Voldemort succeeds in killing Harry.
Thanks to the protection from Harry’s sacrifice, and the fact that Voldemort’s now mortal, another reasonably talented wizard should be able to kill Voldemort.
Ideally, Snape uses the Elder Wand to defeat Voldemort, thereby clearing his name.
So let’s say Harry does not survive the sacrifice. Upsetting though that would be, Dumbledore has planned for this possibility. If Harry ends up dying, his sacrifice should offer protection for all those on the side of good. Therefore, any of Harry’s allies could take up the fight against Voldemort, and since they will be protected from Voldemort’s magic, it’s reasonable to assume they would be able to defeat Voldemort.
This does not even clash with what the prophecy says—namely, that Harry is the “one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord.” (OP841) In this scenario, Harry was the one with the ability to protect the world from Voldemort, empowering someone else to actually do the vanquishing. And in this case, Harry is the one who dies at the hand of Voldemort, so the prophecy still works out.
Dumbledore must have prepared people for this eventuality, no doubt by telling the most powerful of his allies (like McGonagall and Kingsley) something along the lines of, “Harry will be the one to defeat Voldemort. However, should Harry die, it falls to you to kill Voldemort.” At the very least, Dumbledore told Snape this, and he ensured that Snape should be well equipped to kill Voldemort by making Snape the master of the Elder Wand (see Plan A).
If Snape is to be the one to kill Voldemort, he would have had to rely on nothing more than his own prodigious skill. Snape does not have all of the magical protections that Harry has against Voldemort; including a wand imbued with Fawkes’s tailfeathers for a core, Harry’s enormous courage, and Voldemort’s own deadly skill (DH711). So Dumbledore plans to give him the next best thing: the most powerful wand in existence. We’ve discussed the conflicting language before, but I think it clear that Dumbledore (at some point) intended Snape to have the Elder Wand, so Snape could be the one to defeat Voldemort should Harry fail. This is supported by the following exchange:
“[Y]ou meant [Snape] to end up with the Elder Wand, didn’t you?”
“I admit that was my intention,” said Dumbledore (DH721)
This is the first change of plans Dumbledore has regarding the Elder Wand, given that Dumbledore originally meant to die without having the power of the Elder Wand transfer to anyone else. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Dumbledore not living to see the Voldemort War conclude certainly qualifies. This is the first change of plans, made in the beginning of HBP, but it will not be the last.
The plan for Snape to master the Elder Wand shows just how much faith Dumbledore had in him. He essentially painted a bulls-eye on Snape’s back when he conceived of this plan. Dumbledore says he knew Voldemort would go after the Elder Wand (DH721), as soon as he realized that a borrowed wand would not work against Harry’s wand. In other words, after the very next time Harry and Voldemort interacted, Voldemort would set out to get the Elder Wand.
Dumbledore knows that Voldemort cannot resist magical MacGuffins when they present themselves (see: Sorcerer’s Stone, prophecy). Dumbledore would surely not underestimate Voldemort’s intelligence and ability to figure out that Snape was the wand’s master.37 So he put his faith in two things: in keeping Harry away from Voldemort, and in hoping that Snape had enough cunning to keep himself alive once Voldemort does set out on the quest.
As mirrormere astutely pointed out in “The Flaw in the Plan,” that first objective could help explain the reasoning behind the wholly idiotic Seven Potters plan—send Voldemort on a wild goose chase after the wrong Harry (gee, sounds familiar) to prevent him finding out that borrowed wands don’t work.38 The second part—believing Snape can stay alive once Voldemort’s on the trail—speaks volumes to how highly Dumbledore thinks of Snape’s abilities and cunning. But if it were me, I’d forego compliments that come with a death sentence.
This all seems to me the most reckless part of Dumbledore’s plan. As previously mentioned, all his plans hinged on keeping two people alive through the war: Harry and Snape. And while he did his utmost to keep Harry alive, he seemingly trusted that Snape would be able to stay alive despite overwhelming odds. This was perhaps his most serious misjudgment, and it was only chance that ended up saving the day at the end.
On the upside, this plan would have offered Snape a chance for redemption should he live long enough to see it through. If Snape defeated Voldemort using the Elder Wand, he would be hailed as a hero by the good side, who would then forgive him for killing Dumbledore. Perhaps this was Dumbledore’s small gesture of atonement for the hell he had just sentenced Snape to by requesting Snape kill him—a year of loneliness and exile, devoted to keeping the students as safe as he could with no one but Dumbledore’s portrait to talk to.
There is also some beautiful mirroring happening here: if Draco were to fail to kill Dumbledore on Voldemort’s orders, Snape would kill Dumbledore for him (as, indeed, he did.) If Harry were to fail to kill Voldemort on Dumbledore’s orders, Snape would kill Voldemort for him. Either way, Snape gets an awful lot of responsibility and risk thrust upon him.
So Dumbledore has his overarching plan ready, and can be reasonably confident in Voldemort’s downfall whether Harry lives or not. He prepares Harry to hunt the Horcruxes, and even enlists Ron and Hermione as backups should the unthinkable happen. Thus far, it’s all been perfectly logical. Now all he has to do is set the stage for Harry to sacrifice himself. But this is where Dumbledore’s emotions got in the way, and he started messing with his plan.
Dumbledore the Machiavellian
Before we continue with Dumbledore’s plans, we need to talk about his character. Because all this talk of sacrificing Harry and endangering Snape is a very stark departure from the Dumbledore of the previous books, who was “white as his beard.” (DH25) How can this be the same wizard who goes through a lot of hassle to save a condemned hippogriff, who does his best to protect everyone? These are the two Dumbledores I have trouble reconciling.
The death count in the first six books is so comparatively low because Dumbledore works for the good of everyone, rather than for the greater good. . . but in Deathly Hallows that’s turned on its head. In fact, Jo signals this to us in the first twenty pages of the book, buried in Elphias Doge’s sappy obituary: “He died as he lived: working always for the greater good.” (DH20) Of course, we as readers interpret this in the benevolent way that Elphias intended, but it foreshadows much of what we come to learn later about Dumbledore.
The deconstruction of the “wise old mentor” archetype in Deathly Hallows remains some of Jo’s finest work. It’s the culmination of a thread running through the latter half of the series: part of growing up is realizing that grown-ups are only human. James Potter and Sirius Black are both knocked off their pedestals. And in the final book, Dumbledore comes crashing down from the biggest pedestal of all.
Dumbledore does not become a villain for a simple reason: given the chance, he will save everyone. That’s what reinforces our original impression of Dumbledore in the first six books as one of the ultimate good guys. Dumbledore works tirelessly against Voldemort and to help Harry. The things he does are what’s right, no question about it. And that’s because he is fortunate enough not to have to make tough choices back then between the greater good and what’s good for individuals.
But Deathly Hallows presents us with a spectacularly different issue: what happens when there’s a very real human cost to the greater good? Voldemort’s resurrection is the turning point: with him back in action, it’s no longer possible to tie things up in a neat bow for all the good guys. We suddenly realize that Dumbledore is not working to help every single person; rather, he is now sacrificing individuals for the good of all. And this is a much harder pill to swallow.
The first indication we have is Dumbledore’s ruthlessness in keeping up the ruse of the prophecy i
n Order of the Phoenix. For those in fandom, that flew under the radar as we busily debated prophecies and Horcruxes and Snape until the last book came out. And talk of Severus Snape. . . while I hold no great love for him, one paragraph of his dialogue rings unpleasantly true on this topic:
“You have used me. [. . .] I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter—” (DH687)
This is it in a nutshell. Dumbledore manipulated Harry only so Harry could (maybe) die when needed; he ruthlessly used Snape’s love for Lily to employ Snape as a spy, lying to Snape the entire time about why, and then made Snape a pariah by convincing Snape to kill him. All of this is done elegantly and with impressive ruthlessness, leaving those of us who idolized Dumbledore in quite the moral quandary.
Lorrie Kim makes the point: “Snape had never asked why Dumbledore was protecting Harry.” (SNAPE278) In that sense, Snape is suddenly (and bizarrely) the audience surrogate in this scene. Readers, too, never thought to ask why Dumbledore would want to protect Harry—in all the millions of words written analyzing the series before the final book, that question never came up. And that leaves us feeling as betrayed as Severus did at the revelation.
Sure, there is an argument to be made for the necessity of what Dumbledore did, because all of these actions are about bringing Voldemort down. But it’s chilling, how much Dumbledore was willing to sacrifice to bring about Voldemort’s downfall.
One line Dumbledore says to Harry in Order of the Phoenix, when viewed in this light, takes on some sinister layers of meaning: “[Voldemort] hoped, when he possessed you briefly a short while ago, that I would sacrifice you in the hope of killing him.” (OP828)
The scary thing is: Voldemort was right. Dumbledore would not have sacrificed Harry in that moment, because he knew it would be ineffective to try killing Voldemort while Horcruxes were out there. But Dumbledore intended to make that move eventually. For all that Dumbledore makes of Voldemort not understanding love, Voldemort was absolutely correct in his estimation that Dumbledore would sacrifice Harry to kill Voldemort.
Jo sums it up best:
“Although [Dumbledore] seems to be so benign for six books, he's quite a Machiavellian figure, really. He's been pulling a lot of strings. Harry has been his puppet. When Snape says to Dumbledore, ‘We've been protecting [Harry] so he could die at the right moment'—I don't think in Book One you would have ever envisioned a moment where your sympathy would be with Snape rather than Dumbledore.” 39
For those unfamiliar with Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, “Machiavellian” is “the view that politics is amoral and that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used.” In simpler terms: the ends justify the means—which describes Dumbledore’s actions perfectly.
It can be argued that Dumbledore is being utilitarian here, that he is just trying to make things as good as possible for as many people as possible. And for his utilitarian ends, he will sacrifice anything and anyone. . . including himself. Hardcore fans tend to bring up the parallel between Dumbledore’s death in HBP and the chess match in Sorcerer’s Stone. Ron, the black knight (Dumbledore), sacrifices himself by allowing the white queen (Snape) to kill him. This leaves the opportunity for Harry to defeat the white king (Voldemort) (SS283).40
I think this is a moot point, because Dumbledore does not choose to die when he could have lived. Ever since the Ringcrux’s curse affected Dumbledore, he knew he would die within a year. As we’ve discussed, he nearly runs out the clock on this: the night he actually dies, eleven months are already up, and he is weakened from a nasty potion.41 Even if by some odd chance he survived the battle against all the Death Eaters, he would still die within a month. So although his death will be for the greater good, he still chooses a death that would be quick and painless for him, and we don’t know fully how self-sacrificing he really is.
In fact, here Dumbledore is taking a page right out of The Prince: “Those [cruelties] may be called properly used, if of evil it is possible to speak well, that are applied at one blow and are necessary to one's security, and that are not persisted in afterwards.” (Chapter VIII)42 Lorrie Kim, in SNAPE: A Definitive Reading, connected this quote and the “cruelties” to Dark magic, and to Dumbledore’s request that Snape kill him (SNAPE211).
“[Severus,] you alone know whether it will harm your soul to help an old man avoid pain and humiliation. [. . .] I confess I should prefer a quick, painless exit to the protracted and messy affair it will be if, for instance, Greyback is involved. [. . .] Or dear Bellatrix, who likes to play with her food before she eats it.” (DH683)
Kim uses this as evidence that Snape is the titular Prince, since he will be the one using a Killing Curse as necessary. But since the idea is Dumbledore’s, since the Killing Curse is necessary to his security, I take it as further evidence that Dumbledore is the Prince.
I don’t believe Dumbledore would have sacrificed himself for the cause. Alive, Dumbledore is just about the greatest asset that the side of good has. Therefore, by Machiavellian reasoning, Dumbledore should stay alive at all costs, except perhaps if there’s a choice between Harry and Dumbledore. But it never came to that, and Dumbledore sure seems Machiavellian through and through.
In fact, the identity of The Prince of the HP series was one of Jo’s cleverest red herrings. When Half-Blood Prince was released, the answer seemed obvious: the Half-Blood Prince was the duplicitous Snape, who must have been clearly modeled on Machiavelli’s Prince. Many an article was written about that; the best to my memory were Andrew Cooper’s and B.J. Texan’s, both titled “Machiavelli’s Half-Blood Prince.” The theories were very compelling, and “guy out for himself and playing everybody” served as a very appealing third option to “good guy” or “bad guy.” But this was an instance of Jo’s misdirection at its finest, because how wrong we all were!
In the fandom’s defense, part of Snape’s character was derived from The Prince. The only issue is that Snape was not based on Machiavelli’s titular prince but rather on a historical prince who gets a passing mention in Machiavelli’s book, Chapter XIX.43 However, Severus is featured in only three paragraphs of Machiavelli’s treatise, so this is not the be-all-end-all answer to relating the two texts. Because going through Machiavelli’s instructions, Snape does not follow them at all, whereas Dumbledore does to a T. Here are some of the more salient examples:
“Chapter XIX: That One Should Avoid Being Despised or Hated.”
Chapter XIX states that “a prince should guard himself as from a rock” against being “mean-spirited”
Chapter XVIII advises, “Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. [. . .] to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.”
Dumbledore has a sterling reputation among those who are anti-Voldemort. He is unfailingly considerate and sympathetic. Dumbledore appears to be the great champion of good and to have all these admirable qualities, yet he is willing and able to cast those things aside when necessary.44
In his superb essay, Andrew Cooper lays out Machiavelli’s advice in layman’s terms. He writes,
[T]he prince's wisdom must allow him to be noble and virtuous so as to be good and respected, but must also know when and how to be shrewd and forceful. [. . .] The prince must be accountable to no one other than himself, and choose company wisely. He must be unreadable and impenetrable, guarded in advice and true to his word. He must be strong yet cunning, bold yet secretive.
Reading that paragraph, it matches up perfectly with everything we know of Dumbledore. Dumbledore was good and respected, yet he could be shrewd and forceful. Dumbledore is accountable to no one else, as we find out when the Ministry tries to rein him in and
Dumbledore responds with cheerful disdain. Dumbledore is unreadable and impenetrable (hence I’m writing this book). Dumbledore is strong, cunning, bold, and (above all) secretive. Check, check, and an emphatic check all around.
In truth, it would appear that the fandom got a bit overeager with connecting The Prince to the Half-Blood Prince.45 The Prince was a treatise on how to be an effective leader, which Snape never aspired to be. The key to Snape’s character is that he is an agent of leaders, a double agent at that. Over time, “Machiavellian” came to be simplified to reflect anyone who was ruthless and believed the ends justified the means; but it really applies primarily in the context of leadership. So while Snape may be the Half-Blood Prince, inspired by Emperor Severus as described by Machiavelli, Dumbledore is truly Machiavelli’s Prince.
What Was He Thinking?
We have now veered from a saintly Dumbledore to a completely ruthless one, but that is not the full story, as we’re about to see upon further examination of Dumbledore’s master plans. We have already nitpicked at a few of Dumbledore’s more questionable decisions preparing Harry and Snape for their final moves in the war. But as anyone who has devoted hours to discussing Deathly Hallows knows, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Unlike the other books, where things happen for a reason by and large, Deathly Hallows seems to be teeming with coincidences that ricochet off each other, with things then working out through sheer dumb luck. It’s certainly made my job here much harder than it was for previous books.
One thing in particular does not seem to add up. Considering how desperate Dumbledore was to see Voldemort defeated, considering the prices he was willing to pay to see it done, it just seems like he should have been much more thorough about it. At first glance, he seemed to leave an awful lot to chance. . . and that’s not the Dumbledore we know.
The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore Page 12
