top drawer. He no doubt spent much of his first few years at Hogwarts determinedly trying to learn to “pass” as a kid from his patrons’ perceived social level. In short, he was a social climber. A successful one. Upon the whole, this did him no favors either.

This overall perception was if anything consolidated when his affiliations transferred to Malfoy and his slightly younger group of cool (and perhaps even richer) kids. Possibly before the end of Snape’s first year, certainly by the first term of his second.

Given Sirius Black’s relationship with his own family, the Black/Lestrange association alone would probably be a large part of why Snape was targeted by James and Sirius and their little pack. Particularly after the bad mutual impression made on the Hogwarts Express. With the backing of the Black/et als. set(s), Severus may even have had the upper hand in the hostilities between himself and James Potter and his friends for their first couple of years at Hogwarts.

However, Bellatrix had to have already been a 7th year when Severus arrived, and Malfoy had probably finished Hogwarts by the end of Snape’s 2nd year. Narcissa Black finished school the at the end of his 4th. Leaving only “Mulciber” and Avery who may have been originally a part of the Black/Lestrange crowd, but had also transferred to Malfoy’s, as the highest status group available once Bellatrix and the LeStranges had finished.

****

I suspect that Rowling did not consult her notes to double-check precisely who these people were before doing sitting down to write ‘The Prince’s Tale’, recalling only that both Avery and Mulciber were mentioned in GoF and that Sirius Black had given us the names of a number of Snape’s future DE friends in that particular installment. Avery had indeed been mentioned as one of Snape’s “gang of Slytherins”, also that he had, like Lucius Malfoy (who was not named by Sirius Black), gotten off on an Imperius defense. Mulciber, (who was also not named by Sirius Black) however, only was mentioned in Karkaroff’s plea bargain hearing. A Mulciber had also cropped up as one of the DEs who accompanied Riddle to the Hog’s Head at the time of his interview with Dumbledore upon his return to the ww after his 10-year exile in HBP. Obviously therefore, this cannot be the same man. We must retrofit and assume that this 2nd Mulciber is the first one’s son, although it has not ever been mentioned in canon that there were two different Mulcibers. Rowling would have done better to have used Rosier or Wilkes as her 2nd junior DE. And indeed I think that she did intend to do so (why did she bother to give Evan Rossier a first name if she never intended to refer to him again?) and was too lazy to cross-check.

I suspect that Snape was probably the only one of Malfoy’s group in his year, although at least Avery and “Mulciber” were still in the school when Snape and his classmates sat their OWLs. They do not appear to have been in the same year, however. They were not sitting their OWLs with him, anyway, or discussing them with him afterwards. He was quite on his own.

After Malfoy’s departure, another leader of the group would have probably taken his place in the pecking order. That Sirius Black did not even think to mention Mucliber as one of Snape’s school companions suggests (other than that Rowling used the wrong name) that if we can take Sirius Black’s word on the subject at all, Mucliber occasionally permitted Snape to tag along after him, but did not treat him as a boon companion.

By 4th and 5th year Snape may even have been progressively more often on his own and the tables started turning. Certainly he would have been less often in company with Lily, who seems to have taken up with a “peer group” of other girls, and taken her girlfriends’ verdict regarding Snape to heart, and was gradually viewing him as an embarrassment and a social liability. That gaggle of girls would not have welcomed Snape among them and closed ranks, keeping him away. Unfortunately, James & Co. did not regard their now superior numbers as any reason to ease off in their “get Snape” directive. There was already too much of a history between them for them to reflect that four against one was not fair. By the end of 5th year, as we saw in the Pensieve, Snape was twitchy and half-expecting to be attacked at any moment.

Also, at some point during this period, Lily had caught James’s attention and the whole dynamic of the situation was poised to get much, much worse.

****

And Snape had reason to be twitchy.

One of the spells which we watched James use against Snape was allegedly his own magic, turned against him. Which suggests that their year cohort may have gotten the concept of nonverbal spells introduced to them rather earlier than Harry’s group did.

This reading is inconclusive, since we need to recall that both Harry and his usual source of information, Hermione, were both raised outside the wizarding world. Purebloods raised inside that world and familiar with its practices may have known about nonverbal spellcasting from early childhood. Their families probably would have encouraged their taking up the practice at the earliest possible age as well, considering it a sign of superiority. It isn’t likely that Harry would have recognized the notation “[Nvbl]” for what it meant until he was already familiar with the concept of nonverbal magic — which wasn’t until 6th year. But James was already using such magic at teh end of his 5th.

ETA: The mysterious escape of Levicorpus from the margins of Snape’s potions book into the school at large is probably the primary reason that Avery and “Mulciber” have been reintroduced to the narrative in ‘The Prince’s Tale’. We are now invited to assume that Snape taught them the spell and that one of them was careless enough to use it verbally. This does not explain why James is using it nonverbally, but it at least offers us a marginally plausible explanation for the fact he was using it at all.

Actually, for all we know, a spell which created that particular effect may have showed up at some point in that year from some unknown source altogether. And, since it is a nonverbal spell, no one would have known what it was. Snape’s notes could have been merely his own attempt at reverse-engineering it. The original incantation (as well as the one James used) may have actually been something else altogether.

****

In any case, I felt that I had ample reason to suspect that after what we saw in the Pensieve, Snape would have taken no statement from any of the “Marauders” at face value. Which made his insistence that Black “told” him how to get into the passage under the Whomping Willow rather curious, and very difficult to justify. (Perhaps that’s why Rowling reversed the timing of those two incidents. But I wouldn’t count on it.)

Something else that seemed curious, once one considers it, is the fact that from the minute that the Shrieking Shack incident was first brought up, all the way back in Book 3, on that single issue at least, the majority of the readers have seemingly always been solidly on Snape’s side. Much as they may dislike him, no fair-minded reader has ever been in agreement with Sirius Black that “he deserved it”. Even less so since we were forced to witness the hazing attack on Snape in the Pensieve two books later.

We also always rather supposed that the “werewolf caper” was deliberately set up by Sirius Black in advance.

The most plausible possibilities, so far as I could see them, came down to three basic models.

First; Sirius could have inadvertently given something away without realizing it until later. Post HBP, once we had a better idea of the mental sharpness of Severus Snape, this seemed a possibility that we ought not to overlook.

Second; the fact that Sirius supposedly did not consult James on the matter, given what we now know of the relationship between them, suggests that Black, who was nothing if not impulsive, may well have seized upon an opportunity that presented itself without premeditation, or, indeed, any sort of forethought whatsoever.

Which is still no excuse. But it might explain a bit.

Or, last; he could indeed have deliberately planned it. But why? And why then?

Well, that’s a big part of the question, isn’t it? Just when was “then?”

****

In common with just about everyone else, I thought it was a pretty safe bet that it was after the scene we witnessed during our Pensieve junket. I could not imagine that disgraceful exhibition taking place in public at any point after the werewolf caper had occurred. To engage in such an exhibition after such a close call with expulsion would require insane levels of arrogance, and a sense of bullet-proof entitlement which leaves Draco Malfoy’s in the dust.

And it still doesn’t add up to any kind of rational administration of a school. I mean, allowing that kind of an incident — which was nothing if not public — without any note of any kind of consequences puts Dumbledore’s performance as a school administrator on close to the same level as the Carrows’. One belatedly allows that Lucius Malfoy’s contention that Albus was the worst thing to have ever happened to the school might have a valid point. That public attack was an inexcusable breech of discipline.

Taking the hazing incident that we saw in the Pensieve as our starting point, and stacking that kind of behavior up against what everyone (except Snape) had to say about James Potter, I found the suggestion that this incident could have taken place after they had already been pitched into the consequences that followed the werewolf caper, to be insupportable. It is also very clear from the conversation among the Marauders leaving the Castle after sitting the DADA OWL that their monthly full-moon adventures “wandering with werewolves” is still a well-kept secret between the four of them. I could not believe that Lupin’s condition had already been discovered.

So our parameters for the timing of the werewolf caper appeared to be that it could not have taken place before the end of 5th year, when the hazing took place. It was certainly possible that the werewolf caper might have taken place at some point during 6th year. Many fans believed this to be the case.

Sirius, acto Snape, was 16 years of age when the werewolf caper took place, and he would have had to have reached his 16th birthday before starting his 6th year. However, most students’s birthdays take place at some point during the school year, so they end the School year a (numerical) year older than they began it, even though less than a full calendar year has passed.

IF Sirius Black was the eldest of the four with a birthday between September 2 and December 31, he would have turned 17 by the end of the first term of 6th year.

If his birthday was after January 1, but before September 1 he might have turned 16 at any point from January 1 to the end of the school year during 5th year. We have no hint as to which of these is the case. (Although Sirius’s excuse that James was “only 15” at the time of the Pensive junket is a flat-out lie. James had already turned 16.)

We can probably eliminate most of their cohort’s 5th year from our reckoning. We do not know exactly when during 5th year all three of the Marauders managed to become Animagi, but it probably was not accomplished until well into the year, and the Pensieve junket did not take place until the end of it.

We can also eliminate the period of the summer break following the end of the term, around June 30. None of the participants of that incident were at Hogwarts during the summer break.

However, I could not quite accept that the incident took place during the course of year 6, however obviously such a date might seem to fit.

Which, for me, nailed the timing of the werewolf caper to the very tag-end of June 1976.

Either during, or at the end of OWLs.

Right after the hazing of Severus Snape which we witnessed in the Pensieve. Probably before that week was out.

I still think that this timing would have worked better than what we’ve got if Rowling really did intend for the reader to be able to regard the Marauders as no worse than a lot of nasty, spoiled little brats who nevertheless managed to grow out of the worst of it.

****

This assignment was supported by everything else that has ever been either said or shown to us regarding this event in canon up to the end of HBP.

In fact, I was prepared to stick my neck out and say that I was convinced that the incident we witnessed in the Pensieve was an intrinsic part of the final run-up of hostilities that cumulated in the werewolf caper. One could believe this right up to the chapter of ‘The Prince’s Tale’.

So what was it that we actually saw in that incident?

We saw James Potter stage an impromptu performance of; “I’m a bad, bad boy but you can make me be good,” for the benefit of one Lily Evans.

We saw James’s “stage prop” haul off and call Miss Evans a foul name, disrupting the show, bringing the curtain down on that particular act prematurely and completely derailing James’s budding schoolhouse romance.

Which up to that point had been developing quite satisfactorily, thank you.

But that hardly explains why Sirius would have fitted Snape up to be savaged by a werewolf.

Or does it?

By the end of HBP I was totally unconvinced that Lily Evans had anything to do with why Snape signed on with Dumbledore. But I was no longer so sure that she had nothing to do with why Black set Snape up to be cornered by a werewolf.

Lupin refers to the incident as a “trick” that Sirius played on Snape. Dumbledore seems not to take Snape’s insistence that Black was trying to murder him seriously. Although Albus may have been hinting at something else altogether with his rather odd statement that his memory of the event is as good as ever. But we never heard Sirius Black deny that it was attempted murder, did we?

We watched Snape cause James to lose his girlfriend with one dirty name.

Up to that point she was clearly interested, and flattered, by Potter’s attention, and everything was going along swimmingly, and all of it on James’s terms. (Two years later, when they finally got back together, it would have been on Lily’s terms.)

Snape called her a name. Which shocked her. And then she blew up at James and stormed away, and now (maybe a day or two later) she is probably still not speaking to him and giving him the cold shoulder.

Maybe Sirius thought that Snape ought to be punished for that. And if Lupin does make a meal of him, it’s no loss.

This was the point at which we found out that Snape had been right all along about the young James Potter being an arrogant, swaggering berk. Maybe, just maybe, he was right about Sirius Black as well.

After the episode that we saw, Snape would have been absolutely fixated on getting his own back on the lot of them. Particularly if the upheaval had also thrown him off his stride enough to have caused him to botch his DADA practicals that afternoon. In his determination to get revenge, he may have become at least temporarily incautious.

From Remus Lupin’s observed condition at the time of the pants episode, the full moon was obviously either rapidly approaching or just past, and I thought that it is likely that the werewolf caper played out within the next couple of days.

And, however incautious; I seriously question whether Snape would have believed or followed up on anything that any of the four Marauders would have told him about getting past the Whomping Willow if it was said directly to his face under anything like a normal circumstance. He would have expected some kind of a catch.

Given the glimpse we got in the Pensieve of their typical attitude and conduct toward Snape, it becomes interesting to speculate just how Sirius’s luring Snape to the Shrieking Shack was actually accomplished. Particularly since it was strongly implied that Sirius managed to do it without James’s knowledge.

Which, prior to OotP, made me suspect that Snape might have been led to believe that he had discovered the key to the ongoing mystery, and his opportunity for revenge, all by himself. And that the best way this could have been managed would have been to stage a conversation for him to overhear while he was lurking about in the bushes spying on them. You need two people to hold a conversation. It was widely agreed that neither James nor Remus knew about the set-up. Who does that leave?

****

Well, it is usually a mistake to attribute to malice and cunning what can amply be explained by bad timing and stupidity. Which in this case was probably amplified by irresponsibility, machismo and mutual stupidity on a grand order. We have already seen that even 20 years later any confrontation between Sirius and Severus was conducted at middle school level (at best). And it was probably only by the merest fluke that James wasn’t on hand to have deflected it merely by his presence.

Here is another scenario which I thought played pretty well:

In OotP we were given at least a few hints that the wizarding world may be a good deal laxer about alcohol usage than the Muggle one. And it has also been generally noted that the view on alcoholism in Europe is not so... focused as it is in the United States.

To be sure, we’d had comic drunkards in the storyline before that point. Hagrid and Trelawney are both in that tradition. But in OotP the tradition was not really being played for laughs. Mundungus Fletcher might have been pure comic relief a book earlier. Here, he was simply dodgy. And Sirius Black had become a source of considerable concern.

We already knew that butterbeer, widely marketed to teenagers, has at least a slight alcoholic content. This is accepted as a matter of course by everyone. We also see both Hermione (age 16) and Luna (age 14-15) with unidentified drinks of the sort served with paper umbrellas and/or cocktail onions in an establishment as reputable as the Three Broomsticks. In company with Rita Skeeter who is openly drinking firewhisky.

Which raises the possibility that underage drinking may also not be as difficult to accomplish in the wizarding world as, perhaps, it ought to be. (Even though Hermione’s drink could just be Professor Flitwick’s favorite tipple of cherry syrup, soda and ice, and Luna’s something equally innocuous The onion argues against it, but, then again, this is Luna. Onion-like vegetables appear to be a continuing theme there.)

Experimenting with alcohol is something that a great many teens simply do. And, one of the commonest demographics of the sort of teens who pull this particular stupid stunt are the “popular” kids. The ones “above” the rules, The nobs, the jocks, the swaggering “big man on campus” kids.

Kids exactly like Sirius Black. And, for that matter, like James Potter, too.

Kids who Madam Rosmerta recalls as having been frequent guests.

Kids that we already know had a handy invisibility cloak to facilitate being where they ought not to be, and who we have just seen were not above “liberating”, without permission, school property to which they were not entitled. Most typically from the Hogwarts kitchens — with which we have already been told they were intimately familiar. Nor, in their day was there any real difficulty getting off the campus and into the village. There were other still usable secret tunnels in addition to the one to Honeydukes’ cellar back in the ’70s. And Filch may not have known about some of the others yet, back then.

I feel I should point out that it is not necessary to postulate a pair of full-blown teenaged alcoholics here. Just a pair of irresponsible young scofflaws who did not consider themselves bound by rules that inconvenienced them. In fact the awareness that they were breaking the rules just added that much more spice to the adventure.

And it probably didn’t happen all that often, either. But it is no stretch whatsoever to imagine that the occasional bottle of burgundy, or brandy, or whatever, may have disappeared from the kitchen stores on those occasions that there might be something for James and Sirius to celebrate.

I also suspect that these celebratory occasions did not necessarily involve all four of the Marauders.

Remus, as a Prefect, might not have felt he ought to take part in anything like that. And while Peter would have been quite eager to join them, and they may have sometimes let him, this is something that I suspect they more often did on their own.

****

Which brings us back around to the werewolf caper.

One finally concludes that Rowling fully intended that we should never be given any reason to try to keep a good opinion of James Potter. I ask you; what kind of an unmitigated jerk reluctantly saves a person’s life to keep his own friends from getting into trouble — and then takes it out of the victim’s hide in public?

But we have to work from what we have been shown. While I find it next to impossible to accept that Severus Snape would have believed and acted on any information that Sirius Black might have told him when he was sober, he might very well have chosen to follow up on something that Sirius let fly while he was drunk and indiscreet.

If this is the case, it becomes not merely possible, but likely that the werewolf caper, as such, was not some elaborate set-up, or even planned at all.

And; if this is the case, since I doubt that the teenaged Sirius was a solitary drinker, I suspect that it was only by some fortuitous chance that James was not present (or perhaps just not conscious) when Snape and an inebriated Sirius crossed paths and ended up getting into a confrontation.

And; that by the time James caught up with Sirius, Snape had stormed off and Sirius (possibly quite thoroughly hexed) was ranting over something Snape had done or said and not thinking at all of anything he had said. Until the recollection caught up to him, afterwards.

And; that Snape who now had every intention of following them past the Willow to catch them all up to something expulsion-worthy, did not stop to report his having encountered Sirius’s drinking on school property. He was saving that up to add to the whole report, later.

And; if this is the case, and Sirius was drunk when he “sent” Snape to the Shrieking Shack, it becomes much easier to understand how Remus could have forgiven him.

Remus, who is the quintessential “follower” and too often behaves as a classic codependent “facilitator”, is very good at making allowances for other people’s weaknesses. After the fact. Also for valiantly trying to protect his friends from the consequences of their own actions. It might even make some sense as to why Dumbledore believed that Sirius had later revealed the Potters’ whereabouts without investigating further. The werewolf caper may have been successfully hushed up, but Dumbledore remembers what is supposed to have caused it.

And which does at least absolve Sirius of plotting a deliberate murder.

Needless to say; at that point I believed that the smart money was on the chance that, in the aftermath of the pants episode, Severus Snape managed to come across Sirius Black, alone, by some fluke, in a situation where there was sufficient evidence of rule-breaking to permit him to engage in a thoroughgoing “Aha!” confrontation about finally being able to get Black expelled; and that in the ensuing fracas Black incautiously let something slip without realizing it until much later.

Snape — who (unlike his creator) has amply demonstrated his ability to add 2+2 and come up with 4 — in hopes of being able to gather evidence against all four of the marauders, rather than just Black alone, delayed reporting the incident, pending further investigation. With the results as already stated in canon.

It certainly played. Rather well, I thought.

I rather thought that if Sirius’s best friend James’s girlfriend has just thrown him over because Severus Snape called her a dirty name, maybe Sirius Black believed that Severus Snape deserved to have something very nasty happen to him.

Like maybe getting scared out of year’s growth.

Maybe Sirius thought he was doing a friend a favor.

And, maybe I was still just missing something.

In fact, we all were.

****

But the next bit of exploration pertains specifically to the timing of the incident, not the motives.

So. About that timing:

To repeat; it is generally agreed upon by everybody connected with it that the matter was successfully hushed up.

By which I mean, that we were strongly led to believe that neither Remus’s lycanthropy, Sirius’s perfidy, Pettigrew’s possible complicity, Snape’s peril, OR James’s heroism was ever made known to the rest of the Hogwarts student body. Which includes Lily Evans, unless somebody told her about it later. Possibly much later.

And a screw-up of that magnitude is a lot more likely to be successfully covered up during a period where the people who are most likely to notice that something is amiss — like the rest of the students in the group’s own year — are already so distracted, anxious and self-absorbed that breaks in routine go unremarked. In short, a period such as the two weeks during which the OWLs were being conducted.

This timing makes it all the more likely that the staff was able to hush it up so thoroughly — since everybody was also sent home within a couple of weeks afterward.

In Harry’s year, the DADA OWL was given on Thursday of the first week of the two weeks of testing. We do not know for a fact that this was the case in his father’s day. It is possible that the tests are set according to a standard order. But it is also possible that the order in which they are given changes by the year.

If the DADA OWL in James’s year was given on Thursday or Friday, the 2-day window of Remus Lupin’s condition as the full moon approached suggests that the werewolf caper may have taken place on either Friday or, even more likely, that Saturday night. With Sunday as a third possibility.

Second; we also have to consider the fact that James was undeniably Head Boy in his 7th year without having ever served as a Prefect. Post-HBP we now realize that he could very well have been Quidditch Captain, which we were informed to be an equivalent office to Prefect. Rowling states that you do not have to be a Prefect in order to be Head Boy (although it certainly helps). James may not have been the first Head Boy to have gotten the appointment by way of the Quidditch Pitch.

However, until that possibility was handed to us, the fact that Remus was the male Gryffindor Prefect in their 5th year, while James became Head Boy in their 7th suggested that somewhere along the line there may have been a change-over, and it is easy to see how the werewolf caper taking place at the end of 5th year would have provided an opportunity to make such a change.

I wasn’t convinced that Dumbledore and the rest of the staff would have regarded saving Snape at the end of 5th year as sufficient cause to just hand the Head Boy badge over to James two years later. Not when it was his own friends and his own actions which set up the situation that made saving Snape necessary in the first place. And particularly not when everyone was engaged in attempting to hush the matter up.

One would like to think that the Hogwarts staff were neither completely blind nor completely stupid. They may, in the aftermath of the werewolf caper have permitted (or even encouraged) Remus to give up the Prefect’s office, for “reasons of his health” — which I suspect that he might have been all too willing to do by then. And transferred the office to James, challenging him with; “All right, you’ve shown that you at least know the right thing to do. Let’s see if you can do it on a more regular basis.” Any such transfer of office would have been much more convincing if it was decided upon at the end of the term, and arranged over the summer break rather than sprung on the whole student body, without explanation, in the middle of the academic year.

It has to have been abundantly clear to everyone on the staff that Remus was vastly unequal to the task of keeping James and Sirius in line. Perhaps, now that James had gotten a strong wake-up call, he would be more amenable to policing both his own and Sirius’s behavior. And Pettigrew’s.

In addition, Severus Snape now knew that Lupin was a werewolf, and perhaps keeping Lupin on as a Prefect might not have looked like a wise move.

And, for all that they would have recognized James’s apparent heroism in saving a fellow student, at considerable personal risk, I think that with his track record, the staff of Hogwarts would have wanted to see James “prove himself” for a reasonable period of time afterwards before they did anything like awarding him such an accolade. And I think that in order to keep the whole sorry matter under wraps it would have been necessary for them to provide some other public arena from which awarding the Head Boy’s office to James Potter would have made sense. Appointing him Quidditch Captain for year 6 seems the most likely method, assuming that he wasn’t Captain already. Which he may have been. He was certainly a Quidditch star by then. All of this reasoning still plays, even in the wake of DHs.

And for that matter, we do not know what the competition for Head Boy was like in James’s year. His having been appointed Head Boy may simply have been because he really was the best candidate in that year’s field of possibilities. He could well have been appointed despite the werewolf caper (and the public hazing incident) rather than because of it.

In any rationally-operated school, being involved in such a disgraceful incident as the hazing of Snape during OWLs week would have blown his chances at becoming Head Boy out of the water, permanently. However as one of the participants in the Café put it: “boarding-school novels tend to be driven by plotting imperatives other than current best-practice administrative and teaching principles, (and to be preoccupied with themes other than the long-term potential of your adolescent protagonists’ budding romances/ affairs/ whatever)”.

In any case, whatever happened in the public arena that made James Potter Head Boy material would seem to have taken place over their 6th year. For it certainly didn’t happen in their 5th. And I thought that it was quite possible that nothing in particular actually did happen apart from James turning over something of a new leaf and sticking to it. Or of his being the best pick of a sorry lot.

****

Because the timing of these events is really not all that negotiable. Something had to have happened between the end of 5th year, when we saw James being a bullying git showing off to Lily Evans, and the end of 6th for James to have turned himself around to such a degree that he would not only have plausibly been appointed as Head Boy the following year, but would have also finally managed to convince Lily to go out with him after 7th year had begun.

Despite the clear indications that he was already crushing on “Evans” as early as the day we saw him in the Pensieve, after the pants episode there was no certainty of it ever coming to anything, given the level of immaturity at which he was attempting to conduct his courtship. Particularly since we were all “privileged” to watch it blow up in his face. And from the information that we had at our disposal at that point, the werewolf caper seemed the most likely candidate for a life-changing event that we had to work from.

It appeared to most readers that something must first have given him enough of a shock to force him decide to make a change, and that he must also have managed to sustain that “new leaf” long enough for people to start believing in it.

I supposed something else could have taken place during 6th year that made James look like a hero off of the Quidditch pitch. But I had no suggestions for what that something might have been, and I refused to try to pull yet another rabbit out of my hat.

And another vague, nebulous “something” was not necessary to the argument when the werewolf caper served the purpose so extravagantly well. If James was a Prefect or Quidditch Captain for his 6th year then, from the average student’s PoV, all that was really necessary would have been for James to look like a better candidate for Head Boy than the other male 6th year Prefects or Captains.

James’s parents were still alive until his 7th year (or at least so we have been led to believe), and died of natural causes. Being left an orphan at 17 might explain Lily’s finally taking pity on him, but it probably had nothing to do with the Head Boy appointment, for he had already been appointed Head Boy by then.

It was almost laughably easy to suppose that the werewolf caper was every bit as shattering an experience for James as the trip into Snape’s Pensieve was for Harry. That it forced James to face exactly what his best friend really was. And that was a dangerously loose cannon with next to no moral compass or ethical sensibilities!

James had saved Snape, whom he despised, because he wasn’t going to stand by and see his friends commit a murder. And I was willing to believe that to James, as well as to Snape, it would have read as a “murder”. James really had been set up as being a bright boy, as little as he might have acted it, and he probably was capable of realizing that his years of picking on Snape “because he existed” had contributed substantially to the situation. He had had to live through his own little “dark night of the soul” wherein he faced the fact that he had been letting Sirius lead him around every bit as much as he had led Sirius. (“I’m bored.” «Do something about it» et. als.)

After the werewolf caper I didn’t think this was so much the case. I thought that after the werewolf caper James finally took the full lead of his little pack, rather than continuing as a co-leader.

I even thought that the werewolf caper may have been a far more obviously life-changing incident for James than it was for Snape, and certainly more than it ever was for Sirius Black who seems to have missed the point of this particular life-lesson entirely. I convinced myself that James went down from Hogwarts at the end of that term thoroughly ashamed of himself and determined that if he could save that utter git Snape just because it was the right thing to do, he could certainly throw some effort into saving Sirius — from himself, if nothing else.

And, since no good deed goes unpunished, he soon had Sirius camping out at his parents’ house with him and ample opportunity to do it.

****

Because, now that we mention it:

Third; we also have to consider the timing on just when Sirius Black ran away from home and went to live with the Potters.

With the werewolf caper in mind, the timing of Sirius Black’s leaving home (at the age of about 16) and moving in with the Potters starts looking more than a little suspicious. There are few coincidences in a well-built backstory (which we coud still convince ourselves this was, back then). The affair may have been successfully hushed up at school, but I cannot see the families of the perps not being told at least something; and the fallout from that might well have been the last straw for the situation between Sirius and his parents.

Sirius’s relations with his family had been strained for years, and his getting himself sorted into Gryffindor had probably only worsened the situation. (Harry is probably not the first student who has put on the Hat mentally shouting “Not Slytherin!”) But this was almost certainly the event that finally sent him storming out and got his name blasted off the family tapestry. This kind of falling-out would also be more readily precipitated during the summer break when everybody in the Black household was face-to-face.

(I wonder just how our Sev got on with Regulus Black. They were in the same House even though Reggie was somewhat younger.)

I also contended that Snape was probably left conspicuously alone for some time after the werewolf caper. With the end result that any attempt, on Snape’s, part to retaliate was likely to bring the staff down on him, hard, in hobnail boots.

Well, it certainly appears that I was well out in left field on all of those suppositions.

It is certainly beyond question that after James pulled him out of the tunnel to the Shack, Snape’s most probable action would have been to go storming off to Dumbledore’s office, demanding justice. Which in accordance with some of my theories regarding the Snape backstory would certainly have provided an opportunity for Dumbledore to have a serious talk with this particular clever, prickly, somewhat solitary Slytherin boy — who had a pre-existing, connection with the Malfoy set.

Since my own interpretation up to the release of DHs was that Snape was already working for Dumbledore by the time the Trelawney Prophecy was made, we had to seriously consider this possibility. But we do not need to consider it any more, or consider it in any depth here. It is explored elsewhere in other articles listed on the sidebar.

****

So, instead, let’s take a closer look at Black himself, and the situation he set up, while we are at it.

Was Sirius Black capable of murder at the age of 16?

Yes. Absolutely.

But there is as yet no certainty that what he was attempting was in fact deliberate murder, and the rest of what we’ve observed of his character gives us fairly strong counter-indication as to whether he was ever capable of murder in cold blood. He certainly let himself be talked out of killing Pettigrew remarkably easily for somebody who stated repeatedly that he had made that particular murder his pre-eminent goal for nearly a year. What was he waiting for, a signed permission slip?

If the werewolf incident was not due to an inadvertent or spur-of-the-moment piece of indiscrete talk in the heat of a confrontation, Most readers are inclined to agree with the majority that regards the notorious werewolf “trick” as having been a nasty, ill-considered, and dangerous joke in which the intended punch line was supposed to come when Snape screamed like a girl and ran away. But I was not 100% convinced of this, since Rowling had thrown us curves before, and I rather thought this was another one.

And, while we are at it, from where I’m standing, Black’s sullen comment in PoA that “He deserved it” does suggest intent, (and ranks right up there next to Snape’s “I see no difference” from GoF in the “most despicable statement ever” sweepstakes).

Unfortunately, what we have seen distressingly little sign of is any indication on Black’s part that he had ever admitted, even to himself, that:

1. Snape could have been killed. And Remus would probably have been executed or sent to Azkaban for it. Dumbledore and the staff members who had facilitated Remus’s attendance at the school might have been removed from their positions, or at the very least extremely publicly embarrassed. At the worst, considering Albus Dumbledore’s other honors and offices, it might have snowballed into a change of government, right at the time that Voldemort’s first rise was becoming more and more of an issue!

2. Snape could have been bitten — and survive. And, blast-ended skrewts notwithstanding, the deliberate creation of monsters is not a particularly innocent or laudable act. Certainly not when you create them out of otherwise normal humans — against their will — however much you may dislike them. Would Black have been prepared to keep Snape company on nights of a full moon in the future in reparation? I doubt it. Having now met Fenrir Greyback, this possible outcome shows Black up in an even worse light.

3. That if Severus Snape, suspected practitioner of the Dark Arts, really did come to Hogwarts knowing more curses than half the 7th years, (and post-HBP we now know that if he didn’t show up knowing more of them, he certainly knew different ones — having invented them himself) and Black was aware of this; mightn’t it have been reasonable for him to consider that by the end of his 5th year Severus Snape just might possibly have managed to kill Remus Lupin? And he probably would have walked free. Because I am not convinced that using an unforgivable curse on a werewolf in wolf form entails the same legal penalties as using it against a human.

And, right up to the end of his life, Black still doesn’t seem to realize this?

What is more, according to every indication that we had ever been given, he seems to have set this stunt up with no warning whatsoever to Remus!

It’s small wonder that, after the fact, Remus, reluctantly, believed him capable of betraying the Potters. After all, Black had certainly betrayed him. Not for fortune or glory, or by giving in to outside pressure, but, to all appearances, for a joke. I’d say that young Mr. Black seems to have managed to earn himself some seriously bad Karma over the first 20 or so years of his life. And it doesn’t sound like he ever learned his lesson, either.

Although a remarkably valid point made by one fanfic author — probably KazVL — does make a degree of sense. One does not get much of a chance to mature in Azkaban. And he wasn’t more than 21 when he was sent there.

****

Well, at any event, that was my original starting point when trying to figure out what was going on and to try to make sense of it.

And, now, while we are at it, it may be time to take a close look at just how the episode actually played out. I didn’t get into this particular end of the equation until the last year or so, but having finally gotten off the fence on several other issues, the little halcyon before the last book came out seemed the last, best time to do it.

Nothing Rowling gave us in Book 7 absolutely contradicts this reading, either. But I’m going to have to admit that I am no longer convinced that it went quite this way myself.

I had help in putting together this iteration. An e-mail from a correspondent who was trying to work the sequence out, for her own purposes kicked off the whole exercise by asking me my opinion as to why James Potter had run out into the tunnel to intercept Snape without closing the door into the Shack behind him?

The first thing that hit me once I turned my attention to the problem and reread the relevant sequence, was that the whole business turns out to be much more complex than it first appears. Rowling turned out to have thrown us another nasty curve.

First off; there was no door for James to close.

Yes, that’s right. There is no door into the tunnel from the shack, no more than there is a door on the forest end. Harry and Hermione did not go through a door to get into the shack. They did not appear to go through a normal, human-sized doorway either. They went through a “small opening” directly into the house. There are internal walls and doors in the building itself, but the tunnel has no door. The tunnel dumps you directly into a ground-floor (or underground floor) room.

Some people, who simply cannot accept that the School’s security measures could have possibly been that lax, contend that this only indicates that there is no door by the time that Harry crawled through that tunnel. But the definite absence of a door in ’94, is absolutely no indication of there having originally been a door in ’75. I say that “no door” suggests a good deal more strongly that there was No Door.

Which is totally inadequate security for the situation from the get-go, on the school’s end of the equation!

Even if you can depend on the afflicted child complying to an honor system. Even if they have the sense and decency to go into an internal room and close that door, before they transform. If they are late getting into the Shack, it falls apart right there, even if they don’t have 3 other little scofflaws to urge them to come out and play in the moonlight with them.

Of course the security measures aren’t completely useless. It isn’t exactly without risk to get out of the tunnel even in animal form. The Willow, unlike a werewolf, will attack anything that moves. Animals just as readily as humans. And a werewolf isn’t really in his right mind, and may not remember about needing to press the knot on the tree trunk to make it hold still.

For that matter, a reasonable-sized animal like a wolf might not have been able to reach the knob to press it without having to emerge from the tunnel far enough to be attacked anyway. The whole arrangement may have been set up to assure that you could only be let out of the tunnel by someone who was already outside it. The gang really was lucky that one of the four was small enough to be able to dart in close enough to disarm the tree before it got them.

Second; Neither Harry nor Hermione were particularly tall at that point of the series, and yet they both had to move through the tunnel “bent almost-double” and to try to run in a crouch all the way from the Willow; the full half-mile to a mile into Hogsmeade to the Shack. The tunnel never got any bigger. (Was it built by House Elves?) In DHs, now that Harry has his full growth he had to crawl through that tunnel.

A stag wouldn’t have fit in that tunnel.

James could have only used the tunnel while he was in human form.

So unless the Marauders had some other way out of the Shack — which we get no hint of; in Harry’s day the Shack’s windows are boarded up, and all the entrances are sealed well enough that even Fred and George never managed to break in — then James would have had to wait at the forest end of the tunnel for the others to emerge and not join them in the shack at all. Or not unless he joined them, and then left early enough to get out before Remus turned, and then take his Animagus form once he was in the open, and wait for them to follow.

James was the kind of boy who always wanted to be in the middle of things, but a stag just would not fit comfortably in that tunnel. The idea that James would have agreed to stay in the forest as lookout until the rest of the group emerged from the tunnel certainly isn’t what he would have preferred, but the role of lookout seems to have been forced on him.

****

So maybe we have been out in left field ever since PoA, and James didn’t know about the trick because Sirius never said anything about it to anyone. James was waiting in the forest in stag form, dawdling about, keeping the entrance in sight, waiting for the others. He knew nothing about the plot until Snape actually showed up. He saw Snape approach the Willow and did nothing, figuring the tree could take care of itself. He may even have retreated farther into the forest to seem more in character as a stag.

But when he saw Snape actually immobilize the tree and get into the tunnel, he had to transform back into human form to intervene. Indeed, once he followed Snape in and yelled “Stop!” Snape would have scrambled farther in, and James had to chase him. He didn’t catch him until they were nearly at the shack itself. James might not have learned about the whole stunt until later.

Which means that the situation in that tunnel was extremely dangerous. James couldn’t transform in the tunnel. There isn’t room. He had to remain human to get Snape out of there. While Remus was the perfect size to run down that tunnel like the Hogwarts Express if Sirius couldn’t hold him back.

And whatever Sirius’s intentions were for Snape, he had to keep Remus from getting into the tunnel in order to protect James. And as a rat, Peter wouldn’t have been a lot of help. And no one could fault Peter for staying in rat form under those conditions.

As to the possibility of Snape catching sight of the dog as well as the wolf, I’m really not at all sure he would have. The windows are boarded, so the moonlight wasn’t streaming in, and no one was in human form to be performing Lumos but Snape himself, and James, and they were both out in the tunnel, on the other side of the “small opening”.

I suspect Snape heard the wolf more than he saw it (one howl is all that it would have taken to explain the situation). He saw the gleam of eyes and teeth, turned and bolted back the way he came. He certainly wouldn’t have stuck around to try to tell whether it was only one animal yelping and snarling, or two.

Sirius apparently did manage to tackle Remus in time to keep him from getting out into the tunnel. And, Remus says that while he had company he was a little more human in his thoughts, even transformed. Once Snape and James were out of sight and scent, he might have not put up a fight against being confined to the shack that month (may have retreated to the upper floor to let them know?), and Peter and Sirius were then able to run out the tunnel, leaving the Willow to stand guard on Remus as it was designed.

So my original take on the sequence — in this iteration — is that:

1. Black somehow fed Snape the information on how to get into the tunnel. The information could have been planted or “blurted”, unwittingly, unintentionally, or deliberately, intending anything from mischief, to actual murder. Snape was determined to follow up on it.

2. Madam Pomfrey escorts Lupin to the Willow and sees him off down the tunnel.

3. Sirius and Peter get into the tunnel to join Remus in the Shack as usual. James either joins them, then leaves, or remains in the forest in Animagus form as lookout.

4. Snape follows them (and James) out of the castle, but is too late to see them transform. He disarms the Willow and enters the tunnel.

5. James resumes human form and follows, calling out for Snape to stop. Snape does nothing of the sort and James has to pursue Snape all the way into Hogsmeade.

6. Snape is almost to the shack by the time James overtakes him. Sirius has to grapple Remus to keep him from getting into the tunnel. Snape, who is right outside, the shack, catches a glimpse of Remus by his own wand’s light. He may catch a glimpse of Padfoot as well, but the light is poor, it is a “small opening”, Padfoot is a black dog, in the dark, and Snape, being occupied with the scuffle with James may not realize that there is more than one animal in the shack.

Once he realizes there is a werewolf in that shack he stops fighting and runs (doubled-over) back to Hogwarts, as does James, since he cannot transform in the tunnel and cannot return to the shack in human form.

7. Once back on Hogwarts grounds Snape is off to the Headmaster’s office howling bloody blue murder for their expulsion. James somehow managed to fend off the worst of the episode with some “likely story” about how sure the 3 knew how to get into the tunnel, but hadn’t done so themselves, and that Sirius must have said something to give Snape the idea of how to get in by accident. He was skating on thin ice because he had been caught dead to rights by being out of bounds and playing fast and loose with Dumbledore’s (inadequate) security measures. On the other hand, what are the odds that the 4 of them weren’t using the shack as a secret clubhouse during the rest of the month, and Albus knew it?

8. Meanwhile, Remus retreated to the upper story of the Shack and Sirius and Peter left and followed James as quickly as they could.

After all, Albus would have wanted to speak to them as well — Sirius in particular, and it would have looked highly suspicious if they couldn’t be found. We do know that somehow they all managed to hoodwink the Headmaster and their Animagus cover remained unblown. Nor did Snape discover it.

When questioned, Sirius might have tried to brazen it out by passing it off as a joke, that he intended to give Snape the fright of his life. James hadn’t a lot of choice but to play along with that interpretation, and Sirius was a good enough friend to have insisted that James knew nothing of it.

We still have a bit of a problem, however, since Sirius does make his claim to Harry that he was sure that he and James could keep Remus under control. But if he told Snape how to get into the tunnel, and the stag couldn’t fit into the tunnel, then Sirius must have known that he wouldn’t have had James’s help at the shack. Which may be a hint that we’re not quite there, yet.

****

Well, ignoreing the maybe-hint, it certainly plays. But I no longer believe it. Or not completely. A lot of it is probably correct. The stag wouldn’t have fit in the tunnel, and there is still no door from the tunnel to the shack.

But I am no longer convinced that James didn’t know anything about it.

Mind you I still have way too hard a time swallowing the idea that it was all a conspiracy to murder Severus Snape. But where Snape may have been wrong about the Marauder’s intentions, I no longer believe he was wrong in his claim that James Potter was in on it up to his neck.

So what changed?

The timing. And it was Rowling who insisted on that.

Yes. That'’s right. I've finally managed to process at least some of the indigestable brick that Rowling dropped on us when she set the timing of the werewolf caper ahead of that of the Pensieve junket.

****

I do have to admit to having found myself completely baffled as to what Rowling thought she was going to accomplish by placing the werewolf caper before the Pensieve junket. If she had wanted to try to preserve any sort of good-will toward any of the participants, she’d have done better to have simply not have referred to it at all. She certainly didn’t use the reference for anything. Certainly not to give us anything worth having that was of approximate value to what she summarily disallowed by it.

On the surface, it’s obvious why she did it of course. She intended to make it absolutely clear to every reader that Lily Evans never had a kind word to say to Severus Snape after he had publicly called her a mudblood. (He might have been better off calling her a cunt. That, unlike her parentage, was something that reflected only upon her, herself, and her behavior.)

It isn’t nearly so obvious that Rowling truly intended to so harshly clarify just what such behavior at such a time says about James Potter. But maybe we ought to reconsider it.

Of course we cannot count it out. Rowling has made a couple of statements post-release that strongly suggest that she is anything but unaware that, as written, the Weasley twins come across as cruel, and James comes across as a lying young brute.

But we cannot count on it, either. Rowling has a dreary track record of only showing open disapproval of bullies inside the story when they happen to oppose Harry. Any bully who supports him has her (apparently) full approval.

All of which says nothing whatsoever to resolve the internal contradiction she has now inserted by first having Lupin and Black claiming that the staff managed to hush up the whole thing, Dumbledore forcing a vow of silence regarding the incident from Snape, and then to have Lily nagging Snape for his “ingratitude” over James having saved his life, afterwar