Edit: While some points may remain useful for the sake of reference, this theory is disproved in Chapter 82, and Aberforth’s death no longer lacks narrative purpose.
Who killed Narcissa?
Suspects:
Dumbledore
Bones
Lucius
Voldemort
Someone else
HJPEV tells us that this doesn’t fit the headmaster’s style. His style is curiously consistent.
There is one offhand remark, vengeance, and a practical cold-heartedness favoring Bones. “Why not Bones?” is only a little better than no argument at all.
Lucius is presented as a devoted family man. It would be inconsistent characterization for him to do this. That works for real life, but HP&tMoR is fiction, which must make sense.
Voldemort has reason not to do this, as it made a fool out of one of his tools and weakened his side by making them less willing to strike indiscriminately.
I have a ‘someone else’ theory: Aberforth killed Narcissa. Aberforth is dead, and meaningfully so due to Conservation of Detail. We know little else about him from HP&tMoR. Only that he didn’t testify against his brother in the death of his sister, and his brother got quite stern when he died. Basically, this theory allows me to put a piece in a puzzle because it fits, not because the image on the piece makes me think it goes with the pieces next to the hole. Also, I get to write the following paragraph.
Inaworld where innocents are dying, where evil is winning and good people live in fear for their loved ones, oneman had the courage to do what must be done. Aberforth Dumbledore is Narcissa’s Immolator.
Aberfoth kills his enemy’s wife, informs his brother of what he’s done, and then dies either at his own hand or, less style-consistently, his brother’s. He knows that his brother will take this atrocity/sacrifice and make the best of it, and in so doing he saved countless ‘light side’ family members.
He did it all to make up for killing his sister and allowing his brother to kind of take the blame. Maybe.
There is one offhand remark, vengeance, and a practical cold-heartedness favoring Bones. “Why not Bones?” is only a little better than no argument at all.
Also there is the fact (mentioned by someone else, sorry I forget who) that Narcissa’s sister, Bellatrix, murdered Bones’ brother. Edit: I am an idiot, you already mentioned this.
Bringing in Aberforth is a really interesting idea. Now that I think about it, even given the wizarding wars, it is remarkable that so many siblings have died or nearly died:
Albus/Aberforth
Bellatrix/Narcissa
Bones/her brother (who, exactly?)
Petunia/Lily
The last one is interesting with the role of survivor exchanged as well, since there is a hint that Petunia may have threatened suicide in order to convince Lily to brew the beauty potion.
Eponymuse, I think I covered that with the word ‘vengeance.’
Those coincidences are otherwise satisfied by the fact that Bones’ motives are served by Narcissa’s Immolation, whoever did it. Given what we know about her, she’d act the same way if Dumbledore or Moody were Narcissa’s Immolator. Still, it does make some narrative sense for her be the one.
I am not at all confident that Aberforth was involved. I would like it very much, though, if someone could add something more to or take something away from the rickety scaffold propping this theory up.
Aberforth may have died just to emphasize the harshness of the war in ways the source did not. If that’s the case, I’m making a red herring out of a pointless bit of the set. However, there was nothing in the text that tells us that Aberforth was a tragic casualty of a meaningless war or anything of the sort. For now he looks, to me, like a gun on the mantle.
Also, I guess “siblings getting killed” isn’t much of a pattern. Given that people were getting killed in the war, and that people have siblings, you can count the people getting killed as siblings.
“That depends,” Amelia said in a hard voice. “Are you here to help us catch criminals, or to protect them from the consequences of their actions?” Are you going to try to stop the killer of my brother from getting her well-deserved Kiss, old meddler?
It has to be Dumbledore, by Conservation of Narrative Detail: There’s no way that the conditions of Harry’s promise to Draco would have been spelled out in such detail if learning the truth would be all it took to expiate it.
It’s going to turn out that Dumbledore did intentionally burn an innocent Narcissa Malfoy to death, but for a justifiable reason (though it’s going to be interesting to see what that could be), and thus Harry is going to have the impossible task of convincing Draco to let him out of the promise.
Other than my desire for Snape to kill Dumbledore, I don’t see any reason why HJPEV should talk Draco into letting him out of the promise.
It is more important to the themes of the work for HJPEV to follow through on a promise so dramatically given, than to shirk it. Likewise, it would be important for Dumbledore to face the consequences as administered by HJPEV.
You have an interesting point about the promise. It is awfully detailed for something that would just be set aside. Still, it could have been so detailed just to allow a semi-light character like HJPEV to bond with a semi-dark character like Draco. Or maybe to allow the author to demonstrate the practice of thinking things through, through HJPEV. Or, as the Pedant One points out, something else entirely.
It has to be Dumbledore, by Conservation of Narrative Detail: There’s no way that the conditions of Harry’s promise to Draco would have been spelled out in such detail if learning the truth would be all it took to expiate it.
Voldemort has reason not to do this, as it made a fool out of one of his tools and weakened his side by making them less willing to strike indiscriminately.
I disagree. The last part is an inference, and I think we have more evidence that the killing prevented any peace between Lucius and Dumbledore in Voldemort’s absence.
(I don’t know how much stress to put on this, but we learn that Draco thinks the death had this effect in the same chapter where he tells us to understand strange plots by looking at the outcomes. Seems at least 90% certain the author meant us to suspect Voldemort when he wrote that.)
Now, Donny just pointed out that Voldemort could have faked his death entirely by, say, transfiguring some chickens and burning them. We also know that his treatment of Bellatrix ensured her devotion to him would not count as a happy memory and would thus continue in Azkaban. I think he intended this effect, meaning he planned for the possibility of seeming to lose. It sounds like he planned for that from the start.
Setting fire to a chicken back in Chapter 17 should increase P(Dumbledore did it, and is a sadist). But supposedly DD’s weakness lies in doing evil “For the Greater Good,” not in having fond memories of the time he burned a woman to death. Seems more likely to me that he suspects Voldemort faked a burned body (per Donny’s guess), but can’t say so because he has no convincing explanation for why V hasn’t visibly acted since then. So he just taught Harry to doubt such appearances.
Should you take into account the possibility that the chicken was just something transfigured before increasing the probability of Dumbledore being a Sadist?
No, for a qualitative change in various probabilities we can ask if Dumbledore has unpleasant associations with burning—like a memory of something he wishes he didn’t (have to) do, or of a sad time for his family. These would reduce the chance that he sees “setting fire to a chicken” as clever.
Seems like a sadistic DD who killed Narcissa would enjoy alluding to this event, in a way that would disturb Harry without making him suspect the purpose behind it. But that seems to me like a more complicated hypothesis than a Dumbledore who shares Donny’s suspicions, given that DD looks like a ‘bad guy’ of a radically different kind.
Ok, I’m a bit lost here, I haven’t dealt with probabilties for several years and would like to find out where I was wrong. Please correct my reasoning:
P(Dumbledore did it \bigcap Dumbledore is a Sadist) =P (Dumbledore did it) x P(Dumbledore is a Sadist)
P(Dumbledore did it)=1-P(Dumbledore didn’t do it)
P(Dumbledore didn’t do it)=P(Dumbledore didn’t do it | He burned a real chicken) + P(Dumbledore didn’t do it | He burned something transfigured to be a chicken).
Now, we don’t know the probabilities P(He burned a real chicken) and P(He burned something transfigured to be a chicken), but it is something that has to be taken into account, isn’t it?
@your answer
In your answer, you assume he did it. If he didn’t do it, he wouldn’t neccessarily have negative associations with burning, only with the fact of being thought to have burned her.
If I understand you correctly, your reasoning regarding unpleasant associations with burning already assumes that he did it.
If he didn’t do it (and we don’t know yet wether it was him or, for example, Amelia Bones), he wouldn’t have unpleasant associations with the method of Narcissa’s death, only with the fact that it was ascribed to him. So there is the possibility that he didn’t do it, and doesn’t have negative associations with burning that would be brought up when burning transfigured stones or tablecloth or whatever.
My pet theory for some time has been that Narcissa was a Horcrux, and that Dumbledore was destroying said Horcrux by the only means he could—Fiendfyre. Are there any obvious gaps?
Yes: why would Dumbledore allow McGonagall to think that Voldemort only had one Horcrux?
“Perhaps not, then,” Dumbledore said after Minerva tried to explain. “I confess I had been hoping for something that would help in finding Voldemort’s horcrux, wherever he may have hidden it. But...” The old wizard shrugged.
Probably as much “not the headmaster’s style” to kill someone who happened to be a Horcrux so directly instead of weaving a complex plot to something, something, something, and then something else.
Canon seems to imply that living horcrux anchors can be killed normally to destroy the horcrux. (Magic apparently can’t actually fix death, and a horcrux is destroyed when the anchor is “damaged beyond magic repair”.)
I’m not sure MoR retains that, but it would be a huge game-breaker if it didn’t, and one that Voldie would have seen and taken advantage of: You could protect your army from all but a few arcane dark spells by having your minions horcrux each-other. Note that the rare Fiendfyre is mentioned as necessary to destroy a horcrux, but the much more common Avada Kedavra is not—which suggests that, if it were to work like that, horcruxing would make you invulnerable even to AK. (In other words, AK is not mentioned as one of the few horcrux-destroying spells because it only works on living people, and living horcruxes can be just killed normally instead of requiring advanced methods.)
Canon seems to imply that living horcrux anchors can be killed normally to destroy the horcrux
Canon gave us an example of two living horcruxes (Nagini and Harry Potter), and for the former the same sword of Gryffindor that had been used to destroy other horcruxes was used, while for the latter the weird stipulation that Voldemort had to kill Harry Potter himself was added.
The latter especially didn’t make much sense… But either way I suggest we not be too sure of what is required to kill a living Horcrux in HPMoR.
While I’m no longer convinced of the Narcissa-was-a-Horcrux hypothesis, I don’t buy this argument. Even if Voldie thinks of it (which, okay, that part’s reasonable), it assumes that he needs an invincible army more than he needs to keep the idea of Horcruxes secret. This is wildly implausible. His non-invincible army was doing just fine.
I’m not 100% convinced myself, it just seems likely. I won’t argue about the sword (nobody ever tried without it), canon is too fuzzy about the details and Eliezer explicitly said that he makes them up as he goes along.
About Voldie, if Horcruxes worked that way at the very least he would have thought to make himself the Horcrux of someone else, like Bella, just to gain the benefits as a back-up (even though he had horcruxes, reviving is a chore, and at least in MoR he’d be prepared against accidental defeat). And if I was him, I’d have at least my top followers horcrux a small object that I can easily destroy and that I can keep on me at all times (he had easy access to basilisk venom and magic pouches), and Obliviate them about the process to keep the secret. Of course, we have no indication he didn’t do that, except that a lot of his followers were killed and Fiendfyre is still considered rare.
But I still think such an effect would be too powerful for MoR, it’d basically remove anything but Fiendfyre and Basilisk-venom from the offensive options. (And it seems that Salazar’s basilisk might no longer available, though characteristically cannon seems to suggest that breeding a basilisk is ridiculously easy, just forbidden.) Also, if living Horcruxes are not killable by normal means, that would suggest that mean they don’t die of old age, either, which again would not quite fit.
In a world where innocents are dying, where evil is winning and good people live in fear for their loved ones, one man had the courage to do what must be done. Aberforth Dumbledore is Narcissa’s Immolator.
I like this possibility, it furthermore postulates that Albus was confused for Aberforth which is very likely IMO.
Voldemort has reason not to do this, as it made a fool out of one of his tools and weakened his side by making them less willing to strike indiscriminately.
When do you think Narcissa died? There’s, let’s see, seventeen months between Draco’s birth and Voldemort’s “death”, right? I had assumed it happened afterwards.
Sorry to quote the same passage at you twice, but the best we have for dating this other than the necessary birth of Draco is in chapter 56.
From what Amelia heard, Dumbledore had gotten smarter toward the end of the war, mostly due to Mad-Eye’s nonstop nagging; but had relapsed into his foolish mercies the instant Voldemort’s body was found.
I don’t have a quote to back me, just now, but don’t the common folk regard the death of Voldemort as the end of the war? (That’s insensitive to Neville’s parents, of course, but there it is.)
Edit: While some points may remain useful for the sake of reference, this theory is disproved in Chapter 82, and Aberforth’s death no longer lacks narrative purpose.
Who killed Narcissa?
Suspects:
Dumbledore
Bones
Lucius
Voldemort
Someone else
HJPEV tells us that this doesn’t fit the headmaster’s style. His style is curiously consistent.
There is one offhand remark, vengeance, and a practical cold-heartedness favoring Bones. “Why not Bones?” is only a little better than no argument at all.
Lucius is presented as a devoted family man. It would be inconsistent characterization for him to do this. That works for real life, but HP&tMoR is fiction, which must make sense.
Voldemort has reason not to do this, as it made a fool out of one of his tools and weakened his side by making them less willing to strike indiscriminately.
I have a ‘someone else’ theory: Aberforth killed Narcissa. Aberforth is dead, and meaningfully so due to Conservation of Detail. We know little else about him from HP&tMoR. Only that he didn’t testify against his brother in the death of his sister, and his brother got quite stern when he died. Basically, this theory allows me to put a piece in a puzzle because it fits, not because the image on the piece makes me think it goes with the pieces next to the hole. Also, I get to write the following paragraph.
In a world where innocents are dying, where evil is winning and good people live in fear for their loved ones, one man had the courage to do what must be done. Aberforth Dumbledore is Narcissa’s Immolator.
Aberfoth kills his enemy’s wife, informs his brother of what he’s done, and then dies either at his own hand or, less style-consistently, his brother’s. He knows that his brother will take this atrocity/sacrifice and make the best of it, and in so doing he saved countless ‘light side’ family members.
He did it all to make up for killing his sister and allowing his brother to kind of take the blame. Maybe.
Also there is the fact (mentioned by someone else, sorry I forget who) that Narcissa’s sister, Bellatrix, murdered Bones’ brother. Edit: I am an idiot, you already mentioned this.
Bringing in Aberforth is a really interesting idea. Now that I think about it, even given the wizarding wars, it is remarkable that so many siblings have died or nearly died:
Albus/Aberforth
Bellatrix/Narcissa
Bones/her brother (who, exactly?)
Petunia/Lily
The last one is interesting with the role of survivor exchanged as well, since there is a hint that Petunia may have threatened suicide in order to convince Lily to brew the beauty potion.
Also, Bones is the one who speaks up to stop Dumbledore from “confessing” to killing Narcissa.
I think it’s Bones. Too many coincidences otherwise.
Eponymuse, I think I covered that with the word ‘vengeance.’
Those coincidences are otherwise satisfied by the fact that Bones’ motives are served by Narcissa’s Immolation, whoever did it. Given what we know about her, she’d act the same way if Dumbledore or Moody were Narcissa’s Immolator. Still, it does make some narrative sense for her be the one.
I am not at all confident that Aberforth was involved. I would like it very much, though, if someone could add something more to or take something away from the rickety scaffold propping this theory up.
Aberforth may have died just to emphasize the harshness of the war in ways the source did not. If that’s the case, I’m making a red herring out of a pointless bit of the set. However, there was nothing in the text that tells us that Aberforth was a tragic casualty of a meaningless war or anything of the sort. For now he looks, to me, like a gun on the mantle.
Sorry, apparently I’m illiterate.
Also, I guess “siblings getting killed” isn’t much of a pattern. Given that people were getting killed in the war, and that people have siblings, you can count the people getting killed as siblings.
It was meee. Also there’s the Bellatrix idea.
/shameless self-promotion
No, it’s Amelia herself in Chapter 56.
I don’t get it. Why did you quote my first link?
It has to be Dumbledore, by Conservation of Narrative Detail: There’s no way that the conditions of Harry’s promise to Draco would have been spelled out in such detail if learning the truth would be all it took to expiate it.
It’s going to turn out that Dumbledore did intentionally burn an innocent Narcissa Malfoy to death, but for a justifiable reason (though it’s going to be interesting to see what that could be), and thus Harry is going to have the impossible task of convincing Draco to let him out of the promise.
Other than my desire for Snape to kill Dumbledore, I don’t see any reason why HJPEV should talk Draco into letting him out of the promise.
It is more important to the themes of the work for HJPEV to follow through on a promise so dramatically given, than to shirk it. Likewise, it would be important for Dumbledore to face the consequences as administered by HJPEV.
You have an interesting point about the promise. It is awfully detailed for something that would just be set aside. Still, it could have been so detailed just to allow a semi-light character like HJPEV to bond with a semi-dark character like Draco. Or maybe to allow the author to demonstrate the practice of thinking things through, through HJPEV. Or, as the Pedant One points out, something else entirely.
Always be aware that there may be a possibility you haven’t thought of.
I disagree. The last part is an inference, and I think we have more evidence that the killing prevented any peace between Lucius and Dumbledore in Voldemort’s absence.
(I don’t know how much stress to put on this, but we learn that Draco thinks the death had this effect in the same chapter where he tells us to understand strange plots by looking at the outcomes. Seems at least 90% certain the author meant us to suspect Voldemort when he wrote that.)
Now, Donny just pointed out that Voldemort could have faked his death entirely by, say, transfiguring some chickens and burning them. We also know that his treatment of Bellatrix ensured her devotion to him would not count as a happy memory and would thus continue in Azkaban. I think he intended this effect, meaning he planned for the possibility of seeming to lose. It sounds like he planned for that from the start.
Setting fire to a chicken back in Chapter 17 should increase P(Dumbledore did it, and is a sadist). But supposedly DD’s weakness lies in doing evil “For the Greater Good,” not in having fond memories of the time he burned a woman to death. Seems more likely to me that he suspects Voldemort faked a burned body (per Donny’s guess), but can’t say so because he has no convincing explanation for why V hasn’t visibly acted since then. So he just taught Harry to doubt such appearances.
Should you take into account the possibility that the chicken was just something transfigured before increasing the probability of Dumbledore being a Sadist?
No, for a qualitative change in various probabilities we can ask if Dumbledore has unpleasant associations with burning—like a memory of something he wishes he didn’t (have to) do, or of a sad time for his family. These would reduce the chance that he sees “setting fire to a chicken” as clever.
Seems like a sadistic DD who killed Narcissa would enjoy alluding to this event, in a way that would disturb Harry without making him suspect the purpose behind it. But that seems to me like a more complicated hypothesis than a Dumbledore who shares Donny’s suspicions, given that DD looks like a ‘bad guy’ of a radically different kind.
Ok, I’m a bit lost here, I haven’t dealt with probabilties for several years and would like to find out where I was wrong. Please correct my reasoning:
P(Dumbledore did it \bigcap Dumbledore is a Sadist) =P (Dumbledore did it) x P(Dumbledore is a Sadist)
P(Dumbledore did it)=1-P(Dumbledore didn’t do it)
P(Dumbledore didn’t do it)=P(Dumbledore didn’t do it | He burned a real chicken) + P(Dumbledore didn’t do it | He burned something transfigured to be a chicken).
Now, we don’t know the probabilities P(He burned a real chicken) and P(He burned something transfigured to be a chicken), but it is something that has to be taken into account, isn’t it?
@your answer In your answer, you assume he did it. If he didn’t do it, he wouldn’t neccessarily have negative associations with burning, only with the fact of being thought to have burned her.
If I understand you correctly, your reasoning regarding unpleasant associations with burning already assumes that he did it.
If he didn’t do it (and we don’t know yet wether it was him or, for example, Amelia Bones), he wouldn’t have unpleasant associations with the method of Narcissa’s death, only with the fact that it was ascribed to him. So there is the possibility that he didn’t do it, and doesn’t have negative associations with burning that would be brought up when burning transfigured stones or tablecloth or whatever.
Interesting idea.
My pet theory for some time has been that Narcissa was a Horcrux, and that Dumbledore was destroying said Horcrux by the only means he could—Fiendfyre. Are there any obvious gaps?
(EDIT: pedantarrific below points one out.)
Yes: why would Dumbledore allow McGonagall to think that Voldemort only had one Horcrux?
This is a very good point.
Probably as much “not the headmaster’s style” to kill someone who happened to be a Horcrux so directly instead of weaving a complex plot to something, something, something, and then something else.
Canon seems to imply that living horcrux anchors can be killed normally to destroy the horcrux. (Magic apparently can’t actually fix death, and a horcrux is destroyed when the anchor is “damaged beyond magic repair”.)
I’m not sure MoR retains that, but it would be a huge game-breaker if it didn’t, and one that Voldie would have seen and taken advantage of: You could protect your army from all but a few arcane dark spells by having your minions horcrux each-other. Note that the rare Fiendfyre is mentioned as necessary to destroy a horcrux, but the much more common Avada Kedavra is not—which suggests that, if it were to work like that, horcruxing would make you invulnerable even to AK. (In other words, AK is not mentioned as one of the few horcrux-destroying spells because it only works on living people, and living horcruxes can be just killed normally instead of requiring advanced methods.)
Canon gave us an example of two living horcruxes (Nagini and Harry Potter), and for the former the same sword of Gryffindor that had been used to destroy other horcruxes was used, while for the latter the weird stipulation that Voldemort had to kill Harry Potter himself was added.
The latter especially didn’t make much sense… But either way I suggest we not be too sure of what is required to kill a living Horcrux in HPMoR.
While I’m no longer convinced of the Narcissa-was-a-Horcrux hypothesis, I don’t buy this argument. Even if Voldie thinks of it (which, okay, that part’s reasonable), it assumes that he needs an invincible army more than he needs to keep the idea of Horcruxes secret. This is wildly implausible. His non-invincible army was doing just fine.
Also, ArisKatsaris’ comment.
I’m not 100% convinced myself, it just seems likely. I won’t argue about the sword (nobody ever tried without it), canon is too fuzzy about the details and Eliezer explicitly said that he makes them up as he goes along.
About Voldie, if Horcruxes worked that way at the very least he would have thought to make himself the Horcrux of someone else, like Bella, just to gain the benefits as a back-up (even though he had horcruxes, reviving is a chore, and at least in MoR he’d be prepared against accidental defeat). And if I was him, I’d have at least my top followers horcrux a small object that I can easily destroy and that I can keep on me at all times (he had easy access to basilisk venom and magic pouches), and Obliviate them about the process to keep the secret. Of course, we have no indication he didn’t do that, except that a lot of his followers were killed and Fiendfyre is still considered rare.
But I still think such an effect would be too powerful for MoR, it’d basically remove anything but Fiendfyre and Basilisk-venom from the offensive options. (And it seems that Salazar’s basilisk might no longer available, though characteristically cannon seems to suggest that breeding a basilisk is ridiculously easy, just forbidden.) Also, if living Horcruxes are not killable by normal means, that would suggest that mean they don’t die of old age, either, which again would not quite fit.
I like this possibility, it furthermore postulates that Albus was confused for Aberforth which is very likely IMO.
When do you think Narcissa died? There’s, let’s see, seventeen months between Draco’s birth and Voldemort’s “death”, right? I had assumed it happened afterwards.
Sorry to quote the same passage at you twice, but the best we have for dating this other than the necessary birth of Draco is in chapter 56.
I don’t have a quote to back me, just now, but don’t the common folk regard the death of Voldemort as the end of the war? (That’s insensitive to Neville’s parents, of course, but there it is.)
I hadn’t thought that was evidence either way, since apparently no one but the Death Eaters believed that Dumbledore actually did it.