Post by tenderlumpling on Mar 21, 2010 0:45:42 GMT -5
Well, this sites been open for a few weeks now and I thought the time was nigh for a Snape thread. Here it is. Want to gush about Snape? You're in the right place! Want to propose a theory about Snape? Post away! This thread is All Severus, All The Time!
I'll start:
I found a rather interesting set of questions on COSForums, pertaining to a character I've given a lot of thought to recently... Probably too much thought, actually: Eileen Prince.
Why would I think about her? Well, she's Snape's mother, and like it or not, our parents have a huge impact on our lives. (Example: I'm anti-religion because my mother was a religious nutbag when I was growing up.) What kind of woman raised Severus Snape? That is what I wish to examine here.
1. We know she was at Hogwarts fifty years ago - the same time as Tom Riddle, Sirius tells us that Snape came to Hogwarts knowing more curses than most Seventh Years. If this is true, did he learn them from his mother? Is it possible she was part of Tom Riddle's group at Hogwarts?
I think it's a given he learned some Dark magic from his mother; I mean, he bloody well couldn't have learned it from his father (Tobias was a Muggle, remember?). Was she a member of Tom Riddle's group? ...Maybe, possibly, I don't think we could rule it out...
2. The Half-Blood Prince's Potions Book was fifty years old, did she contribute anything to it? Was she a member of the Slug Club?
Debatable; someone on COSForums suggested that Eileen was a corollary to Merope Gaunt, and not confident in her magical abilities (it would explain why she didn't seem to fight back when Tobias started on her). On the other hand, Severus is a very powerful wizard, and it was made clear that he grew up seeing his mother use magic in Deathly Hallows. Also, in Goblet of Fire Sirius tells Harry that Snape "knew more curses" than the seventh-years when he started at Hogwarts. He could have been exaggerating, but considering what we knew about Snape up to that point and what we learned about him after that, doubting this statement is pretty foolish. As much as we want to believe that he's the All-Knowing, All-Seeing Sex God, the fact remains that Snape wasn't born knowing these curses; he learned them from somewhere or someone, and who better to teach him than his mother?
Also consider that Severus, at eleven, was eager to be sorted into Slytherin, which had a reputation for churning out Dark wizards and witches. Obviously, the Princes were a Slytherin family; who's to say Eileen, herself, didn't learn a bunch of Dark magic at a young age? Maybe it was a Prince tradition.
3. We know she married a muggle, Tobias Snape. Why would she choose to do this?
I actually have a theory that Severus Snape isn't really a Snape, but a Riddle. It goes something like this: Tom Riddle, for whatever reason, had sex with Eileen Prince (or raped her; that seems more the kind of thing Voldemort would do) and she ended up pregnant. Since this would have happened in 1959, she would have under a lot of pressure to get married to save face. She wasn't a particularly pretty girl, and it could have happened that Tobias Snape said some nice things to her and promised to take care of her. That kind of marriage -essentially one of convenience- doesn't tend to be a happy one. So sometime between Eileen and Tobais's wedding and Severus's birth, things start going to hell in the marriage, either because Tobias is an asshole or because they both feel trapped.
In any case, I don't believe she married him for love, and I'm dead certain her family didn't approve. If they were pure-bloods and they did, why did she live in poverty? (Assuming that the Prince-Gaunt correlation ends with both Merope and Eileen being insecure young witches; here's hoping the Princes didn't have the hots for their cousins and weren't ludicrously inbred and didn't piss away any money they had.)
4. When Harry is shown glimpses of Snape's past in Occlumency lessons we see him hiding while his parents fight. Was this a regular occurrence? Why would she stay with him if they were not happy?
The $64,000 question. I think early on, it was a regular occurrence (Severus was young and years of unhappiness were weighing on Eileen), but as Severus got older and learned how to protect himself it probably happened less and less.
Also consider that in the memory, Severus is probably no older than five or six. At that age, your parents shouting at each other is a scary thing, and all you want to do is get away from it. If the house was small, he might not have had anywhere to go, or he was told to stay where he was. On the other hand, he's about nine or ten when he tells Lily that his parents are fighting in Deathly Hallows; if his parents fight so much that his friends ask him about it, something's not right in that house.
Another theory I have about Snape's childhood is that he got the idea of cursing people he didn't like from his mother: Let's assume I was right and Tobias beat Severus, but he was usually careful to do it when Eileen wasn't around (she's at the store or something). And now let's say Tobias gets carried away one day and Eileen catches him. She goes into Mama Bear mode and curses Tobias off his feet, screaming that if she ever catches him wailing on the boy like that again, she'll shrink his balls to the size of raisins. This gives little Severus the idea that he can hurt the people who hurt him, and magic will make it easier, leading to his fascination with the Dark Arts. And don't forget, he's probably one of the most intelligent people that ever went to Hogwarts (right up there with Dumbledore and Tom Riddle); so he taught himself the curses he didn't learn from Eileen.
Why would Tobias and Eileen stay together, if they were so unhappy? They got married for convenience, and they would have stayed married for that reason. Believe it or not, a divorce used to be a really hard thing to get; a woman would sometimes only be granted one if she could prove her husband was beating her. What if Tobias never laid a hand on her? (It's not that uncommon for the adults to just shout at each other and hit the kids. Cowardly, but not uncommon.) If Tobias had a job and a regular income, no matter how small, that would have been a big deciding factor as well. Being a single mother is hard no matter what time or area you live in, but back then, it would have been damn near impossible for Eileen to get a job and be able to raise her son. (Assuming Severus was an only child; I mean, I know we never heard of him having siblings, but that could have just been because they weren't important to the story.)
5. Eileen sends her son to Hogwarts, despite her marriage to a Muggle. Do you think she encouraged him to become a Death Eater? Is it possible she encouraged his conversion to the Order?
"Despite her marriage to a Muggle"? What would that have to do with anything? A lot of witches and wizards who married Muggles send their kids to Hogwarts; I'd have found it more strange if she hadn't. Anyway.
I honestly don't think she had much to do with his decision to become a Death Eater or his conversion to the Order. Remember that he originally thought becoming a Death Eater would impress Lily; when that didn't work, he shouldn't have had any motivation to keep going down that path. But if we assume that Severus had lived through an unhappy, abusive childhood, then we can safely assume that he was a very angry young man and joined up with them for that reason. If he was involved in the torture and killing of people, it probably did a lot to release some of his rage. ("So how come his soul was still in one piece?" He never made any Horcruxes, and he repented by trying to protect Lily. You know that noise he made when he found out she was dead? To quote Inigo Montoya, "That is the sound of ultimate suffering." Even if his soul had been damaged, he fixed it through remorse. QED.)
6. Do you think Eileen and Tobias were the original occupants of Spinner's End?
I do. The house in Spinner's End, if my research serves me well, sounds like a house purpose-built for the men who worked at the mill and their families, and it sounds like it was built sometime during the Industrial Revolution. It's possible that the Snape family had been living there for decades, working at the mill. This explains why Severus now lives in the house and doesn't seem to have a house payment; it's his ancestral home, and he lives there because it's convenient for him to do so. Considering how complicated his life is by the time we see him at Spinner's End, can you blame the man for wanting one little bit of simplicity?
7. Do you think Eileen loved her son?
Yes. I don't think she doted on him, and I think given a better husband and a happier living arrangement she could have been a more attentive mother, but I don't doubt she loved him. In fact, I have to admit the idea of Eileen being abusive is kind of laughable. If she was, then why does Severus never show any resentment or hatred towards women? That is incredibly significant; usually a man who grows up seeing his mother abused and belittled will tend to think of women as weaker or lesser people and he won't have a whole lot of respect for them. Severus had respect for Lily and his female colleagues at Hogwarts, which implies that his mother had a strong positive influence on him.
There's also a possibility that Severus and Eileen were really close. If they both had to put up with the same bad treatment from Tobias, they would have spent a lot of time trying to cheer each other up after he was done with them. Given that they were poor, Eileen didn't have enough money to do a whole lot with Severus, so she taught him magic (and probably homeschooled him until he was ready to go to Hogwarts; it explains his lack of social skills at age eleven). And maybe the reason Severus moved back to Spinner's End as an adult was so he could save money and set Eileen up in a nice condo in Barbados. Why? In his mind, she's had a hard life and now that Tobias is gone, why not give her the treat she's had coming for so long.
I'll start:
I found a rather interesting set of questions on COSForums, pertaining to a character I've given a lot of thought to recently... Probably too much thought, actually: Eileen Prince.
Why would I think about her? Well, she's Snape's mother, and like it or not, our parents have a huge impact on our lives. (Example: I'm anti-religion because my mother was a religious nutbag when I was growing up.) What kind of woman raised Severus Snape? That is what I wish to examine here.
1. We know she was at Hogwarts fifty years ago - the same time as Tom Riddle, Sirius tells us that Snape came to Hogwarts knowing more curses than most Seventh Years. If this is true, did he learn them from his mother? Is it possible she was part of Tom Riddle's group at Hogwarts?
I think it's a given he learned some Dark magic from his mother; I mean, he bloody well couldn't have learned it from his father (Tobias was a Muggle, remember?). Was she a member of Tom Riddle's group? ...Maybe, possibly, I don't think we could rule it out...
2. The Half-Blood Prince's Potions Book was fifty years old, did she contribute anything to it? Was she a member of the Slug Club?
Debatable; someone on COSForums suggested that Eileen was a corollary to Merope Gaunt, and not confident in her magical abilities (it would explain why she didn't seem to fight back when Tobias started on her). On the other hand, Severus is a very powerful wizard, and it was made clear that he grew up seeing his mother use magic in Deathly Hallows. Also, in Goblet of Fire Sirius tells Harry that Snape "knew more curses" than the seventh-years when he started at Hogwarts. He could have been exaggerating, but considering what we knew about Snape up to that point and what we learned about him after that, doubting this statement is pretty foolish. As much as we want to believe that he's the All-Knowing, All-Seeing Sex God, the fact remains that Snape wasn't born knowing these curses; he learned them from somewhere or someone, and who better to teach him than his mother?
Also consider that Severus, at eleven, was eager to be sorted into Slytherin, which had a reputation for churning out Dark wizards and witches. Obviously, the Princes were a Slytherin family; who's to say Eileen, herself, didn't learn a bunch of Dark magic at a young age? Maybe it was a Prince tradition.
3. We know she married a muggle, Tobias Snape. Why would she choose to do this?
I actually have a theory that Severus Snape isn't really a Snape, but a Riddle. It goes something like this: Tom Riddle, for whatever reason, had sex with Eileen Prince (or raped her; that seems more the kind of thing Voldemort would do) and she ended up pregnant. Since this would have happened in 1959, she would have under a lot of pressure to get married to save face. She wasn't a particularly pretty girl, and it could have happened that Tobias Snape said some nice things to her and promised to take care of her. That kind of marriage -essentially one of convenience- doesn't tend to be a happy one. So sometime between Eileen and Tobais's wedding and Severus's birth, things start going to hell in the marriage, either because Tobias is an asshole or because they both feel trapped.
In any case, I don't believe she married him for love, and I'm dead certain her family didn't approve. If they were pure-bloods and they did, why did she live in poverty? (Assuming that the Prince-Gaunt correlation ends with both Merope and Eileen being insecure young witches; here's hoping the Princes didn't have the hots for their cousins and weren't ludicrously inbred and didn't piss away any money they had.)
4. When Harry is shown glimpses of Snape's past in Occlumency lessons we see him hiding while his parents fight. Was this a regular occurrence? Why would she stay with him if they were not happy?
The $64,000 question. I think early on, it was a regular occurrence (Severus was young and years of unhappiness were weighing on Eileen), but as Severus got older and learned how to protect himself it probably happened less and less.
Also consider that in the memory, Severus is probably no older than five or six. At that age, your parents shouting at each other is a scary thing, and all you want to do is get away from it. If the house was small, he might not have had anywhere to go, or he was told to stay where he was. On the other hand, he's about nine or ten when he tells Lily that his parents are fighting in Deathly Hallows; if his parents fight so much that his friends ask him about it, something's not right in that house.
Another theory I have about Snape's childhood is that he got the idea of cursing people he didn't like from his mother: Let's assume I was right and Tobias beat Severus, but he was usually careful to do it when Eileen wasn't around (she's at the store or something). And now let's say Tobias gets carried away one day and Eileen catches him. She goes into Mama Bear mode and curses Tobias off his feet, screaming that if she ever catches him wailing on the boy like that again, she'll shrink his balls to the size of raisins. This gives little Severus the idea that he can hurt the people who hurt him, and magic will make it easier, leading to his fascination with the Dark Arts. And don't forget, he's probably one of the most intelligent people that ever went to Hogwarts (right up there with Dumbledore and Tom Riddle); so he taught himself the curses he didn't learn from Eileen.
Why would Tobias and Eileen stay together, if they were so unhappy? They got married for convenience, and they would have stayed married for that reason. Believe it or not, a divorce used to be a really hard thing to get; a woman would sometimes only be granted one if she could prove her husband was beating her. What if Tobias never laid a hand on her? (It's not that uncommon for the adults to just shout at each other and hit the kids. Cowardly, but not uncommon.) If Tobias had a job and a regular income, no matter how small, that would have been a big deciding factor as well. Being a single mother is hard no matter what time or area you live in, but back then, it would have been damn near impossible for Eileen to get a job and be able to raise her son. (Assuming Severus was an only child; I mean, I know we never heard of him having siblings, but that could have just been because they weren't important to the story.)
5. Eileen sends her son to Hogwarts, despite her marriage to a Muggle. Do you think she encouraged him to become a Death Eater? Is it possible she encouraged his conversion to the Order?
"Despite her marriage to a Muggle"? What would that have to do with anything? A lot of witches and wizards who married Muggles send their kids to Hogwarts; I'd have found it more strange if she hadn't. Anyway.
I honestly don't think she had much to do with his decision to become a Death Eater or his conversion to the Order. Remember that he originally thought becoming a Death Eater would impress Lily; when that didn't work, he shouldn't have had any motivation to keep going down that path. But if we assume that Severus had lived through an unhappy, abusive childhood, then we can safely assume that he was a very angry young man and joined up with them for that reason. If he was involved in the torture and killing of people, it probably did a lot to release some of his rage. ("So how come his soul was still in one piece?" He never made any Horcruxes, and he repented by trying to protect Lily. You know that noise he made when he found out she was dead? To quote Inigo Montoya, "That is the sound of ultimate suffering." Even if his soul had been damaged, he fixed it through remorse. QED.)
6. Do you think Eileen and Tobias were the original occupants of Spinner's End?
I do. The house in Spinner's End, if my research serves me well, sounds like a house purpose-built for the men who worked at the mill and their families, and it sounds like it was built sometime during the Industrial Revolution. It's possible that the Snape family had been living there for decades, working at the mill. This explains why Severus now lives in the house and doesn't seem to have a house payment; it's his ancestral home, and he lives there because it's convenient for him to do so. Considering how complicated his life is by the time we see him at Spinner's End, can you blame the man for wanting one little bit of simplicity?
7. Do you think Eileen loved her son?
Yes. I don't think she doted on him, and I think given a better husband and a happier living arrangement she could have been a more attentive mother, but I don't doubt she loved him. In fact, I have to admit the idea of Eileen being abusive is kind of laughable. If she was, then why does Severus never show any resentment or hatred towards women? That is incredibly significant; usually a man who grows up seeing his mother abused and belittled will tend to think of women as weaker or lesser people and he won't have a whole lot of respect for them. Severus had respect for Lily and his female colleagues at Hogwarts, which implies that his mother had a strong positive influence on him.
There's also a possibility that Severus and Eileen were really close. If they both had to put up with the same bad treatment from Tobias, they would have spent a lot of time trying to cheer each other up after he was done with them. Given that they were poor, Eileen didn't have enough money to do a whole lot with Severus, so she taught him magic (and probably homeschooled him until he was ready to go to Hogwarts; it explains his lack of social skills at age eleven). And maybe the reason Severus moved back to Spinner's End as an adult was so he could save money and set Eileen up in a nice condo in Barbados. Why? In his mind, she's had a hard life and now that Tobias is gone, why not give her the treat she's had coming for so long.