Deathly Hallows: Page 472
Voldemort's virtual connection to the Dark Mark system, bad work/life balance in Death Eater culture, what Grindelwald's future might look like, and what Voldemort could learn from Joe Biden.
Good morning, all…today we cover page 472 of Deathly Hallows, which sees all kinds of trio shenanigans. Why doesn’t Voldemort just turn off the Dark Mark system when he doesn’t want to be disturbed? It’s that kind of morning. Enjoy, and if you enjoy, subscribe!
Page 472 of Deathly Hallows gets off to a satisfying start: the trio is at Malfoy Manor, and the page starts right at the beginning of a fresh action sequence. It’s a new paragraph as the page begins:
At once, Harry’s scar felt as if it had split open again.
Clearly, there’s some action to come. Harry is immediately transported away, into Voldemort’s mind, and we see that Voldemort is at Nurmengard interrogating Grindelwald. He’s “enraged” to feel the Dark Mark burn: he’s told the Death Eaters to summon him for absolutely nothing less than the capture of Harry Potter himself.
Here’s the thing: Voldemort doesn’t have his own Dark Mark. We see as much in book four, when he needs to use Wormtail’s mark to summon the Death Eaters after he’s reborn. So whatever connects Voldemort to the whole Dark Mark network isn’t physical; it’s strictly mental. So Voldemort must have some sort of Dark Mark bell going off in his mind. It’s a tense situation, but it’s funny to think about: Voldemort is yelling at a hundred-year-old Grindelwald about the Elder Wand, and suddenly there’s a little ping in his mind that someone touched a Dark Mark again.
Also, Voldemort is in charge of the whole Dark Mark notification system, so you’d think he would just mute it for a few minutes. Getting this one little summons, we see later on the page, basically drives him insane and completely ruins his interrogation, and he’s already told the Death Eaters that they should think really hard before summoning him, so why not just mute it? He’s basically done the Wizarding equivalent of sending out an office-wide email saying “I’ll be on vacation with my family next weekend; I won’t have access to my work email, so the only way to reach me will be my personal home phone number.” And yet, he refuses to actually mute the whole system for a while and just take his time for himself. Face it, Voldemort: you’re just too attached to your work.
There are all sorts of funny ways to take advantage of this, honestly. Like, using Snape’s dark mark, or if the trio was ever able to somehow gain control of a Death Eater’s body, they could apparate to somewhere really inconvenient — say, Best Buy on Black Friday — and summon Voldemort there, and leave immediately, and leave Voldemort to figure out what in the world was happening while dodging dozens of people trying to get to the TVs. Voldemort’s downfall, in the end, is his overreach in pursuing immortality, but it would be way funnier if the thing that ultimately brought him down was burnout, brought on by an out-of-whack work/life balance.
Back at Nurmengard, Voldemort’s annoyance is compounded by Grindelwald, who says:
“Kill me, then! You will not win, you cannot win! That wand will never, ever be yours—"
Not to get too far off track, but this whole tiny sequence at Nurmengard has some pretty huge implications for the Fantastic Beasts series. Grindelwald, apparently, is now pro-Harry and Dumbledore, and anti-Voldemort. Clearly, something between 1929 or so and 1998 turned him. Dumbledore says later on that he’s simply gotten remorseful, but that’s still a pretty big deal. If Grindelwald gets remorseful during the Fantastic Beasts series, it could play a major role in how Dumbledore and Newt eventually manage to defeat him. At the very least, it’s an indication that his character is far more conflicted and emotionally complicated than he displays. Grindelwald seems very comfortable with his plans for a Wizarding takeover of the world, but it seems — based on what we’ve seen so far and what we know if his history with Dumbledore, but especially on this sequence — that he might not feel as good about what he’s doing as he displays to his followers.
The only question is whether Grindelwald’s remorse is for his actions generally, or more targeted at Dumbledore. The answer is probably the latter: that Grindelwald, while not at all squeamish about killing a bunch of people and oppressing muggles, still doesn’t feel great about hurting Dumbledore. That would certainly fit with what we’ve seen of him so far. So all that’s left to figure out is how that reluctance to harm Dumbledore will impact Grindelwald’s plans to harm so many other people.
Voldemort, meanwhile, doesn’t like what he’s hearing from Grindelwald at all, so he just decides to kill him. The people he’s actually mad at are the Death Eaters who’ve summoned him back. This really just gets back to how he should have turned the whole system off for a few minutes: he’s basically entrusted his mental health to Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Peter Pettigrew. It’s not like he’s just decided to kill some guy because he likes killing and it’s no big deal: Voldemort, by letting his incompetent Death Eaters drive him crazy, has just lost a huge lead in his search for the Elder Wand. Well, sort of: it seems like Voldemort is being gratuitous at this point, because it shouldn’t be hard to figure out where the wand is if Grindelwald had it. Everyone knows that Dumbledore defeated Grindelwald — it’s on the back of his Chocolate Frog card, for goodness’ sake — so it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out where the wand went after Grindelwald. Voldemort, in fact, figures it out for himself a little bit later. But he doesn’t know it yet, and Grindelwald is the only person who can tell him — but he still kills him, all because of what amounts to a ping on his magical blackberry.
Voldemort also takes a moment to think about how much retribution he’ll exact on his followers if they didn’t have a good reason for calling him back, which is just the latest example of his having no idea how to manage a modern workforce. The punishment for anything you do wrong, basically, is death, which doesn’t seem like a great way to attract new bodies into your movement. Imagine if Joe Biden had run for president, but instead of just having a normal hiring/firing job structure for his campaign workers, the second you did anything wrong on the campaign, you were just killed. He’d probably have a hard time attracting door-knocking volunteers.
Voldemort’s only successful endgame rests on his being able to command substantial support among wizards. He doesn’t want to rule in secret — he wants people to bow down at his feet — so he has to take over the wizarding world via a combination of fear and charisma. Some followers might join him because they’re afraid of him, but if everyone is afraid of him, eventually the people who fear him will reach critical mass and they’ll just turn against him. Voldemort is powerful, but he can’t beat the entire wizarding world in a battle if they all turn against him; hell, he couldn’t even beat the Order of the Phoenix. So his only real hope is to constantly attract new followers — which will be difficult if he has disgruntled former followers going around saying things like “Voldemort once tried to kill me when I sent a poorly-timed email.”
I’m not any kind of sociopolitical theorist, so my analysis of Voldemort’s power might be off, but it really does seem like he’s too concerned with winning small battles and keeping his followers in line, and not concerned enough with laying the groundwork for a bigger coalition of followers behind him, even if doing so hurts him in the short term. In fact, he could learn a thing or two from Joe Biden.
Bellatrix’s voice draws Harry out of Voldemort’s mind, and for good reason: she’s announcing that Hermione is Fenrir Greyback’s for the taking, if he’s interested. I don’t think we’ve ever quite cleared up what Fenrir Greyback enjoys. Obviously he likes biting people, but what happens after the bite? Does he eat them? Just chew for a while? Or just turn them into a werewolf and move on? It’s a pretty substantial difference; he might just be an over-the-top werewolf, but he might also be an insane cannibal. We’ve seen him bite Bill Weasley and not completely eat him, but that was during the first battle of Hogwarts; he might well have been interrupted. So really, we don’t know. But Fenrir Greyback is a bad egg either way.
Of course, Ron bursts in like a Blast-Ended Skrewt in a china shop. He shouts “No!” Except, he doesn’t: what he does is shout “no” so loudly and prolongedly that it takes up almost an entire page. Here’s exactly what he shouts:
“NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
After shouting presumably loudly enough to disturb the neighbors, Ron disarms Bellatrix; Harry stuns Lucius. A duel ensues, but Bellatrix — clearly the smartest person in the room — shuts things down by holding her knife to Hermione’s throat.
Harry gets a lot of flak for using “expelliarmus” and almost nothing else. But here, it’s Ron who deserves the criticism: why in the world did he disarm Bellatrix of her wand, knowing that she also had a knife that she was using for torture? Stupefy is freely available and doesn’t seem any more difficult, and knocks the target out rather than just making them drop their wand for a while. Maybe the answer is that Ron isn’t thinking logically, he’s in a fight for his life...but that’s not an answer, that’s just the problem. Even Harry, the king of inappropriate Expelliarmus’, uses Stupefy. There’s a reason, of course, that Harry is always using “Expelliarmus;” the whole series is building towards a moment when it turns out to be really important for Harry to take a wand from someone else. But that’s not true of Ron at all. He could use Stupefy, or a bunch of other things, but he chooses a spell that really just forces Bellatrix to swap out her wand for a knife. If anything, Ron makes their situation worse, which...stop me if you’ve heard that one before. Again, he’s not thinking straight, because the woman he loves is being tortured...but come on, Ron. Think straight.
As the page ends, Harry sees that Bellatrix is holding the knife to Hermione’s, shouting “STOP OR SHE DIES!” It’s not very auspicious, as page endings go. Soon, of course, the whole thing will go crazy and down will come the chandelier — very “Phantom Of The Opera,” but we’ll get there when we get there. In the meantime, we’re left with a page that started at the opening of a fresh new sequence, but ends before the sequence does. Honestly, the most memorable thing from this page might be all the things that Voldemort could learn from Joe Biden.
Voldemort was an very good at putting together intricate plots to get what he wants (e.g., Triwizard tournament plot to get Harry to the graveyard, Using his mental connection to get Harry to retrieve the prophecy, etc), but I do not think he really had the broad vision to build support for his open government using methods beyond fear. He can be charismatic, but he was always going to be a strength/fear leader.
Also, it is shocking Harry did not rely on his one true love in this battle sequence. No, not Ginevra Weasley...Expelliarmus!