Text of a talk delivered at the Chestnut Hill College Harry Potter Academic Conference on October 17, 2025.

For today, I wasn’t sure if it was the right move to do a basic-level textual read.  In the current political climate, especially in U.S. fandom circles, some argue that it’s not the time to delve back into the content of the series in a way that includes love.  But then again, I have heard Potter fans discuss their unresolved feelings about the character of Dumbledore, that they feel let down by him and wish they didn’t have to, and I wanted to provide whatever relief I could.  Because if there’s anything Harry Potter readers could use right now, it’s evidence of maturity and generosity of spirit from someone we’re no longer sure we should have trusted.

So, forgive me if I cover ground that many of us already know, but let’s go back into canon.

Four months before Dumbledore got Snape to kill him, Dumbledore closed his eyes tightly, charged Snape with the task of telling Harry that he must let Voldemort kill him, then opened his eyes again.

Snape responded with horror:  “You have kept him alive so that he can die at the right moment?”

Dumbledore evaded that question with a response that was oddly callous:  “Don’t be shocked, Severus.  How many men and women have you watched die?”

But Snape was shocked.  What a chilling twist.  Snape has painstakingly strived for years to become more like the kind of person he thought Dumbledore wanted him to be.  Has Dumbledore himself been cold and scheming underneath the kind exterior?  Was he manipulating Snape all along?

“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 —”

Dumbledore never refuted this accusation, as risky as that decision was, considering that Dumbledore was dependent on Snape’s willingness to kill him and wanted Snape to be the last thing he saw in life:  Dumbledore died knowing Snape would go to his own grave feeling betrayed by Dumbledore’s motives.

The series is explicit about the bravery it took for Snape to know he would die being thought evil by the people he sacrificed himself to protect.  In Half-Blood Prince, Snape broke and cried out “Don’t call me coward” after he forced himself to kill his mentor.  But by the end of his life, he had mastered even that impulse, as much as it must have broken his heart to let people like McGonagall believe they had been wrong to trust him.  The author takes mercy on the readers and grants us a posthumous scene of Harry vindicating Snape.  She was willing to consign Snape to the fate of death without vindication, but it was too harsh to ask her readers to bear that burden.

For Dumbledore, though, she is more secretive.  Harry tells the world about Snape’s long game, but she lays forth the explanation of Dumbledore’s long game through showing, not telling, and it’s up to the reader to piece it all together like so many scavenger hunts through the text.  From some angles, it sure looks like Dumbledore’s main agenda was to exploit Harry to finish Voldemort.

But we find out in the King’s Cross chapter that it wasn’t.  When King’s Cross Dumbledore approaches King’s Cross Harry, Voldemort isn’t finished yet – he lives, and so does the Horcrux in Nagini.  Yet Dumbledore beams at Harry.  “Happiness seemed to radiate from Dumbledore like light, like fire:  Harry had never seen the man so utterly, so palpably content.”  Dumbledore’s focus wasn’t on Voldemort but on freeing Harry from the curse of the scar Horcrux, allowing him a life as only himself:  “Your soul is whole, and completely your own, Harry.”  When Harry asks him, “I’ve got to go back, haven’t I?” Dumbledore leaves the choice completely to Harry.  Dumbledore is at peace with how his hopes for Harry turned out.  His work here is done.

The rules of this universe being what they are, though, not all of Dumbledore’s protégés fare as well.

“Poor Severus.”

“If you planned your death with Snape, you meant him to end up with the Elder Wand, didn’t you?”

“I admit that was my intention,” said Dumbledore, “but it did not work as I intended, did it?”

“No,” said Harry.  “That bit didn’t work out.”

What are they talking about?  Harry and Dumbledore are excluding us here!  This is one of the more aggravating “show, don’t tell” scavenger hunts Rowling sets for the reader in Deathly Hallows.  She’s setting us up for the reveal in the following chapter that the master of the Elder Wand was Draco.  But what was this protection plan Dumbledore and Harry are talking about regarding Snape?    

Let’s try out this scavenger hunt. 

The author lets us know Dumbledore expected Voldemort to plunder his grave for the wand because as Voldemort did so, he thought, “Had the old fool imagined that marble or death would protect the wand?  Had he thought that the Dark Lord would be scared to violate his tomb?”  This is one of the many instances of “show, don’t tell” in Deathly Hallows when Rowling writes a character making an assumption that she never directly contradicts in the text, yet shows to be wrong – such as McGonagall’s guess that Snape learned to fly from Voldemort or Harry’s bitter sarcasm about the “neat,” “elegant” solution of being designated to destroy himself as well as Voldemort.  We know Dumbledore found Voldemort tediously predictable – for example, when he learned that Voldemort requires intruders to give blood if they want to enter his enchanted cave.  Voldemort’s “amused derision” as he looks at Dumbledore’s corpse is Rowling’s oblique clue to us that Dumbledore foresaw grave robbery.

Nobody knew Snape and Dumbledore had planned the death on the tower, so Voldemort cannot be faulted for concluding Snape won the wand from Dumbledore with Avada Kedavra and assuming he could do the same to win the wand from Snape.  But we learn that the Elder Wand, which had taken so many lives, recognized Draco’s Expelliarmus as powerful enough to switch allegiance to Draco, just as it previously switched allegiance from Grindelwald to Dumbledore despite no murder being involved.  We can guess from Grindelwald taunting Voldemort, “That wand will never, ever be yours –” that the Elder Wand considers disarmament more powerful than murder. 

We know from the final duel of Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra against Harry’s Expelliarmus that the wand went “spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill.” 

Following these scattered clues, we can conclude that Dumbledore hoped no spell Voldemort cast against Snape with the Elder Wand would be able to hurt Snape, since the only way for Voldemort to demonstrate enough power to win the Elder Wand’s allegiance would be through an act of disarmament, which Dumbledore safely assumed Voldemort would never consider.  After half a century with the Elder Wand, Dumbledore would have known the wand would recognize his lack of resistance to Snape’s Avada Kedavra to mean the spell was in accordance with Dumbledore’s will, cast in order to protect others from harm. 

That would have been Dumbledore’s attempt to extend the Elder Wand’s protection to Snape from beyond the grave.  He had wanted Snape to survive.

The other element of Dumbledore’s protection of Snape was not telling him about the Horcruxes.

During the argument Hagrid overheard, four months before Dumbledore died, Snape was vulnerable enough to bring up his jealousy, asking why Dumbledore shared things with Harry he would not tell Snape:  “You trust him…you do not trust me.” 

Dumbledore tells him the truth, “It is not a question of trust,” before proceeding to dig himself in deeper with Snape through an astonishing series of insults and evasions, such as the peculiarly emasculating retort, “I prefer not to put all of my secrets in one basket, particularly not a basket that spends so much time dangling on the arm of Lord Voldemort.”  Snape quite rightly objects, “Which I do on your orders!”  Dumbledore seems touchy about this – he’s uneasy about something and avoiding the issue.  When Snape refuses to be deterred, Dumbledore sighs in defeat and invites Snape to his office at the eleventh hour with a beautiful bit of wordplay:  “You shall not complain that I have no confidence in you….”  No, Dumbledore doesn’t confide everything to Snape, but he shows confidence in Snape.  In accepting this invitation, Snape has just agreed to take on an assignment without full explanation.

If Dumbledore had felt free to tell Snape the truth, he might have said the same thing he told Harry in Order of the Phoenix about why he consigned Harry to ten years with the Dursleys:  “My priority was to keep you alive.”

When Dumbledore tells Snape that part of Voldemort’s soul lives in Harry, he keeps his eyes shut tight as a layer of security against even accidental Legilimency.  Snape must not sense any hint about Horcruxes in case Voldemort sees this knowledge in one of his constant sweeps of Snape’s mind.  The series is full of instances of nonconsensual Legilimency:  Snape dragging the image of the Potions book out of Harry’s mind, Dumbledore forcing information out of Morfin and Kreacher, Rita Skeeter taking what she wanted from Bathilda Bagshot, Voldemort destroying Bertha Jorkins’s memory block so thoroughly that it broke her.  Ignorance protects the victim of Legilimency:  if the victim doesn’t seem to know anything useful, the Legilimens will hopefully withdraw.

In the Deathly Hallows chapter called “The Thief,” Harry gets a direct view of what it’s like when Voldemort violates the mind of wandmaker Gregorovitch:  “The hanging man’s pupils were wide, dilated with fear, and they seemed to swell, bigger and bigger until their blackness swallowed Harry whole – And now Harry was hurrying along a dark corridor in stout little Gregorovitch’s wake as he held a lantern aloft.”  Harry can see everything Voldemort sees:  in this case, a decades-old memory so vivid that Voldemort tortures and kills Gregorovitch for it.  This scene is not only a terrifying view into how Legilimency feels; it’s also the author’s demonstration of how clearly Voldemort could see into Harry’s mind and why Snape had been right, two years earlier, to shut down the Occlumency lessons and throw Harry out of his office.

Voldemort depends upon his Horcruxes remaining an absolute secret and there’s no mystery about how he would deal with anyone who knows about them.  Slughorn spends a year on the run in mortal fear just in case Voldemort suspects Slughorn remembers him asking about Horcruxes.  Voldemort is at his absolute most unhinged when a goblin tells him his golden cup has been stolen from Gringotts:  he kills the messenger and everyone else he can reach.  “Bellatrix and Lucius Malfoy threw others behind them in their race for the door, and again and again his wand fell, and those who were left were slain, all of them, for bringing him this news, for hearing about the golden cup –”  These goblins and wizards don’t even know why the cup is significant, but in his panic, he eliminates them all, even his own people.

This is the eventuality Dumbledore wanted to put off as long as possible.

He knew Voldemort didn’t sense the destruction of the diary and ring.  This loss of sensitivity allowed Dumbledore and Harry the advantage of precious time to hunt Horcruxes before Voldemort inevitably caught on that they knew about them — and perhaps worse, caught on that they knew how many Voldemort had made. 

The hint that Voldemort aimed for seven fragments is as crucial as finding the Horcruxes themselves.  What Dumbledore knew about someone as unloved, frightened, and phenomenally powerful as Tom Riddle is that he would have craved limits.  From infancy, he had never known the loving limits that children need to gain a sense of safety:  he never encountered anything more powerful than his own infant rage.  Child Voldemort’s experience was that there were no grownups in the world, nothing strong enough to comfort and contain him.  Could he make Horcruxes and become immortal?  Sure, why not?  Who would stop him?  He would have wanted to know:  at what point could he stop?  When could he feel safe?  Would seven pieces be enough?

If Voldemort learned that someone knew of his Horcruxes, he might move them or try to make more – bad news enough for anyone trying to fight him – but more than that, he would lose whatever sense of security he gained from thinking he had done enough.  As Dumbledore noted about Draco in his sixth year, and as we see during Voldemort’s goblin-killing spree, desperation makes people more dangerous.  Dumbledore had to give Harry as much of a head start as possible while Voldemort remained unaware, but maddeningly – as with the secret he kept from Snape – he could not tell Harry certain crucial, hopeful things because of the risk that Voldemort would read them in Harry’s mind. 

Dumbledore’s frustration reaches its peak in the “Horcruxes” chapter of Half-Blood Prince, when he tries to convince Harry that he does have power that Voldemort doesn’t, but without telling Harry things that Voldemort might be able to find out: 

• That Harry must let Voldemort kill him without defending himself
• That Harry must not try to kill Voldemort, which would only increase the power of the soul fragment in Harry’s scar
• That Dumbledore made the choice at the end of Order of the Phoenix to lie by omission when Harry asked him whether the prophecy meant “that one of us has got to kill the other one … in the end?” and Dumbledore said yes, and then spent the next year choosing his wording carefully to allow Harry to think he might kill Voldemort, not that he would have to let Voldemort kill him
• That every time Voldemort cast Avada Kedavra against Harry, it wouldn’t hurt Harry but would rebound upon Voldemort as it did the first time because Lily’s protective charm was permanently in Voldemort’s very blood. 
• But that Harry couldn’t have the security of knowing this because Voldemort needed to know, through their connection, that Harry was willing to sacrifice himself to protect others – and Voldemort would crave this kind of self-sacrificial protection with the same mortal jealousy that originally devastated him when he saw it in Lily, and would have killed him if not for the Horcruxes that once tethered him to life

Dumbledore cannot tell Harry any of these things.  No wonder Harry thinks he had never seen Dumbledore so agitated.  The poor man is reduced to shouting vaguely at the bewildered teen:  “It is essential that you understand this!  By attempting to kill you, Voldemort himself singled out the remarkable person who sits here in front of me, and gave him the tools for the job!”  It would have been great if Dumbledore had been free to spell out for Harry exactly what those tools were.  That would have spared Harry a lot of suffering.

Dumbledore accepted that after he died, Harry would possibly curse him and his secretiveness, wondering if Dumbledore ever cared for him; Snape would think of him that he cold-heartedly raised Harry for slaughter and cared for Snape even less than he cared for Harry.  That hurt, but as the grownup in the room – the greatest and most clever of men, whose mistakes ran the risk of being correspondingly huger — he accepted it.  That was difficult and lonely and generous, especially since he knew he would die without knowing if his agenda would prevail.  But for me as a reader, it’s satisfying and comforting to read that Dumbledore’s efforts got Harry to adulthood unburdened by anyone else’s damaged soul; that Dumbledore’s second chance enabled Snape to heal his own soul through remorse; that Dumbledore and Snape helped avert damage to Draco’s soul; that Dumbledore’s mercy allowed Grindelwald the opportunity to know remorse; and that Dumbledore even managed to help Voldemort return to mortality, an end to pain, and a soul that was once again in one piece before he died.