Re: Happy to disagree :)
(Anonymous)
It provides a way for Dumbledore to know for certain that Voldemort isn't dead (as he knows in the conversation with Severus), above and beyond the prophecy. Dumbledore doesn't have a lot of respect for Divination in general, and prophecies can be difficult to interpret.
For instance, I would agree that in *retrospect*, the prophecy could be seen as predicting at least two confrontations between Voldemort and Harry, but I wouldn't have felt sure of that without additional knowledge besides the prophecy. I.e., the Dark Lord could mark him as his equal as part of the one confrontation.
When you consider the line "neither can live while the other survives," and how that worked out in the story.... There's no literal way in which that line turned out to be true, so it would have turned out to be pretty dangerous to assume that Voldemort couldn't become corporeal again while Harry lived, or something. And even that conclusion would require stretching the meaning of the line, since Voldemort wasn't actually dead while he was non-corporeal.
So, given Dumbledore's distrust of the field of Divination, and his apparent certainty that Voldemort wasn't gone, it makes sense to me that he had more than the prophecy to go on. Since there *is* more information that Dumbledore could have had, at that point, that would give him that certainty... to me it makes sense to conclude that he had that information already.
Lynn
For instance, I would agree that in *retrospect*, the prophecy could be seen as predicting at least two confrontations between Voldemort and Harry, but I wouldn't have felt sure of that without additional knowledge besides the prophecy. I.e., the Dark Lord could mark him as his equal as part of the one confrontation.
When you consider the line "neither can live while the other survives," and how that worked out in the story.... There's no literal way in which that line turned out to be true, so it would have turned out to be pretty dangerous to assume that Voldemort couldn't become corporeal again while Harry lived, or something. And even that conclusion would require stretching the meaning of the line, since Voldemort wasn't actually dead while he was non-corporeal.
So, given Dumbledore's distrust of the field of Divination, and his apparent certainty that Voldemort wasn't gone, it makes sense to me that he had more than the prophecy to go on. Since there *is* more information that Dumbledore could have had, at that point, that would give him that certainty... to me it makes sense to conclude that he had that information already.
Lynn