I’ve brought it up before here at The Hog’s Head and never received an answer satisfactory enough: Why didn’t Fake Moody just make a portkey out of Harry’s broomstick or pumpkin juice at the beginning of the year? Why the long, elaborate, risky plan?
I may have been thinking too hard about it. At the book table after the event in NYC last night, Melissa Anelli, webmistress of the Leaky Cauldron, said, very simply, “Dumbledore wouldn’t have allowed that kind of magic except in that particular instance – at the end of the tournament.” That didn’t seem like a strong enough argument to me at first, but I asked her a few clarifying questions, and three things struck me in our discussion:
- Portkeys are highly regulated in the Wizarding World.
- The Ministry of Magic may not know who is casting a spell, but they always know which spell is cast.
- A portkey is a perfect way to finish the tournament: The winner is zapped back to the start of the maze.
With these thoughts in mind, the answer might be as simple as this: Fake Moody couldn’t randomly create a portkey. It would be noticed by the Ministry. But since the final trial of the TriWizard Tournament was set to end with a portkey, the plan was hatched that Harry would make it to that portkey, that Fake Moody would be the one to make that portkey, but that instead of sending the tournament’s winner back to the beginning of the maze, it would send him to the graveyard instead.
Even if the whole plan is still a little bit too elaborate and perhaps risky, it’s the best explanation I’ve heard! (My apologies, by the way, if someone here suggested this and I’m forgetting it. Please step up and take credit if you did.)
Thoughts?
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{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
I actually posted a very similar theory here almost a year ago and was shot down
Granted, mine was a little more elaborate, and so probably sounded more absurd, but…
But then the fake Moody would just create a portkey when he and Harry were in Hogsmeade, and whisk himself and Harry away.
Treebeard, it would still be detected by the Ministry, though.
ned, do you remember which thread it was in, by any chance? If you can find it, I’ll link to it and give you credit for being the first at THH to posit it
Wow, that is an excellent idea! I never thought about that. The fourth book is my least favorite of the 7, but with that in mind, I might enjoy it more. Thanks for sharing!
Okay, to add to that: Supporting Melissa’s idea is the fifth book, how Umbridge knew within minutes of Dumbledore creating the portkey to #12 Grimmauld Place that there were students out of bed. Obviously the ministry must have known a portkey was created in DD’s office, and thereby sent Umbridge that direction.
Or, just disapperated out of Hogsmeade.
Treebeard, right – that’s the point where any use of the portkey can be questioned, because why not a simple kidnapping? Snatch Harry in Hogsmeade, and apparate away.
But a kidnapping seems just as risky. I don’t recall that Harry was ever alone in GoF in Hogsmeade, and the only time he was away from the town itself, he was in a cave with Ron, Hermione, and Sirius. So kidnapping = everyone knowing instantly that Harry has been taken, and the search begins quickly. It might seem unlikely they’d be able to find him, but perhaps Voldemort was suspicious of how much Dumbledore knew about his history (though subsequent mistakes by Voldemort might suggest otherwise).
The other advantage of portkey vs. kidnapping is that the portkey was supposed to mysteriously take Harry away and lead to his death, with a period of perhaps hours before anyone knew he was missing, and no trail to follow whatsoever. Remember, Voldemort wanted to maintain the secrecy of his return. A kidnapping, especially with recent Death Eater activity, would result in a lot more suspicion.
Beyond that, apparation is tricky. Too easy to splinch someone with side-along apparation, and obviously Harry wasn’t going to apparate himself, you know? Side-along is meant to be an emergency-type thing. I imagine Dumbledore was able to manage it with Harry so well simply because he was such a powerful and skilled wizard. Harry even implies that his ears felt twitchy afterwards, as if they were almost left behind.
That was a great explanation. I was wondering the same thing when I read Book 4. I love Melissa Anelli!
Sorry, but I’m still having trouble here. Fake Moody could just have said to Harry, “Come with me, we need to talk,” and to Ron and Hermione “Don’t wait for us – we probably won’t even be at dinner.” Then just stun Harry and take him on a broom. Or in a car. It just doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult. Insuring that Harry would win the tournament just seems much riskier. In fact, it wouldn’t have worked if Cedric hadn’t been so noble.
There are problems with either way of doing it. I think that’s part of the point: how do you get Harry out of Dumbledore’s protection? Not easy to do.
The “Come, we need to talk” method of kidnapping still results in the obvious problem that Ron and Hermione know who the culprit is and when he disappeared.
In the tournament, we don’t know if he’s lost in the maze somewhere, still traipsing around, killed by a Sphinx or a Blast-ended Skrewt, etc.
Treebeard, I’m with you. When I read Melissa’s explanation, my first question was, “Why do you need to use a portkey in the first place?”
“Why do you need to use a portkey in the first place?”
Because the portkey was set up in the first few chapters, so it needed a big payoff at the end
I think there are problems with any theory, as I’ve said; but this is the closest I’ve seen to a decent explanation for why something else wasn’t turned into a portkey.
I believe it was in the Pub Cast #50 discussion thread.
My extra little complication was that I thought that using the portkey was just one step in a larger plan that we never saw come to fruition because Harry messed it up by not dying.
Melissa’s explanation satisfies me. It’s matter-of-fact and doesn’t require overelaboration (like all the ornate polyjuicing speculations before Deathly Hallows).
It’s a good explanation but I don’t totally buy it. But it works, I suppose. I still think things could’ve been accomplished much easily in different ways. But then some people are elaborate planners & make overcomplicated plans when a simple one would do & then stick with their plan despite any other opportunities that might come along. That could exemplify fake Moody. One question, though, on something you said, Travis, was the Cup always meant to be a portkey?
Regarding plot devices, something Arabella just said reminded me of something in the earlier wedding chapter of our DH read through. Harry goes disguised as a muggle boy but as far as we know only takes one dose of polyjuice potion when a dose only lasts for one hour & we’re not shown anywhere previously where you could take multiple doses to last for longer periods. Otherwise, fake Moody wouldn’t have constantly needed to drink polyjuice potion.
And, revgeorge, what wedding and reception lasts just one hour?? Was Harry sipping polyjuice on his punch?
Fake Moody DOES constantly drink PP; it’s in his hipflask.
In the wedding chapter it says that Harry had an extralarge dose of PP. Seems inconsistent with the one hour bit (otherwise why didn’t Moody just drink extra large doses, too, but probably simpler for the flow of the book with all the times they use PP. I think Rowling was trying to get around the 1 hour limit she imposed on herself back in COS.
I’m thinking the cup was always meant to be a portkey and had the coming back to the beginning of the maze magic already placed upon it. THey fake Moody overlaid the graveyard aspect. That’s why the cup was able to bring Harry back (which I had always found odd as the portkey doesn’t usually work in reverse). It brought him to the edge of the maze, not the center, because that’s what it originally was supposed to do.
I’m guessing as Melissa said that Hogwarts usually has anti-portkey protections over the castle and grounds (like the anti-apparition protections) so no one can kidnap someone by portkey; DD just lifted it briefly so that the kids could get away in OOTP.
I get the sense that Voldy was going for the grand plan, making Harry disappear right under the nose of Dumbledore and the entire school, not to mention the Minister of Magic.
Well, this is the best explanation I’ve heard. Though I think the night that Harry gives “Moody” the marauder’s map would have been an excellent time for kidnapping. After all, nobody knew that Moody was being impersonated. If Crouch Jr. had been sure to take his trunk, most people probably would’ve just thought that “Mad-Eye” had finally gone off the deep end, and taken Harry with him.
I really didn’t want to be the curmudgeon or devil’s advocate here. I think the larger point is that you really can’t create an alternate universe completely consistently. Narnia, Middle Earth, Star Trek all had their “plot holes.” I was reading a Star Trek technical manual once, where the creators talked about how they had to make warp speed fast, but not too fast – otherwise the galaxy would be too easy to explore! The fact that the invented “alternate laws of physics” aren’t always right doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the books, or the meaning I get from them.
For the record, I think Rowling has done about the best job in creating a consistent alternate universe, with the possible exception of Tolkien.
Melissa’s explanation works for me as well. I never had that much of a problem with that part of the book anyway. It’s fiction, it’s fantasy and once I get to that point, I am fairly willing to just go along with the author without qauestioning it.
The reason GOF wasn’t my favorite is that it’s so much action. I like seeing action in a movie, but I don’t really like reading it. That’s probably the reason I liked OP so much better – less action, until the end, and a lot of internal struggle.
I sent this post to my friend Dana, who had the following thoughts re Portkeys and GoF:
“I always assumed–and this is probably just from reading too much fantasy literature (if there is such a problem)–that the timing of the sacrifice had to be right, that V had to gain a certain amount of strength. Wouldn’t the end of the tournament have been about the same time as the solstice? It’s clearly a powerful incantation; if place and ingredients are so important, why not time of year as well?
Could it be possible that V needed Fake Moody to stay longer at Hogwarts, perhaps checking up on his old friend and double-agent Snape? Moody/Crouch is certainly suspicious of Snape and holds him in contempt for not following V into exile, or going to Azkaban. It also gave V the rare opportunity to have a spy corroborate Snape’s accounts of things, a spy with rare access to Dumbledore. Because of course Dumbledore KNEW that Snape was a double agent, so might choose to keep key information from him, as he did with the Horcruxes in book 6. (Snape knew that the ring was cursed, but not how or why.) But Moody, V might think, would be completely trusted by Dumbledore and be another source of information close to Dumbledore.
Portkeys are used so rarely in the books that it’s hard to draw too many conclusions, especially once the concept of side-by-side Apparition is introduced in book 6. However, in OotP, Dumbledore creates a portkey for the Weasley kids and Harry to travel to Grimmauld Place, after Harry’s vision of Mr. Weasley’s injury. Dumbledore, in this case, uses a Portkey because the Floo networks are under Umbridge’s watch. This indicates both that 1) Portkeys are not/cannot be monitored in the same way as other spells and 2) Portkeys are more difficult magic, and the Floo network is the preferred convenient means of travel.”