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The Real Reason Dumbledore Doomed Himself in Harry Potter Was a Pure Accident

The Real Reason Dumbledore Doomed Himself in Harry Potter Was a Pure Accident
Image credit: Warner Bros.

The character’s fight with evil eventually cost him his life.

Summary:

  • Harry Potter ’s story has witnessed quite many tragic events and deaths on its way — but one of the major characters’ death was in fact foreseen by an accident.
  • Being the first to oppose Voldemort, the character embarked on a search for the seven horcruxes which eventually led to him being cursed forever.
  • In the light of the story that not many fans may know, the character’s sacrifice doesn’t look that meaningless anymore.

Harry Potter’s books and movies are almost literally penetrated with tragic losses throughout the whole plot, but one character’s death hit the fans especially hard.

The greatest headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore has been a fan-favorite wizard since his very first meeting with then little Harry. His deliberate sacrifice in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince definitely shattered a few hearts back then — but not many may know that he was actually doomed long before Dumbledore’s pact with Severus Snape was carried out.

It may not come as something surprising, but Dumbledore was indeed the first one to start everyone’s fight against Voldemort. Having strong suspicions about his former student’s use of forbidden magic, Dumbledore dived deep into his own investigations which eventually led him to finding one of the seven horcruxes with a part of Voldemort’s soul in it.

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While passing by the hovel that previously belonged to Voldemort’s family, Dumbledore managed to locate the ring of Salazar Slytherin which, as the wizard discovered later, had the mark of the Deathly Hallows on it meaning that the ring had a magical power of bringing the dead back to the living world.

Though he knew exactly what consequences it could lead to, Dumbledore wasn’t able to restrain himself from an attempt to see his gone family again — and the main reason for it can be the fact that Dumbledore blamed himself for deaths of his loved ones.

By giving it a try which could give him one-in-a-million chance to bring his sincere apology to his parents and sister, Dumbledore instead exposed himself to a never-ending curse from Voldemort’s horcrux that defined his slow, but certain death.

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This little-known, yet crucial detail about Dumbledore’s life and doomed fate comes as a very logical explanation why he faced his death so easily in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as he always knew he was going to die.

While many fans argued that the wizard’s death was somehow meaningless, it actually wasn’t — and Dumbledore opted for giving his sacrifice some purpose, which resulted in the Order of Phoenix’s weapon being safe from the dark forces, rather than falling another victim to Voldemort’s misdeed.