Nagini as Horcrux
The argument for Nagini as the sixth Horcrux
(Tweaked on 9-9 in response to comments)
In an interview with The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet in July 2005, Rowling said,
“Dumbledore's guesses are never very far wide of the mark. I don't want to give too much away here, but Dumbledore says, ‘There are four out there, you've got to get rid of four, and ( Read more... )
I think the point was made several times (by Dumbledore and Snape) that Voldemort made Nagini into a Horcrux so that he would have more control over her, but on the night of the attack on Arthur, Voldemort was possessing Nagini the way Voldemort possessed Harry at the end of OotP (when Harry was being possessed, he said he was bound to a creature with red eyes, and when the creature spoke, it used Harry's mouth, etc.). So that's where we disagree, I think. I don't believe Voldemort can just see through Nagini's eyes anytime just because he put a soul fragment into her; I think he has to possess Nagini the way he possessed Harry in the DoM, and it was because his mind was in Nagini that night that Harry was able to see out of Nagini's eyes just as Voldemort was at that moment.
I do think there's room for a bit of error in the "you think there might be a Horcrux that once was something of Ravenclaw’s or Gryffindor’s?" in the sense that Dumbledore assumed it would be a true founder's relic whereas (as you know) I think the goblin-made tiara could be a Ravenclaw family heirloom just as the Peverell ring was a Slytherin family heirloom but not something that was once owned by the founder directly. So I don't rule that out, and it would be a little far wide of the mark, but still in the general area and not "off" enough that the trio couldn't work it out (esp with the example they have of the Peverell ring).
For Dumbledore to say Nagini is a Horcrux when he knew she wasn't was just an unnecessary falsehood. He would have been better off saying he didn't know what the last one might be but that it could even be a living thing. If the point was to throw a hint at Harry that wasn't misleading, that would have been the way to do it. And I do believe Dumbledore learned his lesson at the end of OotP and wouldn't withhold vital information. Plus, at the end of PS when Harry wanted to ask Dumbledore questions, Dumbledore said "I shall answer your questions unless I have a very good reason not to . . .I shall not, of course, lie." To say Nagini was a Horcrux when he knew better would be a lie. The alternative is that he was wrong about Nagini and Harry is a Horcrux, but that, IMO would be VERY far wide of the mark.
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I'd be more inclined to think that Dumbledore had concluded that Harry was not a horcrux and that Nagini was one, rather than that Dumbledore though Harry was a horcrux and decided to mislead Harry by telling him Nagini was the horcrux. In other words, I think Dumbledore told Harry the truth about what he actually believed in that office.
I'm still leaving the possibility open in my mind, though, that Dumbledore was wrong on this one. Rowling sort of interpreted her own words: Dumbledore's not being very far off the mark = he has to find and destroy four horcruxes. He's very likely "off the mark" on at least one of them.
Here I go again, swinging further away from the scarcrux theory again...I'll have to start revisiting the old reasons I was tempted towards it to see if they ever had any merit. Janet Batchler told me that her position is that Harry is not a horcrux, but a good enough argument could persuade her. That's about where I am. It makes sense from a storytelling point of view, anyway.
Presently, I'm more tempted towards a little idea I've constructed...I've noticed places within the books where Rowling seems to be tipping her hat towards fandom theories and speculations...I can't think of a specific instance at the moment, but I think she's picking on us when someone within her plot tries to solve a book's mystery and comes up with some dumb idea (like Ron). I'm beginning to wonder if she hadn't planned all of this fandom speculation about the scarcrux, and the in Book 7, Harry will begin to wonder and speculate as to whether or not his scar is a horcrux. It will become a bit of a crisis point for him until he finds out that it isn't one.
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Nagini just hits me as being the right Horcrux for lots of reasons, and one of the strongest is that Dumbledore would be so unnecessarily misleading (dangerously so) for reasons mentioned.
Plus, I believe the Stoppered Death theory as you know, and when Harry and Dumbledore were heading for the sea cave, Harry asked which Horcrux Dumbledore thought might be in the cave and Dumbledore said he didn't know which one was there, but not Nagini (because Voldemort keeps her close and wouldn't be storing her in a remote sea cave). So Dumbledore was still reinforcing Nagini as a Horcrux when he knew his time was almost up. That just isn't Dumbledore.
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Still, the "Dumbledore wouldn't have suggested Nagini if she weren't a horcrux" doesn't work for me. I don't think anyone is suggesting that Dumbledore is intentionally misleading Harry about Nagini. (That would be "nutters"). I certainly don't. I just think it's entirely possible that he (a) wholeheartedly believes that Nagini is the best guess for the final horcrux and that (b) he's wrong. Simple as that.
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But I can’t buy that Dumbledore would have failed to consider the possibility that Harry could be a Horcrux. As I argued in my essay, Dumbledore assumed Voldemort had used Nagini to kill Frank and then as an afterthought considered making her into a Horcrux with his death. That means clearly (to me) that the Horcrux-making is entirely separate from the murder and is performed after the murder. You don’t even need to be considering making a Horcrux with a murder to use that murder afterwards to make a Horcrux. Voldemort wanted to make the last Horcrux with Harry’s murder, so the Horcrux-making ritual wouldn’t have been underway when the curse backfired, and that says to me that 1) any Harrycrux or Scarcrux theories that rely on the murder being an internal part of the Horcrux-making ritual are wrong and 2) Dumbledore ruled out Harry as a Horcrux possibility because he knew Voldemort was destroyed by the backfired curse and wouldn't even have been able to attempt it.
What also destroys the Scarcrux theory for me is that Voldemort didn't give Harry a scar like a brand-mark at the time of the backfired curse; the curse cut Harry's head open as is clear from several passages, and the cut healed into a scar by a natural process (not by a Healer at St. Mungo’s). Baby Harry was described as having “a curiously shaped cut, like a bolt of lightening” when Hagrid dropped him off at Privet Drive; McGonagall asked Dumbledore if he could do something about it, and Dumbledore said he wouldn't even if he could because “scars can come in handy” (PS1). Hagrid said he took baby Harry out of the ruins of Godric’s Hollow with “a great slash across his forehead” (PA10). Draco said “I don’t want a foul scar right across my head, thanks. I don’t think getting your head cut open makes you that special, myself.” (CS6).
So for the Scarcrux theory to work, a piece of Voldemort's soul would have somehow needed to leave Voldemort’s body, travel to baby Harry's open head wound, and then stay there in place until scar tissue trapped it---all of this happening without the soul fragment entering Harry himself or flying off to go behind the Veil. So Scarcrux theories are not plausible from my point of view.
We know Harry did get powers like Parseltongue, which demonstrates that whatever was transferred into Harry at Godric's Hollow did go into Harry himself. For that reason, I think Harrycrux theories are more defensible that Scarcrux theories, but Occam’s razor says Dumbledore was right and powers, not soul, were transferred into Harry. I’ve seen a lot of arguments in favor of Harrycrux and Scarcrux, but all of them IMO are much better explained by the mind/powers transfer, and the mind/powers transfer is what our best sources-Dumbledore and Rowling-are telling us.
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I can't buy that either. It would have to be that Dumbledore did very much consider the possibility, and decided against it (and is wrong).
Which is possible (again, there's that huge Dumbledore error set-up), but unlikely in my mind.
So for the Scarcrux theory to work, a piece of Voldemort's soul would have somehow needed to leave Voldemort’s body, travel to baby Harry's open head wound, and then stay there in place until scar tissue trapped it---all of this happening without the soul fragment entering Harry himself or flying off to go behind the Veil. So Scarcrux theories are not plausible from my point of view.
I'm not sure if this renders the theory implausible. If there was a piece of LV's soul in that cut, where exactly would it go before the scar formed over it?
In any event, reconsidering this issue once again (I dropped it and ignored it for quite some time), I'm definitely leaning against scarcrux once again. There are too many thematic issues that make it possible, however, so I'm not willing to entirely discard it. And we still need something to explain just how "mind links" happen.
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I don't believe the soul fragments are destroyed when the Horcrux vessel is destroyed. What I'm seeing is that turning an object into a Horcrux does not physically damage it (diary, locket) but getting the Horcrux out does require it to be damaged (hole put in diary, stone in ring cracked), and my thought is that the soul fragment is released and goes behind the Veil at that point.
I just don't see how a soul fragment of Voldemort's could have hovered near Harry's open wound for the days it took for the cut to heal. My sense is that it would not have been "anchored" in a closed container so it wouldn't have stayed there.
Plus, if it's true as seems that a vessel is not damaged when a soul fragment is placed in it, but the vessel must be broken open to release the soul fragment, then
Horcrux-making is the opposite of what happened to Harry since he was broken open by the backfiring spell.
Do you see what I mean or am I not thinking of this correctly?
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I just don't see how a soul fragment of Voldemort's could have hovered near Harry's open wound for the days it took for the cut to heal. My sense is that it would not have been "anchored" in a closed container so it wouldn't have stayed there.
If the theory is true, the soul wouldn't have "hovered near," it would have been embedded in the cut itself, in the damaged tissue. If there were no such thing as a "scarring" process and cuts remained open, the soul bit would still be sitting in that cut.
Plus, if it's true as seems that a vessel is not damaged when a soul fragment is placed in it, but the vessel must be broken open to release the soul fragment, then
Horcrux-making is the opposite of what happened to Harry since he was broken open by the backfiring spell.
But I think the key to that night in particular is that nothing happened as planned. The whole night is weird, and spells didn't act like they were supposed to. Now back to the "ifs." If scarcrux theory is true, it would be the first time a horcrux was created simultaneously with the AK spell (I agree with you that horcrux creation is not an addendum to the killing curse). I guess my point in short would be that it wasn't horcrux creation that made the cut - it was still the backfired AK curse that caused that.
Sorry if I'm taking you on a huge tangent here...I know this was supposed to be about Nagini! I think finally writing all this stuff out is letting me see the whole situation from a different angle. The problem continues to be how little know about how a horcrux is created. I just read someone recently suggest that a soul bit is torn fired away from the body with every AK curse. Doesn't fit at all, and your research here proves that. But it just goes to show much we're all guessing. What I like about this essay is that you're going with what we know and basing guesses on that, rather than trying to guess how horcruxes are created and such.
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My first objection to the argument that the soul fragment would have become embedded only in the damaged tissue around the cut on Harry’s forehead is that it breaks the KISS rule. It requires an explanation too arcane to be one Rowling would use. She’s pretty simple about Horcruxes: Voldemort placed a part of his soul in the Peverell Ring, and it was destroyed as a Horcrux by simply cracking the black stone; the diary as a Horcrux was similarly destroyed simply by puncturing it. Nothing complicated.
It’s true that the killing curse didn’t work as Voldemort expected because of the “ancient magic” protecting Harry due to Lily’s sacrifice, but that’s another reason for me to reject Harrycrux or Scarcrux. It was ancient magic that protected Harry. So thematically, it just doesn’t work that Lily’s sacrifice and the protection her death imparted on Harry somehow enabled part of Voldemort’s evil soul to enter her child. The mind/powers transfer does work with that ancient protective magic because Harry now has tools no other wizard possesses (the magical window in to Voldemort’s mind), tools that will enable him to vanquish the most evil wizard ever. A soul transfer would be a corruption of Lily’s sacrifice IMO.
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Harry as horcrux or not, I'm not 100% sold on Nagini as horcrux (though I'm much more willing to believe it after this essay).
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I don't think it's simple for two reasons:
1) Voldemort was casting an AK. That is made clear numerous times in the book and in Rowling's interviews, and as you pointed out in another comment, the AK is not a Horcrux-making spell. So it's a complication to begin with to explain how a piece of Voldemort's soul broke away and went to Harry.
2) I just can't pausibly see how that escaped soul fragment (since no spell caused it to escape or directed it afterwards) would embed itself in the sliver of damaged tissue on the edge of an open wound, but not enter Harry's body and not speed away behind the Veil.
3) And finally, I've never understood how the Scarcrux theory explains how Harry can speak Parseltongue when he needs to or to understand it effortlessly when he hears it unless what entered Harry at Godric's Hollow truly entered his body.
You might be interested to know that Merlin is giving me a hard time over on MuggleMatters.com.
I do know that Nagini as Horcrux is inexplicably unpopular. I don't understand that, either. For so many reasons, it just makes more sense to me that she is the "living" Horcrux.
As always, the interaction with you is first rate!
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I don't think it would be accurate to say that the soul piece hung out around the cut, waited for the scar to form, and entered the scar. It was part of the wound that healed over (again, if the scarcrux theory is true, which I'm doubting more and more).
Another question: If Voldemort was possessing Nagini that night and wasn't simply controlling her from one soul piece to another (which is why Dumbledore suspects he has so much control over her), how would any experiment Dumbledore did prove anything about horcruxes? Voldemort's possessing something doesn't make it a horcrux, obviously.
I'm just about finished writing a post about all this over at SoG. My interest in the subject has reawakened, and my previous conclusions rattled. Thanks a lot ;)
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Dumbledore wasn't dead sure about Nagini when he listed his Horcrux guesses to Harry; it was more a confident hunch, so we know that little silver instrument didn't give Dumbledore 100% certainty. It may have confirmed the possibility or even the likelihood of its being true given what Harry had reported. What does strike me is that although there were three actors involved (Harry, Voldemort, Nagini), the form was of a snake, not a person, and the form split in two when Dumbledore prompted it. Nagini is a snake and Voldemort is snakelike, so the most plausible explanation is that the divided smoke snakes did represent Voldemort and Nagini. The "in essence divided" I expect is pointing to "soul" because the soul is often described as an essence. That's all I can guess at there.
Dumbledore probably knows how much control Voldemort has over Nagini from things Snape has mentioned, which would inform Dumbledore's suspicions. We don't know when Voldemort got Nagini, but it's not likely she was with him during his exile in Albania (wouldn't he have mentioned it when he was talking about possessing snakes and small animals that didn't live long?), but Dumbledore knows her name and knows that Voldemort likes to keep her close, so he's getting that information from someone, and Snape is the spy.
I suspect Voldemort has MORE control over her as a Horcrux than he would have otherwise, and that goes for possession. When we read Harry's dream, Nagini wanted to strike Arthur right away but held back because there was work to do (an odd thing for a snake to be thinking)--so that was Voldemort controlling Nagini from inside during the possession.
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