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When Voldy had just killed Harry's parents, leaving Harry orphaned, and Dumbledore is speaking with Snape about needing to protect Harry...
Snape is refusing, telling Dumbledore that the Dark Lord is gone for good and that Harry does not need protection.
Dumbledore tells Snape, instead, that Voldy will be back.
Question:How does Dumbledore know that Voldy is not defeated for good?
It can't be the prophecy that Dumbledore heard, b/c Snape eaves-dropped on it and he is not convinced that Voldy is coming back.
Snape is refusing, telling Dumbledore that the Dark Lord is gone for good and that Harry does not need protection.
Dumbledore tells Snape, instead, that Voldy will be back.
Question:How does Dumbledore know that Voldy is not defeated for good?
It can't be the prophecy that Dumbledore heard, b/c Snape eaves-dropped on it and he is not convinced that Voldy is coming back.
geeky
My problem with 'Dumbledore knew immediately' is that the Harrycrux accident is an extremely unlikely occurrence. Nobody has ever made more than one Horcrux before; never has anyone made so many that his soul became so instable that a broken piece splits from the main soul by itself and manges to settle in something/someone else.
I don't deny that Dumbledore can have figured it out very early, after he saw Harry himself and thought a bit about it, but not at the time he told Severus that Voldemort will return.
Sionna_raven has made a brilliant point here. Dumbledore is brilliant, and, given time, certainly *did* figure out that Voldy is not gone for good. At the point, though, it was still too early for him to know everything that happened, so, as one very wise person told me, sometimes the simple explanation is the best.
So here it is. (it is not mine, but I am reposting it for the sake of having this question answered). Thank you, you brilliant person you, for this answer. *loves* :D
The simple fact is that there was no body when Voldemort was defeated. JKR is very careful to always say that Voldemort was defeated and not killed. That, plus, the fact that Harry has a cursed scar leads Dumbledore to conclude that Voldemort's power has broken, but that he isn't dead.
So, yeah, Horcrux Theory is long and insanely complicated (which denotes a person who had the time to sit down and think on it a while, not a wizard facing the disappearance of a dark wizard and a one-year-old child with a scar on his forehead in his wake.)
The possibilities are:
a) The conversation took place an entire day later, after Harry was placed with the Dursleys
b) The conversation took place that night, but after Albus heard at the very least from someone who visited the death scene (or after having visited it himself). The Potter household was magical. Hagrid says he got Harry before the Muggles started swarming around. But someone from the Ministry's Magical Catastrophe's department must have shown up at some point, to prevent Muggles from finding objects such as wands or Harry's toy broomstick (or to Obliviate those who did). Or perhaps Albus himself investigated the crime scene to see what he could learn and to do the covering up himself. In any case, someone started the rumors about Harry that very night - Minerva heard them before she arrived at 4PD around 8:30 am.
Happy to disagree :)
I agree with you that Dumbledore had even detailed knowledge of what happened at the attack
a) by his surveillance charms on GH which were the reason he sent Hagrid. Those charms could have told him about the two AKs, the outbreak of Ancient Magic and the backfired AK on Harry.
b) by a short report from Hagrid who is known to carry an owl in his pocket. Hagrid could have told him that James' body was at the foot of the stairs, Lily's in the nursery and that Harry survived with a strange scar on his forehead. This tells him the order of their deaths and that it was Lily's death which triggered the Ancient Magic.
For the conversation with Severus taking place the same night; I assume shortly after midnight (end of the Halloween feast); with these information available to him without much problem he only needs to know about one regular Horcrux for which he already had circumstantial evidence (Voldemort's red eyes, the prophecy).
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Re: Happy to disagree :)
I don't seem to get it.
We need a lot of theorizing and assumptions to achieve that. It makes Dumbledore look almost omniscient and by that -especially, if he postponed the conversation for a day- rather unpleasant. I don't mind a nasty Dumbledore, but IMO he's bad enough already.
Simple question: What is achieved by that theory, for the plot or our interpretation/understanding?
Re: Happy to disagree :)
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
Re: Happy to disagree :)
I tend to think that Dumbledore isn't exactly truthful in his expressed distrust of the field of Divination. He very rarely acts immediately on one piece of information, but he hires Trelawney on the spot after the prophecy. He doesn't even care that this gives more credibility to the otherwise dodgy incident. Many around here believe that Severus didn't take the prophecy too serious and only reported it to have something to report. All Dumbledore does from that day suggests that he firmly believes in the prophecy, no matter what he later says to Harry.
Re: Happy to disagree :)
1) I don't think we know that creating a single horcrux changes your appearance. If it doesn't, then Dumbledore wouldn't have identified the change with the creation of horcruxes at all.
2) There could easily be other Dark Magic that causes the practitioner's appearance to change like that.
3) Not a problem on the same level, but if Dumbledore knew about Voldemort having a horcrux that early, we've *really* got to ask why Dumbledore didn't start looking for horcruxes earlier than he did. This was loooong before the prophecy suggested how things would play out. I'd excuse him for not going after horcruxes right after Voldemort's interview, because he apparently hadn't done much yet, but Idon't think Dumbledore would have had *any* excuse for not looking at least as soon as the war started.
Knowing about the Harrycrux from the start makes Dumbledore look bad in some ways, but at least he seems less incompetent.
Re: Dumbledore's views of Divination: I *think* there's speculation that the whole thing, including his decision to hire Trelawney, was a ploy of some kind. At least until the prophecy started to come true. The fact that he let Severus leave with part of the prophecy, rather than Obliviating him, has been used as one reason to believe this. I'm not especially familiar with the theories surrounding that part of the books, though, so here I'll defer to people who are.
Lynn
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Still, hard to know how he interpreted the prophecy before he had any additional facts, so hard to use that alone as an explanation of his decisions.
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Re: Happy to disagree :)
About the almost omniscient part - we see him arriving very quickly to a correct conclusion (or strong hypothesis) regarding a very obscure matter of magic in GOF - when Harry tells him Voldemort used Harry's blood Albus has that gleam of something like triumph because he immediately recognizes the significance - which is that there is a chance for Harry to survive the destruction of the Horcrux. Despite the fact that this must have been a very rare magical occurrence with little, maybe only partial documentation in the past. So I think that if he really already knew that Lily's sacrifice caused Tom's AK to rebound on him and that Tom's body was not found all he needed was one close look at Harry to realize a bit of Tom's soul entered Harry's head, causing the scar.
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Alternatively, Albus may have had a different reason to place Harry at 4PD and he decided on the protection sometime over the course of the 24 hours. I once thought protecting Harry from Sirius could have been such a reason, but that makes no sense - Lily was in some kind of contact with Petunia. If Sirius was really Tom's spy, wouldn't he try to find out about Lily's contacts? Better send the boy somewhere that has no connection whatsoever to either of his parents or any of their close friends. Out of the country, if necessary.
And no, I can't take seriously the explanation he gave Minerva about protecting Harry from his own fame. Not when he didn't do anything to dampen it in Wizarding Britain, waiting for Harry's return.
So I think we'll have to accept that Albus had detailed knowledge of the attack and its outcome before sending Hagrid in the first place.
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Here I'm happy to agree with you. Our disagreement is only about how detailed. We know from canon that the Ministry can detect from a distance which spells are cast, if they want. I do believe that Dumbledore installed something similar at GH. I only doubt that this surveillance charms detected the accidental soul splitting. The Ancient Magic of Lily's sacrifice is a different matter. Voldemort says in GoF that he forgot about that possiblity. For him to forget about it, it must have been discussed somewhere as a theoretical idea before, even when it never happened.
So we have 3 AKs, two successful, one backfired; one case of Ancient (theoretical known) Magic and a weird accident. All these can be known to Dumbledore through his magic 'blackbox' attack recording device without going there.
BTW there isn't enough time - unless you consider the use of a time turner - for someone to have been there before Hagrid arrived. The Potters' cottage is in the village of Godric's Hollow, maybe on the outer rim, but still close to their Muggle and wizard neighbours. How long do you think it takes them to swarm the place of an explosion? It didn't happen in the middle of the night, twenty minutes at worst IMO.
Why don't we just agree to disagree on this tiny little detail which doesn't really influence the interpretation of the whole story or Dumbledore's character?
Don't get me even started on that. I've spent the last 12 months writing the Sirius-centered half of a post war AU fanfiction. In this fic Sirius spent his time beyond the veil thinking and the handling of the whole 'spy-in-the-order' business by Dumbledore gets him and me barking mad.
Unfortunately this is one of the reasons I don't think it's unusual for Dumbledore to have known Voldemort's Horcruxes for years without looking for them. That's what he always does. He waits, observes, gathers information and only at the last minute he acts. He doesn't act at all about Tom Riddle; he takes 5 to 12 years to confront Grindelwald; he probably knew about the spy for months, Order members are dying in the meantime, nothing....
Re: Happy to disagree :)
20 minutes are plenty. It takes Albus less than a minute to make himself a Portkey to wherever - we see it twice in OOTP. - so no need to go outside the Apparition wards. And we see that at least Albus can make Portkeys to/from Hogwarts as needed. (Though he doesn't do so in HBP when he takes Harry to the cave. More support to conspiracy theories regarding his expectations regarding Draco that night.)
I find it odd you don't find it OOC for Albus to not look for a Horcrux for decades but have an issue with him waiting one day to talk to Severus.
At this moment we can agree to disagree about the exact time Albus found out about the Harrycrux as long as we both agree it was within no more than days from Halloween. Though I think it matters regarding his character - I think it makes a difference if when he asked Severus to protect Harry he was talking in good faith or not. It is somewhat more understandable if he asked for Severus help believing he could destroy the Horcrux when he found it, then discovered what the situation really was and failed to inform Severus (perhaps believing such a revelation would be bad for him at the moment, ignoring the fact that it would be worse if delayed) than if he was insincere from the beginning.
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Not so much, when you consider that within that time Hagrid and Sirius have to arrive (not by Apparition), both discover what happened and Hagrid has to comfort a devastated Sirius. And 20 minutes is the most generous estimate; it could be as bad as 5 minutes. It took my neighbours about 2 two minutes to notice and get out on the street when a chimney caught fire in spring and that was certainly less noisy or spectacular than several green flashes and a house partially tumbling down.
OOC or IC is perhaps the wrong phrase. I'm generally ready to think the worst of Albus, but in this case I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt. Whether he intended to raise Harry to a likely instead of an inevitable death right from the beginning, it doesn't make that much difference to me.
The initial question was how could Albus know that Voldemort wasn't gone for good. The red eyes convince me. He is the only one who's eyes turn red. No other Dark Witch or Wizard shows the same change and I count at least the 3 Lestranges among serious Dark Wizards.
Why I think letting Severus wait so horrible and also unwise from Albus POV is that Severus is a suicidal mood from the moment he knows of Lily's death untill he's given a new purpose in life. That's the main difference between the two other occasion Dumbledore takes his time to talk (Harry in Ootp and Hagrid in GoF). They are unhappy, in mourning, depressed, but not suicidal.
I agreed with that right from the beginning.
Re: Happy to disagree :)
Yeah Dumbly plots and waits and shit. But he's also shown to act on things he's not entirely certain about, act on hunches. Sometimes in the hope that'll reveal more information.
I think he puts more faith in true divination than he seems to let on. He hires Firenze the centaur and he's the one able to get Umbridge back from the centaurs, all by himself, even after they're all pissed off at the hyoomins. So I read that as him having perhaps a longer-standing relationship with the centaurs. There's hints that the centaurs, while not perhaps predicting even something as "specific" as Trelawney's prophesy (if her prophesy can even be called specific,) that they could've known the war would repeat itself again at least. Like the hints in PS when the one centaur is talking about Mars and such. Right? I think it's more that Dumbly doesn't have a lot of faith in Trelawney as a seer, but he knows enough to recognize a true prophesy when he sees one, and takes her on after that.
So not great info, about Voldy specifically, but he in theory could've had hints from the centaurs and then also from Trelawney's phrophesy that this war wouldn't be the only one.
If he had any chance to interact with baby!Harry directly, he could've used legilimency on Harry. This opens up other possibilities. I didn't think of a spell-blackbox thing but that's a good one too. And Hagrid telling him what he saw at the house. Dumbly could've already decided to send Harry to Petunia's (they technically had some sort of connection but near as I can tell one or maybe two gifts over their adult years? Not huge. Sirius might not've been known or thought to know where Petunia lived. And I find this also kinda odd 'cause like, when Hagrid brings Harry to Petunia's he's specifically borrowed Sirius' bike for this duty so somehow Sirius wasn't yet under suspicion for giving them away? Like that does bother me but if so it at least ties up the "need to hide Harry from Sirius and Sirius might know how to find Petunia" issue.) Legilimancy could've shown him exactly the process of events that night, if not flat-out relating that a piece of Mouldy Voldy was stuck in Harry's brain somehow. So, divination from perhaps two sources, description of how Harry was found, perhaps legilimancy if he gets to interact with Harry before the big meet-up at Petunia's doorstep. He wouldn't need to make the connection with horcrux stuff right away, even then, to make a pretty damn good educated guess that a chunk of Voldy got stuck in Harry. Or at least that Voldy'd be back.
Hell he could've talked to Severus before (possibly) seeing Harry prior to Petunia's doorstep, and still chose to speak confidently about Voldy coming back, as perhaps an (manipulative, yes) attempt to keep Severus from falling toward suicide. Tap into Severus' love for Lily ("he has her eyes") and his need to protect or help defend shit, give him something of a purpose. Figure out with more certainty later on. Wouldn't even need to convince the WW that Voldy's coming back, not convince them right away at any rate. Lotsa folk seem to think he's gone for good, some seem to think (among some ex-DE's so this could be reported to Dumbly by Severus himself) Harry might even be the next great Dark Lord himself. Black-box magic wards, description of the house when Harry was grabbed, and a potential for using legilimency on Harry to at least see the sequence of events that night would give all the certainty Dumbly needed about the blood sacrifice protection. Hell Dumbly could've had a two-way mirror in their house for all anyone knows, granted he'd have to be watching that but anyway.
I just... like he could've figured out the horcrux stuff by then, sure, at least the Harrycrux, if not others. Or had a suspicion. I think though there's also other equally plausible explanations and it's really difficult to say which is more likely over the other. I like the discussion though (even if I'm coming in to it some years late, oops.)
-Mirazh
However complicated, he figured it out a long time before Harry's arrival at Hogwarts. He knew Tom had a Horcrux yet he didn't seek it. (We know he didn't because finding the ring was trivial.) So even if he didn't know that night about the Harrycrux he must have figured it out very shortly afterwards.