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deathtocapslockYou'd think by now I would have learned not to believe anything Dumbledore says uncritically. Let's take another look at the passage where he confirms the curse's existence:
You'll notice that he never actually says Voldemort cursed the position. He doesn't even say he suspects Voldemort cursed the position. He just says that no one has lasted longer than a year in the job since and lets us draw our own conclusions. Even for a man who routinely uses academic hedging and waffling, that's... curious. He isn't afraid to "believe" or "suspect" things like the exact means by which Merope Gaunt got Tom Sr. to run off with her, so why so circumspect here?
Maybe because the means by which Voldemort proved he wanted the job wasn't as straightforward as cursing the job himself.
I had previously speculated that the DADA curse worked by taking an existing "don't seriously injure the students or put them in mortal peril" protection in the castle and cranking it up to eleven. That does seem to be the mechanism of the curse, but the hypothesis has some gaps if we assume Voldemort did it. How did he gain control over part of the castle's inherent magic? Why didn't Dumbledore figure out how the curse worked earlier, or if he did, how to dial it back down to normal levels? Why didn't he abolish the position and replace it with a new one covering the same subject matter to see if that worked? Why does he risk his own agents, ones he presumably doesn't want killed (yet), multiple times? Etc.
Well. Those problems would disappear if Dumbledore cursed the position.
Picture him sitting in his office after Voldemort left the job interview. He believes Voldemort will try again, one way or another; this must have been a reconnaissance mission to see how Dumbledore is doing these days. Suppose he manages to get Dumbledore ousted as headmaster by controlling the Board of Governors (as Lucius did temporarily years later for his own purposes), and his replacement is more, ah, persuadable when it comes to hiring decisions? Or suppose he sends an agent in to kill Dumbledore? Dumbledore might be confident that he would defeat the agent, but there might be enough death and destruction beforehand to bring him back to Possibility #1, getting fired. Or maybe the Board of Governors can override the Headmaster's hiring decisions in certain circumstances. We know the Ministry can appoint someone if they think they need to; suppose Voldemort gets control of the right person at the Ministry to get himself or his agent appointed?
No, he can't let that happen. There must be some way to limit the damage--or at least the time period in which Voldemort/his agent could inflict such damage.
And that's when he remembers either an obscure curse or an obscure bit of the castle's magic which is currently inactive or operating at a very low level of sensitivity, and decides to make sure that no one can hold the job for more than a year. Even if Voldemort succeeds in getting the job somehow, his victory will be short-lived.
The next two or three years, Voldemort does send agents to get the job, and each is disposed of with varying degrees of damage. This is what proves Voldemort really wanted the job.
Voldemort soon realizes what's up, more or less, and decides to focus on his other projects, like recruiting more Death Eaters, making Inferi, and playing with ancient magic. He's got time, after all, and he decides that as inconvenient as it will be to have to train young recruits to fight properly, at least it means his enemies won't be able to fight back very well. That's not a bad Plan B. Maybe every few years, he tries again to see if a new agent can circumvent the curse and cause a little trouble for Dumbledore.
But most of the DADA teachers are ordinary people who don't do much harm, and so the curse disposes of them in fairly mild ways. Mild enough that people only occasionally suspect there is a curse, and generally chalk the turnover up to the teaching schedule being brutal. Not everyone can handle the workload as well as veteran teachers like Slughorn, right?
So when Quirrell and then Lockhart suffered much worse curse-induced rebound than usual, Dumbledore wasn't worried about hiring Lupin and then Moody, because he knew that the curse wasn't just ramping its intensity in general and whatever happened to them would be minor. (At least, it would if Lupin really weren't helping Notorious Mass-Murderer Sirius Black return Voldemort to power; if he wasn't, Lupin would come out of the year with a good cover story for becoming a werewolf spy, and if he was, Dumbledore would find out when the curse killed him or something equally terrible.) In Year 6, of course, he knew from the start the most likely reason Snape would have to leave the job, and it was all right with him.
Of course, this has the unfortunate side-effect that students learn magical self-defense very poorly for nearly forty years, but Dumbledore can tell himself that they'll pick things up in other classes, and it's better than whatever Voldemort would have planned for them. It's for--say it with me--the greater good!
There. Does that work better?
"Oh, he definitely wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts job," said Dumbledore. "The aftermath of our little meeting proved that. You see, we have never been able to keep a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for longer than a year since I refused the post to Lord Voldemort."
--HBP Chapter 20, "Lord Voldemort's Request
You'll notice that he never actually says Voldemort cursed the position. He doesn't even say he suspects Voldemort cursed the position. He just says that no one has lasted longer than a year in the job since and lets us draw our own conclusions. Even for a man who routinely uses academic hedging and waffling, that's... curious. He isn't afraid to "believe" or "suspect" things like the exact means by which Merope Gaunt got Tom Sr. to run off with her, so why so circumspect here?
Maybe because the means by which Voldemort proved he wanted the job wasn't as straightforward as cursing the job himself.
I had previously speculated that the DADA curse worked by taking an existing "don't seriously injure the students or put them in mortal peril" protection in the castle and cranking it up to eleven. That does seem to be the mechanism of the curse, but the hypothesis has some gaps if we assume Voldemort did it. How did he gain control over part of the castle's inherent magic? Why didn't Dumbledore figure out how the curse worked earlier, or if he did, how to dial it back down to normal levels? Why didn't he abolish the position and replace it with a new one covering the same subject matter to see if that worked? Why does he risk his own agents, ones he presumably doesn't want killed (yet), multiple times? Etc.
Well. Those problems would disappear if Dumbledore cursed the position.
Picture him sitting in his office after Voldemort left the job interview. He believes Voldemort will try again, one way or another; this must have been a reconnaissance mission to see how Dumbledore is doing these days. Suppose he manages to get Dumbledore ousted as headmaster by controlling the Board of Governors (as Lucius did temporarily years later for his own purposes), and his replacement is more, ah, persuadable when it comes to hiring decisions? Or suppose he sends an agent in to kill Dumbledore? Dumbledore might be confident that he would defeat the agent, but there might be enough death and destruction beforehand to bring him back to Possibility #1, getting fired. Or maybe the Board of Governors can override the Headmaster's hiring decisions in certain circumstances. We know the Ministry can appoint someone if they think they need to; suppose Voldemort gets control of the right person at the Ministry to get himself or his agent appointed?
No, he can't let that happen. There must be some way to limit the damage--or at least the time period in which Voldemort/his agent could inflict such damage.
And that's when he remembers either an obscure curse or an obscure bit of the castle's magic which is currently inactive or operating at a very low level of sensitivity, and decides to make sure that no one can hold the job for more than a year. Even if Voldemort succeeds in getting the job somehow, his victory will be short-lived.
The next two or three years, Voldemort does send agents to get the job, and each is disposed of with varying degrees of damage. This is what proves Voldemort really wanted the job.
Voldemort soon realizes what's up, more or less, and decides to focus on his other projects, like recruiting more Death Eaters, making Inferi, and playing with ancient magic. He's got time, after all, and he decides that as inconvenient as it will be to have to train young recruits to fight properly, at least it means his enemies won't be able to fight back very well. That's not a bad Plan B. Maybe every few years, he tries again to see if a new agent can circumvent the curse and cause a little trouble for Dumbledore.
But most of the DADA teachers are ordinary people who don't do much harm, and so the curse disposes of them in fairly mild ways. Mild enough that people only occasionally suspect there is a curse, and generally chalk the turnover up to the teaching schedule being brutal. Not everyone can handle the workload as well as veteran teachers like Slughorn, right?
So when Quirrell and then Lockhart suffered much worse curse-induced rebound than usual, Dumbledore wasn't worried about hiring Lupin and then Moody, because he knew that the curse wasn't just ramping its intensity in general and whatever happened to them would be minor. (At least, it would if Lupin really weren't helping Notorious Mass-Murderer Sirius Black return Voldemort to power; if he wasn't, Lupin would come out of the year with a good cover story for becoming a werewolf spy, and if he was, Dumbledore would find out when the curse killed him or something equally terrible.) In Year 6, of course, he knew from the start the most likely reason Snape would have to leave the job, and it was all right with him.
Of course, this has the unfortunate side-effect that students learn magical self-defense very poorly for nearly forty years, but Dumbledore can tell himself that they'll pick things up in other classes, and it's better than whatever Voldemort would have planned for them. It's for--say it with me--the greater good!
There. Does that work better?
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no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 11:11 am (UTC)He didn't lie per se, but both the reader and Harry would react in a different way if he was straightforward.
I can accept this as an explanation for the curse. Especially considering other teachers he hired.
Heck, in his mind kids learning next to nothing about DADA might be a good thing. After all, to effectively protect yourself from darkness, you must gaze into the abyss so you understand it. And look where it led Tom and many other students? No, no, that won't do it.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 01:10 am (UTC)We know he has the Horcrux books removed from the library and tells readers in his Beadle commentary that the Deathly Hallows are a fantasy (which he knows perfectly well isn't true--he's carrying one around daily). So there's precedent for Dumbledore suppressing knowledge of evil or just dangerous magic. It wouldn't be out of character for him to have misgivings about too-thorough DADA instruction.
Lupin's hiring
Date: 2019-09-24 05:27 pm (UTC)Re: Lupin's hiring
Date: 2019-09-24 07:13 pm (UTC)On the one hand, Remus is very indebted with Albus: starting with letting him attend Hogwarts, to hiring him.
On the other hand, it seems that not only Remus wasn't a member of OotP during the first war, but also distanced himself from his Order friends during that war.
Add to the stack that he was James' friend (potential link for Harry) and our inability to tell just how much Albus knew about Secret Keeper drama and we get very ugly picture.
In all honesty, I think that Albus hinted that certain teachers *coughcoughLockhartcoughcough* made horrible life choices and ended their career in rather dramatic fashion, but I doubt he was very straightforward about the full extent of the problem. After all, as Albus would tell you truth is a dangerous thing and letting your chess pieces to know about your plans, might work against you.
Re: Lupin's hiring
Date: 2019-09-26 04:09 am (UTC)We know how Dumbledore treats his main spy, Snape: he doesn't tell him about the Horcruxes until nearly the last possible moment, and he doesn't breath a word of the Elder Wand business, ever. Because he thinks Snape is good enough to hide from Voldemort that he's a spy, but doesn't want to risk Voldemort finding out what Dumbledore knows if Snape slips up one day, supposedly. (Snape lacking critical information very nearly scuppers the whole plan, but it isn't a totally bogus argument.) So he might well make the same argument in Lupin's case: assuming he survives teaching, Lupin might very soon be joining Voldemort or at least his supporters as a spy, and so he can't know, well, much of anything. Then Voldemort might find out that either (a) that Dumbledore knows he cursed the job, and what else he knows about the curse, or (b) Dumbledore is claiming Voldemort cursed the job, and Voldemort knows it isn't true, and we certainly don't want him speculating on those lines. And if he has any doubt at all about whether Lupin's already on Voldemort's side for real, naturally he wouldn't want to warn him. So best if Dumbledore just keeps quiet about the whole curse thing.
Incidentally, if Dumbledore cast the curse and can temporarily cancel it or dial down the intensity or make it not apply to his own people, that makes him look a little better with regard to those of his agents he hires as teachers, because he's able to make sure they don't get curse-murdered. Snape's exit was more or less planned before the school year started, when Draco got assigned Operation: Kill Dumbledore, and might only look like it's curse-inflicted. Lupin could be the one teacher who just slipped up on his own, and the parade of cursed teachers before and after him made him look like just one more victim. Moody, of course, wasn't really Moody, and so any exception Dumbledore made might not apply to him.
It's still, uh, a questionable strategic decision with regard to all the other consequences, of course.
Re: Lupin's hiring
Date: 2019-09-24 07:15 pm (UTC)Er... on that subject
Date: 2019-09-26 04:12 am (UTC)If Dumbledore had been the original author of "the curse on the DADA position," then he'd have been in a better position than most to turn it on and off, or even just up and down.
And, um, if the real point of the curse (originally) was to dissuade TOM from applying ever again for the position, or from trying to get his agents into Hogwarts, then we'd expect the curse to get worse when Tom had strong reason to want an agent there.
Like, you know, when Prophecy-Boy was attending.
I'm just saying.
Re: Er... on that subject
Date: 2019-09-28 02:31 am (UTC)You can at least argue that in this case that there weren't any clearly good courses of action, so maybe this isn't as clearly a terrible choice as some of his others, if you're so inclined. But you have to wonder what he'd have done if Voldemort started trying to get other positions instead.
You know, now that I think about it, the fact that Voldemort didn't try that is interesting. Why not kill a redshirt professor like Sinistra in late August and Imperius someone at the Ministry into Imperiusing the Minister to appoint him/his agent? If Voldemort cast the curse, he could continue by cursing any position he/his agents didn't get, making life very difficult for Dumbledore if he doesn't play ball. If Dumbledore cast it, Voldemort could go after each faculty position in turn and either succeed or fail but, again, make life increasingly difficult for Dumbledore and enjoy the bind Dumbledore's in (keep the curse and keep losing staff, or lift it and risk letting in a Voldie supporter with no guarantee of getting rid of them). How long will people follow a headmaster who can't keep any staff (or keep them safe)?
Is there something special about the DADA job that means other positions just won't do? Or did Dumbledore arrange the curse so that incumbents were protected, but any position that opened up and wasn't filled by Dumbledore's own appointment would be subject to the curse as well, and he let Voldemort know somehow?
Re: Er... on that subject
Date: 2019-10-11 12:47 am (UTC)Re: Er... on that subject
Date: 2019-10-11 12:39 am (UTC)As for Dumbles messing with the strength of the curse: We have long thought that prior to Quirrell teachers left under mild circumstances - no deaths, no drama (because it took several years into Harry's schooling for rumors of a curse to start). The ones who were most harmed were Quirrell and Crouch Jr - one possessed by Tom and one serving him loyally. So perhaps the curse was designed to target Tom and his loyalists specifically. Also, let's not forget swythyv's idea that the curse was a modification of a protection (originating with Salazar Slytherin, IIRC) that was tied to the DADA office + room of the DADA teacher, preventing anyone who lived and taught there surviving harming students.