Sorcerer's Stone: Page 275

A super, super deep dive into the obstacles to the Sorcerer's Stone.

Welcome back! Today’s newsletter is a bit unorthodox: today we focus on one main subject. That’s the seven obstacles to the Sorcerer’s Stone, and some fan theories about them that have some merits but are overstated. Enjoy!

Page 279 of Sorcerer’s Stone takes place at a crucial moment, and I have a feeling this issue may go on for a while. The trio is under the school working their way towards the Sorcerer’s Stone, which they believe Snape is trying to steal. They’ve already gotten past Fluffy and escaped the Devil’s Snare; now they’re on their way to the flying key room.

Several things at once are going on here. On the one hand, it’s very straightforward; the trio is trying to save the stone. On the other hand, though, there’s some meta-action happening as well; the trio is also making its way through symbolic representations of each of the seven books.

This is a fairly well-known theory in niche Potter circles. The best distillation, I think, comes from this MuggleNet essay. I say “best,” but I think there are also some glaring holes in it. It’s undeniable that the connection between the obstacles and the various books does exist. But there’s also a lot of dialogue surrounding this theory that wildly overstates things.

Obstacles, Books

The trio faces seven obstacles on the way to the stone. That shouldn’t even be a surprise; there are seven of everything. The obstacles are:

• Fluffy

• Devil’s Snare

• Flying keys

• Chess game

• Knocked-out troll

• Potions riddle

• Mirror of Erised

Some of the connections are easy to see. Some are difficult. The MuggleNet essay argues that “there are two primary connections for each obstacle: the type of magic involved, and how the Trio gets past it.” Right off the bat, I think this is overstating it, especially because some of the examples are extraordinarily tenuous. Rather, it seems that each obstacle just represents its book in its own way. They don’t all represent the same element of a different book; it’s a looser representation, a vague evocation. Each obstacle evokes its book, but there’s no formula to it.

You see this right off the bat. Fluffy, the essay argues, represents Care of Magical Creatures, because Care of Magical Creatures is the thematic Hogwarts subject of book one. But Care of Magical Creatures is probably just as important to book three as book one (Buckbeak), and also plays an important role in book five (thestrals). I don’t buy the whole obstacle -> representative subject -> representative book pipeline.

Rather, here’s why Fluffy represents Sorcerer’s Stone: he’s familiar. He’s comfortable. We know all about him; we’ve encountered him a few times in the book already, and figuring out what he’s doing there has been one of the main plotlines of the book. Fluffy represents Sorcerer’s Stone because Fluffy is the characters’ introduction to the dangers of the wizarding world. He’s a huge part of the book, so he stands in for the book. Representation doesn’t always have to be symbolic. Here, it’s completely literal.

The MuggleNet essay draws a connection between Fluffy attempting to wake up but being lulled to sleep by the music and Voldemort’s attempts to revive himself. I really don’t see it. There’s nothing suggesting that the two elements are connected. This would make a lot more sense if we saw Fluffy try to wake up twice, then stop for a while, then succeed at waking up the third time (the pattern of Voldemort’s attempts to resurrect himself in books one through four), but that doesn’t happen. Fluffy stirs once, then wakes up when the trio is gone and the music stops. Again, this sequence doesn’t have to follow a completely symbolic formula. A lot of things mean something, but not everything means something. Fluffy is just a dog who starts to wake up when the music stops.

On to the Devil’s Snare. The MuggleNet essay argues that this represents Chamber of Secrets because Herbology is the book’s thematic subject, and because Harry and Ron get through it only with the help of Hermione’s expertise, just like in book two. I mean…maybe? Sure, Herbology is important in book two. But “Hermione figures everything out and saves the day” can apply to pretty much any of the books. This seems more like an attempt to make the evidence fit the thesis, rather than the other way around.

To me, the Devil’s Snare represents Chamber of Secrets for a vastly simpler reason: the trio falls through a dark hole into a big mysterious room under the school. I mean, it’s not rocket science. Even the Devil’s Snare itself has a snakelike air, what with all the slithering tentacles. Yes, this obstacle represents book two. But no, it’s not following an exact formula, “representation=subject+resolution;” it’s just an evocation of plot points from the book.

The MuggleNet essay also argues that the trio’s response to the Devil’s Snare mirrors their response to Tom Riddle’s diary. This might work in a really loose sense; at first they think both are good, then later they realize they’re bad. But the responses aren’t really similar, because Hermione instantly recognizes the Devil’s Snare and knows exactly what it is and how to deal with it, whereas in Chamber of Secrets, there’s a whole scene that reveals that she has no idea what the diary is, how to reveal the contents, or that it’s even a malevolent entity. For this theory to be true, it would also mean that the Devil’s Snare somehow represented not only the whole of Chamber of Secrets, but also much more specifically represented Riddle’s diary. There’s no evidence that that’s true.

The trio moves ahead to the flying key room. In the MuggleNet essay, this room represents charms, which itself represents the third book because the Fidelius charm is an important plot element. Again, to me, that’s a stretch. What I would call the true representation works in a few ways. For one, a lock and key are instantly evocative of prison, which is obviously an important theme in Prisoner of Azkaban. There’s also the flying element: book three is the first time Harry wins a Quidditch Cup, and flying also plays a huge role in the climax, when Harry and Hermione fly on Buckbeak to rescue Sirius. Again, this is very loose representation: I don’t have any kind of super-detailed theory. “The metal of the keys represents the handle of Macnair’s axe, and the feathers represent the textual hippogriffs that allow the story to metaphorically fly, and the broomsticks represent the hippogriffs that allow the characters to literally fly, and the fact that the key gets damaged represents the psychological damage that the trio suffers when Snape, also represented by the key, opens the door to the Shrieking Shack, represented by the wooden walls, not to be confused with the actual door in the room, which represents the prison of the mind…” I don’t have anything like that, because I don’t think it’s borne out by the actual books. Again, this is loose representation. J.K. Rowling isn’t spelling out the entire series in front of us. But it seems like the MuggleNet essay thinks she is.

The essay argues, for instance, that “the key is hiding in plain sight, trusting to its camouflage as one of many keys to keep it hidden. In Prisoner, the key to everything – Peter Pettigrew – is also hiding in plain sight, trusting his camouflage as one of many rats to hide him.” But that seems clearly wrong. Pettigrew isn’t trusting his camouflage as “one of many rats” to hide himself; most of the time, when he’s with Ron, he’s the only rat around. What he’s trusting to hide himself is the fact that he doesn’t look like Peter Pettigrew; he looks like a rat. He’s not hiding among rats; he’s hiding because no one knows he can turn into a rat. He’s not blending in; he’s disguised. Again, when you look closely at what happens in the book, the comparison breaks down. Harry manages to find the key because he’s a great seeker and he has a good eye for detail, then he catches the key himself. That’s nothing like what happens in Prisoner of Azkaban. Pettigrew gets caught because Lupin happens to spot him on the Marauder’s Map. Harry has no idea. He doesn’t spot a thing. It’s nothing like what happens to the key.

The essay goes on to argue that Harry letting the key go in a battered state after he unlocks the door represents his sparing Pettigrew’s life, but again, it’s very tenuous. Harry doesn’t “let Pettigrew go;” he spares his life but attempts to have him taken into custody. Wormtrail escapes. The key, on the other hand, just flies away because it’s served its purpose and is no longer helpful to anybody. The nature of the damage is also completely different. Wormtail is damaged in a way that fundamentally compromises him: he owes a life debt to Harry. The key just flies away, a little bit beaten up but still just a key flying around. Nothing has fundamentally changed.

As far as Goblet of Fire is concerned, the MuggleNet essay has a similar problem: it makes some good general points, but then stretches out the details of the story to fit a theory that doesn’t really make sense. The chess game, the fourth obstacle, certainly represents a kind of leveling-up: the obstacles are more complicated now, just as the books starting with Goblet of Fire also get a lot more complicated. The Triwizard Tournament is itself a game, which fits the obstacle perfectly. Ron also gets knocked out, because the obstacles aren’t just more complicated; they’re darker. In book four, Cedric dies. So far, the theory makes perfect sense.

But then the essay gets into the formula it’s trying to fulfill, and it loses the thread. The chess set, it argues, represents Transfiguration. That much makes sense; Professor McGonagall enlarged the pieces and brought them to life. But what special role does Transfiguration play in Goblet of Fire? None; the essay concedes as much. “The connection to the type of magic is perhaps weakest for this one, as Transfiguration never does play a very large role in the series,” it reads. This should make the subject theory fall apart. It’s already tenuous: if one of the obstacles completely fails to fit into it, it starts to become clear that maybe the analysis is just wrong.

Now we come to the interesting one: book five, the knocked-out troll. First, my read on it. Who put the troll there? Quirrell, as his contribution to the teachers protecting the stone. Why did he choose a troll? So that he would be able to get past it later…or so that Harry would be able to get past it later? Either way, we have something here that perfectly mirrors book five: Voldemort (in this case acting through a possessed body) facilitating Harry’s progress so that Harry can help him find what he’s looking for. In book five, of course, Voldemort invades Harry’s dreams with images of the path through the Department of Mysteries to the prophecy, then sends Harry a vision of Sirius being tortured there. He also somehow makes it so that the entire Ministry is empty when Harry and his gang show up, but that’s a discussion for another day. In both cases, we have Harry following a path that Voldemort has cleared for him, thinking he’s racing to stop Voldemort when in reality, Voldemort needs his help.

The MuggleNet essay halfway agrees with me. When Harry and Hermione get to the troll, it argues, “the troll has already been knocked out for them, and there is nothing for them to do.  This echoes Order of the Phoenix, where all the legwork is being done by someone else (mostly Dumbledore) for Harry.”

What? It’s not Dumbledore! This should be obvious, since we know it was Quirrell/Voldemort that actually knocked out the troll. What “legwork” is Dumbledore doing? Harry is the one who leads the D.A., takes his OWLs, and plays Quidditch (until he gets suspended); those are the three main elements of the book. I’m not sure what it means to argue that in Order of the Phoenix, “there is nothing for them to do.” There’s lots of stuff for them to do. The essay calls OotP “a book of inactivity for Harry,” but that just doesn’t seem accurate, especially since there’s an extended sequence within the book in which Harry escapes from Umbridge’s clutches, gets into a fight with centaurs, escapes with the help of a giant, flies away to the Ministry of Magic, breaks into the Department of Mysteries, smashes up the Hall of Prophecy to escape the Death Eaters, sees the Order of the Phoenix arrive and begin a massive duel, runs away to chase his Godfather’s killer, and fights off possession by Lord Voldemort.

Really: if OotP was actually “a book of inactivity,” then this theory would make sense. I just don’t see how that description could possibly apply. To make that argument is basically to argue that OotP is equivalent to Harry not having to do anything. That just doesn’t make sense.

Book six, meanwhile, is pretty easy. Potions is the thematic subject of the book, and there’s also Ron getting poisoned and the potion in the horcrux cave. So the obstacle is a room full of potion bottles. That should be it. The MuggleNet essay, though, takes things to a whole different level.

I’ll say right off the bat, this segment is slightly intriguing. I think there might be something to it. Still, though, there are a lot of issues with the section. The basic argument is this: the four substances — wine, poison, forward-potion, and backward-potion — show up chronologically in book six in the same order as they’re laid out on the table. immediately, though, there’s a problem: we don’t know exactly how they’re laid out on the table. The information in the book is only enough to narrow it down to two possible arrangements. The author of the MuggleNet essay picks the one that fits the theory better. That’s not me guessing; he admits as much. “Of the two options, I believe it’s poison that’s in the exact middle,” he writes. “This works better for all the myriad parallels drawn to the riddle.”

So here are the parallels, as he lays them out:

• In HBP, as in the riddle, there are three poisons, two wines, one potion that moves Harry’s quest forward, and one that moves it backwards.

• The order of the bottles on the table is poison, wine, forward, poison, poison, wine, backward.

• That is the same as the order in which they show up in HBP.

Here’s the list as written in the MuggleNet essay:

1: Poison: Voldemort framed Winky for “putting something in her mistress’s cocoa that turned out not to be sugar, but a lethal and little-known poison.” (HBP438) This happens many years before the other events of the book, so it’s first.

2: Wine: Snape drinks “elf-made wine” with Bellatrix and Narcissa at Spinner’s End. (HBP24)

3: Forward: The Felix Felicis makes its debut appearance in Chapter 9 (HBP187), where Harry wins the bottle. Harry pretends to use it on Ron in Chapter 14.

4: Poison: In a Potions class in January, Slughorn is teaching Golpalott’s Third Law, and the class has to create an antidote to a blended poison. (HBP377)

5: Poison: On March 1st, Ron is poisoned when he drinks Slughorn’s mead, which Draco had poisoned earlier to kill Dumbledore. (HBP401)

6: Wine: At Aragog’s funeral, Slughorn and Hagrid drink wine that Harry keeps refilling. (HBP487)

7: Back: In the cave with the locket, Dumbledore drinks a potion that proves to be a huge setback. (HBP571)

I notice several problems.

First off, differentiating between wine and mead is dubious at best. Mead is often referred to as “honey wine,” and the two drinks are certainly not that different. When Ron gets poisoned, he’s drinking mead; Dumbledore also offers the Dursleys mead when he comes to pick up Harry in chapter three. A few pages after Ron drinks poisoned mead, Hagrid even refers to the mystery person “who sent that necklace (or) put poison in that wine,” strongly implying that “wine” and “mead” are interchangeable. We also see wine at several other moments, albeit not as prominently. The Fat Lady and Violet drink a vat of 500-year-old wine; Slughorn drinks wine in the Horcrux memory; Dumbledore pours Voldemort a glass of wine in the flashback to Voldemort’s job interview. That’s five appearances of wine total; there are also three appearances of mead, which comes to eight different appearances of wine or wine-like drinks, which, of course, is far more than the two listed. Now, you might argue that some of these wine mentions aren’t important enough to count, but they’re all mentioned at least as much as Hokey the house-elf having her memory modified so that she believed that she accidentally poisoned Hepzibah Smith, which is a throwaway line, mentioned once and then forgotten.

As far as poison is concerned, that list of three poisonings seems largely accurate. It does omit one key plot point: Dumbledore. Is the stuff he drinks a potion or a poison? It seems somewhere in the middle: it has magical effects, but it’s also definitely harming him. The list also omits many of the potions that feature in the book: Polyjuice potion that Malfoy uses to disguise Crabbe and Goyle, the love potion that Ron accidentally ingests, all of the potions that Harry brews using the Half-Blood Prince’s book, the love potion that Merope Gaunt gives to Tom Riddle Sr. But charitably speaking, the list might just not include those because it’s focused on wine, poison, and two specific potions, so let’s leave that point behind.

Even still: the “forward” and “back” potions are stretches. Felix Felicis, the potion that moves the story forward, makes its “debut appearance” early in the book, but Harry doesn’t actually use it until a lot later. Sorted by time of use rather than time of mention (as #1 appears to be), that would throw the list out of order. As far as the “setback” potion is concerned, I just don’t quite see it all fitting together. For one, the backwards potion in book one isn’t a setback; it’s an escape. It helps the story move forwards just like the forwards potion does, because it allows Hermione and Ron to get out and run into Dumbledore on his way down. Also, as analysis, “it’s a setback” is way too general to be impressive. It’s too easy a criterion to fulfill. If any time anything bad happens, it can be related back to a potion that moved a character backwards, then obviously eventually something bad will happen and you can claim that your theory holds up. It would be like if you said “Harry’s Quidditch Cup wins near the end of the book foreshadow triumph, so we know something good will happen near the end of the book.” Lots of good things and lots of bad things happen near the end of each book; you’re automatically right. It’s way too easy a prediction to make.

In the essay’s defense, it does make a great point about the importance of knowledge and understanding. Hermione references how most wizards don’t have an ounce of logic; likewise, in book six, rather than teaching him advanced magic, Dumbledore teaches Harry as much as he can about Voldemort’s past in the hopes that Harry can understand Voldemort better. I’ll give you that one. Astute observation.

Finally, on to Deathly Hallows. Again, I think this one is pretty obvious. Harry finds the sorcerer’s stone; Harry finds the resurrection stone. Harry’s priorities shift and he realizes that he doesn’t need to spend time among the dead; Harry drops the resurrection stone after realizing that his dead friends and family are with him regardless. The final showdown with Voldemort; the final showdown with Voldemort. An important mirror. A key Dumbledore plan coming to fruition. Virtue triumphing over power and greed. The MuggleNet essay pretty much nails this one. It’s hard not to.

Like I said at the beginning: overall, the representation and symbolism is clearly there. But it’s important to be careful not to get too granular and literal with every detail. Some things are meaningful. Some are just plot points. It’s rare for symbolism to reach the level of detail where every single thing that happens is represented; more often, it’s vague allusion and evocation. That’s what’s going on here, and the MuggleNet essay, while it gets the fundamentals right, sees more going on than actually exists.

Key-based defense systems

Anyway…the trio walks ahead to the key room. At first, they don’t recognize the keys as keys; they think they’re birds (weird mistake to make, but I suppose it’s possible). By the end of the page, Harry is just realizing that they’re keys, and they have to capture the right one.

We know by now that the entire system of obstacles was set up by Dumbledore to test Harry and the trio’s skills. But honestly, in scenes like this, it’s surprising that Harry himself doesn’t figure that out. They’re in a room with a door they could never open magically, and for all they know there’s no key…then they notice keys flying around above them, and there just happen to be three broomsticks available? Surely, Harry should realize that this isn’t how genuine defense systems work. Maybe it’s one of those things where you’re so involved in something in the moment that you don’t realize until afterwards how dumb it is, but still, Harry should be seeing some red flags. Dumbledore could just keep the key locked in his office and not leave broomsticks there, and the trio could never get in. Instead, it’s set up perfectly so that a great seeker and two of his friends can get through if they work together. It’s literally a team-building exercise.

The only other challenge that’s this ridiculous is the potion room. The others — Fluffy, Devil’s Snare, chess, troll — could be realistic defense mechanisms. The potion room, though, is very clearly a test for Harry and his friends. If it wasn’t — if it was actually supposed to prevent intruders — Dumbledore could just build the room without the potions. You try to steal the stone, you go in, the fire springs up, you’re stuck forever. Or he could even leave the potions there, but not include the lyrical logic puzzle. By that point, Harry should fully understand that he’s just a pawn in Dumbledore’s game. Honestly, though, that should be reassuring. If Harry knows that Dumbledore set the entire thing up, he should know that Dumbledore knows exactly what’s going on, and will protect him before Voldemort can do irreversible damage.

He doesn’t figure that out, though, which is fine. He’s 11. This is pushing 4000 words. Some questions will just never be answered. I’m exhausted. This series is amazing, because it’s complicated and nuanced enough to allow debates like this carried out over competing 4000-word essays. We’ll be back next week, if I’ve recovered from all of this by then. Until then, just remember: if anyone besides the author herself tells you that Devil’s Snare represents Tom Riddle’s diary, that person is a few firewhiskies too deep.