No challenge; The Letters of Albus Dumbledore, 1-3
Title: The Letters of Albus Dumbledore
Summary: The collected letters of Albus Dumbledore from 1899 to 1945, from his last days as a student at Hogwarts to the defeat of Gellert Grindelwald in 1945. He was nothing more, and nothing less, than a man who loved.
Characters/Pairings: Dumbledore/Grindelwald, slight hints of Doge/Dumbledore
Genre: Mock-historical letter biography, aka gen
Beta: shelly-wa of fanfiction.net from the first letter
Rating/Warnings: PG for suggestive...ness
Medium: multi-chapter ongoing fic
Word Count: 2605
The Letters of Albus Dumbledore, 1899 - 1945
Edited by Hermione Granger-Weasley and Minerva McGonagall
Obscurus Books
18a Diagon Alley, London
2009-2011
*
"Albus Dumbledore was a good man."
-Harry Potter, upon his reception of the Order of Merlin, First Class
*
Foreword: A Man Who Loved
In the years since the Dark Lord's defeat, Albus Dumbledore's image has been toppled, dissected, spat-upon, and dragged through the mud. People who shall not be named directly, but with little moral character and the singular desire to make a sensation, who report for the thrill of sullying that which we hold sacred, have done their part in this with more than enough ardor to go around. Similarly, his image has been raised to new heights, praised, lauded, and scrubbed completely clean. There have been well-meaning people, worshipful people, who have taken what Dumbledore was and vaunted his image so high that he has eclipsed Merlin as the ideal of Wizarding society. His name has become both an insult and a blessing, with no room for the in-betweens. He was the greatest of us; he was the worst of us. He manipulated those he claimed to care for; he was always there to protect those who most needed him. He lied; he always told the truth. He trusted; he was a gullible fool. He loved.
This, we believe, is the greatest key to understanding Dumbledore's character: that he loved. Both sides of the debate claim this as an argument. He loved, and this was weak and foolish. He loved, and this is what made him strong. What we should remember is that love has many sides, and that the same man who has loved unwisely can also love justly and well. There are no absolutes in love, just as there should be no absolutes in life. The moment we begin to think in absolutes, we dishonor everything we fought for in the second Great War, and in doing so, we dishonor ourselves. Dumbledore learned this the hard way: love changes. As did he.
Dumbledore was not Merlin. He made mistakes. He tried to make up for them, sometimes with bad results. Dumbledore was not He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. He worked tirelessly for those who had no one else to help them, even those who had no magic, those who could never thank him for what he did. He was not the kind of man to ask for thanks, much less expect it, as the Dark Lord expected gratitude from the Wizarding world for the atrocities he committed, much like Gellert Grindelwald before him. Who was he, then?
Unfortunately, there is little of him left. Dumbledore was not an open man. Accustomed to a life of necessary secrecy, all the letters he received he likely vanished, for even our best forensic witches and wizards have found nothing but knitting patterns and candy recipes from the files he left behind. Thus, we have only what he wrote to other people as a record of who he truly was: not a flawless hero, not a conniving villain, but a man. A man who tried all his life to make up for his single greatest mistake: that, blinded by the love that would later make him strong, he could not tell the difference between the greater good, and the greater evil.
It is our hope that this collection of letters, arranged in chronological order and donated to use by the families of his correspondents as well as the last surviving member of his own family, will help shed some light on who Dumbledore truly was. It is our belief that he was nothing more, and nothing less, than this: a man who loved.
-Hermione Granger-Weasley and Minerva McGonagall, with some insight from Harry Potter.
Written with all due gratitude towards the families of Bathilda Bagshot and Armando Dippet for their gracious contributions, and deepest thanks toward Elphias Dodge, Aberforth Dumbledore, and all who consented to be interviewed for their invaluable assistance. Additional content generously donated from the files of the Daily Prophet, the Ministry of Magic, the British Library of Magic, and the Nuremburg Secret War Museum.
***
"It was a grand time then. Not many are left who remember, but I do. Fantastic things were happening; there weren't any wars going on - at least with us - the galleon was stronger than ever, fellows I knew at school were winning alchemy awards and inventing new spells, the Chudley Canons won the cup, even, and everywhere Witches and Wizards were making strides beyond the limits of what we'd thought magically possible. It never occurred to anyone to be worried. Why should we have been? We were in the prime of our lives."
-Elphias Doge
*
Section 1: The Prime of Our Lives
1899 - 1900
By the time he graduated from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore had already had his papers published in Transfiguration Today, won the Barnabus Finkley Prize for Exceptional Spell-Casting, attained the position of British Youth Representative to the Wizengamot, and won the Gold Medal for Ground-Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo, all feats unheard of for someone his age then and ever since. At seventeen the Gryffindor Head Boy was, in the words of Griselda Marchbanks, his N.E.W.T. examiner, "a charming, sharp young man - and so talented with his wand! You're not going to use that in the book, are you?" Few who met him failed to be impressed by his accomplishments. "No one could call him modest, exactly," says Tiberius Ogden, a former classmate of his. "He didn't pretend he wasn't the best in our class. It was enough to make anyone jealous after a time, to be frank. But his confidence was what attracted people to him. His attitude was infectious. When you were with him, you felt like you were capable of flying a broomstick to the moon."
However, things were not always so easy for Dumbledore. In one of the most sensationalized news stories of the day, Young Albus' father, Percival Dumbledore, was sent to Azkaban after attacking and nearly killing three muggle boys. At the time, Albus was nine. Kendra Dumbledore, mother of Albus, Aberforth, and Ariana, did what she could to protect her family from scandal by moving them from their longtime home in Mold-on-the-Wold to relative anonymity in Godric's Hollow, but a change in location can only do so much when pitted against people's memories for malefaction. When he started Hogwarts in 1892, it had scarcely been more than a year since the incident, and Percival Aberforth's crime was anything but forgotten. On his first day at Hogwarts, barely eleven years old, Albus was an outcast. "I certainly didn't hold with him at first," admits Ogden. "Muggle-hating father and all that. Caught him hanging around with Archon Malfoy the first day, yelling about the latest issue of Warlock at War. Nasty stuff." Warlock at War, the last issue of which was published in 1954, was an anti-muggle periodical started by Brutus Malfoy in the early seventeenth century. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Albus was suspected of keeping less than savory company. Augustus Tofty, then in his seventh year at Hogwarts, remembers the eleven-year-old Dumbledore's troubles during his first few days at school: "Some of the students thought to impress Albus by detailing their own fathers' histories of muggle abuse, believing that he too was not unlike his famous father. Beset on one side by the wrong kind of admirer and ignored by his more righteous peers, Albus had no one to turn to for comfort or companionship for a very long time."
This, however, would soon change. Elphias Doge, Dumbledore's self-proclaimed best friend at Hogwarts, recalls, "We all knew about the business with Albus' father, but once we got to know him, it was easy to forget where he'd come from. There was no one like him, no one at all." Doge, afflicted with a severe case of dragon-pox just before his first day at Hogwarts, remembers Dumbledore as being the only boy his age on his first day of Hogwarts to approach him not with disgust and fear, but in friendship. "Every other person who saw me stayed well away, though I was far past the contagious stage. Every other person except for Albus. He could always see the worth in a person, even if that worth was buried under pox and green skin." It was Dumbledore's unfailing kindness that transformed even the staunchest of his adversaries into lifelong friends. In the words of Ogden, "After his first year, he even had Slytherins after him for the time of day. The right ones, mind." Aberforth Dumbledore, who arrived at Hogwarts in 1895, remembers his brother somewhat less fondly, but no less admiringly. "He [sic] were a right pompous prat with awards up to his arse. Teachers loved him, students loved him, mother was over the moon about him, hell, even Peeves loved him. It's anyone's guess as to how he did that." The articles he published in Transiguration Today led him into correspondence with some of the most noted scholars of his day, such as Bathilda Bagshot, author of A History of Magic and neighbor to the Dumbledore family, and his equations in The Alchemist's Crucible won him a partnership with the celebrated Nicholas Flamel. His peers thought it was only a matter of time before he was appointed Minister for Magic. "He [Dumbledore] used to say he was going to transform his family's name from a curse into a blessing," says Doge. "We thought it was only a matter of time before he was appointed Minister for Magic. When we brought it up, he'd only laugh, modest as always." Poised at the threshold of the Grand Tour, the then traditional journey around the magical world undertaken by wizards who had come of age, and soon to receive top marks in his N.E.W.T.s., the seventeen year old Albus Dumbledore seemed to be standing at the cusp of certain greatness.
True greatness, however, does not come without a price.
It is well-known what happened next. Dumbledore went on to a career of magical research that bore such fruit as the twelve uses of dragon's blood and the application of the diagonal wand movement to cross-species transfiguration. His interest in law led him to be appointed as chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, and his attention to international affairs brought him the title of Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards. When he was offered the position of Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts School, he accepted, and went on to shape the minds of young Witches and Wizards until his career was interrupted by the rise of Gellert Grindelwald in Europe. Then, he took one year to track down and defeat the then darkest wizard of all time in what would be remembered as the most spectacular duel in history. Upon Grindelwald's defeat, he returned to teaching until he accepted the title of headmaster at the school he so dearly loved, a title which he would hold until his death in 1997. To date, he is the only person to have been laid to rest on Hogwarts' grounds.
There is something amiss, however, in the tapestry of Dumbledore's life. One position he would refuse not one, but several times over the next few years was that of Minister for Magic, the very one which his peers and teachers had been so sure he would take, and which his brother remembers he wanted very much. Doge attributes this to Dumbledore's natural modesty. Aberforth Dumbledore does not agree. "Albus? Modest? You may as well call a fish furry, or a goat polite. He used to stay up nights with our mother, talking about how he'd change the world when they made him minister. He couldn't wait to become Minister for Magic." Why, then, did he refuse the appointment? It was offered to him not once, but several times during his life. Why did he instead choose to pursue a rewarding but low-profile career as a schoolteacher and scholar? The answer, we hope, can be found within this collection of letters. In the words of Harry Potter, arguably one of the people who knew Dumbledore best, "He never pretended to anything. He just kept his secrets. These [letters] are probably as close as anyone will ever get to them."
In June of 1899, Albus Dumbledore graduated Hogwarts. It was the summer after that, however, the summer he turned eighteen, that made him into the person he later became; the person who engineered the defeats of the two darkest wizards of all time, who became one of the best loved headmasters of in Hogwarts' history, and who, ultimately, changed the world. In the end, it is uncertain just how much he knew of it at the time.
***
June 5th, 1899
My Dear Mother,
It's near the end of term, as you are doubtless aware, and the mood here is intoxicating. Examination time has (finally!) arrived. All my classmates are sweating themselves into a fever over the N.E.W.T.s. Elvira Winthrope's come over in hives from the powdered dragon claw that Ogden sold her (though I have it in good faith that it was actually powdered doxy droppings, so I daresay the girl got off light), and Elphias hasn't come out from under his bed except for lessons. I try to coax him out every now and then to see the sun, but he just shakes his head and mutters his Arithmancy notes. I suppose they give him comfort. As I myself finished preparing for these exams several weeks ago, all the comfort I need is a good quill, some well-mixed ink, and a healthy amount of parchment. If I were to run out of that last particular once during exams, I should have to continue on the desk by quill or by wand, and I very much doubt the caretaker would appreciate the results of my academic fervor. I expect top marks.
I worry, however, about Aberforth. It seems he has very little care for exam time and everything it entails. He spends most of his time with the Care of Magical Creatures professor, or out on the grounds doing Merlin knows what. Indeed, I rarely see him indoors at all, much less in a classroom. Often when I see him I ask what he does during those long days outdoors, but he always refuses to answer, preferring to acknowledge my inquiries with long glares rather than taking the opportunity to begin an intelligent discourse. It escapes me how someone who seems to care so little for the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom could be a member of our family.
I apologize. I am being unkind. My brother is not like me, and I should not expect him to act as such. However, you do not know how trying he can be for me at times. The reputation of our family that I have built and jealously guarded since my first hour at Hogwarts sometimes seems to depend entirely upon whether my younger brother can pass remedial Charms. I do hope at least you can talk some sense into him during the holidays. Nothing I've said seems to have made any sort of difference.
Elphias and I plan to depart for Greece once we finish up the term (and once I force him to come out from under his bed). Though I know that you would like to have me home for a little while at least before I leave, I find myself increasingly impatient to begin the Grand Tour. Every day I am more overcome with a restlessness I have scarcely the words to describe.
My love to Ariana. The chocolate frogs are for her.
Your son,
Albus
2605/50 = 52 points for Slytherin!
Summary: The collected letters of Albus Dumbledore from 1899 to 1945, from his last days as a student at Hogwarts to the defeat of Gellert Grindelwald in 1945. He was nothing more, and nothing less, than a man who loved.
Characters/Pairings: Dumbledore/Grindelwald, slight hints of Doge/Dumbledore
Genre: Mock-historical letter biography, aka gen
Beta: shelly-wa of fanfiction.net from the first letter
Rating/Warnings: PG for suggestive...ness
Medium: multi-chapter ongoing fic
Word Count: 2605
The Letters of Albus Dumbledore, 1899 - 1945
Edited by Hermione Granger-Weasley and Minerva McGonagall
Obscurus Books
18a Diagon Alley, London
2009-2011
*
"Albus Dumbledore was a good man."
-Harry Potter, upon his reception of the Order of Merlin, First Class
*
Foreword: A Man Who Loved
In the years since the Dark Lord's defeat, Albus Dumbledore's image has been toppled, dissected, spat-upon, and dragged through the mud. People who shall not be named directly, but with little moral character and the singular desire to make a sensation, who report for the thrill of sullying that which we hold sacred, have done their part in this with more than enough ardor to go around. Similarly, his image has been raised to new heights, praised, lauded, and scrubbed completely clean. There have been well-meaning people, worshipful people, who have taken what Dumbledore was and vaunted his image so high that he has eclipsed Merlin as the ideal of Wizarding society. His name has become both an insult and a blessing, with no room for the in-betweens. He was the greatest of us; he was the worst of us. He manipulated those he claimed to care for; he was always there to protect those who most needed him. He lied; he always told the truth. He trusted; he was a gullible fool. He loved.
This, we believe, is the greatest key to understanding Dumbledore's character: that he loved. Both sides of the debate claim this as an argument. He loved, and this was weak and foolish. He loved, and this is what made him strong. What we should remember is that love has many sides, and that the same man who has loved unwisely can also love justly and well. There are no absolutes in love, just as there should be no absolutes in life. The moment we begin to think in absolutes, we dishonor everything we fought for in the second Great War, and in doing so, we dishonor ourselves. Dumbledore learned this the hard way: love changes. As did he.
Dumbledore was not Merlin. He made mistakes. He tried to make up for them, sometimes with bad results. Dumbledore was not He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. He worked tirelessly for those who had no one else to help them, even those who had no magic, those who could never thank him for what he did. He was not the kind of man to ask for thanks, much less expect it, as the Dark Lord expected gratitude from the Wizarding world for the atrocities he committed, much like Gellert Grindelwald before him. Who was he, then?
Unfortunately, there is little of him left. Dumbledore was not an open man. Accustomed to a life of necessary secrecy, all the letters he received he likely vanished, for even our best forensic witches and wizards have found nothing but knitting patterns and candy recipes from the files he left behind. Thus, we have only what he wrote to other people as a record of who he truly was: not a flawless hero, not a conniving villain, but a man. A man who tried all his life to make up for his single greatest mistake: that, blinded by the love that would later make him strong, he could not tell the difference between the greater good, and the greater evil.
It is our hope that this collection of letters, arranged in chronological order and donated to use by the families of his correspondents as well as the last surviving member of his own family, will help shed some light on who Dumbledore truly was. It is our belief that he was nothing more, and nothing less, than this: a man who loved.
-Hermione Granger-Weasley and Minerva McGonagall, with some insight from Harry Potter.
Written with all due gratitude towards the families of Bathilda Bagshot and Armando Dippet for their gracious contributions, and deepest thanks toward Elphias Dodge, Aberforth Dumbledore, and all who consented to be interviewed for their invaluable assistance. Additional content generously donated from the files of the Daily Prophet, the Ministry of Magic, the British Library of Magic, and the Nuremburg Secret War Museum.
***
"It was a grand time then. Not many are left who remember, but I do. Fantastic things were happening; there weren't any wars going on - at least with us - the galleon was stronger than ever, fellows I knew at school were winning alchemy awards and inventing new spells, the Chudley Canons won the cup, even, and everywhere Witches and Wizards were making strides beyond the limits of what we'd thought magically possible. It never occurred to anyone to be worried. Why should we have been? We were in the prime of our lives."
-Elphias Doge
*
Section 1: The Prime of Our Lives
1899 - 1900
By the time he graduated from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore had already had his papers published in Transfiguration Today, won the Barnabus Finkley Prize for Exceptional Spell-Casting, attained the position of British Youth Representative to the Wizengamot, and won the Gold Medal for Ground-Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo, all feats unheard of for someone his age then and ever since. At seventeen the Gryffindor Head Boy was, in the words of Griselda Marchbanks, his N.E.W.T. examiner, "a charming, sharp young man - and so talented with his wand! You're not going to use that in the book, are you?" Few who met him failed to be impressed by his accomplishments. "No one could call him modest, exactly," says Tiberius Ogden, a former classmate of his. "He didn't pretend he wasn't the best in our class. It was enough to make anyone jealous after a time, to be frank. But his confidence was what attracted people to him. His attitude was infectious. When you were with him, you felt like you were capable of flying a broomstick to the moon."
However, things were not always so easy for Dumbledore. In one of the most sensationalized news stories of the day, Young Albus' father, Percival Dumbledore, was sent to Azkaban after attacking and nearly killing three muggle boys. At the time, Albus was nine. Kendra Dumbledore, mother of Albus, Aberforth, and Ariana, did what she could to protect her family from scandal by moving them from their longtime home in Mold-on-the-Wold to relative anonymity in Godric's Hollow, but a change in location can only do so much when pitted against people's memories for malefaction. When he started Hogwarts in 1892, it had scarcely been more than a year since the incident, and Percival Aberforth's crime was anything but forgotten. On his first day at Hogwarts, barely eleven years old, Albus was an outcast. "I certainly didn't hold with him at first," admits Ogden. "Muggle-hating father and all that. Caught him hanging around with Archon Malfoy the first day, yelling about the latest issue of Warlock at War. Nasty stuff." Warlock at War, the last issue of which was published in 1954, was an anti-muggle periodical started by Brutus Malfoy in the early seventeenth century. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Albus was suspected of keeping less than savory company. Augustus Tofty, then in his seventh year at Hogwarts, remembers the eleven-year-old Dumbledore's troubles during his first few days at school: "Some of the students thought to impress Albus by detailing their own fathers' histories of muggle abuse, believing that he too was not unlike his famous father. Beset on one side by the wrong kind of admirer and ignored by his more righteous peers, Albus had no one to turn to for comfort or companionship for a very long time."
This, however, would soon change. Elphias Doge, Dumbledore's self-proclaimed best friend at Hogwarts, recalls, "We all knew about the business with Albus' father, but once we got to know him, it was easy to forget where he'd come from. There was no one like him, no one at all." Doge, afflicted with a severe case of dragon-pox just before his first day at Hogwarts, remembers Dumbledore as being the only boy his age on his first day of Hogwarts to approach him not with disgust and fear, but in friendship. "Every other person who saw me stayed well away, though I was far past the contagious stage. Every other person except for Albus. He could always see the worth in a person, even if that worth was buried under pox and green skin." It was Dumbledore's unfailing kindness that transformed even the staunchest of his adversaries into lifelong friends. In the words of Ogden, "After his first year, he even had Slytherins after him for the time of day. The right ones, mind." Aberforth Dumbledore, who arrived at Hogwarts in 1895, remembers his brother somewhat less fondly, but no less admiringly. "He [sic] were a right pompous prat with awards up to his arse. Teachers loved him, students loved him, mother was over the moon about him, hell, even Peeves loved him. It's anyone's guess as to how he did that." The articles he published in Transiguration Today led him into correspondence with some of the most noted scholars of his day, such as Bathilda Bagshot, author of A History of Magic and neighbor to the Dumbledore family, and his equations in The Alchemist's Crucible won him a partnership with the celebrated Nicholas Flamel. His peers thought it was only a matter of time before he was appointed Minister for Magic. "He [Dumbledore] used to say he was going to transform his family's name from a curse into a blessing," says Doge. "We thought it was only a matter of time before he was appointed Minister for Magic. When we brought it up, he'd only laugh, modest as always." Poised at the threshold of the Grand Tour, the then traditional journey around the magical world undertaken by wizards who had come of age, and soon to receive top marks in his N.E.W.T.s., the seventeen year old Albus Dumbledore seemed to be standing at the cusp of certain greatness.
True greatness, however, does not come without a price.
It is well-known what happened next. Dumbledore went on to a career of magical research that bore such fruit as the twelve uses of dragon's blood and the application of the diagonal wand movement to cross-species transfiguration. His interest in law led him to be appointed as chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, and his attention to international affairs brought him the title of Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards. When he was offered the position of Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts School, he accepted, and went on to shape the minds of young Witches and Wizards until his career was interrupted by the rise of Gellert Grindelwald in Europe. Then, he took one year to track down and defeat the then darkest wizard of all time in what would be remembered as the most spectacular duel in history. Upon Grindelwald's defeat, he returned to teaching until he accepted the title of headmaster at the school he so dearly loved, a title which he would hold until his death in 1997. To date, he is the only person to have been laid to rest on Hogwarts' grounds.
There is something amiss, however, in the tapestry of Dumbledore's life. One position he would refuse not one, but several times over the next few years was that of Minister for Magic, the very one which his peers and teachers had been so sure he would take, and which his brother remembers he wanted very much. Doge attributes this to Dumbledore's natural modesty. Aberforth Dumbledore does not agree. "Albus? Modest? You may as well call a fish furry, or a goat polite. He used to stay up nights with our mother, talking about how he'd change the world when they made him minister. He couldn't wait to become Minister for Magic." Why, then, did he refuse the appointment? It was offered to him not once, but several times during his life. Why did he instead choose to pursue a rewarding but low-profile career as a schoolteacher and scholar? The answer, we hope, can be found within this collection of letters. In the words of Harry Potter, arguably one of the people who knew Dumbledore best, "He never pretended to anything. He just kept his secrets. These [letters] are probably as close as anyone will ever get to them."
In June of 1899, Albus Dumbledore graduated Hogwarts. It was the summer after that, however, the summer he turned eighteen, that made him into the person he later became; the person who engineered the defeats of the two darkest wizards of all time, who became one of the best loved headmasters of in Hogwarts' history, and who, ultimately, changed the world. In the end, it is uncertain just how much he knew of it at the time.
***
June 5th, 1899
My Dear Mother,
It's near the end of term, as you are doubtless aware, and the mood here is intoxicating. Examination time has (finally!) arrived. All my classmates are sweating themselves into a fever over the N.E.W.T.s. Elvira Winthrope's come over in hives from the powdered dragon claw that Ogden sold her (though I have it in good faith that it was actually powdered doxy droppings, so I daresay the girl got off light), and Elphias hasn't come out from under his bed except for lessons. I try to coax him out every now and then to see the sun, but he just shakes his head and mutters his Arithmancy notes. I suppose they give him comfort. As I myself finished preparing for these exams several weeks ago, all the comfort I need is a good quill, some well-mixed ink, and a healthy amount of parchment. If I were to run out of that last particular once during exams, I should have to continue on the desk by quill or by wand, and I very much doubt the caretaker would appreciate the results of my academic fervor. I expect top marks.
I worry, however, about Aberforth. It seems he has very little care for exam time and everything it entails. He spends most of his time with the Care of Magical Creatures professor, or out on the grounds doing Merlin knows what. Indeed, I rarely see him indoors at all, much less in a classroom. Often when I see him I ask what he does during those long days outdoors, but he always refuses to answer, preferring to acknowledge my inquiries with long glares rather than taking the opportunity to begin an intelligent discourse. It escapes me how someone who seems to care so little for the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom could be a member of our family.
I apologize. I am being unkind. My brother is not like me, and I should not expect him to act as such. However, you do not know how trying he can be for me at times. The reputation of our family that I have built and jealously guarded since my first hour at Hogwarts sometimes seems to depend entirely upon whether my younger brother can pass remedial Charms. I do hope at least you can talk some sense into him during the holidays. Nothing I've said seems to have made any sort of difference.
Elphias and I plan to depart for Greece once we finish up the term (and once I force him to come out from under his bed). Though I know that you would like to have me home for a little while at least before I leave, I find myself increasingly impatient to begin the Grand Tour. Every day I am more overcome with a restlessness I have scarcely the words to describe.
My love to Ariana. The chocolate frogs are for her.
Your son,
Albus
2605/50 = 52 points for Slytherin!