“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows“, eh? Doesn’t give anything away, but sounds suitably ominous!

Here are some of my thoughts on what will happen in the last book. Be warned, SPOILERS for the previous books (but anyone who cares will have read them all by now, I’d guess!)

I’ve thought that Harry is a horcrux ever since I first read HBP. The main clues that I can see are as follows:

• Voldemort had one horcrux left to create when he went to Godric’s Hollow.
• The creation of a horcrux requires a murder – Harry’s parents had just been murdered.
• There is a strange connection between Harry and Voldemort; some of Voldemort’s abilities were transferred to Harry and a connection made between them when Voldemort tried to kill Harry
• Harry describes this in CoS as “Voldemort put a piece of himself into me”

My theory: Voldemort’s plan was to use the murder of James Potter to make Harry’s dead body his final horcrux, a gruesome trophy of his victory over the one prophecied to defeat him and over destiny itself. The plan backfired when Harry didn’t actually die, though Voldemort is probably unaware that Harry still became a horcrux.

This works very well dramatically, because it up the stakes and means that destroying Voldemort is going to be very costly for Harry.

Thematically, I think that it’s pretty much a given that Voldemort will in some sense be defeated by love. According to Dumbledore, his great weakness is that he doesn’t understand that there are worse things than death; Dumbledore also describes love as a force more wonderful and terrible than death. One of the things that the glimpses into Voldemort’s past in HBP seemed to be designed to show was that Voldemort has grown up completely without love. The whole theme of the power of sacrificial love is a very important one in the series so far, and I reckon it’s probably the key theme of the series.

So I can see a couple of possibilities. One is that Harry will, on discovering he’s a horcrux, believe that he has to kill both himself and Voldemort at the same time to defeat him. He does this, but the power of being willing to lay down his life out of his love for his friends destroys the fragment of Voldemort’s soul within him and somehow shielding him so he doesn’t actually die. Another theory I have is that Harry will destroy Voldemort by showing some act of love towards him.