Quote from The Gestalt Prince on December 14, 2022, 11:20 pm

I'll say a bit on both of them while trying to stick to the canon as best as I can:

Eileen

• Here's what we don't know:
  • Blood status. Harry refers to her as pure-blood, and Hermione references the Prince family as a wizarding family. However, Harry doesn't know Eileen's blood status, because there's no indication that he was ever explicitly told; in addition, being a wizarding family doesn't mean that each member is pure-blooded. As we don't know, Eileen could be either pure- or half-blooded.
  • House. The audience is told that students tend to be Sorted into the same House as their parents, but that isn't always the case (Harry and Albus Severus). We don't know much about her character apart from how miserable she seems to look (even while at Hogwarts), so it's possible that there were factors in her life that contributed to this; this is relevant as the Hat takes traits into consideration.
    • If she was a half-blood in Slytherin, she may have been looked down upon by her fellow housemates. This would also mean she too would be a half-blood Prince, and that she would possess some resourcefulness, ambition, pride, etc. Although based on how she is depicted and what she becomes, it's difficult to see that she has any of these traits.
  • Magical Prowess. We also don't know how proficient she was as a witch, only that she was able to pass down what she knew to Severus. However, this could have been in the form of old schoolbooks, so knowing her actual skill is difficult to determine.
• We know that she was born c. 1930. Assuming that she was born in 1930, then she would have started attending Hogwarts in 1941-42, which means that she not only attended with the likes of Tom Riddle, Myrtle Warren, and Rubeus Hagrid, but was also around when the Chamber was opened.
• She was captain of the Gobstones Team in fifth year and president of the Gobstones Club. From what I can tell, gobstones isn't a very popular game, and it's mostly younger students who play it. The fact that she achieved a leadership role in both the team and the club at the same time might indicate either her maturity or her social status among her peers.
• After graduation, she met Tobias Snape, and the two married and moved to Spinner's End in Cokeworth. She gives birth to Severus on 9 January 1960 and raises him, teaching him about the wizarding world.
• Her marriage to Tobias is not pleasant, and there is enough evidence to suggest that she was abused. Lily seems to believe that they argue, based on what she knows of Severus' homelife, but we don't have anything to confirm this other than what Severus admits. There's something else about this, but I'll talk about it in Tobias's section.
• Either due to poverty or negligence, she doesn't provide for Severus as a mother should, despite having the magical means.

Tobias

• What we don't know:
  • Date of Birth. We know he was old enough to father Severus, but no specific information is given.
  • Occupation. We know that he lived near a mill, but we don't know if he worked there. It's possible, as they moved to Cokeworth for no logical reason other than for Tobias to find a job. And aside from the Railview Hotel, we don't know of any other places of work.
• We know that he abused Eileen and Severus, explicitly and implicitly. What we don't know is why.
  • There seems to be a consensus among Snape fans that it was due to magic, but there is nothing confirming that this is the reason for his terrible behavior. We hear directly from Severus that he "doesn't like anything, much" when Lily asks if he doesn't like magic. Notice that it's Lily that asks this question, and it isn't Severus that confirms it. What Severus confirms is that Tobias doesn't like anything much, which means that, assuming Severus isn't lying, this is more than a dislike of magic and more of a chronic behavioral thing.
  • Another common thing to attribute to Tobias is alcoholism, but again, there isn't really anything to confirm this either.
    • If alcohol is to blame, then there must be a reason that he drinks. Either he has poor self-control (addiction in the family), or there is an outside force that causes him to retreat to the bottle.
    • If alcohol isn't to blame, then this is Tobias's natural disposition, and he either is naturally this angry and aggressive or he doesn't know how to deal with stress.
  • Looking at both of the above possible reasons and ruling them out points to a behavioral problem. The most likely (or most provable) explanation is frustration due to poverty. Now this doesn't excuse the behavior, but it's something tangible in the books.

This is about as much as I can write on this subject, let me know what you think and if you have any points that stand out to you.

Quote from Heatherlly on December 15, 2022, 2:50 am

Quote from The Gestalt Prince on December 14, 2022, 11:20 pm

This would also mean she too would be a half-blood Prince, and that she would possess some resourcefulness, ambition, pride, etc. Although based on how she is depicted and what she becomes, it's difficult to see that she has any of these traits.

Was Eileen truly miserable at Hogwarts? JKR may have intended to communicate that through Harry's POV, though to me, that's insufficient. I don't think that a teenage boy (or anyone, really) can form an accurate assessment of who a person was or how happy/miserable they were based on a single photograph. Yes, Eileen could've been perpetually unhappy, though it's equally possible that she was just having a bad day or didn't like having her picture taken, etc.

This isn't my core point (I'll get to that in a minute). It's just something I try to keep in mind when reading the series. Character POV (usually Harry's in this case) is always going to be unreliable to some degree. Like their human counterparts, characters are always going to have limitations, blind spots, and biases.

That said, I don't think Eileen's happiness (or lack thereof) would exclude her from having typical Slytherin traits (proud, ambitious, resourceful). I'd argue that Severus was all of those things, qualities he drew upon despite his misery following Lily's death. Eileen might not have been successful in that respect (i.e. able to use those traits to achieve specific results), but does that mean she didn't have them? Not necessarily.

I think it's more likely that she "gave up". I don't know when or how or why, but it seems like she reached the conclusion that things couldn't get better. This could be psychological damage from an abusive relationship, or who knows? It might go back further than that, to a magical family who mistreated her and/or rejected her outright. Maybe she was disowned for marrying Tobias. Maybe it was for some other reason, one that made her feel like marrying someone like him was the only option she had (isolated from the magical community, no idea how to survive in the Muggle world, etc). Maybe she got married due to an unplanned pregnancy, or maybe she'd been in an abusive marriage for a decade or more before Severus came along…

There are so many possibilities, though the conclusion is the same. She was an abuse victim, someone who clearly suffered both physically and psychologically from that experience. I don't think that can be overstated, both in terms of her neglect toward Severus and her inability to escape such an unfortunate situation.

Point is, she could have been proud, resourceful, ambitious, and an abuse victim who lived in poverty. Those things aren't mutually exclusive… on the contrary, it goes to show how detrimental abuse can be. Abuse can make a proud person feel ashamed, an ambitious person lose all direction, leave a resourceful person feeling utterly helpless. Following that logic, it could also make a person who is technically more powerful (Eileen, by virtue of her magic) feel too weak or fearful to fight back.

To me, this is especially clear when she's described as a "cowering woman". Objectively, she has no need to cower. Even if her magical abilities were mediocre at best, she could've easily overpowered a Muggle like Tobias. But abusive situations/psychological damage/coercive control aren't that simple. It's not how much power the abuse victim has, but how much power she believes she has. The latter is what matters, and in Eileen's case, her behavior speaks for itself.

As for Severus…

What's the difference between him and Eileen? Why did she effectively give up while he chose to keep fighting? To me, the difference has nothing to do with Slytherin traits or lack thereof. The difference is hope.

"You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily's son."

No matter how miserable Severus was, he always had a light at the end of the tunnel, something he could do to set things right (as much as it was possible). Eileen didn't seem to have that, which is what makes her story so tragic. Without some sort of light, it's impossible to see anything other than darkness.

Quote from Motanul Negru on April 13, 2023, 9:43 am

My working HC is that Eileen was the last of the Princes, who were a mostly-pure-blood family that got destroyed in the throes of the Grindelwald war, probably on his side. Their family name comes from the family being founded by a witch who had a son by one of the English crown princes who never became king, but enough generations have passed, and they'd become modestly respectable.

They don't make the Sacred 28 but a marriage with a Prince isn't a scandal even for the likes of Blacks and Lestranges.

I have Eileen herself born in 1932, making her 40 during the summer after her son's first Hogwarts year. And while she overlapped with Tom Riddle two or three years, she never caught his notice and was too young to get caught up in the proto-Death-Eaters even if she ever wanted to.

By the time she leaves Hogwarts in '49 Eileen is a sullen young witch with mediocre skills, weak connections, and no living close family; she has precious little of the family fortune left, to the extent that there ever was any; and is not a homeowner (any properties of the Princes having been destroyed in the Grindelwald war).

 

Unwilling or unable to work for someone else, she uses what money and skill she has to try to make a living on her own, possibly exploiting Muggles in an unethical manner. She makes a complete dog's breakfast of this, and gets into so much legal hot water - possibly due to a large unintended breach in the Statute of Secrecy - that she has her wand snapped, is banned from practising (wand) magic, and serves a stint in Azkaban.

She comes on the other side completely gutted and alone, utterly unemployable if she wasn't before; but still young, and with about two hundred Galleons left to her name.

Since she's a pariah in the Wizarding World, she decides to retreat to a corner of the Muggle one where she won't be bothered; and alights in Cokeworth, which matches her mood.

Finding herself just as unemployable on the Muggle side, and with complete destitution looming ever closer, she seduces Tobias Snape (who is within one or two years of her in age), without love potion, and they get married - in 1955, let's say.

I explain Severus being an only child and born 5 years into his parents' marriage - which would be highly unusual for a working-class couple in the Snapes' millieu - by how shattered in body and spirit Eileen must've been after all the traumas beginning with the loss of her family and ending with the realization that her new Muggle husband is a violent drunk against whom she can't defend herself.

I've also placed Tobias deliberately as too young to fight in WWII for that extra tragic zest of having him be part of the generation that lived their whole adult lives in the shadows of the veterans whose respect and approval they, by and large, could never secure.

Quote from Naaga on April 13, 2023, 9:48 am

I like your take on Eileen and Tobias @motanulnegru.

Quote from JaySM on October 24, 2023, 2:04 pm

I know there’s conjecture on Eileen’s date of birth based on the book’s publishing date but I have a theory that it was a book from the second-hand store based on the year alone.

In my headcanon, Eileen’s father and any male siblings that she may have had would have also been conscripted but by the Ministry to aid in magical affairs. This would have taken a financial toll on the Prince family who more than likely started as middle class or lower middle class. I like to think that Eileen was a war baby, one last present left behind by her father who went off to fight. That would put Eileen to be conceived in 1939-1942 because anything later would make her too young. With no other breadwinner in the family, Prince family funds would have slowly drained forcing Eileen’s mother to start working when Eileen was old enough.

Because of the war, the British were in survival mode in the 1940s, they didn’t stop issuing ration cards until 1954. Eileen’s, now widowed, mother, had to depend on the muggle system if the magical didn’t have an equal or better alternative. If Eileen attended muggle schools during her Pre-Hogwarts days she would have received ration cards anyways. By the time Eileen entered Hogwarts they would have done away with the ration cards but the damage would have been done, with absent parents for the majority of her childhood and a non-existent support system (we can assume everyone Abraxes Malfoy and the Potter family age died from dragon pox at some point), Eileen had no one.

Fast forward to her trip to Diagon Ally in her 6^th year, Eileen’s family would not have enough money to purchase a new book but rather from a second-hand store. She probably looked worn and sad because she was worn and sad from a meager diet that ration cards provided and from her less-than-simple life.

Eileen would not have been considered for pureblood marriage because she wasn’t part of the higher echelon of wizarding society, but rather working class. If she were Slytherin, she probably had a hard time finding potential mates amongst the classists and House feuds so she searched outside of Hogwarts for someone who could hold their own.

In comes war veteran Tobias Snape who seemed to have a handle on his life with a stable job at the mill. She could depend on him if war broke out again because of his military experience and he didn’t mind her background and class. Tobias would have been at least 18 to have been conscripted making him at least 17-20 years older than her. It would have explained why Tobias wasn’t present in Severus’ adulthood he could have just died from old age in combination with unhealthy habits.

Severus would have grown up like Eileen did, eating meals as if they were still receiving ration cards because that’s all Eileen knew. Severus had to fend for himself pretty much like Eileen did, and Tobias was in his own world upset that the high expectations he had for his wife and child fell short. He probably felt entitled to more and with each wave of bad luck he fell deeper into his addictions and took it out on his loved ones.

This is long-winded. I wrote an entire fanfiction here.

JK Rowling has a knack for drawing parallels between historical events and the wizarding world. I thought I would too for characters who had little to no information.

Quote from Sam on October 24, 2023, 3:02 pm

Interesting point of view. Never thought about it quite like this. In my headcanon, it's more to do with Eileen not having any suitable suitor and plus being on her own for the most part. And her parents trying to set her up with some old dude and she decided nah. Went to the muggle world, got charmed by the muggle Tobias who hadn't shown his true colours then. She only later came to regret it, but by then she was disowned by her family and was stuck with Tobias. That made her bitter and more aloof. She neglected Severus due to her own misery etc. And we know the rest of the story. Besides, Rowling didn't bother clarifying various plotholes and missing details and it's not like she's gonna do it now or anytime soon or well, ever.

Quote from Nikka on October 24, 2023, 3:49 pm

In the fic I keep talking about Sympathetic Magic, one of the characters, Moribund Prince (an ancestor of Severus), was the husband of Claudia Black. So, @motanulnegru, I completely agree with your assessment of their blood purity. It is often theorized that Eileen was disowned for marrying a Muggle and it has almost become canon that Tobias was a drunk abuser, but I honestly love their relationship dynamic in the fic A Difference in the Family: The Snape Chronicles.

Quote from mmlf on February 25, 2024, 2:38 pm

@expecto-nikka1889 Are you able to provide the links to both fics and add them in the fanfiction recommendations thread, if you haven't done so already? Maybe with some more information about the aspects of their relationship that this fic did justice to. They sound fascinating!