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usually don't do theories because I like to be right and there's a good chance I won't be, but this came to me this morning and I'm sticking it out here, long before Book 7, where everyone will have a chance to forget it if it's wrong, but I can still smugly link to it in the small chance it's right.
It's about that locket, the one that Harry and Dumbledore find in the Bird Bath of Death but turns out not to be the real Slytherin Horcrux!Locket but a fake left with a "nyah nyah" note by one RAB. Fandom seems to have decided that RAB is Regulus Black and the real locket is that one the gang found in OotP at Grimmauld Place and couldn't open.
That makes a lot of sense to me, and my theory assumes that that is true, which of course it might not be. My theory, building on that, is this. When Dumbledore first comes to see Harry in HBP he tells him Sirius left a will, and that Grimmauld Place is now his. Now, we assume that the horcruxes being tracked down and destroyed will be the plot of Book 7, so we're talking about a big scavenger hunt. Things should presumably stand in the way of all the objects, so it's a puzzle. The locket is the object we already know we have to find, and there are already hints in HBP about the things that might stand in our way, namely that Mundungus may have stolen and pawned that locket.
But here's another thought. When Dumbledore tells Harry about the will he also says that he's not sure if the will is going to hold up, because knowing the Blacks, there's a good chance they might have some enchantment on the house so that it will rightfully pass to the eldest living Black, Bellatrix, no matter who Sirius wants to leave it to. He calls Kreacher to test if Harry can give him orders. Harry can give him orders, which not only means the house is his, and that Sirius "knew what he was doing" (perhaps knowing all about those types of spells, as a Black) but that Dumbledore has just given us information that went nowhere--for now. There was no reason for Dumbledore to give us that information plot-wise, yet. That test with Kreacher wasn't necessary to get Kreacher to Hogwarts. Dumbledore could easily have just said oh, and Harry you've also inherited Kreacher (pop!), maybe you should send him to Hogwarts. Then Harry could do that. The scene would be just as funny, certainly. I think that whole "test" idea could be there to lay the groundwork for a future test of the same type that somebody fails.
Since Dumbledore *did* suggest that kind of enchantment, I think it may come into play on that locket. If Regulus is the one who stole the locket and took it back to Grimmauld Place, *he* may have placed that kind of enchantment on it. Perhaps that is why no one could open it in OotP--the diary seemed to have no such spell on it (though of course Voldemort could have gotten more paranoid with later objects).
If that locket has a Black spell on it, that leaves a few people who are Blacks to open it: Sirius, Tonks, Narcissa, Bellatrix and Draco. Sirius was considered a traitor by his family, and there's good reason to believe there was no love lost between him and Regulus, so Regulus may not have considered Sirius a Black and not given him access to the locket. That leaves Tonks, but Tonks is a half-blood, and Regulus seems to have ascribed to "Pureblood Mania." Perhaps he'd turned against Voldemort, but he might still automatically rule out half-bloods.
That leaves the locket possibly being opened by Bella, Cissy (I love calling her Cissy) or Draco, all of whom make more dramatic sense because there's a good chance they won't do what our guys want, unlike Tonks. Bella obviously wouldn't do it. That leaves either Narcissa opening it to save Draco or vice-versa. I think Draco is obviously the more dramatic choice. It gives him something to actually do to save his family and himself. It would do something to make up for the pain he caused in HBP, even if it was under duress. Also, it much more neatly ties up the hints in OotP about having to work with Slytherin (which Harry thought was impossible because that meant Malfoy), and it would give a Slytherin a chance to change the character of that house. Voldemort used Slytherin's locket for his own purposes, so this would be a good way of symbolically showing that Slytherin=/=Volemort.
After all, the one other Founder thing we know of is the cup of Hufflepuff, and there's a possibility this might mean working with Zacharias, if only because it was owned by a Smith who claimed to be a Hufflepuff relation, and HBP made a point of stepping up the Zacharias Hate. Not that I think both stories (locket and cup) would be too similar, but they might need some information from Zach about his family history or some such.
Anyway, so that's my main theory, that House of Black is important to the story in the form of Regulus and that type of enchantment that Dumbledore described in HBP. One thing that always seemed really clear to me in OotP was that we should *not* take Sirius' words at face value in that chapter. He'd dismissed his family outright and assumed anything they did that didn't seem wasn't completely evil was a fake. His story about his brother already seems like it could be totally off. But also, it was Sirius' family that killed him, and just as it makes sense to "heal the house of Hogwarts" by having the houses sort of come together, so it would also be nice to "heal the house of Black" by using one of its "grey" members to finish Regulus' job and thus do something for Sirius.
ETA: I totally forgot Andromeda! Though she, too, may be out of the question for being a blood traitor.
It's about that locket, the one that Harry and Dumbledore find in the Bird Bath of Death but turns out not to be the real Slytherin Horcrux!Locket but a fake left with a "nyah nyah" note by one RAB. Fandom seems to have decided that RAB is Regulus Black and the real locket is that one the gang found in OotP at Grimmauld Place and couldn't open.
That makes a lot of sense to me, and my theory assumes that that is true, which of course it might not be. My theory, building on that, is this. When Dumbledore first comes to see Harry in HBP he tells him Sirius left a will, and that Grimmauld Place is now his. Now, we assume that the horcruxes being tracked down and destroyed will be the plot of Book 7, so we're talking about a big scavenger hunt. Things should presumably stand in the way of all the objects, so it's a puzzle. The locket is the object we already know we have to find, and there are already hints in HBP about the things that might stand in our way, namely that Mundungus may have stolen and pawned that locket.
But here's another thought. When Dumbledore tells Harry about the will he also says that he's not sure if the will is going to hold up, because knowing the Blacks, there's a good chance they might have some enchantment on the house so that it will rightfully pass to the eldest living Black, Bellatrix, no matter who Sirius wants to leave it to. He calls Kreacher to test if Harry can give him orders. Harry can give him orders, which not only means the house is his, and that Sirius "knew what he was doing" (perhaps knowing all about those types of spells, as a Black) but that Dumbledore has just given us information that went nowhere--for now. There was no reason for Dumbledore to give us that information plot-wise, yet. That test with Kreacher wasn't necessary to get Kreacher to Hogwarts. Dumbledore could easily have just said oh, and Harry you've also inherited Kreacher (pop!), maybe you should send him to Hogwarts. Then Harry could do that. The scene would be just as funny, certainly. I think that whole "test" idea could be there to lay the groundwork for a future test of the same type that somebody fails.
Since Dumbledore *did* suggest that kind of enchantment, I think it may come into play on that locket. If Regulus is the one who stole the locket and took it back to Grimmauld Place, *he* may have placed that kind of enchantment on it. Perhaps that is why no one could open it in OotP--the diary seemed to have no such spell on it (though of course Voldemort could have gotten more paranoid with later objects).
If that locket has a Black spell on it, that leaves a few people who are Blacks to open it: Sirius, Tonks, Narcissa, Bellatrix and Draco. Sirius was considered a traitor by his family, and there's good reason to believe there was no love lost between him and Regulus, so Regulus may not have considered Sirius a Black and not given him access to the locket. That leaves Tonks, but Tonks is a half-blood, and Regulus seems to have ascribed to "Pureblood Mania." Perhaps he'd turned against Voldemort, but he might still automatically rule out half-bloods.
That leaves the locket possibly being opened by Bella, Cissy (I love calling her Cissy) or Draco, all of whom make more dramatic sense because there's a good chance they won't do what our guys want, unlike Tonks. Bella obviously wouldn't do it. That leaves either Narcissa opening it to save Draco or vice-versa. I think Draco is obviously the more dramatic choice. It gives him something to actually do to save his family and himself. It would do something to make up for the pain he caused in HBP, even if it was under duress. Also, it much more neatly ties up the hints in OotP about having to work with Slytherin (which Harry thought was impossible because that meant Malfoy), and it would give a Slytherin a chance to change the character of that house. Voldemort used Slytherin's locket for his own purposes, so this would be a good way of symbolically showing that Slytherin=/=Volemort.
After all, the one other Founder thing we know of is the cup of Hufflepuff, and there's a possibility this might mean working with Zacharias, if only because it was owned by a Smith who claimed to be a Hufflepuff relation, and HBP made a point of stepping up the Zacharias Hate. Not that I think both stories (locket and cup) would be too similar, but they might need some information from Zach about his family history or some such.
Anyway, so that's my main theory, that House of Black is important to the story in the form of Regulus and that type of enchantment that Dumbledore described in HBP. One thing that always seemed really clear to me in OotP was that we should *not* take Sirius' words at face value in that chapter. He'd dismissed his family outright and assumed anything they did that didn't seem wasn't completely evil was a fake. His story about his brother already seems like it could be totally off. But also, it was Sirius' family that killed him, and just as it makes sense to "heal the house of Hogwarts" by having the houses sort of come together, so it would also be nice to "heal the house of Black" by using one of its "grey" members to finish Regulus' job and thus do something for Sirius.
ETA: I totally forgot Andromeda! Though she, too, may be out of the question for being a blood traitor.
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I wonder if a disillusioned-with-the-Death-Eaters Regulus went to her, originally, as someone who was nearly neutral ground.
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I'm thinking- re the anachronism of the locket- that it's what's *inside* the locket that's the horcrux, and protected by it.
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Definitely, though, the horcrux could be in the locket--the ring may have been the same idea.
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Or an adopted family member...
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Oh, man, I had to read that sentence TWICE just to make sure I'd read what I thought I'd read, but it made my LIFE.
Incidentally, I found the perfect icon for it in someone's journal the other day....*points*
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Yes! Utterly perfect!
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It's like fandom acted out by Kreacher and Dobby, and naturally Dobby is pummelling Kreacher when we meet him, offering to shut his mouth for him, when Kreacher is like a thousand years old.:-)
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ROTFLMAO
That's hilarious, and OH, so true.
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Ahahah. <3
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Harry is so doomed. Who can resist fine bones, graceful walk and shiny sleek blond hair?
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Draco for the locket...I so need this.
Are there any clues for Ravenclaw?
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Will they all need to die?
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My question is: of the 4 remaining Horcruxes, why is only one of the unidentified ones from a House? I mean, why only *either* a Ravenclaw *or* a Gryffindor item?
Besides, surely the last Horcrux is in the Sword of Gryffindor, and the reason Voldemort visited Dumbledore in his office was that he was inserting his bit of soul into the sword during that meeting? Or was it not yet in the office? (I can't remember.)
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The cup seems likely, if he was going for Founder connections. Nagini, as Dumbledore mentions, would be a poor choice. Dumbledore says that if Voldemort was dying and used the nearest thing to him it could be her, but I think that was Harry. On the other hand he does seem to have a strong bond with her.
I'm with you on your theory, if only because the last book needs to introduce interhouse unity without them being at school.
Could the last Horcrux be the sorting hat? It would neatly include all four founders, and, since the hat itself has doubts about its job, its destruction might be a good thing.
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Dumbledore's identification of Nagini is a mistake. Voldemort was barely back in the physical world at that point and i think that he was too weak to create a Horcrux until after he re-incarnated himself at the end of GoF.
Besides; merely murdering someone does not create a Horcrux. It messes with your soul, but in itself it doesn't peel off a piece so you can secure it into an object. A simple AK won't do it. And we've mostly just assumed that Harry survived the AK. But if Voldemort did intend to create a Horcrux with the death of his "appointed enemy", what he threw at Harry was not a simple AK, and he had already brought an object with him to hold the soul fragment.
However, when the spell *found* a victim, it wasn't the one that Voldemort expected. His soul got a piece sliced off it when it left his living body and he was in no condition to direct where it went. I doubt that the Horcrux is Harry himself, but It has a good chance of being the curse scar.
Most unfortunately, the false lead on Nagini suggests that Harry will be face to face with the enemy before he discovers this.
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But, yeah, I suspect that the people who are now theorizing that the scavenger hunt is going to include some hunting through Hogwarts may be right.
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Harry pulled it out of a hat; it could have been anywhere before that. If it was a Horcrux, Harry bypassed the necessity of going through the curse to get it, made redundant one of Voldemort's masterful spells, just because he's a true Gryffindor, according to Dumbledore. (Dumbledore says that only a true Gryffindor could pull that out of a hat.) Which, if it were true, would hold really interesting implications, and also support the idea that only a real Black - a true Black, which = a true Slytherin, which Draco totally is - would be able to access the Horcrux!locket.
Hm.
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Look, you don't suppose this could be a honking great CLUE could you? All the horcruces (and how I do hate fantasies that degenerate into "Collect the complete set of Artefacts of Doom and trade them in for guaranteed world domination!" It was one of the things that put me off The Dark Is Rising - plus, the poem in that wasnm't actually much better objectively than the one about Odo, and we were supposed to take the Susan Cooper one seriously) are in fact concealed in or around naff garden ornaments and furniture! The Garden Gnome of Gnostic Gnastiness, the Heron of Hellish Horribilitude, the Vomiting Concrete Otters (this was a real garden ornament I met in Peterhead, Scotland. I wanted to steal it and use it for the sign for a pub named after it)...
A nasty thought, but then we are talking about a Dark Wizard whose maternal ancestors were sorely in need of a visit from the Extreme Makeover team, so natural taste is clearly not carried on his genes.
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Still, I would have been inclined to guess that the person who took it *did* destroy it. After all that, it would be so frightful not to complete the task. Can we be sure he didn't?
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*moves back to lurkerdom, brain still spinning* I love the first roughly two months after new canon. Everything is shiny and new and different on every level.
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The whole bit about Regulus getting "cold feet" or whatever, as if his desertion was more cowardice than legitimate qualms, has never sat right with me. I would like to see it portrayed otherwise.
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Oooh, I like that idea. I hadn't considered it before, but it does make sense. But how distant does the bloodtie have to be? I mean, Ron has ties to the Black family, could he (or Ginny or one of the other Weasleys, for that matter) open the locket? And does the name matter at all? It was only the issue of a different name that kept Draco from inheriting the Black family fortunes and whathaveyou.
I definately think that somehow the four Houses will have to be linked again, and I wonder which of the characters will be the ones to represent the different Houses. Harry for Gryffindor seems obvious, and Draco for Slytherin as well. Zacharias for Hufflepuff, given not only the last name tie to the cup (as there are a lot of Smiths) but the similarities of first names as well, shows him for a likely canidate. And for Ravenclaw, Cho perhaps? I'd imagine it would be someone of their year, but I can't think of any other Ravenclaw who's played such a major role.
Either way, you've brought up some interesting points and as always, it's a joy to read them. HBP is wonderful. It's made debating all of these things fun again.
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Also, I forgot to say in the last post that I thought of you when I saw the word "magpie" in HBP. :) Just letting you know.
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Me too. Was laughing out loud actually because of the context in which magpie was brough up, though good-naturally of course :)
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But by stealing the locket in the first place, not to mention revolting against the Dark Lord, would Regulus be in a position to judge Sirius as a traitor to the family? Furthermore, he had to have been aware that at least two other Blacks in the family were loyal Death Eaters (Narcissa and Bellatrix), so putting an enchantment that is safe only to Blacks seems more hazardous than prudent; I mean, Regulus had to have known that he would not be looked on kindly by the rest of his family (if not his immediate family, at least by his cousins) for deserting the Dark Lord. He also had to have known that (at the time) if either Bella or Cissy got their hands on the locket, they'd take it straight back to Voldemort.
Sammy
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Personally I find that far too inhibiting a rule ;) but I don't know if you have to worry -- this sounds really persuasive. I like both the ideas of the locket being one of three or four similar cases -- so that Harry has to use his persuasive powers to get a representative of each House to help with their Horcrux -- and that it offers a chance for a dramatic commitment by Draco, who may have a unique ability to open the locket. This is a very fun theory.
Although I wonder a little about how the Kreacher example applies -- if Harry is Sirius' legitimate heir and has power over things belonging to the Blacks, wouldn't that give him the power to open the locket? Maybe especially after he has asserted ownership by recovering it from Mundungus? The protective charm that Dumbledore speculates about seems to apply to the whole inheritance (with Kreacher as a part standing in for the whole for test purposes) rather than part by part. But who knows?
In any case I really like the idea of, say, Draco being the key to both healing the house of Black and healing the rift at Hogwarts. He is certainly being set up as the last legitimate Black descendent, depending on what we think of Remus/Tonks.
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ahahaha, crackpot theories, how I love you.
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i was thinking that Zacharias Smith is probably a distant relative of Helga Hufflepuff, and helping Harry, Ron and Hermione find the cup would be a way for him to redeem himself (at least i can't help but think that he'll have some sort of role in Book 7--i don't think that JKR is quite done with him yet)...
and if a member of the Black family was necessary to help open up the locket, what with Sirius and Regulus now both dead and having left behind no children, i think that it would be perfect if Draco Malfoy were able to step in and help Harry and the rest with this task.
Andromeda and/or Tonks would just be too easy, and i think that both Bellatrix and Narcissa would rather die a slow death from "Sectumsempra" than help anyone against the Dark Lord...
but we've seen that Draco in future could be a liability for Voldemort and the Death Eaters, so if he were in any way able to slip away from them, it would be wonderful if he could help destroy Slytherin's locket, as Zacharias could help find Hufflepuff's cup.
and, um, let's see...
as far as i can recall throughout the series, Marietta Edgecombe is the only Ravenclaw who would really need to redeem herself in the trio's (and the readers') eyes, so it would be perfect if she turned out to be a distant relative of Rowena Ravenclaw, and helped our heroes find that heirloom.
(and i'm one of those people who don't believe that Nagini is the final horcrux, but that Harry's scar is, and that he's the last descendant of Godric Gryffindor through his father's side, and so in a way, Voldemort's final horcrux is something that remains of Godric Gryffindor.)
you have awesome theories, and you have me speculating in the right direction, i think.:-)
hope you don't mind if i come back for more.
have a nice day.
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