Deathly Hallows: Page 472

Why Voldemort is sort of an idiot, how "expelliarmus" works, workplace culture, and how the Hallows are like ... the New York Knicks?

Welcome back! I know we’ve been dormant here for a while, but I so wish that wasn’t the case, and I hope it won’t be going forward. Today, we get back into action with a look at page 472 of Book 7.

Which — surprise! For the first time, we’ve landed on a page that we already covered! We could have just chosen another random number and moved on, but it’s been a few years, and why not look at things with a fresh set of eyes?

One personal note: My book is out! It comes from the other side of my life, where I root for the New York Mets with the same intensity as Ron’s support for the Chudley Cannons, and roughly the same level of payoff. It’s called “Only in Queens: Stories from Life as a New York Mets Fan,” and it’s available on Amazon in paperback and ebook form.

As page 472 of Deathly Hallows starts, we’re thrown right into the action: Voldemort is torturing Grindelwald, but at the same time, he’s getting what amounts to a Dark Mark push notification from back at Malfoy Manor. We’ve talked before about how the Dark Mark is absolutely terrible as Voldemort’s office communications system, so I won’t relitigate that here, even though it’s a fun topic because Voldemort is sort of an idiot. That’s how any discussion of this page would ordinarily start, but again, asked and answered.

Instead, let’s address in more detail the specifics of what’s playing out on the page. Voldemort is being summoned to Malfoy Manor, because the Death Eaters have captured Harry, but he’s completely fuming over being summoned, because he’s in the process of torturing Grindelwald. And as we begin the page, the theme of “Voldemort is sort of an idiot” is front and center.

This should all be obvious

Voldemort is torturing Grindelwald, since he learned from Gregorovitch — and subsequently from that photograph in Rita Skeeter’s book, of all places — that Grindelwald had stolen the wand. So he’s followed the wand’s trail down to Grindelwald, and now he needs to figure out where it leads next.

But here’s the thing: the answer is probably one of the most well-known facts in the Wizarding World.

It’s literally on a Chocolate Frog card: Grindelwald was defeated by Dumbledore in 1945. There’s your answer: Dumbledore had the wand. 11-year-olds know this. Voldemort seems to have forgotten it.

This, of course, fits into a larger theme: Voldemort’s whole approach to Dumbledore is really not that smart. In Half-Blood Prince, when his whole scheme to have Malfoy murder Dumbledore should clearly be failing — Dumbledore obviously knows about it, because Malfoy is terrible at hiding it! — it somehow succeeds, and rather than thinking to himself, “huh, that’s suspicious, I wonder why Dumbledore was so okay with being killed?” Voldemort just says to himself, “man, I’m really smart.”

For almost the entire seventh book, Harry and the rest of the trio are hiding in the middle of nowhere, hiding so well that even Voldemort can’t find them. Voldemort knows Harry pretty well. They’ve encountered each other a bunch of times, and they’ve shared each other’s minds. Voldemort should absolutely know that Harry wouldn’t just disappear into the middle of nowhere for no reason. If he had nothing better to do, he would be out there putting himself on the line to lead the fight against the Death Eaters. Indeed, Voldemort does know this. His whole plan during the Battle of Hogwarts hinges on luring Harry into the forest specifically by taking advantage of the fact that he’s willing to put himself on the line in order to protect everyone else.

But when Harry and the trio disappear for months on end earlier in the book? Voldemort shows no suspicion at all that they’re up to something. He doesn’t have the slightest idea that his Horcruxes could be in jeopardy; he doesn’t seem to think too much about the trio at all. He’s interested in finding them, of course, but doesn’t display even a shred of interest in why they’ve been hiding for so long in the first place. Even when they BREAK INTO THE MINISTRY, there’s absolutely no glimmer of thought!

“Excuse me, Dark Lord, sir? Harry Potter and his friends broke into the Ministry and infiltrated a hearing, knocked out Dolores Umbridge, then left.”

“Wait, they did? Do we know why?”

“We’re not sure — Harry stole Mad-Eye Moody’s eye from Umbridge’s office door, and there was a weird moment where Hermione-in-disguise was commenting on Umbridge’s locket, but otherwise, we have no idea.”

“Huh — weird! I didn’t know Umbridge had a locket, good for her! Well, thanks for letting me know … okay, I’ve got to get back to trying to figure out what happened to Grindelwald.”

“What happened to Grindelwald? Didn’t you take first-year History of Magic, don’t you remember … never mind, thanks for your time!”

Voldemort is sort of an idiot. The scene on page 472 is yet another example.

Grindelwald’s … glow up?

Since when was Grindelwald an old woke man?

Seriously — the books address this absolutely drastic character change by Dumbledore casually saying that “they say he showed some remorse in his later years,” or something like that. But this is a lot. As he’s being tortured, Grindelwald yells at Voldemort: “Kill me then! You will not win, you cannot win! That wand will never, ever be yours—”

On the surface, Grindelwald and Voldemort have very similar ideals: bringing wizards out of the shadows and taking power over the muggle world. So is Grindelwald angry at Voldemort simply because his mindset has changed, and he’s abandoned the ideas he used to hold? Maybe — but I think there are also a few other factors at play.

Grindelwald, for one, is not into Horcruxes. He probably knew about them, but as far as we’re aware, he never created one. He was all-in on the Deathly Hallows. Voldemort is at the opposite end of the spectrum; he’s basically disregarded the Hallows for his entire life up to this point in favor of Horcruxes. So Grindelwald seems to regard Horcruxes as a cheat code, an inorganic way to achieve immortality without doing the hard work of uniting the Deathly Hallows.

Aside from his own aversion to Horcruxes, though, Grindelwald likely also thinks the Deathly Hallows deserve to be known far and wide as the true solution for immortality, even though he won’t be the one to unite them. It’s sort of like how athletes often become fans of teams they played for, even after they retire. Obviously, if the Knicks win the NBA Championship, Walt Frazier won’t get a trophy. But it’s still the outcome he’s rooting for, because he devoted so much of his life to the cause of Knicks basketball that it’s become meaningful beyond what he himself can achieve.

Are the Deathly Hallows Grindelwald’s New York Knicks? Consider it from his point of view. He devoted his life to the Hallows; they’re a lot of the reason he’s been imprisoned for 50 years. They’re his lodestar. And now, out of nowhere, some little upstart twerp has invaded his room and started torturing him for information about one of the Hallows — but not even for its use as one of the Hallows, but simply because he wants to use it on its own in a different, inferior way. Outrageous!

It would be like if someone broke into Walt Frazier’s house and started torturing him for information: “You’d better give me a way to get the Knicks to the finals — I want them there so I can make them lose to the Lakers!”

An unavoidable aside on workplace culture

We have likewise talked about this before, but in addition to being sort of an idiot, Voldemort is a terrible boss, to the point where it’s really preventing his organization from functioning effectively. Good thing for the world, I guess.

Voldemort kills Grindelwald in a fit of fury, failing to extract the information he needs (not that it matters, because the information is freely available elsewhere). He leaves the cell with “his wrath barely controllable,” and thinks to himself, “they would suffer his retribution if they had no good reason for calling him back.”

At risk of over-analogizing, let’s try to re-imagine this scenario in more familiar terms.

Say you’re Tom Hanks in Catch Me If You Can, and you’re out on a mission alone trying to track down some key information about Leonardo DiCaprio. You say to your whole team, “this is really important, don’t call me unless it’s absolutely necessary — basically, don’t get in touch with me unless you genuinely think you’re on the verge of capturing him.”

So you go off to do your thing, and in the middle of it, you get a message from your team. For one, obviously, you can just ignore it for five minutes while you finish your mission, but putting that aside — can you imagine how counterproductive it would be for your team’s functioning if, because they sent you that message, you wanted to kill them? They might literally have captured the target — in this scene in the book, in fact, they have captured Harry, and they’re about 90 percent sure of it — but obviously, if the mere act of letting you know what has happened is going to trigger homicidal rage, they’re not going to want to tell you about it!

Look at it this way: companies are constantly competing to attract the best talent. Some try to gain an edge in the competition by offering high salaries and benefits; some try to pull ahead by having fun offices and flexible schedules; some just earn an advantage because they’re naturally jobs that people want. But no one is getting ahead in the race to build a strong team by constantly wanting to murder their employees.

Disarmament as summoning

Harry and Ron have broken out of the basement just in time to save Hermione from Bellatrix’s torture chamber. They burst in — with Ron shouting (this is genuinely how it’s written out in the book) “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” — and Ron casts expelliarmus on Bellatrix, who is disarmed. Her wand flies through the air, and Harry, who has sprinted into the room behind Ron, catches it.

So what direction does expelliarmus go?

I think instinctively, it’s easy to regard expelliarmus as basically a blasting charm that focuses on a wand. It’s the equivalent of shooting a cannon ball at the wand; it just gets flung away from whoever is casting it. And indeed, it sometimes works like this. When Snape disarms Lockhart at the Dueling Club, his wand just gets blasted away; Malfoy similarly disarms Dumbledore by blasting his wand off the Astronomy Tower. There are probably other examples that I’m forgetting.

But when you think about it, we also definitely do see examples of expelliarmus used to summon the victim’s weapon toward the caster. It happens at the climax of the Battle of Hogwarts, just for one, but that’s a pretty fluky situation, so we can disregard it; it also happens when Harry and Ron disarm Lockhart in book 2, and when Harry charms the Diary out of Malfoy’s hand earlier in the same book.

It seems strange, because it’s possible to construct a dichotomy on which expelliarmus seems like it would fall on one side, but actually sort of falls on both. When you look at spells that target people or objects, a lot of them have a sort of implied physical momentum. That is, when you cast stupefy on someone, the implication is that they don’t just collapse where they’re standing; the spell makes them fall in its direction. If someone is standing facing you, it seems like if you cast a stunning spell on them, they’ll fall backwards, in the direction the spell is moving.

But there are other spells that don’t work like this. Crucio, for instance, doesn’t seem to have any physical force to it. You just feel the pain throughout your entire body; it’s not like there’s a cannonball of pain shooting out of your wand and smashing into the target. And levicorpus doesn’t have any kind of momentum coming from the caster’s wand; you’re lifted up by your ankle, but there’s no equivalent of the Dueling Club-type expelliarmus, where the spell actually throws you in the direction it’s moving.

Expelliarmus, indeed, seems like it would fall into the former category; it seems, basically, like a throwing spell localized to the target’s hand. But there’s completely incontrovertible evidence that sometimes, it works more like accio armus.

Why? This feels like one of those situations where the magic comes as much from the intent going into the spell as the words coming out of the caster’s mouth. It’s a Justice Breyer-type interpretation of magic (that’s a reference I absolutely couldn’t resist). When you cast expelliarmus, your wand has some idea of what you want to do. It knows whether you’re just blasting a wand out of someone’s hand, or you want to take the wand for yourself. Or at least, based on the multiple ways in which we’ve seen the spell working, that’s an interpretation that makes sense.

Anyway, the page ends with Bellatrix holding her knife to Hermione’s throat. Fun! There’s a lot more to come in this scene, stuff that will prove almost shockingly consequential when it’s all said and done — like, to a point where it’s sort of iffy the first time you get to the end and finally understand what has happened. For now, though, Bellatrix has been disarmed, Grindelwald is dead, and Voldemort is still sort of an idiot.