Make no mistake: Dumbledore was Machiavellian. He did what he believed needed to be done in order to defeat Voldemort. He fought for the greater good. In the course of this battle, he behaved ruthlessly. He was incredibly cruel to Snape, and when necessary, he did plan Harry’s death. Rita Skeeter calls the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore “unhealthy, even sinister.” (DH27)
But Dumbledore’s Machiavellian tendencies did have a limit, and that limit was Harry. The sensible and utilitarian thing to do would have been to allow Harry to sacrifice himself, to die if need be, in order for Voldemort to be defeated. And although Dumbledore knew that must happen eventually, he struggled against it in every way he could. He procrastinated, he delayed things, he set up schemes to give Harry a better chance of survival. And luckily for all involved, Harry did indeed survive.
Evaluating the morality of Dumbledore’s actions, now that they’re clear, will have to be undertaken by every reader individually. I look forward to debating it, but I will leave you with a verdict from three parties that are very invested in Albus Dumbledore.
First and foremost, J.K. Rowling. In 2008, Jo did an interview with Adeel Amini, where she had this to say about her newly controversial headmaster: “He’s an innately good man.”
Second, Harry Potter. Of those still alive, he has perhaps suffered the most due to Dumbledore. And in many ways, his relationship with the headmaster mirrored the fandom’s perception of Dumbledore: we spent our formative years believing him to be a paragon of virtue, but after Deathly Hallows, we were filled with anger and a sense of betrayal. For Harry, the turning point was the chapter “King’s Cross,” where Harry acknowledged the awful things Dumbledore did, yet forgave him.
Harry’s verdict on Dumbledore comes to us in the Epilogue (DH753). He has named his son Albus. Not Sirius, who’s relegated to a middle name. Not Remus, who makes no appearance in Harry’s brood. Albus. There can be no higher token of Harry’s esteem.
Finally, I offer my own verdict, because I now know where I stand on Dumbledore’s morality.
The practical (more Ravenclaw) side of me is appalled by Dumbledore’s dangerous sentimentality. Dumbledore let people die, he gambled the entire future of the wizarding world on keeping one boy alive and happy just a little bit longer. Thinking about it logically, this is horrible and I should hate Dumbledore all the more for it.
But I can’t bring myself to hate Dumbledore now, because this just proves his love for Harry. The fact that Dumbledore loved Harry so much, that he was willing to risk everything because he cared about Harry, is something worth admiring in my opinion. It shows that Dumbledore is human after all and exemplifies the virtues of love that he always extolled.
Much like Harry, all I wanted in Deathly Hallows was proof that Dumbledore actually cared about something other than his greater good—that there was some shred left of the benevolent wizard we thought we knew in the first six books. So after many confusing years trying to puzzle it out, crafting this book has been like my own King’s Cross, as I hope reading it may be for even a few of you. Once I lay Dumbledore’s cards on the table, stripped of salacious gossip and unfounded assumptions, I could acknowledge his faults and forgive them—returning to love Dumbledore almost as much as when I first wept for him in Half-Blood Prince.
“In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.”
—Albus Dumbledore (OP838)
Appendix A:
The Timeline
Figuring out dates in Harry Potter can seem a touch futile, since Rowling has often confessed she’s no great shakes at math. However, certain timelines are significant enough for her to have paid attention; among those is Voldemort’s. The timeline of who’s Headmaster of Hogwarts factors into this significantly, so it appears Rowling was detailed enough for us to craft a timeline.
Most importantly, we should figure out when Dumbledore became Headmaster. Through several clues, we can pinpoint the start of his tenure at December 1956. McGonagall says that she will have been teaching Transfiguration for “Thirty-nine years this December,” (OP321) in 1995. So she started teaching in December 1956. This doubtlessly coincided with Dumbledore, the previous Transfiguration teacher, leaving the post, presumably by becoming Headmaster.
This fits in with the time-table around Voldemort’s visit to Hogwarts to ask for the D.A.D.A. position. In the flashback, Voldemort says, “I heard that you had become headmaster,” (HBP441), indicating this was a recent appointment. We are told that this is “ten years” after Tom Riddle murdered Hepzibah Smith (HBP440). Tom Riddle graduated Hogwarts in summer of 1945, so if we assume he worked at Borgin and Burkes for a year or so, that would place this visit in the winter of 1956-1957, just after Dumbledore became Headmaster.
As an aside: that means that Voldemort spent about fourteen years consolidating his power after making his fifth Horcrux (the diadem) and hiding it at Hogwarts, before fully unleashing his reign of terror. When he falls in October 1981, Dumbledore says, “We’ve had precious little to celebrate for eleven years.” So Voldemort was wreaking havoc from 1970 onwards.
Back to the headmasters. We know that Armando Dippet was Dumbledore’s immediate predecessor. Since he was at Hogwarts during Riddle’s tenure, he was Headmaster from at least the mid-1930s onwards. However, we also know that he put Professor Kettleburn on probation sixty-two times (TBB39). Let us assume that Dippet put Kettleburn on probation twice a year on average (which is still quite impressive!). That would give Dippet a tenure as Headmaster of 31 years, meaning he would have become Headmaster in 1925. Of course, it could have been quite a bit earlier, since Dippet is portrayed as very old, but we can be reasonably sure he started no later than the mid-1920s.
We can go back further,
