Snape: A Definitive Reading

by Lorrie Kim

After all the precautions put in place for Lupin’s protection as a student, after all the special treatment, Lupin still led his friends into danger, out-of-bounds, at night, and visited Hogsmeade as a werewolf. Yet when Sirius nearly got him to kill another student, nobody was expelled; there is no evidence that anyone was even punished. The only consequence we know for sure is that Snape was “forbidden by Dumbledore to tell anybody” (HP/PoA, 357) that Lupin is a werewolf. He was forbidden to speak of his terrifying experience. His near murder, and his need to work through it by talking, were considered less important than Lupin’s privacy and, perhaps, Dumbledore’s chagrin.