With the final Harry Potter book due out in around 15 hours, I thought I should take a moment and get a few pet theories on the record before everyone knows what happens. I have not read any spoilers nor any electronic copies of the book. So if any of these happen to be true (which, deep down, I kind of doubt) then I'm sorry if this ruins it for you. Maybe best you just stop reading now if speculations upset you.
My first one just struck me this morning. I've always had a problem with the prophecy. J. K. Rowling (JKR from here on to save from retyping a complexly punctuated name) has said that she worded that
very carefully. And yet to take it on its face value, it's a very stupid prophecy. And, worse yet, absurdly false. To recap:
Neither can live while the other survives.Which Dumbledore claims to mean that, in the end, one of them must kill the other. And this is the accepted explanation.
But, um, if I may meekly raise my hand on that. They're both already alive and surviving. So how can that be true?
So, logically this must mean one of two things: either it's a poorly-crafted prophecy (which seems unlike JKR) or... wait for it...
Harry's a zombie.
Yes, I think Harry Potter might be a zombie. Or an Inferi, anyway (or whatever the singular of Inferi is - I'm reluctant to go look it up right now with spoilers flying about. Inferus? Something?)
Another clue that she's given is that it's very important to know how Dumbledore got the invisibility cloak from Harry's father. An obvious answer would be that he went and got it from their house. And it's likely that, after the attack, he and the rest of the Order went to their house. If nothing else they would have wanted to take care of Harry. The books say that Hagrid went to get him but I can't imagine no one else would have gone.
Anyway, so we know that Dumbledore knew the prophecy. Voldemort knew it to and so he tried to kill Harry, etc. Well what if he succeeded? What if his attack killed them both? Dumbledore would have known that Voldemort could come back to life so in order to prevent that, he turned Harry into a zombie.
It's interesting that she used "lives" and "survives". They are not entirely the same meaning, after all. Perhaps by becoming a zombie he "survived" enough to prevent Voldemort from leaving his undead state and fully "living" again. That could be the source of all of Dumbledore's guilt that we see at the end of books 5 and 6 (when drinking the cup).
So now they're both undead wizards - liches would be more accurate than zombies, I suppose - both being animated by dark magic. Only once one of them is "dispelled" (Voldemort's process being much more complicated with Horcruxes and such) can the other one live. Though it might end up with Harry dying rather than being a lich.
Of course this begs the question: why would Dumbledore use dark magic? Maybe because...
Dumbledore is evil.
Voldemort talked often about having an infiltrator in Hogwarts. What if it wasn't Snape after all but Dumbledore? What if that is why Snape, acting in good conscience, killed him? I suppose it could be more complicated like Dumbledore was possessed or something. But it would explain a number of things if that turned out to be true.
No, I don't really believe either of these. Unless they turn out to be true. In which case it was I, yes I alone that had the courage to put forth these theories despite great mockery.