The smart money is on the following revelations in the next, and ultimate, Harry Potter book:

1) Snape was in love with Harry's mother, and it was her death that caused him to repent of his connection with Voldemort and switch sides. Snape's enmity towards Harry stems as much from Harry's being the son by Lily that he did not have as from Snape's hatred of Harry's father James;

2) Harry himself is the final Horcrux. There have been hints at this throughout, in the repeated mention that Voldemort "put some of himself into Harry" on the fateful night, resulting in, among other things, Harry's ability to speak Parseltongue;

3) Harry and Snape are in fact related. If Rowling is a truly elegant writer, that relationship will be on their Muggle rather than their wizard sides, i.e., Snape and Lily would have been cousins (see #1);

4) Dumbledore will return. He has been identified with the immortal phoenix throughout the series, and like the phoenix, his body is consumed by fire at his funeral. He also is one of the two creators of the Sorcerer's Stone, which confers eternal life.

5) The final defeat of Voldemort will be accomplished by his experiencing a dementor's kiss.

You read it here first.

I agree with 1 and 2. 3 is new to me and an interesting innovation especially if the relation is on the muggle side. Could be true.

Don't believe 4, that Dumbledore will rise from the dead - it makes him too much like Gandalf and that tomb is a pretty impressive affair. I say leave him in it, and make him a kind of King Arthur - or 12th Imam for that matter - with a myth that he will return once more at a time of profound trouble.

Though I note that Voldemort and Harry are also associated with Phoenixes. Voldemort has of course already 'risen from the dead' more than once. And I fully believe that Harry will also seemingly rise from the dead once the final Horcrux - which I think is his scar - is removed from him. We'll learn that there is no way to destroy it without him sacrificing his life - and he'll do it - but the spell will transmute in some weird way so that, in the end, he'll be alive.

As for 5, that's possible as a way to do away with Voldemort once all the Horcruxes are already destroyed and he is vulnerable. Though, of course, there will be very little soul left at that point to suck out. Also interesting.

Regarding my #3 above (Harry and Snape being related), while I could be wrong, it could also turn out that there are blood relationships between Harry and Snape, Snape and Voldemort, or among all three; Snape, Voldemort and Harry. All three are, famously, "half-bloods;" Voldemort himself comments on the similarities between himself and HP in "The Chamber of Secrets." Sirius commented on how "all the old wizarding families are related to each other;" what with S, V and HP all being half-bloods, there are potential revelations of a dysfunctional family of almost Biblical proportions.

As far as Dumbledore's return making him "too much like Gandalf," well, why not? It's not as though the Harry Potter series is not derivative. It contains elements--or at least echoes--of the Billy Bunter books, Kipling's "Stalky & Co.," Arthur Calder-Marshall's "The Fair to Middling," and "Carbonel," just for starters. Throwing a little essence of Gandalf into such a brew is nothing.

In a world where long-dead people continue to speak and act--such as Everard Nigellus, via his portrait--it would be astonishing if Dumbledore did not make at least a token reappearance, if only via his picture on a Chocolate Frog trading card.

Despite the fact that Voldemort and Harry both carry wands with phoenix-feather cores, Fawkes, the phoenix which supplied them, is Dumbledore's faithful pet. Voldemort himself is less associated with the phoenix than with Dracula; he is not so much a figure of eternal life and reincarnation as undead.

Even if all the Horcruxes except Harry are destroyed, a dementor would solve the problem of disposing of Voldemort without Harry having to kill someone (something he has, thus far, managed to avoid). He's already shown that he can function as a good person while carrying around a smidgen of the Voldemort soul (leaving open the possibility that as a Horcrux he became the repository of what little good still remained in Voldemort). If a dementor (perhaps goaded by the combined Patronuses of Harry and several others) were to devour the portion of soul which animates the resurrected Voldemort, it is probable that would be sufficient to destroy the Dark Lord while leaving Harry unscathed.

Sorry - a lot of these theories sound much too mechanical, and Rowling has shown herself to be a better writer than that.

For example - the *thematic* link already established between all the half-bloods is sufficient for her purpose, underscoring the chauvinism of the Death Eaters (which she has further underscored with the leitmotif of chauvinism and racisim in the general wizarding community).

Harry clearly will have to choose whether or not to trust Snape - but that's already been set up: the notion of a blood kinship between them is an unneccesary, forced, computer-game type of plot twist. Rowling is much better than that.

Ben-David:

I'd have to disagree with you. For one thing, I don't think Rowling is a particularly good writer. Enjoyable, certainly--to a point--but not particularly good. Not only is her writing highly derivative thematically, but I have found sentences in each of the books which echo sentences from the books on which she has drawn. And, while I like onomatapoetic names at least as much as the next guy, she's a little heavy-handed in this regard; SJ Perelman she ain't.

It may be overreaching to forecast one or more blood relationships among Harry, Voldemort and Snape; of my various original predictions, it is certainly the weakest (and the least necessary), but it is not without foundation.

The real test of whether Rowling is a decent writer will turn on Draco Malfoy's redemption. Rowling's characters for the most part have been black and white cartoons; good or bad, once limned they remain forever the same, like Dickens' characters without the depth. It will be interesting to see if Malfoy, who has been an arrogant, cowardly, bigoted bully and sneak from the beginning, but who shrank at the last moment from committing murder even to save himself and his family, will finally show that he has the character to go against type and do something noble--such as sacrificing himself to save Harry when Harry is in a tight corner. My money is on Wormtail rather than Malfoy doing this (with reference to Alcibiades' invocation of Tolkein above, Wormtail will play Gollum to Dumbledore's Gandalf), but Malfoy is the second-best bet.

Ben David,

Something will have to explain that extraordinary bit where Petunia knew about dementors and seemed to know about the wizarding world than we ever suspected she would.

If she knew Snape and had been sympathetic to him, or had even been in love with him in the past, her terrific resentment of James Potter, and after him, his son, will have some sort of cohesive psychological explanation.

My worry is that having set up all these storylines in six books, she can't possibly live up to finishing them all off (or a satisfying number of them) in a fulfilling manner. I'm afraid the last book wil be disappointing.

buzzsawmonkey wrote:

It contains elements--or at least echoes--of the Billy Bunter books, Kipling's "Stalky & Co.," Arthur Calder-Marshall's "The Fair to Middling," and "Carbonel," just for starters.

I have to admit that I haven't read any of these. [I feel all illiterate. Hangs head]

As for your suggestion that Dumbledore might manifest another way, through a picture or through the Mirror - or some new way that JKR makes up, that I would not find surprising at all. Though the one I really want to know about, and I suspect so does Harry, is Sirius. I want him to manifest some way. And he's just behind the veil, not encased in a marble tomb, so it should be eas[y][ier].

It's hard to imagine that a death spell would be the occasion of Harry ending up with Voldemort's good side, if he had any left. No, given what emotional moments that Harry experiences in his dream of Voldemort, I imagine it will be tied into emotion: glee/anger, etc, if Voldemort has subdivided himself so neatly.

You know, it occurs to me, if Harry and co. succeed in destroying all the other Horcruxim, and Voldemort knows that, than Voldemort himself is unable to kill Harry without killing himself. He'll want to spare Harry and spare himself. Which makes more sense of the prophecy than I thought.

Also I wonder, once more of those horcruxes get destroyed, whether some kind of symbiotic state will be set up between Voldemort and Harry as Voldemort feeds on that part of his soul. So that their mutual existences will be driven on the one hand by the pain of Voldemort's possession of Harry - and on the other hand, by Voldemort unable to bear the love he feels in Harry. Extremely unpleasant for both of them.

I think Snape will turn out to be the most interesting character. Whatever you can say about him, he's not a cartoon.

As for Wormtail, by name and personality, he always make me think of Grima Wormtongue rather than Gollum. So, I wouldn't be surprised if he turns on Voldemort before the end. Particularly in light of the fact that we have had that warning about him doing so from Dumbledore.

Alcibiades:

Don't feel too bad about not having read the books I mentioned. My having read them is in large part a function of being in the right place at the right time, i.e., having briefly gone to school in England on the cusp of teenhood.

School stories have been a major English genre since "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes. Kipling's "Stalky & Co., a fictionalized account of his school days at the United Services College, was in part written as an antidote to some of the more gooey examples of the genre. If you want an executive summary, so to speak, of the school story genre you might want to check out Orwell's essay "Boys' Weeklies." The comic school stories of fat boy Billy Bunter, which Orwell discusses at length, were still standard fare for preteens and early teenagers at the time I was there. Bunter was also featured in at least one of the comic weeklies we all read back then.

Arthur Calder-Marshall was one of the British intellectuals who went Catholic rather than communist. His "The Fair to Middling" is also a school story, with a bit of a twist: the school (co-ed, which is unusual in the standard school story, but it resembles Hogwarts in this regard) is a school for orphans, and the teachers all have some sort of handicap; one was (IIRC) a former athlete whose leg is crippled, one a former beauty whose face became terribly scarred, etc. Anyway, the children and masters go to a fair at the neighboring town of Middling (hence the book's punning title), where each is offered something which may, or may not, cure their particular problem. Some of the offers are of angelic origin, some of demonic origin; it is not usually clear until the end of each episode which is which. Some of the characters accept their offers, and some do not. Incidentally, the demonic figure who tempts the ex-beauty with the offer of a new face is named Monsieur Volte-face; I would be very much surprised if this character was not Rowling's inspiration for Voldemort's name.

I can't remember who wrote "Carbonel." It's a story of a girl who unknowingly buys a cat from a witch. She later acquires the witch's cauldron and broomstick, and adventures ensue.
*****
Returning to the HP series, I see the Horcrux phenomenon as a sort of mini-storage for the soul--but if the warehouse is destroyed, that bit of soul is lost, e.g., the Riddle diary in "Chamber of Secrets."

If I am correct in this, Voldemort is functioning quite well (by his lights) without the bits of soul he has placed in storage; consequently, if all the other Horcruxim were destroyed he could still kill Harry (he tried to, after all, in "Goblet") without harming himself--but he would then revert to a mortal state, as he would have the only remaining bit of his own soul.

While committing murder is mentioned in "Half-Blood" as the sort of spiritual upheaval which would allow the soul to be split, there is nothing to say that the portion of Voldemort's soul which he split off via the murder of Harry's father could not have been that containing the residue of Voldemort's good side, if any. Of course, Voldemort could merely have been going for a twofer; killing James to oblige the Lily-besotted Snape while parking a soul fragment in his prophesied nemesis for extra safekeeping.

Your symbiotic agony theory is very interesting, and quite plausible.

Wormtongue and Gollum are in essence the same character, in that they both turn on their masters at the end to accomplish something--the death of Saruman, the destruction of the Ring--which others hesitate to do. But you're right; the Worms, both -tail and -tongue, have the trait of fawning, hate-filled loyalty in common as well as the first syllable of their names.

buzzsawmonkey wrote:

f I am correct in this, Voldemort is functioning quite well (by his lights) without the bits of soul he has placed in storage; consequently, if all the other Horcruxim were destroyed he could still kill Harry (he tried to, after all, in "Goblet") without harming himself--but he would then revert to a mortal state, as he would have the only remaining bit of his own soul.

But he tried to kill Harry before anyone - to our knowledge - had discovered the secret of the Horcruxim. And if he had killed Harry at that point, while several fragments were still in existence, then he would have been "safe."

However, if the last remaining bit of his soul is contained in Harry, then I think he might have a question as to his fate. Because effectively, without any bit of soul remaining, he'll exist in the same state as people whose souls have been sucked out of them by dementors.

And we know that can't be good. ;-'

By the way, here's my theory - Regulus found the locket using Kreacher. Regulus made Kreacher (creature) drink the potion in the cup, because we know already that Voldemort would never stoop to consider that such a creature as a house elf would have magic of an order he should take into account.

Drinking the potion may be what drove Kreacher around the deep end - or not - but in any case, Harry will have to find out from Kreacher one way or the other what happened on that fated trip.

Alcibiades:

But he tried to kill Harry before anyone - to our knowledge - had discovered the secret of the Horcruxim. And if he had killed Harry at that point, while several fragments were still in existence, then he would have been "safe."

Precisely. Voldemort tried to kill Harry even though he knew that Harry was one of the Horcruxim. Freshly reincarnated, he did not know that one Horcrux--the diary--had already been destroyed, but he would certainly have learned of that later from Lucius Malfoy.

There is no reason that Voldemort should yet know that two other Horcruxim (the ring and the locket) have been found and dealt with. Had he learned of the theft of the real locket, there would be no reason for the substitute to still be sitting in its place. Nor would he necessarily know that Dumbledore had destroyed the Horcrux within the ring, unless Dumbledore had wrested the ring from him directly; like the locket, the ring would surely have been secreted somewhere obscure for safekeeping.

Surely the fact that all the Horcruxim save Harry have been destroyed will be a revelation Harry makes to Voldemort during their final showdown, at which time Voldemort will be forced to choose between permitting Harry to live in order to preserve his last surviving hedge against mortality, or destroying his nemesis and becoming conventionally mortal once more. And if the two lone remaining bits of Voldemort's soul are those held by him and that carried by Harry, Voldemort would indeed be vulnerable if he is attacked by a dementor. (A contrary thought; might it prove that a dementor attack upon Harry could relieve him of the portion of Voldemort's soul which he carries, thereby destroying the final Horcrux while leaving Harry himself unscathed?)

I agree with your analysis regarding Regulus Black--and possibly Kreacher. What a relief; I had been wracking my brain to think of what character might have had a last name beginning with "B," and the only one I could come up with was Mr. Borgin of Borgin & Burkes, who I could not imagine suddenly emerging as a surprise hero. Sirius' late brother makes much more sense.

Regarding Petunia, to whom you alluded above, I have often wondered whether it will turn out that she a) is a Squib, like her neighbor Mrs. Figg, or b) was offered a place at Hogwarts as her sister was, but turned it down, was expelled, or (most probably) dropped out, after deciding that she wanted none of the wizarding world.