Dumble’s (Mis) Conceptions about Godric’s Hollow: James’s and Lily’s Roles
To figure out what Albus believed saved Harry from Tom that night, we have to look closely at his actions. (Including his speech acts, while making sure not to assume he’s invariably speaking truthfully.)
So, what acts can we judge Twinkles on?
First, he left Harry on Petunia’s doorstep the very day after his parents’ murder. And eventually told Harry that he had done so because his mother’s blood was Harry’s shield and refuge.
Second, Albus consistently (from first to sixth years) told Harry that Harry had been saved by his mother’s sacrifice. In contrast, Lupin said (PoA 14, emphasis mine), “Your parents gave their lives to keep you alive, Harry. A poor way to repay them-gambling their sacrifice for a bag of magic tricks.” We perfectly understand why Dumbles wouldn’t use the argument that Harry’s risking his life was a poor way to repay a parental sacrifice-but why didn’t Dumbles ever bring up the possibility that James, like Lily, had sacrificed himself? Particularly since he was always encouraging Harry to model himself on the gallant hero Harry imagined his father to have been?
Twinkle’s actions and words are (unusually) congruent here. Both make most sense if Dumbles really did believe that Lily, but not James, had died to protect Harry.
Third, he allowed Harry’s life to be endangered repeatedly from first to fourth years. First year, he let Harry have a broom and play Quidditch (almost getting killed in his first match), gave him an invisibility cloak, encouraged him to help Hagrid with Norberta, assigned or allowed a detention in the forest while a unicorn-killer was on the loose there, and encouraged or allowed Harry to face Quirrell!mort.
Second year, knowing Harry to be Riddle’s special target when “the Heir of Slytherin” claimed to have opened the CoS (and probably with a good guess what the monster was), he gave Harry no protection or even warning. Nor did he prevent Dobby’s well-meant, but potentially lethal, interventions. (It is not canon that he was enough in touch with events at Hogwarts after his suspension to have in any way affected Harry’s decision to try to rescue Ginny.)
Third year, when Sirius, thought to be Riddle’s most fanatically loyal and dangerous follower, escaped from Azkaban, Twinkles responded by promptly hiring Sirius’s only surviving friend. He then dismissed Severus’s well-founded suspicions that Lupin might be colluding with his former friend, and ignored firm evidence that Harry had found a way to get past the surveillance to go to Hogsmeade. Albus didn’t so much as confiscate the cloak, despite witnesses testifying that Harry had used it at least once to escape the (dubious) protection of Hogwarts. And at the end he sent Harry and Hermione out, unprotected, to face an unmedicated werewolf and rogue Dementors.
(The last only recently hit me. Yes, Twinkles had had evidence that H&H had successfully used the time-turner to free Buckbeak. But at the time that he sent them out, he had no evidence for their continued survival. None. He didn’t, at the time he made his decision, know that Sirius had disappeared again [with Harry’s presumed assistance]. Nor had Harry yet told him about seeing “his father” cast a Patronus that had driven away the Dementors. And Severus and Sirius hadn’t witnessed that. All they knew was that the Dementors had dispersed-to chase the werewolf, Severus probably thought. Or-other prey? If H&H had both been destroyed that night, whether soul-sucked or werewolf-eaten, what evidence would have suggested that their own headmaster had deliberately sent them out into such danger?
(And in fact, Twinkles had not. It was Hermione’s own idea entirely-he made sure of that. Deniability is rather the watchword of PoA, isn’t it? He could have sworn that he had left them safely in the Hospital Ward, and that Hermione’s misapplied use of the Time-Turner was entirely her own idea.)
Fourth year, Dumbles forced Harry to participate in the Triwizard and neither advised the child to default on specific tasks nor gave him any training to survive. And after Harry was kidnapped from the Maze, Severus must surely have reported his Mark burning black the moment it happened, which must have made Albus wonder what had happened and whether Harry was involved, but he did nothing. Finally when the boy returned with Cedric’s corpse, and was kidnapped a second time, Albus claimed (GoF 35), “The real Moody would not have removed you from my sight after what happened tonight. The moment he took you, I knew-and I followed.”
“The moment he took you, I knew”? (Surely “Moody” must already have been under suspicion, for one [final] out-of-character action to have so given him away?) But… “and I followed” -some thirty minutes later?
Okay, Fudge and Amos were requiring Twinkle’s attention, but I find it hard to believe Albus simply didn’t register the second kidnapping of the evening. Not when it happened literally under his nose. Barty pulled Harry away while Fudge was talking to Albus, over Harry’s feeble (but voiced) protests: “Dumbledore said stay.”
Now, Barty was limping badly on Moody’s wooden leg, and he had to “half-pull, half-carry” Harry while shoving through a panicking crowd. How long did it take a half-crippled man to drag a fainting teen through a near-riot, across the lawn, past the lake, up the stairs… and then lock the door, give Harry a restorative, grill the boy about what had happened, and go into his insane gloat (which by itself must have lasted six to eight minutes-I read his rant, timing myself). How long did all that take?
If it were truly the case that “The moment he took you, I knew,” then Dumbles could have stopped Barty before the man had dragged Harry three feet.
And he did not.
Mind, if a cold-blooded, ruthless, pragmatic war leader had just realized that a supposed ally were instead actually a dangerous, indeed murderous, enemy agent, such a leader might have decided to let said agent remove himself (imagining his cover still to be intact) from a crowd of innocents. And even to take a hostage with him, especially if said leader had long since mentally written off said hostage’s life.
But once “Moody” and Harry were away from the innocent crowd, and certainly once they’d entered the castle, there was no advantage to giving the enemy more time alone with the hostage (whether dispensable or not). The moment the agent was isolated from all the non-disposible hostages, our ruthless leader should have moved in to neutralize the threat.
Which did not happen. Dumbledore left Harry to Barty’s mercy for at least eight to ten minutes after no one else was under threat from the enemy agent.
With Harry’s usual good luck, Albus DID arrive: just at the very instant Barty raised his wand to kill Harry. The headmaster was flanked by Snape and McGonagall, too, his chief lieutenant in the war effort and his deputy headmistress, so Twinkles had to appear to act decisively. (Was it, indeed, one of them who’d noticed Harry’s absence and dragged Albus to the rescue?).
But Albus could have reasonably expected that the cavalry he was leading would arrive, alas, a little too late. He’d given Tom’s agent enough of a head start, after all! Had the man’s mind been on his duty to his master, it would all have been over by the time Albus blasted through that door.
*
And yet, a few weeks later, Albus acted promptly and effectively to move Harry from an abode that Twinkles had abruptly realized not to be secure, to the one with the highest levels of protection in all of Britain. And a year later, in the fight in the Ministry atrium, Albus saved Harry from being killed by Tom, even though there were no witnesses present from the Order or the Ministry to have noticed had Albus’s intervention been delayed for one single, tragic moment.
*
One final point: one evaluates unfamiliar events from the perspective of the familiar. Our friend Twinkles, however he pretends to infallibility, was no exception.
And I think a relevant familiar event was in fact familial: the resemblance between the Potters’ passion play, which warped young Harry’s life, and the Dumbledores’, which had warped Albus’s.
Let’s start there, with a synopsis of how Ariana’s tragedy might have simmered in Albus’s back brain.
The baby of the family was vilely attacked. Papa reacted by erupting in violence against the baby’s attackers. This accomplished nothing except Papa’s permanent absence from his family-abandonment, from the view of his orphaned child.
Mama, in contrast, sacrificed everything in a (successful, for a time) attempt to protect her child. Including, eventually, her life.
And when she sacrificed her life the responsibility for the child fell to Albus, who didn’t really want it.
And he ended up so horrifically failing in that duty as to consign the mother’s treasured child to death.
… . Nah.
None of that could map in any way onto what happened later in Godric’s Hollow.
*
So what did Albus originally think happened that Halloween, and how did his ideas change?
First off, I can’t remember who (oryx_leucoryx?) suggested that Albus had gotten much of his information from Harry’s memories. If he did (always assuming Tom’s memories to have been accurate in DH 17)….
Harry would have heard a bang, and then his papa shouting. When (if) resolved into words, he would have heard James screaming, “Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off!”
Well. We readers know from Tom that “James came sprinting into the hall. It was easy, too easy, he had not even picked up his wand….”
But Harry didn’t know that, and so Albus couldn’t have learned that from his memories.
This was James Potter, of the James-and-Sirius double act. Sirius had dismissed the Defense OWL paper (which brilliant young Severus was still reviewing, OotP, 28) with the comment that it was “a piece of cake. I’ll be surprised if I don’t get Outstanding at the least.” Er, “at the least,” Sirius? That’s the best possible grade.
And James Potter’s ego was said to be, if possible, greater than his.
Then there was Potter’s brilliant scheme (as known to Albus) for protecting his wife and baby from the Death Eaters. Employ the Fidelius, but use Sirius as Secret-Keeper. Gamble their lives, as well as his own, on Black’s being game to defy Voldemort’s most rigorous interrogation if captured.
And, er, on Black’s being able to do so.
I imagine that Severus and Albus were in general agreement about how many minutes Black would have lasted under the Dark Lord’s full attention.
Hey! Give Sirius due credit here-it almost certainly would have been minutes, not seconds!
Almost certainly.
(There was, of course, always also a slight possibility that the Dark Lord might deliberately prolong the process for his own entertainment. But that wasn’t likely, given what was at atake. Tom wouldn’t have wanted, for example, to give Black any opportunity to die. And once Sirius were known to have been kidnapped, anyone depending on his secret-keeping might start changing security procedures. So breaking Sirius quickly would have been important.)
And it was someone who came up with THAT bright idea, someone who seriously considered Marauders capable of bearing up indefinitely against Voldemort’s worst, who yelled, “I’ll hold him off!”
Now, if one knew that Potter screamed “I’ll hold him off!” while unarmed, one might infer that James’s intent had been to use his own death to buy a precious few seconds of delay for his wife and son to try to escape. .Not even James Potter, surely, could have been arrogant enough to imagine that he could arm-wrestle You-Know-Who into submission.
But lacking that information, that statement could sound as though Potter had had the unmitigated gall to imagine that he could take on Tom Riddle and win.
In which case, as far as Albus could see, James Potter had been murdered by Tom as punishment for his presumptuousness in thinking himself up to Tom’s weight.
No sacrifices there.
And we never saw anything in canon to indicate that Albus ever questioned that interpretation of James’s death.
*
Lily, however, did sacrifice herself. In fact Tom three times offered her a chance to save herself, giving Lily three chances to refuse. Poor planning, Tom. Didn’t you remember anything from Arithmancy about the power of numbers?
But anyhow, Albus could easily read her death as an (inadvertent, unconscious on both sides) enactment of a ritual sacrifice. Which could, probably would, have magical powers.
How did Albus think that power exhibited itself in what followed?
What did Albus think happened next?
What would Harry have observed after his mummy fell?
She didn’t get up again, and Harry saw that the man who’d made her fall hadn’t been Papa. Then he got scared and started crying, and then there was another green flash and he fell down, and his forehead hurt and there was a lot of noise (as the house exploded around him)….
Stop.
EXACTLY what just happened?
If Dumbledore read the baby’s memories, Dumbles might well have imagined he’d learned the truth while missing crucial information.
Especially if Albus were preconditioned to think he already understood what he was witnessing through the baby’s eyes.
A Pensieve would have revealed exactly what happened, but would Albus have used a Pensieve? At least at first? I assume that to extract specific memories from someone ELSE, Legilimency would first be needed to locate them. So if you’re already using Legilimency to view memories, why go the step further of extracting the memories to view them in a Pensieve unless you expect to need to show them to someone else, or unless you’re worried you might have missed something in your rummaging? Albus did not expect to use these memories as formal evidence, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be caught with indisputable evidence that he’d meddled with a baby’s mind without permission. Nor did he want anyone but himself to understand exactly what had just happened. Under those circumstances, would Twinkles have extracted and kept the memories to look at later, or just contented himself with rifling through the toddler’s mind until he was satisfied he understood what had happened?
But if Twinkles HAD merely mind-raped a baby (as opposed to, mind-raped him and saved the evidence for external viewing), what would he have seen at the moment of Tom’s AK?
Consider: When Harry and Tom dueled in the graveyard at Little Hangleton (GoF, 34), “A jet of green light issued from Voldemort’s wand just as a jet of red light blasted from Harry’s-they met in midair-“
Then, the Killing Curse that killed Albus was described as “a jet of green light [that] shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest.”(HBP, 27)
However fast spells travel though air, it’s slower than the speed of light. Moreover, it’s slower than human perception of light (which is much, much slower). To perceive a spell as “a jet of light,” one has to see the spell-light first in one place, then in another, then in the next, progressively. Traveling from origin to destination, like Zeno’s arrow. (With a lingering afterimage, otherwise the travelling spell-light would look more like a bullet of light than a jet. Or maybe the spell is ionizing the air or some such, so Harry/the reader is really viewing the track of the spell through the air?) But at any rate, spells travel visibly slowly enough that they can be dodged (at much closer quarters than bullets can be).
(I wanna research spells cast in vacuum! And in null-g! Pouts.)
A “jet” of colored light, “flashing” around a room? An eyewitness would register the first “flash” of color before the tip of the “jet” could hit its target. Especially if the “jet” of light were aimed straight at the witness’s face. (Because the colored light would be visible instantaneously, while the fact that the tip of this “jet” of light was still travelling toward its final destination would only be apparent from a side view of the “jet”.)
So. If the baby became aware of falling at the same time he became aware of the second green flash, he’d have started falling before the second spell actually reached him. And if the spell subsequently skimmed over his head, hit something behind him, and bounced back in Tom’s face, the baby wouldn’t necessarily have seen that part. Just that green light, flashing around
And if Harry fell down after seeing that flash of green, who could doubt that Harry fell down because of that flash? (Post hoc ergo propter hoc!). Which however did not kill him. Why not?
OBVIOUSLY, because Lily’s death sacrifice had formed a shield which saved her boy! Which reflected Tom’s Killing Curse back upon the murderer, and then the magical backlash destroyed the room.
And a piece of Tom’s fragmented soul, seeking a refuge, entered Harry, making that scar….
(Or maybe, even, Dumbles was stupider than oryx_leucoryx, and believed his own press releases that the scar was created by the bounced AK itself. Albus did keep saying that Lily’s protection was both a shield and in Harry’s very blood-maybe he thought that the drawing of Harry’s blood activated his mother’s protection. Which would be fairly stupid of him, because a properly-cast AK doesn’t shed blood.)
However, anyone preconditioned to romanticize a mother’s love sacrifice eould easily have read Harry’s memories that way, if it wasn’t incontrovertibly clear that the baby had started falling before the killing spell had actually touched him.
And in any head-on view (e.g., Harry’s) this, if true, could not have been clear.
*
Moreover, once Albus was satisfied he understood what had happened, Albus “knew” that the only way to get rid of that soul-fragment and finish off Tom was to kill the baby.
Only he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
Not himself, not a second time.
So he cane up with the option that seemed much better to him.
This is our heroic Albus, after all, who spent years dithering rather than confront Gellert, allowing hundreds of people to die (or some seven to nine million, depending how closely we’re supposed to map Gellert’s war to WWII) because of his horror at admitting to himself his part in Ariana’s murder (DH 35): “I dreaded beyond all the things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.”
So, THIS time Albus would do much better. This time he’d bring about a child’s death through arrogance and stupidity (if he’d deliberately released the Prophecy as bait for Tom, he’d effectively already done so), but this time he wouldn’t strike the fatal blow. In what passes for Twinkle’s heart, see, it’s much, MUCH better, infinitely superior morally, to commit manslaughter through neglect and negligence, or through deliberately leaving someone a prey to vicious attackers, than through striking a blow oneself.
Albus wouldn’t make the same mistake twice; he’s far too intelligent for that.
How good it must have made Twinkles feel each time he watched Harry face death, how it must have salved his lingering guilt over murdering his baby sister, to reflect that he, Albus, hadn’t ever raised his wand to this child!
But he didn’t quite admit to himself he was perfectly happy to see the inconvenient child die so long as he didn’t have to kill him directly.
And really Twinkles would feel much better about everything if the victim could consent.
So the solution was to offer nominal protection to the child. While raising him in a way that will make him willing to sacrifice his life when he’s no longer a child, when he’s legally able to consent to dying.
And so Albus built on the mother’s sacrifice. Her blood had shielded her child, so let it BE a shield.
Is Lily really buried next to her husband?
Er, all of her?
The extremely ancient magic that I’ve read about (in The Golden Bough) that used sacrifice and bonds of “blood” to protect domiciles used real blood and/or the body in situ to anchor that protection.
We can infer that Dumbles really did believe-at first-that Lily’s sacrifice had somehow shielded her child, because we know that Dumbles really did want-on the conscious level at least-to keep Harry safe from Tom until he came of age and could consent to his death. And so Albus constructed a blood-based “shield” and “refuge” for Harry which made it impossible for Tom to “touch or harm” the boy while he was a minor living with his mother’s “blood.”
Note that Albus did not, that we know of, do anything to reinforce the boy’s supernaturally good luck, which would have been the reasonable thing to do if he understood that luck, not a shield, had saved the child.
Note moreover, please, that Dumble’s protection was crafted with Tom’s greatest weakness in mind: that Tommy has always cared only for himself. Albus’s shield was designed to destroy Tom’s body slowly and painfully, and to advertise that it would do so, if Tom should try to (directly) touch or harm Harry.
If Tom hadn’t minded dying, he could have touched Harry all he wanted. (Which is what allowed Harry to hold on to Quirrell-stopping Voldemort was more important to Harry than his own pain or death.)
So Albus must have constructed that shield believing in the power of Lily’s sacrificial death, but not realizing that the real “lingering protection” she (and James) gave Harry was insanely good luck in his encounters with Tom (and/or with death).
(Consider the first attempt we see against Harry’s life in canon, Quirrell’s attempt to unseat Harry from his broom. First, Snape realized in time what was going on and performed the counterjinx. Then, when Hermione set Snape on fire to stop his spell-casting, she first accidentally knocked Quirrell over in her rush to stop Snape. Luck, and luck, manifesting in two completely different ways. Finally, had Hermione not acted as she had, Quirrell claimed he could have overcome Snape’s counterjinx and unseated Harry.)
Note further that Harry’s “shield” against Tom was voided when Tom used Harry’s blood to make his new body, but Harry’s luck stayed the same, absurdly good. Tom had succeeded in breaking Albus’s protection, not Harry’s parents’.
But then, Tom and Albus understood each other’s machinations. Great minds and all that.
And Albus finally figured out that Lily’s sacrifice had conferred luck on Harry, not a shield, at the end of GoF.
First, Albus, Severus, and Minerva arrived just in time to save Harry from Barty. Then, Albus heard Harry’s story, and realized the role that luck (and Harry’s parents, though the Dumb One apparently still didn’t quite register the plural) played in Harry’s escape after Tom’s resurrection using Harry’s blood.
Albus probably reflected back over Harry’s career, and realized the role luck had always played in saving the boy. Sometimes by attracting more powerful and talented protectors, sometimes by making the enemy slip up….. ( “I have been careless,” admitted the Dark Lord. “… more talented friends,” sneered Snape, in which category he himself was manifestly included.
I think Dumbles must have started to understand that Harry’s primary protection was fair fortune when he realized that he had blasted through Barty’s door exactly in time to save Harry, and registered that Barty had had to ignore both the Foe-Glass and Moody’s eye’s ability to see through doors and walls in order to let the rescue squad approach.
Then, finally, there’s the fact that the blast-though the door, so presumably aimed blind-knocked Barty unconscious and off his feet, but didn’t touch Harry.
Now that’s some luck!
Thus, when Twinkles questioned Harry about his experiences while kidnapped, he knew already that Harry was still protected by obscenely good luck. Hence his initial shock and surprise (visible even to our Harry) when Harry informed him that Tom had indeed used’ Harry’s blood in his resurrection potion. Which should have voided, which DID void, the blood-based charm Albus had cast, but which evidently hadn’t voided Harry’s true protection of being the child of good fortune.
When Harry told of Wormtail piercing his arm with the dagger, however, Sirius let out a vehement exclamation and Dumbledore stood up so quickly that Harry started. Dumbledore walked around the desk and told Harry to stretch out his am. Harry showed them both the place where his robes were torn and the cut beneath them.
“He said my blood would make him stronger than if he’d used someone else’s,” Harry told Dumbledore. “He said the protection my-my mother left in me-he’d have it too. And he was right-he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face.”
For a fleeting second, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him.
“Very well,” he said, sitting down again. “Voldemort has overcome that particular barrier.”[GoF 36]
See? Albus’s first reaction was to check if this could actually be true, if Tom could really have taken Harry’s blood, which by his calculations should have cancelled…. Maybe the boy was just deluded about what Tom had really done. Albus had to check before he could believe it.
But I’ll give Twinkles this; he was swift on the uptake. Once he realized that Tom really had used Harry’s blood, and that this had cancelled Albus’s charm but not Lily’s protection, he realized almost at once that Tom might have inadvertently given Albus an out.
The boy was Tom’s accidental Horcrux. He had to die to destroy the soul-fragment. Yet if Harry sacrificed himself voluntarily, like his mother had, that death could, theoretically, provide protection to Tom’s victims.
One of which was Harry himself.
If Tom were still alive at the time of Harry’s death, still securely anchored to life, could Harry’s blood in Tom’s still-living body tie the boy enough to life that the boy could potentially return, were the boy’s body physically undamaged? The two were now tied by blood as well as soul, after all.
And Harry has, still, supernaturally good luck. Bought by others’ sacrifices to save him. Were this reinforced by Harry’s own voluntary sacrifice….
Because notice that Dumbledore told Snape [DH 33], “If there comes a time when Lord Voldemort stops sending that snake forth to do his bidding, but keeps it safe beside him under magical protection, then, I think, it will be safe to tell Harry.”
Safe for whom?
The trigger to tell Harry that he must sacrifice himself was not the destruction of all Horcruxes save the Harrycrux---it was the destruction of all other Horcruxes-but-one.
Twinkles wanted Harry to die (preferably by Avada Kedavra cast by Tom’s wand) while Tom was still firmly anchored to life by one real, undestroyed Horcrux.
For so the boy might possibly redeem Albus from his long guilt.
The child killed by Albus’s actions, finally saved.
*
Only, how humiliating to poor Dumbles, to realize that Lily’s instinctive love-protection was stronger and more durable than all of Albus’s carefully-crafted spells stealing their power from her sacrifice!
Which others of Albus’s spells, then, might be less powerful than a true sacrifice confers?
No wonder the man looked old and weary. He’d just realized his life’s work had been upstaged. And that he had to revisit everything he thought he knew about Lily’s sacrifice and Tom’s mortality…..
Still, I suppose it’s to Twinkle’s credit that his very first reaction was to think of the possible consequence for Harry: a “gleam of triumph” that the boy he’d condemned to death might now have a chance to survive.
*
This takes us to Dumble’s change of heart in the matter of protecting Harry.
Before the end of GoF, Dumbles knew that Harry must eventually die, and that his death was the only thing that could finish Tom’s existence. From the perspective of brutal practicality, the sooner the better, right?
But still some tender part of Twinkles wanted Harry to live to adulthood and consent to his death, for the sake of salving Albus’s conscience.
This ambivalence ended when Albus realized, first, that Harry’s death wouldn’t by itself destroy Tom’s life (since Tom was now embodied), and second, that Harry now might have a get-out-of-death free card.
After that realization, Dumbles was working for, wanted, Harry to die only under the right conditions.
And, finally, unambivalently.
Which is why Albus fought so for Harry’s life in the atrium.
Harry wasn’t graciously consenting to die there for the sake of saving others-he was giving up. Overwhelmed and defeated.
The boy mustn’t, absolutely must not, die inadvertently.
And it’s past time for him to learn the prophecy, to be told enough to set him up to receive the final revelation….
*
And if previous commentators are correct that Tom was looking through Harry’s eyes in Dumble’s office that night, AND that Twinkles was deliberately apprising Tom as well as Harry of the prophecy…. then Albus was also doing something else that night.
Hornswoggling Tom. Making Tom believe that he’d overcome the protection Lily had given her child with her death, but not the “shield” Albus had created from Lily’s sacrifice. Making Tom, in fact, believe the exact opposite of the truth.
Making Tom credit that the protection on Four Privet, Albus’s strongest shield, was still utterly unassailable until Harry reached adulthood.
After all, if Albus, who knew what spells he’d cast, and knew both Tom’s powers and his own, and knew that Tom had taken Harry’s/Lily’s blood into himself, still told Harry confidentially “there you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort” -why, it must be true!
And that Harry’s actual protection was his incredible luck, not any barrier or shield, and that Harry’s luck was fully intact, would (with luck) continue to slide right past Tom’s awareness.
And so it did.
And, more embarrassingly, past ours.
***
One final matter.
The idea that James’s sacrifice would have conferred good luck on his wife and child finally gives us another explanation for why Tom might have been such a numbskull as to give Lily a choice about dying.
The Doylist explanation for why Tom, for no discernible reason, went to the trouble of politely asking Lily to move out of the way so he could kill her baby is, Jo’s just that bad a writer.
Either Jo wanted Lily to have a clear choice, and the author couldn’t be arsed to come up with a motive for Tom to give Lily that choice, or Jo just plain forgot that she was writing fantasy and that she’d armed Tom with a wand.
Now, if a gunman faced his target’s unarmed mother courageously interposing her own body as a shield, the assassin would have only four options: persuade the mother to step aside, come to grips with her and try to wrestle her away (which would void his advantage of being armed-she might grab his weapon in the struggle and shoot him), shoot her first, or give up the attempt altogether. If she refused to step aside, and the assassin were determined to fulfill his mission, the killer’s only option would be to shoot her.
Tom, however, as a wand-armed wizard, operated under no such constraints. Forget any super-speshul knowledge of the Darkest Arts-just using spells we’ve seen in canon, Tom could have used the Imperius Curse to make Lily step aside. Or stunned her the moment he broke through the door, never even speaking to the frill he was sparing to indulge a follower’s fancy.
Or, if he wanted to make her suffer by leaving her conscious to watch her baby die, used Incarcereous or Petrificus Totalis or the spell he used to make Harry’s body bow to him. Or Levicorpus. Or Tarantellaga. Or Rictumsempra, cast hard enough to make Lily collapse on the floor laughing helplessly as he killed her baby in front of her.
There was no reason for Tom to ASK Lily to move, to give her any say in the matter at all.
If Tom chose for her to live, he should have made it impossible for her to die. If Tom felt safer with the Prophesied One’s family all dead, he should have killed her without fanfare the moment he clapped eyes on her, as he did James.
Faffing about conversing with her, letting HER decide her fate-what’s up with that? Since when is Tom a proponent of freedom of choice?
And how was Tom so stupid as to forget the power of numbers, that he should have given Lily THREE chances to affirm her refusal before he killed her?
The Doylist answer is, Idiot Plot. But I like looking for Watsonian answers.
So I came up with one explanation: that Severus had conned Tom into offering Lily that choice to play with her, to mess with her mind. And, incidentally, to mess with the mind of his loyal follower who’d begged his master to spare this one Mudblood.
In that scenario, Tom would have expected Lily to refuse his generous offers to spare her; he just wanted to make her say so.
And that explanation fits the mechanics, but there’s nothing in Tom’s own memories to support that that was Tom’s motivation.
But now another possibility presents itself.
A sudden onset of carelessness in one’s opponent, of outright idiocy, even, is one of the ways magical good luck can manifest. (“I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance,” whined the Dark Lord to his followers.)
For example, when Harry, under the influence of Felix Felicis, approached Slughorn, that cautious teacher so far forgot about Harry’s overriding desire to question Horace about his dealings with Tom as to let himself get drunk in Harry’s presence. Not smart at all. Sluggy was usually much more self-preserving than that; he’d been evading Harry’s attempts to interrogate him for months at that point!
So,
James, we saw, sacrificed his life. For what cause or purpose, specifically?
“Lily, take Harry and go!”
To try to buy his wife the opportunity to save their son.
Maybe James was successful.
Maybe James bought Tom’s utter idiocy in offering Lily-three times!-the choice to step aside.
Bought, and paid for.
And her refusal, her sacrifice, was then added to his when Tommy aimed his wand at their child.
Not a single sacrifice protecting Harry with good luck, but a double one.
So, what acts can we judge Twinkles on?
First, he left Harry on Petunia’s doorstep the very day after his parents’ murder. And eventually told Harry that he had done so because his mother’s blood was Harry’s shield and refuge.
Second, Albus consistently (from first to sixth years) told Harry that Harry had been saved by his mother’s sacrifice. In contrast, Lupin said (PoA 14, emphasis mine), “Your parents gave their lives to keep you alive, Harry. A poor way to repay them-gambling their sacrifice for a bag of magic tricks.” We perfectly understand why Dumbles wouldn’t use the argument that Harry’s risking his life was a poor way to repay a parental sacrifice-but why didn’t Dumbles ever bring up the possibility that James, like Lily, had sacrificed himself? Particularly since he was always encouraging Harry to model himself on the gallant hero Harry imagined his father to have been?
Twinkle’s actions and words are (unusually) congruent here. Both make most sense if Dumbles really did believe that Lily, but not James, had died to protect Harry.
Third, he allowed Harry’s life to be endangered repeatedly from first to fourth years. First year, he let Harry have a broom and play Quidditch (almost getting killed in his first match), gave him an invisibility cloak, encouraged him to help Hagrid with Norberta, assigned or allowed a detention in the forest while a unicorn-killer was on the loose there, and encouraged or allowed Harry to face Quirrell!mort.
Second year, knowing Harry to be Riddle’s special target when “the Heir of Slytherin” claimed to have opened the CoS (and probably with a good guess what the monster was), he gave Harry no protection or even warning. Nor did he prevent Dobby’s well-meant, but potentially lethal, interventions. (It is not canon that he was enough in touch with events at Hogwarts after his suspension to have in any way affected Harry’s decision to try to rescue Ginny.)
Third year, when Sirius, thought to be Riddle’s most fanatically loyal and dangerous follower, escaped from Azkaban, Twinkles responded by promptly hiring Sirius’s only surviving friend. He then dismissed Severus’s well-founded suspicions that Lupin might be colluding with his former friend, and ignored firm evidence that Harry had found a way to get past the surveillance to go to Hogsmeade. Albus didn’t so much as confiscate the cloak, despite witnesses testifying that Harry had used it at least once to escape the (dubious) protection of Hogwarts. And at the end he sent Harry and Hermione out, unprotected, to face an unmedicated werewolf and rogue Dementors.
(The last only recently hit me. Yes, Twinkles had had evidence that H&H had successfully used the time-turner to free Buckbeak. But at the time that he sent them out, he had no evidence for their continued survival. None. He didn’t, at the time he made his decision, know that Sirius had disappeared again [with Harry’s presumed assistance]. Nor had Harry yet told him about seeing “his father” cast a Patronus that had driven away the Dementors. And Severus and Sirius hadn’t witnessed that. All they knew was that the Dementors had dispersed-to chase the werewolf, Severus probably thought. Or-other prey? If H&H had both been destroyed that night, whether soul-sucked or werewolf-eaten, what evidence would have suggested that their own headmaster had deliberately sent them out into such danger?
(And in fact, Twinkles had not. It was Hermione’s own idea entirely-he made sure of that. Deniability is rather the watchword of PoA, isn’t it? He could have sworn that he had left them safely in the Hospital Ward, and that Hermione’s misapplied use of the Time-Turner was entirely her own idea.)
Fourth year, Dumbles forced Harry to participate in the Triwizard and neither advised the child to default on specific tasks nor gave him any training to survive. And after Harry was kidnapped from the Maze, Severus must surely have reported his Mark burning black the moment it happened, which must have made Albus wonder what had happened and whether Harry was involved, but he did nothing. Finally when the boy returned with Cedric’s corpse, and was kidnapped a second time, Albus claimed (GoF 35), “The real Moody would not have removed you from my sight after what happened tonight. The moment he took you, I knew-and I followed.”
“The moment he took you, I knew”? (Surely “Moody” must already have been under suspicion, for one [final] out-of-character action to have so given him away?) But… “and I followed” -some thirty minutes later?
Okay, Fudge and Amos were requiring Twinkle’s attention, but I find it hard to believe Albus simply didn’t register the second kidnapping of the evening. Not when it happened literally under his nose. Barty pulled Harry away while Fudge was talking to Albus, over Harry’s feeble (but voiced) protests: “Dumbledore said stay.”
Now, Barty was limping badly on Moody’s wooden leg, and he had to “half-pull, half-carry” Harry while shoving through a panicking crowd. How long did it take a half-crippled man to drag a fainting teen through a near-riot, across the lawn, past the lake, up the stairs… and then lock the door, give Harry a restorative, grill the boy about what had happened, and go into his insane gloat (which by itself must have lasted six to eight minutes-I read his rant, timing myself). How long did all that take?
If it were truly the case that “The moment he took you, I knew,” then Dumbles could have stopped Barty before the man had dragged Harry three feet.
And he did not.
Mind, if a cold-blooded, ruthless, pragmatic war leader had just realized that a supposed ally were instead actually a dangerous, indeed murderous, enemy agent, such a leader might have decided to let said agent remove himself (imagining his cover still to be intact) from a crowd of innocents. And even to take a hostage with him, especially if said leader had long since mentally written off said hostage’s life.
But once “Moody” and Harry were away from the innocent crowd, and certainly once they’d entered the castle, there was no advantage to giving the enemy more time alone with the hostage (whether dispensable or not). The moment the agent was isolated from all the non-disposible hostages, our ruthless leader should have moved in to neutralize the threat.
Which did not happen. Dumbledore left Harry to Barty’s mercy for at least eight to ten minutes after no one else was under threat from the enemy agent.
With Harry’s usual good luck, Albus DID arrive: just at the very instant Barty raised his wand to kill Harry. The headmaster was flanked by Snape and McGonagall, too, his chief lieutenant in the war effort and his deputy headmistress, so Twinkles had to appear to act decisively. (Was it, indeed, one of them who’d noticed Harry’s absence and dragged Albus to the rescue?).
But Albus could have reasonably expected that the cavalry he was leading would arrive, alas, a little too late. He’d given Tom’s agent enough of a head start, after all! Had the man’s mind been on his duty to his master, it would all have been over by the time Albus blasted through that door.
*
And yet, a few weeks later, Albus acted promptly and effectively to move Harry from an abode that Twinkles had abruptly realized not to be secure, to the one with the highest levels of protection in all of Britain. And a year later, in the fight in the Ministry atrium, Albus saved Harry from being killed by Tom, even though there were no witnesses present from the Order or the Ministry to have noticed had Albus’s intervention been delayed for one single, tragic moment.
*
One final point: one evaluates unfamiliar events from the perspective of the familiar. Our friend Twinkles, however he pretends to infallibility, was no exception.
And I think a relevant familiar event was in fact familial: the resemblance between the Potters’ passion play, which warped young Harry’s life, and the Dumbledores’, which had warped Albus’s.
Let’s start there, with a synopsis of how Ariana’s tragedy might have simmered in Albus’s back brain.
The baby of the family was vilely attacked. Papa reacted by erupting in violence against the baby’s attackers. This accomplished nothing except Papa’s permanent absence from his family-abandonment, from the view of his orphaned child.
Mama, in contrast, sacrificed everything in a (successful, for a time) attempt to protect her child. Including, eventually, her life.
And when she sacrificed her life the responsibility for the child fell to Albus, who didn’t really want it.
And he ended up so horrifically failing in that duty as to consign the mother’s treasured child to death.
… . Nah.
None of that could map in any way onto what happened later in Godric’s Hollow.
*
So what did Albus originally think happened that Halloween, and how did his ideas change?
First off, I can’t remember who (oryx_leucoryx?) suggested that Albus had gotten much of his information from Harry’s memories. If he did (always assuming Tom’s memories to have been accurate in DH 17)….
Harry would have heard a bang, and then his papa shouting. When (if) resolved into words, he would have heard James screaming, “Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off!”
Well. We readers know from Tom that “James came sprinting into the hall. It was easy, too easy, he had not even picked up his wand….”
But Harry didn’t know that, and so Albus couldn’t have learned that from his memories.
This was James Potter, of the James-and-Sirius double act. Sirius had dismissed the Defense OWL paper (which brilliant young Severus was still reviewing, OotP, 28) with the comment that it was “a piece of cake. I’ll be surprised if I don’t get Outstanding at the least.” Er, “at the least,” Sirius? That’s the best possible grade.
And James Potter’s ego was said to be, if possible, greater than his.
Then there was Potter’s brilliant scheme (as known to Albus) for protecting his wife and baby from the Death Eaters. Employ the Fidelius, but use Sirius as Secret-Keeper. Gamble their lives, as well as his own, on Black’s being game to defy Voldemort’s most rigorous interrogation if captured.
And, er, on Black’s being able to do so.
I imagine that Severus and Albus were in general agreement about how many minutes Black would have lasted under the Dark Lord’s full attention.
Hey! Give Sirius due credit here-it almost certainly would have been minutes, not seconds!
Almost certainly.
(There was, of course, always also a slight possibility that the Dark Lord might deliberately prolong the process for his own entertainment. But that wasn’t likely, given what was at atake. Tom wouldn’t have wanted, for example, to give Black any opportunity to die. And once Sirius were known to have been kidnapped, anyone depending on his secret-keeping might start changing security procedures. So breaking Sirius quickly would have been important.)
And it was someone who came up with THAT bright idea, someone who seriously considered Marauders capable of bearing up indefinitely against Voldemort’s worst, who yelled, “I’ll hold him off!”
Now, if one knew that Potter screamed “I’ll hold him off!” while unarmed, one might infer that James’s intent had been to use his own death to buy a precious few seconds of delay for his wife and son to try to escape. .Not even James Potter, surely, could have been arrogant enough to imagine that he could arm-wrestle You-Know-Who into submission.
But lacking that information, that statement could sound as though Potter had had the unmitigated gall to imagine that he could take on Tom Riddle and win.
In which case, as far as Albus could see, James Potter had been murdered by Tom as punishment for his presumptuousness in thinking himself up to Tom’s weight.
No sacrifices there.
And we never saw anything in canon to indicate that Albus ever questioned that interpretation of James’s death.
*
Lily, however, did sacrifice herself. In fact Tom three times offered her a chance to save herself, giving Lily three chances to refuse. Poor planning, Tom. Didn’t you remember anything from Arithmancy about the power of numbers?
But anyhow, Albus could easily read her death as an (inadvertent, unconscious on both sides) enactment of a ritual sacrifice. Which could, probably would, have magical powers.
How did Albus think that power exhibited itself in what followed?
What did Albus think happened next?
What would Harry have observed after his mummy fell?
She didn’t get up again, and Harry saw that the man who’d made her fall hadn’t been Papa. Then he got scared and started crying, and then there was another green flash and he fell down, and his forehead hurt and there was a lot of noise (as the house exploded around him)….
Stop.
EXACTLY what just happened?
If Dumbledore read the baby’s memories, Dumbles might well have imagined he’d learned the truth while missing crucial information.
Especially if Albus were preconditioned to think he already understood what he was witnessing through the baby’s eyes.
A Pensieve would have revealed exactly what happened, but would Albus have used a Pensieve? At least at first? I assume that to extract specific memories from someone ELSE, Legilimency would first be needed to locate them. So if you’re already using Legilimency to view memories, why go the step further of extracting the memories to view them in a Pensieve unless you expect to need to show them to someone else, or unless you’re worried you might have missed something in your rummaging? Albus did not expect to use these memories as formal evidence, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be caught with indisputable evidence that he’d meddled with a baby’s mind without permission. Nor did he want anyone but himself to understand exactly what had just happened. Under those circumstances, would Twinkles have extracted and kept the memories to look at later, or just contented himself with rifling through the toddler’s mind until he was satisfied he understood what had happened?
But if Twinkles HAD merely mind-raped a baby (as opposed to, mind-raped him and saved the evidence for external viewing), what would he have seen at the moment of Tom’s AK?
Consider: When Harry and Tom dueled in the graveyard at Little Hangleton (GoF, 34), “A jet of green light issued from Voldemort’s wand just as a jet of red light blasted from Harry’s-they met in midair-“
Then, the Killing Curse that killed Albus was described as “a jet of green light [that] shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest.”(HBP, 27)
However fast spells travel though air, it’s slower than the speed of light. Moreover, it’s slower than human perception of light (which is much, much slower). To perceive a spell as “a jet of light,” one has to see the spell-light first in one place, then in another, then in the next, progressively. Traveling from origin to destination, like Zeno’s arrow. (With a lingering afterimage, otherwise the travelling spell-light would look more like a bullet of light than a jet. Or maybe the spell is ionizing the air or some such, so Harry/the reader is really viewing the track of the spell through the air?) But at any rate, spells travel visibly slowly enough that they can be dodged (at much closer quarters than bullets can be).
(I wanna research spells cast in vacuum! And in null-g! Pouts.)
A “jet” of colored light, “flashing” around a room? An eyewitness would register the first “flash” of color before the tip of the “jet” could hit its target. Especially if the “jet” of light were aimed straight at the witness’s face. (Because the colored light would be visible instantaneously, while the fact that the tip of this “jet” of light was still travelling toward its final destination would only be apparent from a side view of the “jet”.)
So. If the baby became aware of falling at the same time he became aware of the second green flash, he’d have started falling before the second spell actually reached him. And if the spell subsequently skimmed over his head, hit something behind him, and bounced back in Tom’s face, the baby wouldn’t necessarily have seen that part. Just that green light, flashing around
And if Harry fell down after seeing that flash of green, who could doubt that Harry fell down because of that flash? (Post hoc ergo propter hoc!). Which however did not kill him. Why not?
OBVIOUSLY, because Lily’s death sacrifice had formed a shield which saved her boy! Which reflected Tom’s Killing Curse back upon the murderer, and then the magical backlash destroyed the room.
And a piece of Tom’s fragmented soul, seeking a refuge, entered Harry, making that scar….
(Or maybe, even, Dumbles was stupider than oryx_leucoryx, and believed his own press releases that the scar was created by the bounced AK itself. Albus did keep saying that Lily’s protection was both a shield and in Harry’s very blood-maybe he thought that the drawing of Harry’s blood activated his mother’s protection. Which would be fairly stupid of him, because a properly-cast AK doesn’t shed blood.)
However, anyone preconditioned to romanticize a mother’s love sacrifice eould easily have read Harry’s memories that way, if it wasn’t incontrovertibly clear that the baby had started falling before the killing spell had actually touched him.
And in any head-on view (e.g., Harry’s) this, if true, could not have been clear.
*
Moreover, once Albus was satisfied he understood what had happened, Albus “knew” that the only way to get rid of that soul-fragment and finish off Tom was to kill the baby.
Only he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
Not himself, not a second time.
So he cane up with the option that seemed much better to him.
This is our heroic Albus, after all, who spent years dithering rather than confront Gellert, allowing hundreds of people to die (or some seven to nine million, depending how closely we’re supposed to map Gellert’s war to WWII) because of his horror at admitting to himself his part in Ariana’s murder (DH 35): “I dreaded beyond all the things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.”
So, THIS time Albus would do much better. This time he’d bring about a child’s death through arrogance and stupidity (if he’d deliberately released the Prophecy as bait for Tom, he’d effectively already done so), but this time he wouldn’t strike the fatal blow. In what passes for Twinkle’s heart, see, it’s much, MUCH better, infinitely superior morally, to commit manslaughter through neglect and negligence, or through deliberately leaving someone a prey to vicious attackers, than through striking a blow oneself.
Albus wouldn’t make the same mistake twice; he’s far too intelligent for that.
How good it must have made Twinkles feel each time he watched Harry face death, how it must have salved his lingering guilt over murdering his baby sister, to reflect that he, Albus, hadn’t ever raised his wand to this child!
But he didn’t quite admit to himself he was perfectly happy to see the inconvenient child die so long as he didn’t have to kill him directly.
And really Twinkles would feel much better about everything if the victim could consent.
So the solution was to offer nominal protection to the child. While raising him in a way that will make him willing to sacrifice his life when he’s no longer a child, when he’s legally able to consent to dying.
And so Albus built on the mother’s sacrifice. Her blood had shielded her child, so let it BE a shield.
Is Lily really buried next to her husband?
Er, all of her?
The extremely ancient magic that I’ve read about (in The Golden Bough) that used sacrifice and bonds of “blood” to protect domiciles used real blood and/or the body in situ to anchor that protection.
We can infer that Dumbles really did believe-at first-that Lily’s sacrifice had somehow shielded her child, because we know that Dumbles really did want-on the conscious level at least-to keep Harry safe from Tom until he came of age and could consent to his death. And so Albus constructed a blood-based “shield” and “refuge” for Harry which made it impossible for Tom to “touch or harm” the boy while he was a minor living with his mother’s “blood.”
Note that Albus did not, that we know of, do anything to reinforce the boy’s supernaturally good luck, which would have been the reasonable thing to do if he understood that luck, not a shield, had saved the child.
Note moreover, please, that Dumble’s protection was crafted with Tom’s greatest weakness in mind: that Tommy has always cared only for himself. Albus’s shield was designed to destroy Tom’s body slowly and painfully, and to advertise that it would do so, if Tom should try to (directly) touch or harm Harry.
If Tom hadn’t minded dying, he could have touched Harry all he wanted. (Which is what allowed Harry to hold on to Quirrell-stopping Voldemort was more important to Harry than his own pain or death.)
So Albus must have constructed that shield believing in the power of Lily’s sacrificial death, but not realizing that the real “lingering protection” she (and James) gave Harry was insanely good luck in his encounters with Tom (and/or with death).
(Consider the first attempt we see against Harry’s life in canon, Quirrell’s attempt to unseat Harry from his broom. First, Snape realized in time what was going on and performed the counterjinx. Then, when Hermione set Snape on fire to stop his spell-casting, she first accidentally knocked Quirrell over in her rush to stop Snape. Luck, and luck, manifesting in two completely different ways. Finally, had Hermione not acted as she had, Quirrell claimed he could have overcome Snape’s counterjinx and unseated Harry.)
Note further that Harry’s “shield” against Tom was voided when Tom used Harry’s blood to make his new body, but Harry’s luck stayed the same, absurdly good. Tom had succeeded in breaking Albus’s protection, not Harry’s parents’.
But then, Tom and Albus understood each other’s machinations. Great minds and all that.
And Albus finally figured out that Lily’s sacrifice had conferred luck on Harry, not a shield, at the end of GoF.
First, Albus, Severus, and Minerva arrived just in time to save Harry from Barty. Then, Albus heard Harry’s story, and realized the role that luck (and Harry’s parents, though the Dumb One apparently still didn’t quite register the plural) played in Harry’s escape after Tom’s resurrection using Harry’s blood.
Albus probably reflected back over Harry’s career, and realized the role luck had always played in saving the boy. Sometimes by attracting more powerful and talented protectors, sometimes by making the enemy slip up….. ( “I have been careless,” admitted the Dark Lord. “… more talented friends,” sneered Snape, in which category he himself was manifestly included.
I think Dumbles must have started to understand that Harry’s primary protection was fair fortune when he realized that he had blasted through Barty’s door exactly in time to save Harry, and registered that Barty had had to ignore both the Foe-Glass and Moody’s eye’s ability to see through doors and walls in order to let the rescue squad approach.
Then, finally, there’s the fact that the blast-though the door, so presumably aimed blind-knocked Barty unconscious and off his feet, but didn’t touch Harry.
Now that’s some luck!
Thus, when Twinkles questioned Harry about his experiences while kidnapped, he knew already that Harry was still protected by obscenely good luck. Hence his initial shock and surprise (visible even to our Harry) when Harry informed him that Tom had indeed used’ Harry’s blood in his resurrection potion. Which should have voided, which DID void, the blood-based charm Albus had cast, but which evidently hadn’t voided Harry’s true protection of being the child of good fortune.
When Harry told of Wormtail piercing his arm with the dagger, however, Sirius let out a vehement exclamation and Dumbledore stood up so quickly that Harry started. Dumbledore walked around the desk and told Harry to stretch out his am. Harry showed them both the place where his robes were torn and the cut beneath them.
“He said my blood would make him stronger than if he’d used someone else’s,” Harry told Dumbledore. “He said the protection my-my mother left in me-he’d have it too. And he was right-he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face.”
For a fleeting second, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him.
“Very well,” he said, sitting down again. “Voldemort has overcome that particular barrier.”[GoF 36]
See? Albus’s first reaction was to check if this could actually be true, if Tom could really have taken Harry’s blood, which by his calculations should have cancelled…. Maybe the boy was just deluded about what Tom had really done. Albus had to check before he could believe it.
But I’ll give Twinkles this; he was swift on the uptake. Once he realized that Tom really had used Harry’s blood, and that this had cancelled Albus’s charm but not Lily’s protection, he realized almost at once that Tom might have inadvertently given Albus an out.
The boy was Tom’s accidental Horcrux. He had to die to destroy the soul-fragment. Yet if Harry sacrificed himself voluntarily, like his mother had, that death could, theoretically, provide protection to Tom’s victims.
One of which was Harry himself.
If Tom were still alive at the time of Harry’s death, still securely anchored to life, could Harry’s blood in Tom’s still-living body tie the boy enough to life that the boy could potentially return, were the boy’s body physically undamaged? The two were now tied by blood as well as soul, after all.
And Harry has, still, supernaturally good luck. Bought by others’ sacrifices to save him. Were this reinforced by Harry’s own voluntary sacrifice….
Because notice that Dumbledore told Snape [DH 33], “If there comes a time when Lord Voldemort stops sending that snake forth to do his bidding, but keeps it safe beside him under magical protection, then, I think, it will be safe to tell Harry.”
Safe for whom?
The trigger to tell Harry that he must sacrifice himself was not the destruction of all Horcruxes save the Harrycrux---it was the destruction of all other Horcruxes-but-one.
Twinkles wanted Harry to die (preferably by Avada Kedavra cast by Tom’s wand) while Tom was still firmly anchored to life by one real, undestroyed Horcrux.
For so the boy might possibly redeem Albus from his long guilt.
The child killed by Albus’s actions, finally saved.
*
Only, how humiliating to poor Dumbles, to realize that Lily’s instinctive love-protection was stronger and more durable than all of Albus’s carefully-crafted spells stealing their power from her sacrifice!
Which others of Albus’s spells, then, might be less powerful than a true sacrifice confers?
No wonder the man looked old and weary. He’d just realized his life’s work had been upstaged. And that he had to revisit everything he thought he knew about Lily’s sacrifice and Tom’s mortality…..
Still, I suppose it’s to Twinkle’s credit that his very first reaction was to think of the possible consequence for Harry: a “gleam of triumph” that the boy he’d condemned to death might now have a chance to survive.
*
This takes us to Dumble’s change of heart in the matter of protecting Harry.
Before the end of GoF, Dumbles knew that Harry must eventually die, and that his death was the only thing that could finish Tom’s existence. From the perspective of brutal practicality, the sooner the better, right?
But still some tender part of Twinkles wanted Harry to live to adulthood and consent to his death, for the sake of salving Albus’s conscience.
This ambivalence ended when Albus realized, first, that Harry’s death wouldn’t by itself destroy Tom’s life (since Tom was now embodied), and second, that Harry now might have a get-out-of-death free card.
After that realization, Dumbles was working for, wanted, Harry to die only under the right conditions.
And, finally, unambivalently.
Which is why Albus fought so for Harry’s life in the atrium.
Harry wasn’t graciously consenting to die there for the sake of saving others-he was giving up. Overwhelmed and defeated.
The boy mustn’t, absolutely must not, die inadvertently.
And it’s past time for him to learn the prophecy, to be told enough to set him up to receive the final revelation….
*
And if previous commentators are correct that Tom was looking through Harry’s eyes in Dumble’s office that night, AND that Twinkles was deliberately apprising Tom as well as Harry of the prophecy…. then Albus was also doing something else that night.
Hornswoggling Tom. Making Tom believe that he’d overcome the protection Lily had given her child with her death, but not the “shield” Albus had created from Lily’s sacrifice. Making Tom, in fact, believe the exact opposite of the truth.
Making Tom credit that the protection on Four Privet, Albus’s strongest shield, was still utterly unassailable until Harry reached adulthood.
After all, if Albus, who knew what spells he’d cast, and knew both Tom’s powers and his own, and knew that Tom had taken Harry’s/Lily’s blood into himself, still told Harry confidentially “there you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort” -why, it must be true!
And that Harry’s actual protection was his incredible luck, not any barrier or shield, and that Harry’s luck was fully intact, would (with luck) continue to slide right past Tom’s awareness.
And so it did.
And, more embarrassingly, past ours.
***
One final matter.
The idea that James’s sacrifice would have conferred good luck on his wife and child finally gives us another explanation for why Tom might have been such a numbskull as to give Lily a choice about dying.
The Doylist explanation for why Tom, for no discernible reason, went to the trouble of politely asking Lily to move out of the way so he could kill her baby is, Jo’s just that bad a writer.
Either Jo wanted Lily to have a clear choice, and the author couldn’t be arsed to come up with a motive for Tom to give Lily that choice, or Jo just plain forgot that she was writing fantasy and that she’d armed Tom with a wand.
Now, if a gunman faced his target’s unarmed mother courageously interposing her own body as a shield, the assassin would have only four options: persuade the mother to step aside, come to grips with her and try to wrestle her away (which would void his advantage of being armed-she might grab his weapon in the struggle and shoot him), shoot her first, or give up the attempt altogether. If she refused to step aside, and the assassin were determined to fulfill his mission, the killer’s only option would be to shoot her.
Tom, however, as a wand-armed wizard, operated under no such constraints. Forget any super-speshul knowledge of the Darkest Arts-just using spells we’ve seen in canon, Tom could have used the Imperius Curse to make Lily step aside. Or stunned her the moment he broke through the door, never even speaking to the frill he was sparing to indulge a follower’s fancy.
Or, if he wanted to make her suffer by leaving her conscious to watch her baby die, used Incarcereous or Petrificus Totalis or the spell he used to make Harry’s body bow to him. Or Levicorpus. Or Tarantellaga. Or Rictumsempra, cast hard enough to make Lily collapse on the floor laughing helplessly as he killed her baby in front of her.
There was no reason for Tom to ASK Lily to move, to give her any say in the matter at all.
If Tom chose for her to live, he should have made it impossible for her to die. If Tom felt safer with the Prophesied One’s family all dead, he should have killed her without fanfare the moment he clapped eyes on her, as he did James.
Faffing about conversing with her, letting HER decide her fate-what’s up with that? Since when is Tom a proponent of freedom of choice?
And how was Tom so stupid as to forget the power of numbers, that he should have given Lily THREE chances to affirm her refusal before he killed her?
The Doylist answer is, Idiot Plot. But I like looking for Watsonian answers.
So I came up with one explanation: that Severus had conned Tom into offering Lily that choice to play with her, to mess with her mind. And, incidentally, to mess with the mind of his loyal follower who’d begged his master to spare this one Mudblood.
In that scenario, Tom would have expected Lily to refuse his generous offers to spare her; he just wanted to make her say so.
And that explanation fits the mechanics, but there’s nothing in Tom’s own memories to support that that was Tom’s motivation.
But now another possibility presents itself.
A sudden onset of carelessness in one’s opponent, of outright idiocy, even, is one of the ways magical good luck can manifest. (“I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance,” whined the Dark Lord to his followers.)
For example, when Harry, under the influence of Felix Felicis, approached Slughorn, that cautious teacher so far forgot about Harry’s overriding desire to question Horace about his dealings with Tom as to let himself get drunk in Harry’s presence. Not smart at all. Sluggy was usually much more self-preserving than that; he’d been evading Harry’s attempts to interrogate him for months at that point!
So,
James, we saw, sacrificed his life. For what cause or purpose, specifically?
“Lily, take Harry and go!”
To try to buy his wife the opportunity to save their son.
Maybe James was successful.
Maybe James bought Tom’s utter idiocy in offering Lily-three times!-the choice to step aside.
Bought, and paid for.
And her refusal, her sacrifice, was then added to his when Tommy aimed his wand at their child.
Not a single sacrifice protecting Harry with good luck, but a double one.