Product of the Department of Mysteries

[sunnyskywalker]

On oneandthetruth's last DH chapter commentary, an interesting thread compared the Mirror of Erised to the Resurrection Stone in its seductive (and potentially deadly) powers of showing something/someone you want.

There's another object somewhat like that: the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. There are voices coming from behind the Veil - voices Luna believes to be those of the dead - and Harry feels tempted to walk through it.

Well, okay, Harry is being trained to have a death wish. But maybe that just means he's more susceptible.

The Department of Mysteries is a research facility. One which we know has produced tangible items now available for (restricted) public use, such as Time-Turners. (Whether they invented them or improved on an existing idea, we don't know.) I seriously doubt they've only produced one artifact ever. So what else might they have made?

They also have the locked room full of either love or Amortensia, depending whom you ask. The Mirror's ability to reflect your heart's desire is suggestively similar to the potion's ability to reflect the scent of what you desire.

A big glass mirror sounds like a relatively recent invention (unless you posit a long history of magical glassmaking, but wizards seem to adapt Muggle technology more often than the other way around). I propose that the Mirror of Erised is a product of the Department of Mysteries, combining attributes of Amortensia and the Veil which the DoM was able to partially replicate/adapt after long study.

Next question: are the Stone and the Veil related? Maybe Mr. Death, whoever he was, created both, and the DoM only got ahold of one of them. Whether this makes the Veil a fourth Hallow, left out of Beedle's version for numerical reasons, is not clear. Possibly it's a super-Hallow, and you can be Master of Death^TM with it alone? Or it's a death-related magical... thing... which shares some properties with the Hallows, but it isn't the same class of artifact and mastery isn't an issue in its case.

Or maybe the Veil is more ancient and the Stone is a portable adaptation created centuries ago by the DoM's first head researcher, Johannus Mors, along with a couple of other powerful items which also escaped the premises and have not been replicated. (And Death took the second lab assistant for his own...)

Thoughts? Fanfic links?

Comments

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Re the Veil, the only use of it I've seen in a fanfic is in notwolf's Death Eater No More. In that story, Lucius angers some goblins. They get revenge on him by kidnapping Narcissa, putting her in a coma, and throwing her through the Veil. Several chapters are devoted to her rescue. The Veil is explained as having been created 1500 years ago by a group of wizards and witches as a means of communicating with the dead and learning from them.

That's a good catch on the similarities between the Veil, the mirror, and the Hallows. The most annoying undeveloped aspect of the Potterverse to me is that stuff in the Dept. of Mysteries. The hummingbird that endlessly cycles through life, the tanks of brains--that's all great stuff that could have made that world so much richer and more interesting. Instead, we get endless crap about teen love angst (both present and past) and useless camping trips. What a waste!

[attilathepbnun.livejournal.com]

Yet more evidence for the theory that Rowling didn't actually plan the series in much detail, whatever she publicly says. She wrote the first book, maybe with a reasonable start on the second and third, in case the first one took off; but with only a vague idea of what else would happen. Then Book One was a rousing success; she had to write the rest of the story but wasn't really up to the task ... at least at the pace she set ...

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

I think she kinda sorta had a plan, but it wasn't laid out in detail. So when she was writing the individual books, she would come up with great ideas and just throw them in there willy-nilly, without any thought of what she might do with them later, or whether she'd do anything at all. They were just cool and provided atmosphere in the now.

There's also the possibility she knew how she wanted to start and finish the story, but was vague about the middle. Given her "oh, dear, maths" propensity, there's a cartoon that's appropriate. It shows two people standing at a blackboard. On the left, one of them has written the beginning of a complicated problem. In the middle of the board it says, "Then a miracle occurs." On the right it says, "Solution." The other person says, "That's a good beginning, but you need to be more explicit abut the middle and the end."

[sunnyskywalker]

Interesting-sounding fic - I'll have to look it up sometime!

The DoM just has that feel of a Very Significant Place We'll Be Seeing Again, So Pay Attention. We spend so much time there in OotP, with passing significantly nearby the portentous hallway before the trial, Harry's recurring visions, Nagini's attack on Arthur, and then the battle when we get a lovingly detailed grand tour, and Dumbledore making a point of what's behind that knife-melting door during his wrap-up when we expect to hear about significant things. And then... we never bother with it again? What? That just doesn't fit our narrative expectations! If you're going to break an expectation like that, it should be for a point, not just because it was a neat bit of scenery that got out of hand.

I think it's completely natural and expected that an author's plans for a series might shift a bit after she's written the first third or half of it. The problem was she (a) couldn't go back and revise the earlier ones to fit if she got a better idea down the road, and (b) wasn't able to change her plans for the later ones, either through lack of time or lack of experience or talent (or a combination). DH shows all the signs, to me, of being full of messages from JKR's subconscious trying to yank her story into the new path it had fallen into, where (for instance) she realized Dumbledore's actions made him actually pretty untrustworthy and not the best guide for Harry, and that the whole "plan" to defeat Voldemort was terrible - but then she tried to yank things back onto the pre-planned track and have Dumbledore show up again to play mentor and Harry agreeing he's great after all, and the plan works and was the only way it could have happened because... er... just because, stop asking questions! (She may have had some vague notion of Dumbledore having made a bad choice once in his teens, but since he hadn't "done" many of the things he later did until she actually wrote them down, they weren't as real and solid, and his repentance and reformation were perfectly convincing. But once she did that, all the little details didn't add up to the picture she'd originally intended for the Book 7 evaluation of Dumbledore's character.)

Actually things started cropping up by GoF, like the "oops wait, isn't the world as I've depicted it awfully wrong when it comes to magical beings like goblins and all those other house-elves I mentioned in passing?" So she had started realizing where the holes were while she was writing, and started adding stuff in related to them. A more experienced writer might have been able to look at that draft and realize, well, the conclusion I planned originally won't address all the additional subplots and themes in here now that I wasn't expecting, and then reevaluate and tweak (or totally scrap and re-do) the ending so that it worked. Maybe Harry will have to come up with his own plan instead of just doing what Dumbledore said, or at the very least will have to come to terms with the idea that there might have been a better plan but he's now locked into one because of Dumbledore's mistakes and personality flaws, and he won't be naming his son after him even if he can make it work against all odds. JKR wouldn't, or couldn't, do that.

Well, maybe she could have made the ending fit better with the series as it developed given a little more time, but we'll never know now.