A reflection on Horcruces and Dumbledore
Feb. 3rd, 2011 11:49 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslockI've argued before that Dumbledore knew from the start that Harry had become Tom's Horcrux.
But, if he were as smart as he thought he were, he should have realized that that fact alone proved that Riddle had others (or some other means of avoiding death when his body was destroyed, and Horcruces do seem to be the only known means).
He deduced that Riddle had planned to manufacture a Horcrux from the baby's death, right? Not either of the parents' deaths.
Therefore, the death that created the soul-fragment that landed in Harry, was Riddle's own from that reflected AK.
If he hadn't already been anchored to life by another Horcrux somewhere, he should have merely died.
So Dumbledore ought to have started looking for another Horcrux in 1981....
But, if he were as smart as he thought he were, he should have realized that that fact alone proved that Riddle had others (or some other means of avoiding death when his body was destroyed, and Horcruces do seem to be the only known means).
He deduced that Riddle had planned to manufacture a Horcrux from the baby's death, right? Not either of the parents' deaths.
Therefore, the death that created the soul-fragment that landed in Harry, was Riddle's own from that reflected AK.
If he hadn't already been anchored to life by another Horcrux somewhere, he should have merely died.
So Dumbledore ought to have started looking for another Horcrux in 1981....
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Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-05 08:50 pm (UTC)Makes you wonder what he *was* waiting for to make that one last Horcrux all these years.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-05 09:40 pm (UTC)She had pretty clearly decided, possibly at the last minute, to stack the deck against the Potters, for whatever reason (no wands at hand? really?), and of course had to cram in a joke ("nice costume, mister") despite the fact that I gather that trick-or-treating hadn't really become much of a British thing, even as late as '81, having lost track of the backstory of what Tom had intended by that murder is all just of a piece with the rest. Everything was just jerked about by the author so the universe could deliver Harry some answers.
For my own part, I think Tom had been fixated on a subborning Gryffindor artifact to complete his set, and had been balked of access to one. I suspect the Sword hadn't made an appearance for generations, and he hadn't remembered that the Hat had been Godric's too. Or, possibly the Hat had never sung about that during Tom's years at Hogwarts, or Tom couldn't be bothered to pay attention to a talking hat. But in any case, he already had the first five by the time he showed up to ask for the DADA post, and probably felt he could wait for the last one. After all, he had all the time in the world.
Of course being handed a Child of Prophesy-- a personal prophecy all about *him*-- made an excellent substitution, and the fact that the child's parents had both been Gryffindors was just icing.
But of course Rowling couldn't be bothered to set that up by then, she just wanted it over.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-05 09:46 pm (UTC)So under this theory, he created six horcruxes before killing the Potters, accidentally created a seventh there (the Harrycrux), and then created an eighth deliberately, believing it to be the seventh.
Which again would mean that Voldemort is still not dead at the end of the books. :^P
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-05 10:23 pm (UTC)Rowling refused to let him realize that he had actually managed to create one by attempting to kill Harry. Although what he thought their mind connection *was* you will have to explain to me.
On the other hand, the other Horcruxes were all properly made, and had completely separated from him, and the Harrycrux hadn't. He had no such connection with any of the earlier ones. He may have lost enough of his smarts by then not to realize that the connection with Harry indicated that the attempt to create a Horcrux had in fact succeeded.
Consequently what we really need to know on the subject is what Rowling never told us. Which is; how did his connection with *Nagini* actually work. Since she was his other living Horcrux. Albus claims that Tom was "possessing" her when she attacked Arthur Weasley, and Harry had been dragged along for the ride. But we do not know how the link functioned in general. Nagini would not have had the pain reflex upon contact certainly, or she would have hardly been so willing to cooperate Clearly the connection with each was sufficiently different that he never got suspicious of the nature of the connection with Harry.
I happen to think Harry's pain was the result of Lily's interference, although Rowling didn't write Lily's murder in any way that would explain how Lily's unwillingness to step aside would have interfered with anything Tom intended. Particularly not with anything he intended after her death. My own theory accounts for this, but Rowling quite directly never endorsed my theory. Unfortunately she didn't replace it with anything that would actually work for any reason beyond "because i say so".
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 12:18 am (UTC)Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 01:19 am (UTC)Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 12:20 am (UTC)Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 01:26 am (UTC)Of course in the Great Hall he left a body, and he wasn't killed while *trying* to create yet another Horcrux.
That's the broken link that Rowling should have remembered. Tom was *supposed* to be trying to create one when he first attacked Harry, and she forgot to write that.
You just do not create Horcruxes accidentally. Harry became a Horcrux because the attack on him was an attempt to create one. That he became one was no accident, that the soul fragment ended up stuck *in him* was.
Of course by my theory there wasn't any place else for it to be. But Tom must have thought that he's lost that fragment in the event, or otherwise never put 2+2 together.
Or he realized that Harry's link to him was just too dangerous to his own plans and was prepared to undo that one.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 01:34 am (UTC)I've heard the theory that after creating a certain number of horcruxes, soul fragments will invariably attach to living beings. Is that your theory? It's another way of making sense of the Nagini horcrux, but I think I prefer the explanation for that that you gave elsewhere in the thread.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 01:57 am (UTC)The process is actually remarkably simple--although nasty-- but it depends upon a specific magical skill which Tom Riddle amply demonstrated a mastery of, and no one else in the whole series was ever hinted at being able to do. (And no, I don't mean flying around like Superman. Snape is hinted at being able to do that.)
If Horcrux creation was something only ever done by wizards of "a certain caliber" then it's covered.
The theory is covered (in exhaustive detail) here:
http://www.redhen-publications.com/Changeling.html
The actual nuts-and-bolts of the theory of just how one creates a Horcrux however, is fairly short--although I don't know whether it's within the limits of an Lj post. I'll try. There are a lot of additional ramifications in the essay. Such as what Lily did, and what the result of that seems to have been.
"Riddle has at least one other presumably rare (although never stated in the text as such) ability, however. One which he kept even after his defeat, and probably kept to the end. Even as a thing of shadow and vapor; a disembodied portion of a soul, he retained the ability to take possession of others. Not merely to dominate them and bring them under his control by force of will, but to take full psychic and physical possession of them. Indeed even the soul fragment that haunted the Diary was able to take such possession of Ginny Weasley, ultimately even against her will, and over her resistance. Another such fragment came very close to overmastering Ron.
That doesn’t sound nearly as innocent as chatting to snakes, and I am indebted to the LiveJournalist Swythyv for giving me a timely nudge, reminding me of this particular detail.
So let’s follow this particular line of inquiry a bit further shall we?"
(snip)
"However. One evidently cannot just split off a piece of their soul and put it directly into an inanimate object, or murder would not be necessary in order to produce a Horcrux. And it is also quite blindingly evident that the typical method of getting a soul out of a body is by killing the body that houses it.
But what if the soul in that body is not the Victim’s? Or, rather, what if the body in question contains not only the Victim’s soul?
What if the Murderer takes possession of the Victim before killing him. What would become of the portion of the Murder’s soul that is possessing the Victim at the point of death?
It would get split off, wouldn’t it?
Thank you, Swythyv. I think you have just solved our fundamental problem."
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 02:02 am (UTC)It's up to the Prime to prevent this. IN Harry's case, Tom had lost control of the spell and was in no position to do this, and the fragment no longer had an embodied Prime to orient on. So it stayed where it was.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 02:11 am (UTC)If we postulate that Myrtle's death was *planned* as a base for a Horcrux creation, then Tom would have known she was there, and had an artifact (I believe the Ring) prepared to catch the fragment in with him. He entered the room, called his instrument and grabbed possession as soon as she apppeared. He didn't need to hold onto her any longer than it took for the Basilisk to look her in the eye, but she probably wouldn't have been able to put up much of a fight even if it had taken longer.
Possession does not seem to require eye contact. He got hold of Harry in the Artium without being in Harry's line of sight.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 02:23 am (UTC)On another note, although Rowling says so, I'm not sure I buy that Nagini was ever a horcrux. Why couldn't it be the case that Tom was simply possessing Nagini, the way he attempted to possess Harry, and Harry got pulled along for the ride? It doesn't make sense to me that Tom would intentionally make a horcrux from a mortal creature.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 02:37 am (UTC)Frankly I thought that it would be a very nice example of one of Albus's rare "huge mistakes" and one that would not have major effects on the story since they were going to need to deal with the snake anyway. The revelation of the Harrycrux (which I was convinced of) was the big one.
I thought that Tom had Nagini under Imperius. Perfectly within his capabilities, even as BabyMort.
And yes, the insistence upon killing Harry himself in order to retrieve the soul fragment would certainly play (and is brighter than Rowling gives him credit for being). He couldn't have antcipated that killing Harry the 2nd time would backfire, destroy the fragment, and land him under a bench in the cosmic King's Cross station. Evidently Lily's protection didn't wear off upon Harry reaching his majority.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 04:45 am (UTC)Yes exactly!
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 07:05 am (UTC)But Voldemort's protection of Nagini when he realized Harry took the cup from Gringotts proves Albus was correct about her.
So either Voldemort expected to gain something by Horcruxifying Nagini that was worth the risk or she was protected from most forms of death (what did she eat? maybe she was being fed unicorn blood) or she was not the intended Horcrux, but since Godric's Hollow Tom lost control of the entire process. Because there is another bit we don't have a clear explanation for: Albus tells Harry that Voldmeort was *very much* incensed that Lucius deployed the diary - because he could no longer make more Horcruxes. How did Tom know he couldn't? And how did Albus know Tom knew? Did Albus agree with Tom? Which may also be related to Tom himself going to kill Amelia Bones. Was he trying to force a situation where he could make a Horcrux anyway, despite the limitation he already ran into?
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 08:20 am (UTC)Or that Albus was simply spouting off about that which he had no real information. An awful lot of the shorhand deployed in the last couple of books came down to; "let Albus tell us what to think" and then never support his statement by anything that corroborates it. Particularly when these statements directly contradicted things that she'd already set up. We're lucky that she even did remember to have Tom conspicuously protect his snake. But then she had already decided to use that snake for a set-piece.
It might have been that, as BabyMort, creating a Horcrux came so close to sending him straight back into disembodied form that he decided not to do that again even when he did get a proper body. It might have been that having, he thought, failed with Harry, the Nagini Horcrux completed his set of six and he didn't *need* to do it again. What we *don't* get is any indication, apart from Albus's pronouncement, that he *couldn't* do it again.
Albus didn't have Snape spying for indications of Horcrux-creating. We've got no indication to establish that Snape was even aware of the possibility of Horcruxes until Albus was ready to reveal to him that Harry had to die. So I don't know where Albus got the idea that Tom had exceeded the maximum.
Snape reported back to him on Tom's fury at Lucius for having lost the Diary. But I even if Tom *did* say something about the Diary being irreplacable, that isn't, in itself, evidence that he couldn't create another Horcrux. Just that he couldn't recreate the Diary.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 02:18 pm (UTC)If he hadn't been so secretive, he might have shared this with Snape in the PT chapter so we'd understand just how he knew about this limit.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 07:05 pm (UTC)I speculated in at least one of my essays that when Tom came out of the cauldron and ran his hands over his face, he knew that the Horcrux he'd made had had some effect on his appearance. Because she'd obviously set it up that creating multiple Horcruxes had a cumulative effect. What he didn't know, or not at first, was that he'd actually created two of them. And that, so far as we know for sure, the "melting wax" iteration of Tom that came to request the DADA post was the face that he'd worn right up to the time he'd gone to kill the Potters.
Which is *not* a conclusion that is supported by the flashback. Rowling was clearly having the trick-or-treaters comment on his *current* appearance, i.e., post defeat, post cauldron, and at least two more Horcruxes down. She'd forgotten that she'd established that his appearance had deteriorated over the course of his career in the previous book.
Actually, I personally suspect that when he went to confront Albus and ask for a job, he had created only four of them. We saw what he looked like when he went to visit Hepzibah, and I think that at that point he had created only one, which was the Ring. That was at his "elegantly wasted" stage. The "molten wax" iteration was still predominently human in appearance. By then he'd created the Locket, Cup and Diadem and was now trying to zero in on the Sword.
I don't think he created the Diary until he had a use for it, and that was just before he handed it over to Lucius Malfoy in '81. But there isn't any textual evidence to support that, and I'm not going to insist on it.
But the fact remains that, acto Albus, the Diary was designed to be kind-of-sort-of disposable. We have no way of telling whether this was yet another of Albus's mistakes. The Diary was a *weapon* without doubt. But we have *no* idea as to whether Tom had figured out that if you give a Horcrux a user interface, the soul fragment will eventually manage to escape its housing. We've no way of knowing whether a reimbodied Horcrux revenant would be killable by normal means either, but it would certainly no longer be safely housed in the artifact--unless it was a classic Koschi, *only* killable by destroying the housing. The most we can depend upon is that Tom was confident that the Diary would control it's holder enough to raise havoc at Hogwarts and set the Basilisk to roaming the halls.
If one squints around the edges, one can extrapolate that the Trelawney Prophecy changed the whole ball game. I really do think that Tom was able to count up to six, and the Sword would have been number five. He had been reserving that last Horcrux slot for emergencies. That there was actually a Prophecy of his downfall out there constituted an emergency. The death of the Child of Prophecy would be a fair trade for the Sword, and I think the Diary was meant as a means to at the very worst take Albus down with him.
But the big mystery which we are stumped at is whether he realized the Diary revenant could escape the book. Without knowing that, it's impossible to extrapolate what his intentions might have been.
Re: Horcrux making
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Date: 2011-02-06 08:02 pm (UTC)Tom really did intend to make the 6th Horcrux at Godric's Hollow and he had the proto-Horcrux in his pocket. But when Lily refused his polite request to step aside he got distracted and forgot he had to start the Horcrux-making before attempting to AK Harry. Later Albus found the proto-Horcrux (or one of his lackeys on the clean-up team found it and brought it to him).
Since Albus never heard of anyone making more than one Horcrux and logically one would want to ensure one's immortality *before* confronting one's destined vanquisher he thought Tom attempted to make a Horcrux with James' death. But being new to this (so Albus believed) he messed up resulting in some half-way soul situation that caused the final soul-split when the AK rebounded. And the soul-bit ended up in Harry's head rather than in the proto-Horcrux because without special direction soul-bits prefer being in heads of living beings than in inanimate objects, however well prepared.
Re: Horcrux making
From:Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 08:07 pm (UTC)But if Tom only Horcruxified the diary later wouldn't he have plenty of other diaries from later years to use as a Horcrux-that-can-also-possess-people? Because I don't see why he'd stop making such recordings. Or did it have to be the diary from that particular year if he wanted the chamber reopened? If he used a diary from his inferi-making years it would possess people to make inferi?
Re: Horcrux making
From:Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 08:09 pm (UTC)We know that even when he knew that several of the trinkets were removed from their hiding places he only thought to protect Nagini rather than make some more.
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 04:17 pm (UTC)But Voldemort's protection of Nagini when he realized Harry took the cup from Gringotts proves Albus was correct about her.
Oh, these are both good points. Nuts.
OK, so how about this...
Tom planned to AK Harry in order to retrieve the soul bit lodged in Harry's scar. He was keeping Nagini close by and protected so that he could then store the freed soul bit in the snake until a permanent Gryffindor object was available. In other words, Nagini wasn't a horcrux yet, but she was supposed to become a temporary one after Harry was dead.
Yes, I know it's a stretch. ;D
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 06:04 pm (UTC)Or there's some sort of Horcrux-detecting spell equivalent to Hominum Revelio, and Tom realized Fawkes was already a Horcrux. In which case the question would be, whose? Dumbledore might have gotten interested in Horcruxes after he picked up a phoenix Horcrux somewhere. Or, if you really don't trust Dumbledore, maybe it was his, and of course now he regrets his misspent youth blah blah blah, single tear... And then we could theorize that while the normal immolation cycle doesn't destroy the Horcrux, since that's just something phoenixes do, being reborn after being deliberately killed would dislodge the soul-fragment. So when Fawkes showed up to take that AK in the Ministry, Voldemort in fact had taken to first step toward killing Dumbledore for good. Which might explain why, if Dumbledore already had a line on some of the Horcruxes, had more license to sneak out to look for them than a schoolkid, and had a Horcrux-destroying sword, that he suddenly started training Harry to find them the next year: he might have planned all along to destroy them himself (we know how much he hates delegating and sharing information!), and then somehow arrange for Harry to be killed during a duel with Voldemort (or whatever) after which Dumbledore would finish Voldemort off, but once he lost his Horcrux, he panicked and decided he needed a backup plan. (Why he then screwed up by putting on the Ring, I don't know, but it doesn't get any worse than it already is as written.)
Re: Horcrux making
Date: 2011-02-06 07:11 pm (UTC)By that point Rowling was presenting the central plot in shorthand. Nobody's behavior makes any sense. They all jerk along like aotomations.
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