I’m inclined to wonder if Harry’s ability to block the killing curse with his patronus might be enough to clue Quirrelmort in to how it works. Possibly any collision of their magics would have produced a similar effect, but if not, it still makes thematic sense that the patronus would be able to block a killing curse, since it represents defiance of death. Given that Harry has already told him that he made the patronus by thinking about the eradication of death, I wonder if Quirrelmort might have enough information to piece together the nature of Harry’s revelation.
I believe that Quirrel, being the overeducated ruthless genius that he is, has already understood Harry’s revelation, but has his own obstacles to casting human patronus, some that are not so easily overcome. For one, he may already be a bit too dead.
He should be able to deduce the nature of the dementors from Harry’s invisibility cloak being able to hide the wearer from them (which should be readily apparent from Harry’s summary of events and the fact that Bella was wearing it). Other things like what you point out or Harry’s parselmouth description as life-eaters could help, but the cloak thing by itself should be quite sufficient given Quirrel’s previously displayed deductive abilities. I don’t think he will be able to cast a true patronus, though.
The fact that the true invisibility cloak effectively hides one from dementors doesn’t necessarily mean that dementors personify death, only that whatever mechanism they use to detect people is also blocked by it. The cloak is said to be able to hide one from the gaze of death itself, but that doesn’t mean that if the cloak hides you from something’s gaze, that thing must be death. The hint Harry used doesn’t really carry in the opposite direction.
The life-eaters part does sound like a clue though.
Would a person have to think about universally conquering death to cast a true patronus, or is it enough to imagine personally conquering it? If all it requires is the latter, I can certainly see Quirrelmort managing it.
The cloak is said to be able to hide one from the gaze of death itself, but that doesn’t mean that if the cloak hides you from something’s gaze, that thing must be death.
Not as a logical deduction in the strict sense, but its so obvious that he would consider it, and since Dementors = death also fits well otherwise that answer is much more probable than that dementors are something else, coincidentally also blocked by the cloak (which Harry somehow figured out in another unrelated way), and hiding one from the gaze of death itself refers to yet something else that is so far inexplicable.
Would a person have to think about universally conquering death to cast a true patronus, or is it enough to imagine personally conquering it? If all it requires is the latter, I can certainly see Quirrelmort managing it.
Even if personally conquering it were enough it has to be a positive thought and Quirrel doesn’t seem to think about life in particularly positive terms, merely preferring it over the alternative.
Considering that the true invisibility cloak is said to have a general ability to keep one hidden, rather than merely invisible, I don’t see how the fact that it hides one from dementors counts as evidence for the idea that dementors are personifications of death. It’s evidence that it’s a really kickass invisibility cloak.
Since no one (neither Harry before remembering the gaze of death line, nor the aurors confronted with Bellatix’ inexplicable disappearance, nor the designers of Askaban) expected it to hide you from dementors being “a kickass invisibility cloak” is evidently not enough to make the fact that it does completely unsurprising, so naturally that fact is evidence for any hypothesis that does an even better job of explaining it.
There’s only one true invisibility cloak, and it’s not enough to get someone out on its own. What reason to we have to suppose that the aurors or the designers of Azkaban ever bothered to consider the question of whether it would hide someone from dementors? The aurors were surprised that Bellatrix had vanished from the senses of the dementors, but this is clearly an unusual occurrence that should not arise within ordinary experience, so we should not be surprised at their surprise. They do not have “someone sneaked in with the true invisibility cloak” as a cached explanation to check for plausibility in this situation.
Given that we don’t even know the approximate ages of either, Azkaban may even predate the true invisibility cloak’s creation.
There’s only one true invisibility cloak, and it’s not enough to get someone out on its own.
Everything else needed to escape is readily available, given that people sneaking in with patronuses is a regular occurance. The owner of the cloak could easily have been sneaking someone out every few months.
What reason to we have to suppose that the aurors or the designers of Azkaban ever bothered to consider the question of whether it would hide someone from dementors?
The fact that no one in the story is supposed to be holding an idiot ball. The fact that no one is supposed to be able to escape the dementors notice is the central element of Askaban’s security, so much so that they barely put up a token effort of guarding against break-ins. If they considered this merely a hiding problem then to never ever have considered whether it might be possible to hide from them after all, or to not have considered a legendary item of hiding in that context would be pretty incompetent.
The aurors were surprised that Bellatrix had vanished from the senses of the dementors, but this is clearly an unusual occurrence that should not arise within ordinary experience, so we should not be surprised at their surprise. They do not have “someone sneaked in with the true invisibility cloak” as a cached explanation to check for plausibility in this situation.
There were dozens of them and they had about two hours to think about it. If they considered it merely a hiding problem at least one of them should have raised the possibility. When confronted with something apparently impossible powerful magic is a rather obvious answer.
Given that we don’t even know the approximate ages of either, Azkaban may even predate the true invisibility cloak’s creation.
Seems unlikely since ancient powerful magic keeps getting lost, the cloak looks like ancient powerful magic, but Askaban doesn’t seem to incorporate anything unreproducible. Even if Askaban predated the cloak that would still mean no one between the time the cloak became public knowledge and the current day made the necessary adjustments to Askaban security.
If they considered this merely a hiding problem then to never ever have considered whether it might be possible to hide from them after all, or to not have considered a legendary item of hiding in that context would be pretty incompetent.
My impression was that it was legendary in the sense of “yeah, we tell those stories to our children” instead of “look, every student’s sat under the Sorting Hat, it exists and there are thousands of witnesses.” That’s an unfortunate part of magical stories- it’s hard to avoid the Every Rumor Is Completely Correct trope without inundating the reader with worthless information, and so when you say something is legendary it’s not clear whether you mean it’s +6 or it probably doesn’t exist.
Regular patronuses do not hide a person from dementors, so if a person came in with the true invisibility cloak, but not a true patronus, they would be noticed by the dementors as soon as they gave it to the escapee.
On further consideration, I suppose that it might work if you could slip them into a bag of holding and conceal them on your person, but the implications of readily available bags of holding that can contain untransformed people without harming them are so broad and incredibly broken that I’m inclined to suspect that you simply can’t do that, first because it would be a story breaker, and second because people would do it on a regular basis and it would have come up before.
The fact that nobody is supposed to be holding the idiot ball doesn’t mean that everyone is particularly intelligent or rational (in the wizarding world, this is clearly more the exception than the rule) or that they have access to the same information we do.
Remember that the Deathly Hallows, in canon, were widely believed to be mythical. It’s hardly fair to expect these people to even keep in mind that they exist, let alone contemplate exactly how powerful they might be and account for them in their plans.
Keep in mind that when we, the readers, are encouraged to think of artifacts of great power in this setting, the Deathly Hallows immediately come to mind, but to a person who’s grown up in the wizarding world, they’re just three out of perhaps thousands of possibly-real objects out of myth and story. From their perspective, it could be equally plausible that someone dominated the will of the dementors using the hand of Vecna or something.
Regular patronuses do not hide a person from dementors, so if a person came in with the true invisibility cloak, but not a true patronus, they would be noticed by the dementors as soon as they gave it to the escapee.
They would be in the same situation as a regular intruder, which are not all that rare, and whom the Dementors usually don’t seem to immediately report about (otherwise the aurors would have wondered why that hadn’t happened and have been much more alarmed).
Remember that the Deathly Hallows, in canon, were widely believed to be mythical. It’s hardly fair to expect these people to even keep in mind that they exist, let alone contemplate exactly how powerful they might be and account for them in their plans.
In canon, but apparently not MoR. Santa Claus, Dumbledore and Snape all mentioned the true cloak to Harry right away.
Remember that when we, the readers, are encouraged to think of artifacts of great power in this setting, the Deathly Hallows immediately come to mind, but to a person who’s grown up in the wizarding world, they’re just three out of perhaps thousands of possibly-real objects out of myth and story.
Very likely not. If there were supposed to be thousands of comparable items in MoR rather than the dozen or so we know of the odds of most of the ones from canon being mentioned, but none of those extras would be pretty short even considering overlapping reasons for being mentioned.
In relation to population size true cloaks of invisibility are more common that jetpacks for us. If 20 FBI agents had two hours to think about an apparently impossible mystery that would be obviously solved if you assume a jet-pack I’d expect at least one of them to raise the possibility.
Although it’s possible that the dementors would not quickly report an intruder who gave the true invisibility cloak to a prisoner, if they have that degree of reasoning ability, I suspect they would take more notice of a person leaving one of the cells who they hadn’t seen coming in than someone entering.
Santa Claus gave him the true invisibility cloak knowing what it was, and Dumbledore had been searching for the deathly hallows for much of his life, and had good reason to suspect one was in Harry’s possession. Snape is the odd one out, being the only one whose awareness of it does not have a clear explanation other than chance. He might have heard about James’s possession of it through Dumbledore at some point, but he’s also a professor who has conducted considerable research in various areas of magic, so his knowledge is probably well above average, and a single such mention could probably be marked down to chance.
I don’t recall Snape mentioning it at all though. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Quirrel?
For true cloaks of invisibility to be more common to wizards per capita than jetpacks are to us, there would have to be fewer than three thousand jetpacks in the world. I can’t find any numbers on this online, but given that you can buy one for about $150,000 dollars, I’m inclined to doubt they’re anywhere near that rare. They’re still rare enough that I would not expect any number of FBI agents given a few hours to suggest one as a possibility in an apparently intractable but otherwise mundane mystery. All sorts of mysteries could be solved by applications of really rare and expensive technology, but much more often it comes down to a clever trick the detectives simply haven’t thought of.
Try reading reports of unsolved crimes, and imagine how you might have carried them out given an unlimited materials budget. I think you’ll find that the solutions you come up with are generally not ones put forward by the police.
Although it’s possible that the dementors would not quickly report an intruder who gave the true invisibility cloak to a prisoner, if they have that degree of reasoning ability, I suspect they would take more notice of a person leaving one of the cells who they hadn’t seen coming in than someone entering.
Why on earth would you expect them to wear it on the way in?
I don’t recall Snape mentioning it at all though. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Quirrel?
It’s in the chapter with Lesath. And it’s not just that they know, but that they so casually mention it to Harry.
Let me rephrase that: In a work of fiction where jet-pack use was dramatically appropriate I would be disappointed with the smarts of 20 FBI men who never considered jet-packs when they were the only to their knowledge even slightly possible solution to a mystery, and in fact the correct solution.
I don’t think we’ll get much further in this particular sub-thread. It doesn’t seem all that much anyway. Even if the cloak does not add all that much evidence to dementors = death it should at least cause Quirrel to generate that hypothesis, and we already know that even the commonly available knowledge was enough for Harry to correctly reach that conclusion. Considering that Quirrel has even more evidence beyond that he should as well, unless he has a mental blind spot.
I’m inclined to wonder if Harry’s ability to block the killing curse with his patronus might be enough to clue Quirrelmort in to how it works. Possibly any collision of their magics would have produced a similar effect, but if not, it still makes thematic sense that the patronus would be able to block a killing curse, since it represents defiance of death. Given that Harry has already told him that he made the patronus by thinking about the eradication of death, I wonder if Quirrelmort might have enough information to piece together the nature of Harry’s revelation.
I believe that Quirrel, being the overeducated ruthless genius that he is, has already understood Harry’s revelation, but has his own obstacles to casting human patronus, some that are not so easily overcome. For one, he may already be a bit too dead.
Hmm. Also, it’s another big coincidence that the Boy Who Lived grows up a transhumanist (at least, his light side does).
Explanations for events in MoR may differ from explanations in canon...
He should be able to deduce the nature of the dementors from Harry’s invisibility cloak being able to hide the wearer from them (which should be readily apparent from Harry’s summary of events and the fact that Bella was wearing it). Other things like what you point out or Harry’s parselmouth description as life-eaters could help, but the cloak thing by itself should be quite sufficient given Quirrel’s previously displayed deductive abilities. I don’t think he will be able to cast a true patronus, though.
The fact that the true invisibility cloak effectively hides one from dementors doesn’t necessarily mean that dementors personify death, only that whatever mechanism they use to detect people is also blocked by it. The cloak is said to be able to hide one from the gaze of death itself, but that doesn’t mean that if the cloak hides you from something’s gaze, that thing must be death. The hint Harry used doesn’t really carry in the opposite direction.
The life-eaters part does sound like a clue though.
Would a person have to think about universally conquering death to cast a true patronus, or is it enough to imagine personally conquering it? If all it requires is the latter, I can certainly see Quirrelmort managing it.
Not as a logical deduction in the strict sense, but its so obvious that he would consider it, and since Dementors = death also fits well otherwise that answer is much more probable than that dementors are something else, coincidentally also blocked by the cloak (which Harry somehow figured out in another unrelated way), and hiding one from the gaze of death itself refers to yet something else that is so far inexplicable.
Even if personally conquering it were enough it has to be a positive thought and Quirrel doesn’t seem to think about life in particularly positive terms, merely preferring it over the alternative.
Considering that the true invisibility cloak is said to have a general ability to keep one hidden, rather than merely invisible, I don’t see how the fact that it hides one from dementors counts as evidence for the idea that dementors are personifications of death. It’s evidence that it’s a really kickass invisibility cloak.
Since no one (neither Harry before remembering the gaze of death line, nor the aurors confronted with Bellatix’ inexplicable disappearance, nor the designers of Askaban) expected it to hide you from dementors being “a kickass invisibility cloak” is evidently not enough to make the fact that it does completely unsurprising, so naturally that fact is evidence for any hypothesis that does an even better job of explaining it.
There’s only one true invisibility cloak, and it’s not enough to get someone out on its own. What reason to we have to suppose that the aurors or the designers of Azkaban ever bothered to consider the question of whether it would hide someone from dementors? The aurors were surprised that Bellatrix had vanished from the senses of the dementors, but this is clearly an unusual occurrence that should not arise within ordinary experience, so we should not be surprised at their surprise. They do not have “someone sneaked in with the true invisibility cloak” as a cached explanation to check for plausibility in this situation.
Given that we don’t even know the approximate ages of either, Azkaban may even predate the true invisibility cloak’s creation.
Everything else needed to escape is readily available, given that people sneaking in with patronuses is a regular occurance. The owner of the cloak could easily have been sneaking someone out every few months.
The fact that no one in the story is supposed to be holding an idiot ball. The fact that no one is supposed to be able to escape the dementors notice is the central element of Askaban’s security, so much so that they barely put up a token effort of guarding against break-ins. If they considered this merely a hiding problem then to never ever have considered whether it might be possible to hide from them after all, or to not have considered a legendary item of hiding in that context would be pretty incompetent.
There were dozens of them and they had about two hours to think about it. If they considered it merely a hiding problem at least one of them should have raised the possibility. When confronted with something apparently impossible powerful magic is a rather obvious answer.
Seems unlikely since ancient powerful magic keeps getting lost, the cloak looks like ancient powerful magic, but Askaban doesn’t seem to incorporate anything unreproducible. Even if Askaban predated the cloak that would still mean no one between the time the cloak became public knowledge and the current day made the necessary adjustments to Askaban security.
My impression was that it was legendary in the sense of “yeah, we tell those stories to our children” instead of “look, every student’s sat under the Sorting Hat, it exists and there are thousands of witnesses.” That’s an unfortunate part of magical stories- it’s hard to avoid the Every Rumor Is Completely Correct trope without inundating the reader with worthless information, and so when you say something is legendary it’s not clear whether you mean it’s +6 or it probably doesn’t exist.
Regular patronuses do not hide a person from dementors, so if a person came in with the true invisibility cloak, but not a true patronus, they would be noticed by the dementors as soon as they gave it to the escapee.
On further consideration, I suppose that it might work if you could slip them into a bag of holding and conceal them on your person, but the implications of readily available bags of holding that can contain untransformed people without harming them are so broad and incredibly broken that I’m inclined to suspect that you simply can’t do that, first because it would be a story breaker, and second because people would do it on a regular basis and it would have come up before.
The fact that nobody is supposed to be holding the idiot ball doesn’t mean that everyone is particularly intelligent or rational (in the wizarding world, this is clearly more the exception than the rule) or that they have access to the same information we do.
Remember that the Deathly Hallows, in canon, were widely believed to be mythical. It’s hardly fair to expect these people to even keep in mind that they exist, let alone contemplate exactly how powerful they might be and account for them in their plans.
Keep in mind that when we, the readers, are encouraged to think of artifacts of great power in this setting, the Deathly Hallows immediately come to mind, but to a person who’s grown up in the wizarding world, they’re just three out of perhaps thousands of possibly-real objects out of myth and story. From their perspective, it could be equally plausible that someone dominated the will of the dementors using the hand of Vecna or something.
They would be in the same situation as a regular intruder, which are not all that rare, and whom the Dementors usually don’t seem to immediately report about (otherwise the aurors would have wondered why that hadn’t happened and have been much more alarmed).
In canon, but apparently not MoR. Santa Claus, Dumbledore and Snape all mentioned the true cloak to Harry right away.
Very likely not. If there were supposed to be thousands of comparable items in MoR rather than the dozen or so we know of the odds of most of the ones from canon being mentioned, but none of those extras would be pretty short even considering overlapping reasons for being mentioned.
In relation to population size true cloaks of invisibility are more common that jetpacks for us. If 20 FBI agents had two hours to think about an apparently impossible mystery that would be obviously solved if you assume a jet-pack I’d expect at least one of them to raise the possibility.
Although it’s possible that the dementors would not quickly report an intruder who gave the true invisibility cloak to a prisoner, if they have that degree of reasoning ability, I suspect they would take more notice of a person leaving one of the cells who they hadn’t seen coming in than someone entering.
Santa Claus gave him the true invisibility cloak knowing what it was, and Dumbledore had been searching for the deathly hallows for much of his life, and had good reason to suspect one was in Harry’s possession. Snape is the odd one out, being the only one whose awareness of it does not have a clear explanation other than chance. He might have heard about James’s possession of it through Dumbledore at some point, but he’s also a professor who has conducted considerable research in various areas of magic, so his knowledge is probably well above average, and a single such mention could probably be marked down to chance.
I don’t recall Snape mentioning it at all though. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Quirrel?
For true cloaks of invisibility to be more common to wizards per capita than jetpacks are to us, there would have to be fewer than three thousand jetpacks in the world. I can’t find any numbers on this online, but given that you can buy one for about $150,000 dollars, I’m inclined to doubt they’re anywhere near that rare. They’re still rare enough that I would not expect any number of FBI agents given a few hours to suggest one as a possibility in an apparently intractable but otherwise mundane mystery. All sorts of mysteries could be solved by applications of really rare and expensive technology, but much more often it comes down to a clever trick the detectives simply haven’t thought of.
Try reading reports of unsolved crimes, and imagine how you might have carried them out given an unlimited materials budget. I think you’ll find that the solutions you come up with are generally not ones put forward by the police.
Why on earth would you expect them to wear it on the way in?
It’s in the chapter with Lesath. And it’s not just that they know, but that they so casually mention it to Harry.
Let me rephrase that: In a work of fiction where jet-pack use was dramatically appropriate I would be disappointed with the smarts of 20 FBI men who never considered jet-packs when they were the only to their knowledge even slightly possible solution to a mystery, and in fact the correct solution.
I don’t think we’ll get much further in this particular sub-thread. It doesn’t seem all that much anyway. Even if the cloak does not add all that much evidence to dementors = death it should at least cause Quirrel to generate that hypothesis, and we already know that even the commonly available knowledge was enough for Harry to correctly reach that conclusion. Considering that Quirrel has even more evidence beyond that he should as well, unless he has a mental blind spot.