"The  truth...is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution."
     -- Albus Dumbledore

What follows on this page is a discussion of some of my favorite mysteries of the Harry Potter universe. JKR is very good at sneaking little hints and clues into her books, tidbits that turn out to be important later. This really came home for me when the true nature of Scabbers was revealed in PA. What a delicious moment that was! And not only because it was totally unexpected but because it made me realize that everything in every book just MIGHT be a clue to something bigger. I'm not alone in this...discussions of who might really be whom and what's really going on fill the email lists and clubs. I'm not trying to recreate all those discussions here, believe me. What this page does do is offer some of the evidence from the books that fuel these discussions. You're free to draw your own conclusions. And if you want to discuss your thoughts on any of these matters, I heartily recommend a very active Harry Potter online group: Harry Potter for GrownUps.

• Who is Mrs. Figg?
• Who are Harry's family?
• When did Arthur and Molly Weasley attend Hogwarts?
• Who's going to end up in love with whom?
• Why did just having that Tournament mean no one got to play Quidditch for an entire year?
• In which years is all this happening?
• Socks and wristwatches...

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Who are Harry's family?
I know, his parents are Lily and James Potter. But we know very little about these people. Sure, we know that Lily is Petunia Dursley's sister, but that's about it. Here are some details to consider:

• Lily has dark red hair. There's a lot of red hair in the books, actually. The most obvious ones are of course the Weasley family, and that's what we immediately think of. But they're not alone; in fact, I think they're something of a (forgive me) red herring. Besides Lily, there is one other major character whose hair is described as "auburn" and that's Dumbledore. Oh, not now, of course, but when he is encountered inside Tom Riddle's diary, when he's fifty years younger, he is mentioned as having auburn hair. So okay, is he maybe Lily's grandfather, Harry's great-grandfather?
• If Dumbledore is Harry's great grandfather, it would make sense that he would have James' Invisiblilty Cloak. He could have ended up with a lot of James' things after they died, most likely, since he was a direct relative. And it would make even more sense that he would feel strongly compelled to give it back to the boy.
• And then what about Tom Riddle's family? Might he be a relative of Harry's? He was named Tom after his father, whose name is also Tom Riddle, and Marvolo after his grandfather. Some folks have immediately jumped to the conclusion that Marvolo must be the elder Riddle who was also killed on that fateful evening fifty years ago. But wait, he's got another grandfather: his mother's father. His mother was a witch, after all, and let's face it, Marvolo certainly sounds like a wizarding name. So it makes sense to me that he's named after his grandfather on his mother's side. Who was...who? Could it be Dumbledore as well? What's Albus's middle name anyway?
• Now remember all those people Harry saw in the Mirror of Erised. What happened to them all? Are they ALL dead? Did Voldemort kill them all, and if so, why? Was he trying to wipe out the family for some reason? I assume that the people Harry saw were from both sides of the family, although they are referred to as "the Potters." If not, then where are his family on his mother's side?

When did Arthur and Molly attend Hogwarts?
Okay, now we're getting into nitpicky stuff. I don't suppose this has any bearing on things, but it bugs ME since I'm trying to create a complete time line and right now there are BIG holes in it. I have narrowed down the dates for James, Lily, Sirius, Snape, and that whole crowd to the 1970's, which works okay, but it surprises me that there are no more specific clues in any of the books. We know a lot more details about other characters, even relatively minor ones. Charlie Weasley, for example, left school seven years before Harry got there, so we can determine what years he was there, when he was born, and so on. But the James and Lily and their contemporaries are trickier to nail down, even though we are learning much about their exploits and adventures. So what? Well, I just get suspicious, that's all. If it seems like something's being left out or information is being withheld, I get curious. 

And here's why this question gets to me. There is one niggling little comment in GF that suggests to me that--brace yourself--there just might be TWO time lines going on here. Molly Weasley fondly recalls a man named Ogg being the groundskeeper when she went to Hogwarts. Now she's older than Sirius and Lupin, granted, but not so much older that she would have gone to Hogwarts before Hagrid and Tom Riddle, which was fifty years ago. After Hagrid was expelled, however, he was given the groundskeeper position. How does this Ogg fellow fit into the picture then? Okay, this is very thin logic, since it assumes that the gamekeeper and the groundskeeper have always been one and the same person and it also assumes that Hagrid wasn't an assistant or anything for a while (which we know he was, but we don't know for how long). But perhaps, just perhaps, we're dealing more than one time line. Maybe Molly and Arthur remember one time line, a time line that Voldemort changed somehow (changing time is a major no-no for wizards, we learn in PA, but I don't think that would have stopped him). Maybe Harry's big task is going to be to fix the past (Harry's present) so the future turns out the way it should, not the way it did the first time around (when Voldemort survived and somehow maybe even won). I'm not sure what I just said, but you get the drift...

And probably the strongest evidence of some kind of time twisting going in is the comment on CS that Voldemort is the last remaining ANCESTOR of Slalzar Slytherin. Some editions of the books have this "error" corrected, but other later editions have the word "ancestor" put back in. JKR herself suggested that the word ancestor might be used intentionally in an online chat session. We'll just have to see what happens next...

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Who will end up in love with whom?
No idea. Sorry.

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Why does just having that Triwizard Tournament mean nobody gets to play Quidditch for the whole year?
Boy, I wish I knew the answer to this one. No one got to play for the whole year. And no, it's not just that they play and we just don't hear about it. According to the book, Harry wishes at one point that he had Quidditch to take his mind off his worries. So no Quidditch, all year. I do have one suggestion, but it's pretty pathetic. Their Quidditch field is out of operation for the fall because they are using it to store dragons on and it's knocked out again in the spring for growing the maze (and that, according to the book, takes months.) You don't play Quidditch much in the winter, the weather is too bad.

But think about it...no Quidditch for an entire school year. What about people like Harry for whom Quidditch is an all-consuming passion? What about the folks who look to start a career as a Quiddich player, like Oliver Wood did? Is it fair to just drop the sports program, the sport which everyone in the wizarding world is mad about, so that a couple of students can compete in a tournament?

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Socks and wristwatches...
Have you noticed how little odd things seems to crop up a little more often than you might expect? That's the way it is with socks and wristwatches. I don't see any particular pattern in the wristwatches, to be honest with you. It's just that JKR keep mentioning them. Dudley gets a new one for his birthday. Harry looks at his quite often, and then gets frustrated when it stops working after swimming in the lake. The sun glints off the watch that George (or is it Fred) is wearing during a Quidditch game and off a watch worn by Pansy Parkinson as they are introduced to the nifflers. But except for that crazy suspicion of mine about two time lines and all that, I can't see where wristwatches could connect to anything. Just thought I'd mention it.

But socks...that's another story. There are just a couple of references here, but they are intriguing ones. First of all, when Harry asks Dumbledore what he would see if he looked into the Mirror of Erised, Dumbledore said that he would see himself with a nice new pair of thick socks. So, unless he was joking, which he certainly could be, socks are Dumbledore's deepest desire. Socks. Then think about this: who else wanted a sock more than anything in the world? Dobby. And we know that house-elves are just about the most powerful magic-using entities in the world, able to do incredible magic without even using a wand. So is Dumbledore wishing he could release the elves from their centuries of enslavement so they can use their awesome powers to fight Voldemort? 
See: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Socks by Morag Traynor

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