The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

by Irvin Khaytman

  This was the crux of Dumbledore’s plan to use the prophecy as a decoy. Dumbledore probably realizes that one of Voldemort’s top priorities is killing him. Dumbledore wants to hunt down Horcruxes unmolested (for if Voldemort finds out, that’d defeat the whole purpose). So he had better make extra-sure Voldemort’s attention is focused exclusively on something else. The plan works swimmingly—Dumbledore gets several uninterrupted months of Horcrux hunting without anyone being the wiser.

  In fact, he was actually planning for something like this. Certainly, he seems prepared when Umbridge discovers the DA and goes on the warpath. Considering how concerned he is about the students of Hogwarts, it seems rather unlike Dumbledore to leave them at Umbridge’s mercy just to cover up for Harry and the DA, unless he had something rather important to be doing. And in his little speech to Fudge, Dumbledore indicates that he does have important plans: “I could break out [of Azkaban], of course—but what a waste of time, and frankly, I can think of a whole host of things I would rather be doing.” (OP620)

  Of course, this is partially Dumbledore being snarky for the heck of it. He has lost all patience with the Ministry, and he no longer politely acquiesces to them the way he did in CoS and PoA. But everything Jo writes is there for a reason, and this statement was her signal that Dumbledore had something important to be doing at the time.

  Dumbledore was waiting for an opportunity to be “kicked out” of Hogwarts. He could have stayed if he so wished, but at first opportunity, he invites Fudge and Umbridge to “force” him to go on the run. This makes sense—Dumbledore cannot go Horcrux hunting if it would make Umbridge and Fudge suspicious, but once he saw an opening to leave for a few months, he took it. It just illustrates how crafty Dumbledore is.

  And this was the ultimate payoff from the prophecy decoy. Dumbledore has kept Voldemort chasing after the prophecy (with increasing effort) for ten months at this point, from late June 1995 to late April 1996.29 He was doing research while Voldemort was occupied, and that was very nice, but now he has two months to hunt a Horcrux while Voldemort remains obsessed with the prophecy. All in all, the decoy was a resounding success.

  The Occlumency Gamble

  Dumbledore may have succeeded in distracting Voldemort with the prophecy for a good long while, but eventually the time ran out because another plan of Dumbledore’s had failed: having Harry learn Occlumency. I’ve said before that Dumbledore likes controlled situations, but in Order of the Phoenix, he sends his two most valuable and volatile assets—Harry and Snape—into an emotionally charged situation with more variables than he can hope to control.

  Dumbledore genuinely believes that teaching Harry Occlumency himself is the equivalent of hanging a “Welcome Voldemort!” sign in Harry’s mind, and Snape is the only other one qualified to teach Harry Occlumency. So Dumbledore does his best to impress upon both parties—as well as upon those adults to whom Harry would listen—the importance of this exercise. But even if by some miracle the personality clash does not completely derail the exercise, there is another danger: Harry breaking into Snape’s mind and seeing an awful lot of things he shouldn’t.

  At this moment in time, thirteen of the twenty memories that will encompass the Prince’s Tale are already in Snape’s head. While the most revelatory stuff has yet to be said—the fact that Harry’s scar is a Horcrux—there is plenty in those first thirteen memories that Dumbledore (let alone Snape) really does not want Harry to see.

  It is critical to Snape that Harry not find out about his love for Lily. For one thing, we know that’s the reason that Snape’s Worst Memory—the one where he calls Lily a Mudblood—is hidden away from Harry. For another, consider the time Harry uses a Shield Charm and ends up seeing Snape’s memories:

  Harry’s mind was teeming with memories that were not his—a hook-nosed man was shouting at a cowering woman, while a small dark-haired boy cried in a corner. . . . A greasy-haired teenager sat alone in a dark bedroom, pointing his wand at the ceiling, shooting down flies. . . . A girl was laughing as a scrawny boy tried to mount a bucking broomstick—

  “ENOUGH!” (OP591-592)

  One guess as to who that girl laughing was. . . Lily. Snape lets Harry see his abusive home, but as soon as the scene switches to a memory with Lily, Snape pulls away. He does not want Harry to see the friendship between them. Apart from anything else, Snape knows that Harry is the type to throw Lily’s love in his face (Exhibit A: “[My dad] saved your life!” PA285). Snape would never be able to look Harry in the eyes again!

  But there’s more to it than that: there is one memory Snape has that would scupper all of Dumbledore’s plans.

  “The—the prophecy . . . the prediction . . . Trelawney . . .”

  “Ah, yes,” said Dumbledore. “How much did you relay to Lord Voldemort?”

  “Everything—everything I heard!” said Snape. “That is why—it is for that reason—he thinks it means Lily Evans!” (DH677)

  The entire point of this Occlumency exercise is to avoid Harry being used to get the prophecy. If he hears Snape and Dumbledore discussing a prophecy about his mother, Harry is not the type to put it out of his mind; he would go tearing away to the Department of Mysteries, straight into the Death Eaters’ clutches.

  Dumbledore sets up a safety precaution, and loans Snape the Pensieve for the lessons. This is probably not done lightly, given that it contains all of Dumbledore’s own memories, but he trusts Snape not to abuse that. Dumbledore needs to protect the knowledge of the prophecy. And to appease Snape, who is doing a task he really does not want to be doing here, Dumbledore ensures he “shall never reveal the best of [Snape].” (DH679) So Snape ends up with the Pensieve during the Occlumency lessons.

  What Dumbledore did not foresee was how the Pensieve actually made it likelier that Harry would see those memories. Snape will take any opportunity to knock Harry down a peg—that’s why he makes such a show of removing his memories into the Pensieve every single time. He knew Harry’s curiosity would be piqued. This is Snape snidely asserting his dominance over Harry, nonverbally gloating that Snape’s memories were safely tucked away whereas all of Harry’s were fair game.

  Harry is reckless at the best of times. The combination of Voldemort-related mood swings, constant goading from Umbridge, and Snape going through his memories was a cocktail destined to end in disaster. And so it does when Harry takes the opportunity to dive into Snape’s forbidden memories.

  Snape got lucky that Harry only saw the memory he did. But when Snape finds Harry, he cannot be sure which memories Harry has seen. The one he catches Harry in is squarely in the middle, and if Harry saw the other memories in The Prince’s Tale, the results would have been catastrophic.

  So when Snape blows up at Harry and brings the Occlumency lessons to an inglorious conclusion, it is not just anger we are witnessing.

  It was scary: Snape’s lips were shaking, his face was white, his teeth were bared.

  “Amusing man, your father, wasn’t he?” said Snape, shaking Harry so hard that his glasses slipped down his nose.

  “I—didn’t—”

  Snape threw Harry from him with all his might. Harry fell hard onto the dungeon floor.

  “You will not tell anybody what you saw!” Snape bellowed.

  “No,” said Harry, getting to his feet as far from Snape as he could. “No, of course I w—”

  “Get out, get out, I don’t want to see you in this office ever again!”

  And as Harry hurtled toward the door, a jar of dead cockroaches exploded over his head. (OP649-650)

  To be sure, Snape is genuinely angry here—Harry just violated his privacy, so Snape bellows and throws dead cockroaches at Harry.30 But while the text says Snape was “white with rage,” his reaction is different from the other times he has a hissy fit (in Prisoner of Azkaban, and during “The Flight of the Prince” in HBP). Here he maintains his sarcasm, and at no point is he described as “deranged,” “mad,” or anything synonymous with that. There’s no CapsLo
ck, no italics, only two measly exclamation points! There’s more going on in Snape’s head at this point than pure fury.

  Snape is terrified in this scene, because he realizes how badly he messed up by allowing Harry to get into those memories (and remember, he still doesn’t know how much Harry has seen). The physical description of Snape at that point—lips shaking, face white—is consistent with fear as well as anger. Snape and Dumbledore had just repaired their relationship less than a year ago, and Snape knows Dumbledore would be livid—he would blame Snape for tempting Harry with those memories. When Snape yells at Harry not to tell anyone about what he saw, it’s likely he has Dumbledore in mind, since Snape knows how angry Dumbledore would be after this slipup.

  Fortunately for Snape, Dumbledore blames himself (as part of a huge mea culpa at the end of OotP, where Dumbledore shoulders responsibility for almost every bad thing that happened). “I forgot—another old man’s mistake—that some wounds run too deep for the healing. I thought Professor Snape could overcome his feelings about your father—I was wrong.” (OP833) Dumbledore realizes that the setup of Harry and Snape working together in emotionally fraught conditions, despite any number of precautions, was doomed to fail because of their very natures.

  The failure of Dumbledore’s gamble on Harry and Snape ends up costing Sirius Black’s life, and that has to be awful for Dumbledore. Dumbledore feels guilt acutely, having been consumed by guilt for his sister Ariana’s death for a century. Now he can add Sirius’s death to his conscience, which is really upsetting for him. However, it’s not upsetting enough to stop Dumbledore from going double or nothing on the Harry/Snape gamble.

  Repeating Old Plans

  There were a lot of balls in the air during Order of the Phoenix, so let’s recap. The prophecy that everyone spent a year worrying about was essentially of no importance, but only Dumbledore knew this. Dumbledore used the prophecy to send Voldemort on a wild goose chase and used the unwitting Order to keep Voldemort occupied for a year, while Dumbledore started researching and then hunting the Horcruxes. This allowed him a valuable head start on attempting to defeat Voldemort, with no one to bother him.

  The evidence indicates that Dumbledore set this plan into motion right away after Voldemort’s resurrection, coming up with it on the spot when Harry informed him that Voldemort had returned. Dumbledore spent the night revealing things to Harry about the wands and Crouch Jr. and everything Harry could possibly want to know. . . except the prophecy. Whatever Dumbledore says to the contrary about not wanting to put Harry through more suffering that night, he certainly didn’t seem to shy away from putting Harry through whatever he felt necessary. Dumbledore didn’t tell Harry about the prophecy to prevent his secrets from getting leaked—he didn’t tell anyone, so as to ensure his decoy worked perfectly. This was the beginning of the Machiavellian Dumbledore we see at work in the last book, and is a harbinger of things to come.

  Interestingly, in Order of the Phoenix, both Dumbledore and Voldemort revisited their old strategies, and both received an identical result to the last time. In Sorcerer’s Stone, Dumbledore kept Voldemort occupied by dangling something he wanted in front of him. And just like the Sorcerer’s Stone served to keep Voldemort busy and mostly harmless for a year, so too did the prophecy. Another commonality: Voldemort failed to acquire both the Stone and the prophecy in the end. This strategy works so well, I bet Dumbledore was half-tempted to give it another go to buy himself another year.

  As for Voldemort’s strategy, it seems awfully familiar. He exerts a lot of effort to maintain his anonymity from the Ministry. When the Death Eaters are mocking Harry for falling for Voldemort’s trap, Harry brings up an excellent point: “Why couldn’t [Voldemort] come and get it himself?” (OP786) And indeed, why not?

  Because Voldemort is trying to repeat his plan from the previous year! He uses Harry to achieve an objective, shows off in front of Death Eaters, and maintains anonymity throughout. (This second point probably grew ever more attractive to Voldemort as he spent months doing his own thing with Fudge being none the wiser.) Voldemort wants to display how weak Harry is, that he would fall for a mind trick of Voldemort’s. He wants the Death Eaters to bring the prophecy to Voldemort, all while making sure the Ministry is none the wiser. (After all, short of seeing Voldemort in the Ministry, Fudge would keep blaming Dumbledore for everything going wrong.) Just like the previous year, Voldemort takes obstacles out of Harry’s path to get him to the goal—I have to believe that the Ministry’s security would not allow six teenagers to wander in unmolested in the middle of the night.

  This time, however, Voldemort is entirely at fault for the plan going wrong. He completely overestimates his Death Eaters, half of whom are still likely weakened from Azkaban, believing they’ll be able to take the prophecy from Harry without incident. To be fair, Voldemort most likely did not expect Harry to show up with six friends in tow (he consistently shows no regard for Harry’s friends and allies), and a dozen Death Eaters would have been able to take care of Harry by himself.

  It’s the same plan as Goblet of Fire, and it once again failed because Harry had an ace up his sleeve—Priori Incantatem, love—and Dumbledore was informed immediately. And while the GoF plot at least succeeded in returning Voldemort to his body, Voldemort’s OotP plan was an unqualified failure. That’s why Voldemort allows his temper to get the better of him when Harry announces the prophecy is smashed, meaning Voldemort will never get to hear its contents. Voldemort really wanted that prophecy, and is so peeved, he throws away his other considerations. He shows up at the Ministry to kill Harry, risking his anonymity, and doesn’t even bother waiting for an audience. This time, there are no games or theatrics, he just lets the Killing Curses fly. It’s a stark contrast to the Voldemort from Book 4. Yet because Voldemort was so angry as to not listen to Bellatrix hollering about Dumbledore being present, he is surprised by Dumbledore, and utterly defeated—no prophecy, no Death Eaters, and cover blown.

  It is after this PR nightmare that Voldemort issues his “I will be the one to kill Harry Potter” decree (probably subtly encouraged by Snape). We first hear about it from Snape during the “Flight of the Prince”: “Have you forgotten our orders? Potter belongs to the Dark Lord—we are to leave him!” (HBP603)

  For better or worse, at the end of Order of the Phoenix, the schemes of both Dumbledore and Voldemort are over with for that year. Going forward, Dumbledore and Voldemort double down on their respective styles. Voldemort remains a performer throughout the entire series, and his theatricality becomes his predictability (though he learns enough to Avada Kedavra Harry immediately in Deathly Hallows and go through the theatrics after the threat has been nullified). Dumbledore, meanwhile, doubles down on his secrets and his manipulation. It’s time to reset the chessboard for the final match.

  Chapter 6:

  Albus Dumbledore and the

  Half-Blood Prince

  When we examine Dumbledore’s plans for how the war with Voldemort would play out, we can only see the plans he formed in July 1996 onwards. This is because there is a crucial paradigm shift in July 1996: Dumbledore no longer expects to live to see the war effort through. He is blindsided during his hunt for the Ringcrux, when he suddenly gets a blast from the past upon finding it:

  “When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts—the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons—I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that it was now a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry I was . . .” (DH719-720)

  At this point, Dumbledore has not thought about the Hallows in years; certainly not since returning the Cloak to Harry in 1991. But suddenly, the entire chessboard he’d been setting up is upended: he only has a year to live, at most. The odds of the war ending in that year are so long, eve
n Bagman wouldn’t bet on it. So Dumbledore has to toss all of his plans out the window, and come up with a whole batch of new plans. . . and he has the Hallows as a potential confounding variable now.

  Until this moment, Dumbledore fully intended to wipe out the Horcruxes single-handedly. After all, who else could do it? Who else has the magical prowess to deal with Voldemort’s defenses? Who else has the knowledge of Voldemort’s background to figure out what and where the Horcruxes are? And who else has the wherewithal to do it so Voldemort’s none the wiser? Ideally, Dumbledore would get rid of all the Horcruxes, deal with the Scarcrux last of all by instructing Harry to sacrifice himself and defeat Voldemort once and for all.

  Also until this moment, Dumbledore fully intended to die (much later) as the undefeated master of the Elder Wand. There are conflicting statements in Deathly Hallows regarding what Dumbledore intended for the Elder Wand, whether he intended to die undefeated or to pass on mastery of the wand to Snape. Credit here must go to mirrormere’s superb editorial, “The Flaw in the Plan,”31 for untangling the conflicting statements about the Elder Wand. I recommend reading the entire piece, but the gist is that when Harry says the following, they should be read as separate statements instead of interconnected ones.

  “Snape never beat Dumbledore! Dumbledore’s death was planned between them! Dumbledore intended to die undefeated, the wand’s last true master! If all had gone as planned, the wand’s power would have died with him, because it had never been won from him!” (DH742)