She says hallow..edited...pasted d articl

Many loose ends and ambiguities need to get squared away. Will Severus Snape turn out a goodie or a baddie? Who is R. A. B., the mysterious new figure who turned up in book six? Is Harry a horcrux for Lord Voldemort? Why did Harry's mum go from hating his father to falling in love with him?

Important questions, to be sure. But the key question is this: will Harry survive?

Rowling has told us at least two main characters will be killed, and there is widespread speculation that Harry will be one of them.

Readers know that Harry and Voldemort are the subjects of a prophecy, recovered in book five, which states: "Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives."

Dumbledore, Harry's mentor and the former headmaster of Hogwarts School, has explained what it means: either Harry must die by Voldemort's hand, or Voldemort by Harry's.

Harry's prognosis is not good, mythologically speaking. Rowling has established him as a heroic deliverer - one who feels the pains and pleasures of ordinary mortals, but who exists slightly outside, or beyond, their world. Such figures are born to save, not to live like ordinary people, and they do not traditionally outlast their own epic narratives.

Take Christ, for example. Or if he seems a little rich for the blood, take Aeneas, King Arthur, Frodo, or the Pevensie children from the Narnia chronicles. For each of these, death is not a cessation but a passing - a saviour's passing into another, better world. Is this what Rowling has in mind for Harry?

The death of the hero is a heavy mythological inheritance for a children's book to bear. Particularly one that has been absorbed into mainstream popular culture, giving so much hope and pleasure to children throughout the world.

If Harry dies in Deathly Hallows, won't Rowling's readers rise up in rebellion? How fun can a theme park be if Harry is dead?

More importantly, according to the prophesy, if Harry dies, then Voldemort lives - a possibility nobody wants to countenance. But suppose Dumbledore's prophecy means something other than what Harry thinks.

What if it means neither Harry nor Voldemort can remain alive once the other has died? Harry will defeat Voldemort, but it will cost his life.

Rowling has said repeatedly that the deep theme of the Harry Potter books is death. Certainly, it is a central motif, and some people think the body count makes the books too dark for most children. So far, Harry has lost his parents, his godfather, Sirius, and his beloved mentor, Dumbledore, as well as witnessing several violent deaths. How can Harry bear to go on living if he loses anyone else?

But Rowling's interest in death goes deeper than the plot alone, explaining the sadness and sense of loss that runs through all the books.

The contest between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort - and between Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix and Voldemort's Death Eaters - is not merely a fight to the death. It is a struggle over the meaning of death itself.

In many ways, Harry and Voldemort are similar. They are both orphans, both "half-bloods", meaning that they each have one wizard-born and one Muggle (non-magical) parent. Each is brave, with what we might call good leadership potential. Each has known great suffering, and suffering has made each strive for greatness.

Voldemort's experience of suffering has made him aspire to immortality. He and the Death Eaters are waging war against death itself, hoping to vanquish the Order of the Phoenix so that they can co-opt magic to their own dark purposes - granting Voldemort everlasting life.

The Death Eaters' power comes from the fear they feel, and consequently inflict, and Voldemort's signature trait is his fear of dying. His name means something like "flight from death". Harry is different because affliction does not frighten him. On the contrary, great loss teaches Harry love and loyalty, and the enduring strength such emotions have when they are born out of suffering.

This is not to say heroism comes easily or naturally to Harry. Through the books we watch him struggle with anger, resentment, even hatred, as he attempts to understand the deaths of those he loves. But in the end, Harry is heroic because his suffering has made him unafraid of life, and - I'm taking a gamble here - it will make him unafraid of death.

THERE IS A VERY important scene in The Order of the Phoenix when Harry finds a mysterious archway in the basement of the Ministry of Magic. He and his friends stumble upon it accidentally, and are puzzled. It stands unsupported in the middle of a room, a veil hanging across it.

Harry is fascinated by the veil, sensing a figure behind it, but when he looks, nothing is there. He believes he hears voices coming from within, and longs to walk through the arch. But Hermione calls Harry back - she can hear nothing.

The arch turns out to be a gateway out of life. To pass beyond the veil is to enter into the world of the dead, as Sirius will do a few pages later.

And yet Harry is oddly drawn to it. He can hear voices beyond the veil; he hears them because they are the voices of people he loves. At the climax of each book, when death is closest to Harry, he feels the dead around him, and they bring comfort. If Harry does step through the arch at the end of The Deathly Hallows, he will do so willingly. He has waited a long time to meet those who are beyond it.

The battle between Harry and Voldemort pits the power of love against the fear of death. Which will prove the stronger? But if, as we hope, Harry is the victor, and the fear of death is vanquished, what will be left to keep Harry alive?

Nobody wants Harry to die. We want to see him slay Voldemort, and live happily ever after with Ginny Weasley. For this to happen, however, Harry must destroy all of Voldemort's horcruxes - relics that contain fragments of Voldemort's soul, created to secure his immortality. Once there were seven of them; we know two have been destroyed, so there are five to go.

Which brings us to a crucial question: is Harry himself a horcrux? Those in favour would make some or all of the following claims: Harry's scar is the relic of Voldemort, which explains why it is able to register the Dark Lord's pain and pleasure.

Therefore, if he is to vanquish Voldemort, Harry must lose a part of himself, his scar - the very thing that marks him as special. This would be a mythologically satisfying outcome - heroes and anti-heroes are almost always inextricably linked, so that the vanquishing of evil must exact a sacrifice from the hero. The price Harry will pay for victory will be the loss of his special power.

Opponents of the horcrux theory argue that it's logistically impossible for Harry to be one (see mugglenet.com for details), and that Voldemort wouldn't be so foolish as to plant a bit of himself in the very person he most wants to destroy. Either way, the Harry-Voldemort interdependence is psychoanalytically fascinating, and we wait with bated breath for Rowling to explain the precise nature of their connection.

Fingers crossed, then, that Harry survives his final battle with Voldemort. But even if he does, it's still crucial that the worlds of the living and the dead are bound tightly together. Important because it explains Rowling's perverse insistence that her books are about Death, when we know that they are really about magical japes, wizard wheezes, boarding school and who-loves-who. The vision of a magical world, and Rowling's interest in death are two sides of the coin.

THE WIZARDING WORLD exists right beside the world of the Muggles, but Muggles just don't know it's there. Magic is all around, though Muggles give it other names - bad luck, good luck, coincidence - because they can't see things the way that Harry and his friends do.

What interests Rowling about the worlds of magic and Muggledom is not that they are far apart but uncannily close - which is a very frightening discovery if you're a Muggle, but consoling if you're a wizard.

It is the very same discovery that Harry is destined to make about death. The dead are all around, Harry can hear them whispering from the other side of the veil. Periodically they come to visit, and Harry glimpses them, knowing that one day he will join them. Signs that the dead are close by bring Harry comfort, though they frighten Hermione and Ron, who do not yet understand their meaning.

The worlds of the magical and the familiar, the worlds of the living and the dead. Rowling wants us to remember that the distance between them is short, and that it can be easily travelled.

Divining the future for Harry Potter

And what about the fun stuff? Which of Rowling's characters will hook-up in the last instalment? Ron and Hermione, of course. My bet is that both of these characters survive the ordeals of the final volume and come together at long last. Ron and Hermione will be the happy couple of the Potter books and they deserve to be.

Which leaves Harry and Ginny. Harry broke up with Ginny at the end of The Half-Blood Prince, knowing that he would put her in danger by being with her. But will Ginny take that lying down?

I couldn't help but notice that she cast a longing look at the arch of death in Order of the Phoenix, (along with Neville), so perhaps, like other heroines before her, Ginny is willing to go all the way to stay at Harry's side.

But Harry doesn't seem to feel desire like ordinary people, and as long as he is marked as Rowling's messiah, I think Ginny will be sitting out an awful lot of dances.

Poor old Ginny will either be following Harry under that arch, or hoping that he loses his status as the chosen one.

Surely Neville won't be left high and dry - I bet heroics are in store for him, whether romantic or martial. Hagrid will stomp off into the sunset with Maxine.

On the subject of that arch of death, my guess is that we'll be seeing it again in the last book. I'm pretty sure some wizards know how to step through it and come back again.

I wonder if Snape went through at some point and whatever he saw on the other side made him join Dumbledore's team for good? Yes, I do think Snape's a goodie.