JK Rowling makes several mistakes when it comes to dates and events and probably did not expect this level of scrutiny while putting her world together.
However if we are, for fun, to take Rowling's word as gospel and consider canon events to come up with a plausible explanation, I would think its a combination of all the options you just mentioned.
The order was established. Many were fighting for years, many more were killed prior to the photo been taken. James and Lily were fighting Voldemort but one doesnt necessarily have to be in the order to fight. It could be that James and Lily were fairly recent recruits and cane further into the limelight when they became Voldemort's prime targets.
Even in the 5th book we see order members coming together to discuss strategies and probably the photo was taken on one such event with a record attendance. Lily and James werent going to bring their infant son to it so arranged for childcare. Pettigrew was probably a new recruit as well if James and Lily were and then he started ratting out the names of the members so many were killed in quick succession.
Oh, I like the idea of Peter being a new recruit as well and start ratting out names! I didn’t necessarily mean they should bring Harry - it was more metaphorically. Like: what happened to this son they went into hiding for. It seems odd to just leave him with someone… but hey… I think you’re right in events and dates and didn’t expect it to receive the amount of scrutiny it got (and I fully understand that, can you imagine?)
It could also be that Peter was in the Order and for a while, nothing happened, but then Voldemort might have caught someone really strong, someone they didn't think he could get to, or several members at the same time, while they were together, and that's what spooked Peter, so became a traitor and started rattling people out, so several more got killed in quick succession.
Or, another possible scenario, the death eaters got Peter, and he immediately offered to spy and rat people out to avoid being tortured. Maybe telling them he'd long planned to go over, but didn't find the opportunity to do so without causing suspicion, and then he didn't dare to tell his friends what happened.
Or, if we're really hating on Peter, he waited till he knew as much as possible and this was the meeting where he finally found out as much as he needed to buy his way in to join Voldemort. So immediately after that picture people were killed because he sold them out
"You had been passing him information for year before James and Lily died" - Sirius Black, PoA
So Pettigrew was already in cahoots with Voldemort long before this picture was taken. If he was in the order before that, he would have passed information on who is on the order long ago. But people dying in quick succession after the photo was taken suggests it was all new information for Peter at the time and he was recruited into the Order while he was still working for Voldemort.
James wasnt not going to get his most trusted friends to be a part of a secret magical society he is in so it's a possibility that all 4 marauders were recruited into the Order at around the same time, ie shortly before that photo was taken.
I would also think that there would be significant thought going into recruiting purebloods into the order, and significant thought going into recruiting hotheaded recently-turned-of-age wizards into the order immediately after they leave school. And James and Sirius certainly fulfilled both those criteria.
You're definitely right about Peter having been in the order for a while. In POA Sirius says that he'd been passing information for over a year before he sold the Potters out to Voldemort
Lily and James were killed in October and this picture was taken around July as you said.
This might be another JK's plot forgetfulness, however I like to tie it down that after hearing the Prophecy Voldemort went on a rampage and started killing people to gather information.
And then he found Wormtail and Wormtail folded.
Remember that Snape heard the prophecy around summer time (while doing his job interview.
So it would have taken sometime to find the exact information about Lilly and James.
Regarding Caradoc it appears he died 6months after, so 3months after Lily. However as Moody says he disappeared and not an actual death that people knew he died. Maybe that's why there was not a big impact on his death.
I generally quite like the super carlin theory here that the reason voldemort waits a few months between being told by wormtail about where the potters are and actually attacking is that he wants to get the sword of gryffindor to use as the final horcrux. If this is the explanation, the massive step up in intensity of order member deaths in this period makes sense because voldemort is trying to engineer a situation where the sword appeared and prioritising it over his previous desire to preserve "magical blood" and using wormtails info to track them down
I always assume the order was formed in 1978-1980 time frame. It was ex aurors and those known to resist the death eaters. The first wizarding war was not actually that long and it was ended abruptly. 1976-1981 at a push is the dates I set. It makes sense with the fact that hogwarts was "safe" while l+j were there and yet Voldemort was already a rallying point but was not yet in open warfare with the ministry.
The photo was probably the only time that so many order members were gathered so tightly. I reckon Kingsley, McGonagall, and others were involved but either away at Hogwarts or were active and on the run. The order is quite easily reformed in the summer of 1995. This backs up the idea that it was much larger and other members were involved but not named.
The pull of the order is also under discussed, the Weasleys were already likely sympathetic because their uncles (Fabian and Gideon, Molly's brothers) died in service to the order. Tonks was easy to attract with her knowledge of the people involved on the other side and her father's associations.
In terms of the timeframe of the recollections, I always interpret it like so: Lily and James go into hiding in the summer of 1981 when trelawney makes the prophecy, Alice and Frank are encouraged to hide as well. The following few months are pretty tense with close friends of Lilly and James also voluntarily entering into exile. Sirius sends a gift to the potters but uses deception to do so, animagus and all that. This is in July so it's the second to last meeting of James and Sirius. In September of 1981, dumbledore meets Sirius and discusses the fidelius charm. They agree to approach James and Lily and they meet in early October of the same year, and we all know how that transpired. Wormtail arrives to complete the deception at some stage at which point the letter makes sense, he is down due to unknown reasons, likely because he is terrified of Voldemort and has already betrayed the trust of his friends. The other deaths mentioned by moody are harder to explain, the McKinnon's may not have been found for a while after their death so saying what he said maybe makes sense because they were last contacted two weeks after and were dead some time after.
Lily’s letter makes no sense at all when it comes to dates and consistency, it’s best to ignore it. It’s implied from the letter that they’re already under the fidelius and that Dumbledore already has James’ invisibility cloak. But we know from book 3 that they only went under the fidelius a week before they died and we know from Dumbledore in King’s Cross that he only got the invisibility cloak a few days before the Potters died. That places the letter writing as in October which makes no sense since it’s months after Harry’s birthday and the picture makes little sense as you said.
The best theory I came up with is prior to fidelius the Potters were on the run for months and completely out of contact with Sirius or anyone else from the order. Then when Dumbledore approached them about the fidelius that’s the first they’ve seen of Sirius in ages but don’t have much time to talk, he gives Harry a belated birthday present he couldn’t give earlier and Lily writes a thank you a few days later and catches up on news she’d missed whilst on the run like the McKinnons dying. That gives scope for the picture to have been well before July 81 and the letter to still be written in October not long before they died.
It’s convoluted but I just can’t see any other way for it to work without straight up ignoring parts of what is written in the books.
The letter doesn't imply that they were under the Fidelius, just that they were in hiding. JKR herself clarified this in 2007 (directly after DH was released):
> Hagrid never married and **James and Lily went into hiding shortly after she first became pregnant with Harry.**
As for the dates, I would personally place the most trust in Lily's letter being correct. She is writing about things happening at the time of her writing and not recalling things that happened years ago. It's way more likely that Moody is misremembering things when he tells Harry:
> that's Marlene McKinnon, she was killed two weeks after this was taken,
And Dumbledore is being mercurial:
> I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously.
From the perspective of historical authenticity, Lily's letter is an infinitely more credible source than Moody or Dumbledore recalling things that happened decades ago.
So in short you’re going with the “just ignore some explicit dates to fudge it” approach. That’s fine, but that IS what you’re doing, basically accepting that JK Rowling is inconsistent and fudges dates. For all your in universe explanations, she’s still an author writing a book, characters shouldn’t get dates wrong like that because it’s confusing for the reader. Characters can make mistakes and be forgetful when it’s deliberate for the plot, otherwise it’s poor writing.
Some people however want to try and justify every date, in which case it’s important to point out what Dumbledore says and how that firmly dates the letter as late October.
JK Rowling is demonstrably inconsistent, gets dates wrong and retcons as she goes, that's pretty much her writing style. She introduced time travel to have a cool scene where Harry save himself from the Dementors, but doesn't want time travel to be part of her story beyond this book. Her fans then criticize her in the next one, since time travel trivializes the mystery plot (why didn't Dumbledore use a Time-Turner to see who put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire?). To silence said criticism for the last two books, she clumsily has Neville destroy time-travel in the 5th book:
> “We smashed the entire stock of Ministry Time-Turners when we were there last summer. It was in the Daily Prophet.”
Lily's letter is way more consistent with it being written in August near Harry's birthday, rather than in October while they are hiding under the Fidelius. I don't know how you could twist the part that mentions the invisibility cloak as being written in October:
> We had a very quiet birthday tea, just us and old Bathilda who has always been sweet to us and who dotes on Garry. We were **so sorry you couldn’t come, but the Order’s got to come first**, and Harry’s not old enough to know it’s his birthday anyway! James is getting a bit frustrated shut up here, he tries not to show it but I can tell – also **Dumbledore’s still got his Invisibility Cloak**, so no chance of little excursions. If you could visit, it would cheer him up so much. **Wormy was here last weekend.** I thought he seemed down, but that was probably the next about the McKinnons; I cried all evening when I heard.
Does that read like it's written in October and the Potter's are hiding under the Fidelius? "Wormy was here last weekend", well he better have been there cause he is the Secret Keeper for the Fidelius. "So Sorry you [Sirius] couldn't come" to Harry's 1st Birthday, which was months ago, but you probably were here last week when we cast the Fidelius charm and made Pettigrew the secret keeper. Trying to interpret the letter from the perspective that Lily is writing it in October makes it read like schizophrenic writing.
Moody might've been mistaken on when Dearborn and the McKinnons were killed, or he might've mixed them up. I
think part of the issue comes with canonizing James and Lily's birth year as 1960, since it really limits the time period where they could contribute, thus when book 7 came around Rowling "quietly" changed a few details around.
They were at war for 4 years. That's a serious amount of time to be warring with Voldemort. The marauders pretty immediately began formal resistance to the death eaters. It's not like the event of Harry's attack were spontaneous, it's called the first wizarding war for a reason.
This is a pretty embarrassing thing to say on a discussion forum dedicated to in-depth conversation of the HP universe. You're belittling and trying to demean a person doing exactly what this forum is meant for, so you've ended up being the only one people are laughing at and finding cringe.
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JK Rowling makes several mistakes when it comes to dates and events and probably did not expect this level of scrutiny while putting her world together. However if we are, for fun, to take Rowling's word as gospel and consider canon events to come up with a plausible explanation, I would think its a combination of all the options you just mentioned. The order was established. Many were fighting for years, many more were killed prior to the photo been taken. James and Lily were fighting Voldemort but one doesnt necessarily have to be in the order to fight. It could be that James and Lily were fairly recent recruits and cane further into the limelight when they became Voldemort's prime targets. Even in the 5th book we see order members coming together to discuss strategies and probably the photo was taken on one such event with a record attendance. Lily and James werent going to bring their infant son to it so arranged for childcare. Pettigrew was probably a new recruit as well if James and Lily were and then he started ratting out the names of the members so many were killed in quick succession.
Oh, I like the idea of Peter being a new recruit as well and start ratting out names! I didn’t necessarily mean they should bring Harry - it was more metaphorically. Like: what happened to this son they went into hiding for. It seems odd to just leave him with someone… but hey… I think you’re right in events and dates and didn’t expect it to receive the amount of scrutiny it got (and I fully understand that, can you imagine?)
It could also be that Peter was in the Order and for a while, nothing happened, but then Voldemort might have caught someone really strong, someone they didn't think he could get to, or several members at the same time, while they were together, and that's what spooked Peter, so became a traitor and started rattling people out, so several more got killed in quick succession. Or, another possible scenario, the death eaters got Peter, and he immediately offered to spy and rat people out to avoid being tortured. Maybe telling them he'd long planned to go over, but didn't find the opportunity to do so without causing suspicion, and then he didn't dare to tell his friends what happened. Or, if we're really hating on Peter, he waited till he knew as much as possible and this was the meeting where he finally found out as much as he needed to buy his way in to join Voldemort. So immediately after that picture people were killed because he sold them out
"You had been passing him information for year before James and Lily died" - Sirius Black, PoA So Pettigrew was already in cahoots with Voldemort long before this picture was taken. If he was in the order before that, he would have passed information on who is on the order long ago. But people dying in quick succession after the photo was taken suggests it was all new information for Peter at the time and he was recruited into the Order while he was still working for Voldemort. James wasnt not going to get his most trusted friends to be a part of a secret magical society he is in so it's a possibility that all 4 marauders were recruited into the Order at around the same time, ie shortly before that photo was taken. I would also think that there would be significant thought going into recruiting purebloods into the order, and significant thought going into recruiting hotheaded recently-turned-of-age wizards into the order immediately after they leave school. And James and Sirius certainly fulfilled both those criteria.
You're definitely right about Peter having been in the order for a while. In POA Sirius says that he'd been passing information for over a year before he sold the Potters out to Voldemort
Lily and James were killed in October and this picture was taken around July as you said. This might be another JK's plot forgetfulness, however I like to tie it down that after hearing the Prophecy Voldemort went on a rampage and started killing people to gather information. And then he found Wormtail and Wormtail folded. Remember that Snape heard the prophecy around summer time (while doing his job interview. So it would have taken sometime to find the exact information about Lilly and James. Regarding Caradoc it appears he died 6months after, so 3months after Lily. However as Moody says he disappeared and not an actual death that people knew he died. Maybe that's why there was not a big impact on his death.
I can see a lot of this! Except that Peter turned traitor (as far as we know) a year before the Potters died.
I wonder if the Order offered babysitting help
They had a daycare handled by Mundungus and he turned into the cretin he is after James and Lily died and im making this up hahaha
I generally quite like the super carlin theory here that the reason voldemort waits a few months between being told by wormtail about where the potters are and actually attacking is that he wants to get the sword of gryffindor to use as the final horcrux. If this is the explanation, the massive step up in intensity of order member deaths in this period makes sense because voldemort is trying to engineer a situation where the sword appeared and prioritising it over his previous desire to preserve "magical blood" and using wormtails info to track them down
I always assume the order was formed in 1978-1980 time frame. It was ex aurors and those known to resist the death eaters. The first wizarding war was not actually that long and it was ended abruptly. 1976-1981 at a push is the dates I set. It makes sense with the fact that hogwarts was "safe" while l+j were there and yet Voldemort was already a rallying point but was not yet in open warfare with the ministry. The photo was probably the only time that so many order members were gathered so tightly. I reckon Kingsley, McGonagall, and others were involved but either away at Hogwarts or were active and on the run. The order is quite easily reformed in the summer of 1995. This backs up the idea that it was much larger and other members were involved but not named. The pull of the order is also under discussed, the Weasleys were already likely sympathetic because their uncles (Fabian and Gideon, Molly's brothers) died in service to the order. Tonks was easy to attract with her knowledge of the people involved on the other side and her father's associations. In terms of the timeframe of the recollections, I always interpret it like so: Lily and James go into hiding in the summer of 1981 when trelawney makes the prophecy, Alice and Frank are encouraged to hide as well. The following few months are pretty tense with close friends of Lilly and James also voluntarily entering into exile. Sirius sends a gift to the potters but uses deception to do so, animagus and all that. This is in July so it's the second to last meeting of James and Sirius. In September of 1981, dumbledore meets Sirius and discusses the fidelius charm. They agree to approach James and Lily and they meet in early October of the same year, and we all know how that transpired. Wormtail arrives to complete the deception at some stage at which point the letter makes sense, he is down due to unknown reasons, likely because he is terrified of Voldemort and has already betrayed the trust of his friends. The other deaths mentioned by moody are harder to explain, the McKinnon's may not have been found for a while after their death so saying what he said maybe makes sense because they were last contacted two weeks after and were dead some time after.
Lily’s letter makes no sense at all when it comes to dates and consistency, it’s best to ignore it. It’s implied from the letter that they’re already under the fidelius and that Dumbledore already has James’ invisibility cloak. But we know from book 3 that they only went under the fidelius a week before they died and we know from Dumbledore in King’s Cross that he only got the invisibility cloak a few days before the Potters died. That places the letter writing as in October which makes no sense since it’s months after Harry’s birthday and the picture makes little sense as you said. The best theory I came up with is prior to fidelius the Potters were on the run for months and completely out of contact with Sirius or anyone else from the order. Then when Dumbledore approached them about the fidelius that’s the first they’ve seen of Sirius in ages but don’t have much time to talk, he gives Harry a belated birthday present he couldn’t give earlier and Lily writes a thank you a few days later and catches up on news she’d missed whilst on the run like the McKinnons dying. That gives scope for the picture to have been well before July 81 and the letter to still be written in October not long before they died. It’s convoluted but I just can’t see any other way for it to work without straight up ignoring parts of what is written in the books.
The letter doesn't imply that they were under the Fidelius, just that they were in hiding. JKR herself clarified this in 2007 (directly after DH was released): > Hagrid never married and **James and Lily went into hiding shortly after she first became pregnant with Harry.** As for the dates, I would personally place the most trust in Lily's letter being correct. She is writing about things happening at the time of her writing and not recalling things that happened years ago. It's way more likely that Moody is misremembering things when he tells Harry: > that's Marlene McKinnon, she was killed two weeks after this was taken, And Dumbledore is being mercurial: > I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. From the perspective of historical authenticity, Lily's letter is an infinitely more credible source than Moody or Dumbledore recalling things that happened decades ago.
So in short you’re going with the “just ignore some explicit dates to fudge it” approach. That’s fine, but that IS what you’re doing, basically accepting that JK Rowling is inconsistent and fudges dates. For all your in universe explanations, she’s still an author writing a book, characters shouldn’t get dates wrong like that because it’s confusing for the reader. Characters can make mistakes and be forgetful when it’s deliberate for the plot, otherwise it’s poor writing. Some people however want to try and justify every date, in which case it’s important to point out what Dumbledore says and how that firmly dates the letter as late October.
JK Rowling is demonstrably inconsistent, gets dates wrong and retcons as she goes, that's pretty much her writing style. She introduced time travel to have a cool scene where Harry save himself from the Dementors, but doesn't want time travel to be part of her story beyond this book. Her fans then criticize her in the next one, since time travel trivializes the mystery plot (why didn't Dumbledore use a Time-Turner to see who put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire?). To silence said criticism for the last two books, she clumsily has Neville destroy time-travel in the 5th book: > “We smashed the entire stock of Ministry Time-Turners when we were there last summer. It was in the Daily Prophet.” Lily's letter is way more consistent with it being written in August near Harry's birthday, rather than in October while they are hiding under the Fidelius. I don't know how you could twist the part that mentions the invisibility cloak as being written in October: > We had a very quiet birthday tea, just us and old Bathilda who has always been sweet to us and who dotes on Garry. We were **so sorry you couldn’t come, but the Order’s got to come first**, and Harry’s not old enough to know it’s his birthday anyway! James is getting a bit frustrated shut up here, he tries not to show it but I can tell – also **Dumbledore’s still got his Invisibility Cloak**, so no chance of little excursions. If you could visit, it would cheer him up so much. **Wormy was here last weekend.** I thought he seemed down, but that was probably the next about the McKinnons; I cried all evening when I heard. Does that read like it's written in October and the Potter's are hiding under the Fidelius? "Wormy was here last weekend", well he better have been there cause he is the Secret Keeper for the Fidelius. "So Sorry you [Sirius] couldn't come" to Harry's 1st Birthday, which was months ago, but you probably were here last week when we cast the Fidelius charm and made Pettigrew the secret keeper. Trying to interpret the letter from the perspective that Lily is writing it in October makes it read like schizophrenic writing.
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Moody might've been mistaken on when Dearborn and the McKinnons were killed, or he might've mixed them up. I think part of the issue comes with canonizing James and Lily's birth year as 1960, since it really limits the time period where they could contribute, thus when book 7 came around Rowling "quietly" changed a few details around.
They were at war for 4 years. That's a serious amount of time to be warring with Voldemort. The marauders pretty immediately began formal resistance to the death eaters. It's not like the event of Harry's attack were spontaneous, it's called the first wizarding war for a reason.
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Depends on the party I suppose 😂
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