From AOL News:
Rowling Reveals Clues to Harry’s Future
Letting out only the slightest of hints about the future of her hero, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling told about 500 young fans in her native Scotland Sunday that the boy wizard would survive to the seventh book in her series — but that’s about all she said.
In a rare public appearance, Rowling, 39, read from her fifth book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in the Scottish capital.
As for Harry’s survival, she said he will live “mainly because I don’t want to be strangled by you lot, but I don’t want to say whether he grows any older than that,” Rowling told the youngsters, according to the Associated Press.
She encouraged the fans to map out Harry’s future for themselves, helpfully pointing a finger to why Harry’s nemesis, the evil warlock Voldemort, had not been killed.
“There are two questions I don’t think I’ve ever been asked and that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean,” Rowling said.
The question at hand, she stressed, is that readers should be asking themselves “not, ‘Why did Harry live?’ but, ‘Why didn’t Voldemort die?'”
The other question, concerning the headmaster of the Hogwarts School, is: “Why didn’t Dumbledore kill, or try to kill, Voldemort?”
Obviously she was tightlipped about the final outcome, saying of the finish of her proposed seventh book: “I’m not going to tell you, I’m sorry. The trouble I would be in if I did. My agent would have me hunted down and killed.”
Rowling also kept the lid on how the budding romance between Harry’s pals Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger might turn out.
“I’m not going to say. I can’t say. I think I’ve given quite a lot of clues by now on this subject,” she said. “You are going to have to read between the lines on that one.”
Well, I’ve been talking this over with some HP fans, and I think I agree with them. Voldemort won’t die unless Harry dies. They are tied together (somehow), and as long as Harry is alive, then Voldemort has something (or someone, in the case) to feed off of. If Dumbledore had killed Voldemort, it would have killed Harry.
I often wonder if Harry has the potential to turn into the next Voldemort. Or if they are related in some way. There is a definite connection there–something stronger than magic that is tying those two together. The feather in the wand, for example. The fact that Harry can *see* what Voldemort is up to. The scar burning. I don’t think one can kill the other without killing himself.