The Boy Who Will Die, Someday

The title for the seventh and last Harry Potter book has been announced. I had fun following some of the links from that Wikipedia article, especially this one, which collects interviews with J.K. Rowling, with an eye toward hints that she's dropped over the years about future developments in the books. If Rowling has a supernatural power, it's the ability to do interviews and make such hints without spoiling the books themselves. In some cases, she kind of goes "oops" and says that she's given away too much, when she really hasn't said anything at all; one suspects a bit of misdirection, which wouldn't be out of character with her penchant for red herrings in the books.

One thing that intrigued me was that she said that the prophecy wasn't necessarily inevitable, that Harry and Voldemort could just declare an armistice and not fight (although I think that she did say that it would simply be out of character for the two of them). That led me to think of a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

Walter Donovan: You could go down in history.
Indiana Jones: As what? A Nazi stooge like you?
Walter Donovan: The Nazis? Is that the limit of your vision? The Nazis want to write themselves into the Grail legend, take on the world. Well, they're welcome to it. But I want the Grail itself, the cup that gives everlasting life. Hitler can have the world, but he can't take it with him. I'm going to be drinking my own health after he's gone the way of the dodo.

If Voldemort is immortal, he could simply retreat, go into hiding (and he is very good at that, no one has ever found him when he didn't want to be found, AFAIK), and wait for Harry to get old and die. At this point, though, it's extremely unlikely that Harry or any of the others in the Order of the Phoenix would simply let him go or stop searching for his Horcruxes. And Voldemort, of course, can't admit that this punk kid might actually have a chance of killing him.

No publication date for the book yet, although speculation has it on either July 7 (7/7/07) or Halloween of next year.