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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
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.