Goblet of Fire: Page 639
A deep dive on Wormtail's finger, why he probably should have gone to a knot workshop, the literal nature of Voldemort's weird soul-baby body, and Voldemort's dark-wizard regeneration consommé.
Welcome back! I’m sorry this issue of the newsletter is a few days late; hopefully it can brighten the start of your week rather than helping out towards the end of it. This week, we’re looking at page 639 of Goblet of Fire. We explore the serious — Voldemort coming back, Cedric being dead, etc — along with the ridiculous — did Wormtail go to a knot camp? Enjoy…and if you do, take a moment to subscribe…and if you do, share with everyone you know!
I’m going to start my examination of page 639 of Goblet of Fire with something that has almost nothing to do with the page itself. It does, however, have a great deal to do with...well, nothing. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything. It’s unimportant. If you don’t like it, write your own newsletter.
The page starts with Harry, tied up, being hit by a man who has a finger missing, and realizing that the man who’s hitting him is Wormtail. So let’s talk about Wormtail’s missing finger.
Most of us will remember the background here. After Wormtail betrayed the Potters, he knew that Sirius would be blamed for it, unless he (Wormtail) was captured. So, as Sirius tells it (and we have no reason to doubt his version of the story), when Sirius confronted him, Peter blew apart the street with his wand behind his back, then fled into the sewers with the other rats, leaving behind only a blown-up street and a single finger.
We know that the plan worked: Sirius got blamed and went away for murder, and Pettigrew was unanimously presumed dead. But the thing is, once Lupin figured out what had actually happened in Prisoner of Azkaban, the fact that he’d cut off his finger was also strong evidence to the Marauders that Scabbers was Peter. By cutting off his finger, he successfully faked his own death in the short term, but in the long term, he marked himself in a way that’s incredibly difficult to hide or disguise.
My question is, was there another way he could have done it? And relatedly, did he even need to do anything? Let’s say the whole thing happens the same way, but he doesn’t chop his finger off and leave it behind at the scene. The most likely outcome seems exactly the same. Peter escapes, looks like he was blown-up, and is presumed dead; Sirius goes to Azkaban; no one has any doubt as to who did what. If none of the many people watching even noticed Peter blowing the street up with his wand behind his back (which, let’s face it, isn’t a very normal way to stand; if you see a guy supposedly fighting another guy while holding his wand behind his back, you’re probably going to think “what the hell is that guy doing with his wand behind his back?”), they’re not going to fuss about the presence or absence of a finger.
Alternatively, Wormtail couldn’t have gotten a finger in a different way — from a cadaver, or just via a conjuring charm, or by sneaking into a hospital under a disillusionment charm? The thing is, I can’t even imagine Wormtail cutting off his own finger in this situation. Now, before you say “don’t be stupid, he’s about to cut off his hand to bring Voldemort back, obviously he’s not completely averse to severing extremities,” wait for a second. Yes, Peter cuts his hand off to bring Voldemort back — but only because he’s even more afraid of Voldemort than of cutting off his hand. In a strange way, by cutting off his hand, he’s actually taking the easy way out.
In the Sirius/death faking situation, by contrast, Wormtail has a lot less motivation to cut off a body part. Voldemort has disappeared and might himself be presumed dead, so Wormtail is presumably a lot less afraid of him. He can also rationalize himself into not harming himself: “I’ll be fine, no one knows I’m an animagus anyway, the finger won’t even matter.”
On a slightly related note, I’m thinking of a very funny scenario. Say that just before Wormtail blew up the street with his wand behind his back, the aurors showed up and stunned Sirius. Obviously, now Wormtail can’t fake his own death, because he can’t blame Sirius if Sirius has been stunned...but he’s not sure they’re going to get Sirius, maybe he’ll evade the stunners and the fake death will be plausible, so he goes ahead with it anyway. So Sirius is sitting there stunned, tied up and clearly not doing magic on his own — then suddenly, the street explodes around Wormtail, and when the smoke clears, it’s just a big hole with a finger. “What the hell...” you can imagine the aurors saying. “Why did he do that? And why did he leave his finger there?”
The only way it would be funnier would be if Wormtail somehow stayed there, and when the smoke cleared, he was pointing at Sirius, acting with his life on the line. “It was him!” he would shout. “Did you guys see that? He blew up the street! He cut off my finger!”
So, anyway, Wormtail ties Harry up and shoves some kind of makeshift fabric gag in his mouth. Do you think Voldemort ever made Wormtail go to some sort of knot workshop before they carried out their plan? Like, he dressed up as a sailor and went to a trade show on knots for nautical use, or something like that, that would never fit in the books but would work perfectly if Harry Potter was a sitcom? Tying someone up isn’t something you can just learn on the fly, especially when you’re tying the person to a gravestone, which doesn’t seem like it would do all that much to hold a rope in place. Obviously, it wouldn’t work for the plot of the series, but imagine if Wormtail tied Harry up, then brought Voldemort back, then Voldemort gave his little speech to Harry, then he brought the Death Eaters back...but then as soon as Voldemort’s focus was elsewhere, Harry maneuvered himself out of the ropes in about 20 seconds. Just imagine Voldemort’s expression if he finished telling the Death Eaters his story of achieving immortality, then said “now, Harry Potter, we duel to the death,” or whatever the line is, then turned to Harry only to realize that he’d been gone for fifteen minutes.
In fact, the funny version of this that I’m now envisioning reminds me of a scene at the end of the criminally underrated comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West. The main character Albert, played by Seth MacFarlane, has just defeated Liam Neeson’s villainous outlaw antagonist, and now he’s triumphantly explaining how he used a native American technique to coat his bullet with snake venom. Then, out of nowhere, we get this gem of a dialogue sequence:
Ruth: “Albert...he’s dead. You did it.”
Albert (disappointed): “Oh.”
Ruth: “Yeah.”
Albert: *(long pause)* “Did he hear all that smart stuff I did?”
Edward: “Uh...no. No, I don’t think so.”
Albert: “Oh.” (Long pause). “Well, it’s still good though.”
As things stand, though, Wormtail does a shockingly good job of tying Harry up, so much so that Harry can’t even turn his head. I wasn’t even aware that you could achieve that with rope, but maybe the Wizard boy scouts have learned things that we Muggles haven’t even imagined yet. Imagine the Wizard boy scout jamboree, especially during one of the dark years when they’d have to invite Voldemort to be a speaker and he’d completely ruin the mood. Actually...well, draw your own conclusions. Oy vey.
Anyway, Wormtail leaves the scene, and his knots prove shockingly effective. Harry can barely see anything. He sees Cedric’s body, and the Triwizard Cup further off; his wand is on the ground at Cedric’s feet. Then Harry notices the bundle of robes, which he’d previously thought was a baby, “stirring fretfully.” Harry applies his lightning-fast analytical mind to what he’s looking at and reaches a conclusion that will shock you with its searing profundity and nuance: “he didn’t want that bundle opened.”
As we’ll learn later, the bundle contains Voldemort’s fake soul-body. It’s basically the thing that Harry sees later during the King’s Cross scene in Deathly Hallows. But I’ve always wondered: why is this the body that he’s stuck with? Even if the weird gross baby body is a physical manifestation of his tortured soul, at this point it has taken physical form: what would happen if Wormtail pointed his wand at baby Voldemort and said “engorgio”? Maybe what would happen is that you’d have a giant baby Voldemort running around, which would be a lot funnier than the status quo. But Wormtail should be capable of some level of transfiguration, since he’s a Hogwarts graduate, and Voldemort, one of the most powerful wizards of all time, can also do it himself.
Maybe the answer is that like food, souls are one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration. If that’s the case, though, then it starts to seem like Gamp’s law has a very weird, random group of exceptions. You know that John Mulaney bit about how the amendments to the Constitution are arranged in a weird order that has nothing to do with relative importance? That’s what I’m thinking of here.
“Hey, what are the five exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration?”
“Hmm, let me think...oh, I remember, here they are: food, souls, pencils, velvet, and those metal pieces on the end of shoelaces.”
“Aglets?”
“Oh yeah, that’s it. Food, souls, pencils, velvet, and aglets.”
Of course, Gamp’s law isn’t quite what we’re dealing with here. Food you can transfigure once it’s there; you just can’t summon it out of thin air. Voldemort’s soul-body, on the other hand, seems inalterable. He’s just stuck that way. Maybe there’s a lesson in there about how even magic can’t change the core who you really are, and only kindness and good works can do that, because no matter what Voldemort does and how long he lives, he’s still that weird scaly baby on the inside — but on the other hand, maybe it’s just about how Voldemort is super creepy, and this scene takes place in a graveyard and is by far the scariest scene that we’ve seen in the series so far. Maybe it’s both. That’s the kind of thing you can do with fiction.
At this point, Nagini slithers through the grass past Harry, circling the headstone where he’s tied up. Harry, though, is completely unfazed. He’s seen Nagini before in a dream, and he’s also interacted with snakes before, but still, you’d think that the sight of a snake just circling his feet would inspire more of a reaction. Maybe he’s startled for a second, or something small like that. This is a nice companion moment to the beginning of the book, when Frank Bryce gets scared when Nagini slithers past him, so in a way it makes sense that Harry’s reaction is the opposite. It makes sense literarily, that is, but not literally within the literature (try saying that five times fast). The different experiences with snakes make a nice pair of bookends, but in the real events that are happening in the book, Harry should be at least a little scared, rather than just immediately moving on to the next thing.
Speaking of the next thing: Wormtail comes back. His fast, wheezy breathing gets louder again. Man — imagine having to sit next to him in a movie theater. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. Some people eat in annoying ways — my mother can’t stand the way my father eats starbursts — but it’s on another level if one person’s very breathing is annoying, as Wormtail’s seems to be.
Wormtail returns to Harry’s field of vision, and we see what he’s been doing: he’s pushing a cauldron across the ground to the foot of the grave. It’s a stone cauldron, for one: why? Stone seems like an aggressive choice, even if Voldemort is going for a particularly creepy aesthetic. Plus, it was never even guaranteed that Wormtail would be strong enough to push it across the ground (if he’s not going to use his wand to move it, which he’s apparently not for some reason). All I’m saying is, invest in a cauldron made of silicon or fiberglass, and you’ll have something a lot lighter and also less likely to cut Wormtail’s hands as he pushes it (although, come to think of it...).
The Cauldron, Harry sees, is full of something that looks like water. But I’ve always wondered this: what is it really? We know the three ingredients in Voldemort’s revival spell (and I’m now going to type them from memory, because I enjoy showing off my skills like that): flesh of the servant, willingly given; bone of the father, unknowingly given; blood of the enemy, forcibly taken. I think there may be one or two errors in there, but still, that’s pretty good.
So is it water-based? On the one hand, you’d think it probably would be, because the ingredients are doing all the work, so you don’t really need an exciting base. On the other hand, though, it’s just a little boring. Flesh, blood, and bone...in water? Like a weak consommé? Snake venom, or something like that, would be cooler, but then again not all dark wizards are particularly into snakes; that’s mostly Voldemort and Salazar Slytherin. Who knows whether Emeric the Evil or Uric the Oddball (deep cuts only!) had thestrals or hippogriffs or salamanders as the bases of their respective iconographies.
Anyway, that’s where the page cuts off — we don’t find out what the base of the potion is, and all we get at the end of the page is “Harry could.” I have a feeling that the next word is “not,” because this doesn’t seem like a particularly positive situation. That’s okay though. We’ve all read the series: Harry will survive. Voldemort even won’t be back for that long. It’s surprising, when you think about it: Voldemort only has three years to live after he comes back. He’s so brash with throwing his life around...you’d think it was Peter Pettigrew’s finger.