Dumbledore's Boggart

[felicitys_mind]

What is Dumbledore’s Boggart?

In a July 2006 Leaky Cauldron/Mugglenet interview, Rowling suggested we’d be able to develop theories about Dumbledore’s boggart from reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

A boggart takes the form of what a person fears most, and I believe HBP reveals that Dumbledore’s greatest fear is harm coming to

Comments

[rednuck]

This is the best theory I have ever read, not only on Dumbledore's boggart, but also on whose 'visions' Dumbledore was seeing as he was drinking the green potion on the cave. Very well thought out, and I get behind it completely.

[clodia_risa]

Very inventive. You argue your case well, and it definitely has some analysis that I hadn't seen anywhere else. I can definitely see this being canon eventually.

[sophierom]

Very nicely done! The idea that Riddle uses his Horcruxes as a way to brag about his magical prowess is especially fascinating.

I was lucky enough to attend the first JKR reading in NYC (August 1). She read the scene from HBP in which Dumbledore and Harry visited Tom Riddle and the orphanage via Dumbledore's Pensieve. I've been wondering why she chose that scene to read. Your essay makes me wonder if she didn't want to remind us of what Tom Riddle did to the orphans. It seems to be an important scene, and your theory helps to explain why.

[felicitys_mind]

You know, I watched the video of her reading on MSNBC, and thought of the above argument a day later. I'm sure listening to her read that passage triggered something in my mind.

[cpqueen]

Nice. this definitely help me to see that it's possible Snape is not a traitor. Merely, he was a double agent all along, and to kill him in the event that anything happen to one of the children to save them being their agreement. Also, making it easy for him to agree to the binding spell with Draco because he already had a pact with Dumbledore to protect him. Still, he had to keep Harry in the dark, which was easy because he hates him, anyway, but the overall goal is still to defeat Voldemort. The key to Voldemort's defeat is that he is a genius and very talented wizard, but he is not without flaws in his plans.

[cpqueen]

Oh, that's a good point, too. I didn't think of that one. I was starting to doubt the Snape idea again after reading the 6th book again last weekend. There's another possibility, though!

[mari4212]

I think the original poster was stating that the drinker of the potion would experience the torture of the children, not just witness it. In that case, it wouldn't matter whether the drinker had empathy or not.

[felicitys_mind]

The potion was meant to be incapaciting to anyone who drank it, and the drinker was reliving the torture from the point of view of the children, not from Riddle's point of view. Even a masochist (someone who enjoys feeling pain) would not have had immunity to the potion but would experience the torture as the children had. The drinker would also have still been "out of it" while drinking the potion. And Voldemort's point was to show what young Tom Riddle had done to the children, irrespective of whether the drinker was a sadist, a masochist, or whatever