* I know this is in the wrong section but I don't know how to put it in the right one, but I was trying to put it in the "CoS" section, please move it if possible *

In book 2, CoS, there was a basilik and if you looked at it with a naked eye, it would petrify you, am I correct? Now, something weird is going on here, Moaning Myrthle looked at it and died. But she should've just been pertified, because she has glasses! She didn't look at it in the eye, at least not directly! So why did she die instead of being petrified??

On the one hand, all the people who turned out pertified looked at the Basilisk through other things...
Mrs Norris ---- water from the girl's bathroom
Colin Creevy ---- his cammera
Hermione --- a mirror
Justin Finch-Fletchey -- through Nearly Headless Nick
Although at least two of these people-Colin and Justin- didn't see the basilisk's reflection; actually, when they saw it, there was something that was "breaking" that direct contact between the person and the Basilisk.
Therefore, I don't think that glasses would count, because their whole point is that you see more clearly when you wear them.

Yeah, I agree with this... But you had a good point... She didn't look directly at the basilisk she saw it through glasses... But glasses make you see better so there fore she saw the basilisk pretty much head on... Am I making sense??

I agree with Phoenix_1 and rebel_megz. Yes she saw them through something else but the glassed were not a reflection or anything like that but at the same time Colin saw it through hiscamera which in some sense is in my opinion not much different is it?

I agree with everybody else. In fact, if Myrtle saw the basilisk without the glasses, she would be pretrified, I guess.

I doubt it matters whether or not she would see clearer, she didn't look at it with the naked eye, so she should've just been petrified. Glasses have lenses, cameras have lenses, basicly the same thing (in a way) both should've just been petrified!!

I believe she was still crying when she stepped out of the stall... and I know when I cry I take my glasses off, or it just gets a messy. So I think she didn't even have her glasses on, hence she died.

You have a very good point jester_lynn, I think that all of us who wear glasses, usually take them off when crying, so, maybe she didn't have them on when she got out of the stall, and therefore she looked direclty at the basilisk

I agree, jester_lyn. I take my glasses off when i cry. Otherwise they're just in the way. I think maybe she wasn't wearing them when she saw it ... but lot's of people here have a point-looking through glasses isn't technically looking at it directally. Hmmm ... someone should ask JKR that.

Yeah, same here. Its pretty difficult to wipe tears from your eyes with glasses getting in the way, and seeing how Myrtle is in the movies she probably had to be wipe her tears away a LOT so she probably had just left them off.

Yea well, if she died without them, why is she wearing them? I mean, it doesn't make much sense to me...

Maybe she had them in her hand or pocket when she died. If they were on her possession when she died she'd be able to use them I'm sure. It'd sort of be like how Nearly Headless Nick can still pull his head on and off--he is dead, but the stuff he had with him when he died could still move and all. Then again... it is a little different I suppose because that was part of his body and glasses aren't...

Yes ohmyHP!, and if you are grabbing someone real, it doesn't mean that person will become "ghostly" right!?

I agree that she may have had them in her hand at the time, or sitting some place else. However, how would the glasses have traveled with her to the "ghost" side of the world (or whatever) on her? I don't think that matters though since Sir Patrick Delaney Podmore (I forgot his entire name and spelling, sorry) still carries his head around, right? And that was separate from his body.

rebel_megz, please read the site rules, one liners are not allowed.

Obviusly, she told she was crying because some kid made fun of her, so she wasn't wearing glasses, she was wiping her tears when she heard the basilisk, and then she saw it without glasses

But then, do tell me why she died WITH glasses on? Ahhhhh I see a little snag

I myself being a person who wears glasses, I know that if your glasses are a bit big, they tend to fall down your nose a bit.

I noticed in the illustrations of her showed that she has enormous glasses so it wouldn't be entirely unreal if her glasses had gone down her nose a bit and she was no longer looking through a lens but rather AIR.

This is an excellent point. If only I could write to JKR in person! Perhaps she saw it from the corner of her eye, which may not be covered with her glasses, or is that not directly? Jeez, this is annoying me so! Perhaps it'll be explained in the HP Encyclopedia!

I think it does count as directly looking at the basilisk. There is nothing between her and the snake to stop her dying, so if she made eye-contact - regardless of the angle - she would have died.

As for the glasses... I don't know. Would you die if you looked the snake straight in the eye, but looking through a window? You're still seeing the living snake. Through a ghost, you're seeing it through another 'living' thing; in the water and mirror, you're seeing the reflection, not the snake itself; through the camera, you're sort of seeing the image of it aren't you? The snake is demagnified etc. I don't know if this makes any difference. And I suppose that's what glasses do, don't they? Magnify. God, this is confusing.

With Myrtle having the glasses on her person when she died - as she is now wearing them as a ghost - I think perhaps the glasses were part of her. Like, Myrtle wouldn't be Myrtle without those glasses, so maybe she could access them regardless of whether she was wearing them when she died? Which sort of begs the question - when you die, do you spend you're ghosting years in the outfit you died in? What if you died naked? Would you be allowed to come back as a ghost in this case? A little off-topic, but oh well

If you really consider glasses as directly then it should have been impossbile for Justin to survive his meeting with the basilisk as he has seen it just through Nealry-headless Nick...
in both cases it is actually just another substance but you see it directly not like when they were seeing it with a mirror or the water when they just saw the reflection
I actually consider that as a mistake from JK

Hmm. Mistake or not, I think that Mourning Myrtle had her glasses of when she was killed. Yes, she’s wearing them in her death, but could it be possible that when people die, they still have their belongings with them… I mean, she’s her clothes on as well, so why not glasses? People tend to take of them when crying, and seeing as Myrtle was crying (as always) when she was in the bathroom she might have taken them off, just holding them… ?

I'm not very good at unveiling this kinds of subjects, but I came across this thought...

Why is it that Myrtle died and instead of going to heaven or whatever other realm there is for people when they die (like Harry's parents for example, or Sirius, that are able to come back through a wand connection or a Resurrection Stone), she stayed as a ghost to tell her story?

Maybe it was because she saw the Basilisk through her glasses! And that's also why she got to keep them on her afterlife... (Silly thought, I know, but it just happened to pop into my head...)

I still don't know how ghosts are made, and maybe this could have been the fact that triggered how she came back... We know professor Binns didn't eve realize he had left his body behind, but maybe since there was no "other substance" allowing her to become rigid and not dying.

I believe that since none of the other characters actually saw the Basilisk but its reflection, that's why they didn't die, and Myrtle did. She actually saw the Basilisk, even if through her glasses.

I read through the posts and I didn't see this anywhere so I just wanted to point out a few things. First of all, I'm pretty sure that whether Myrtle was wearing her glasses or not does not really matter. If she was not wearing them, then she saw the basilisk and died, because she saw the basilisk directly. However, even if she was wearing the glasses there was nothing to block the brunt of the stare.

What I mean by that is in the case of Colin seeing the basilisk he was only petrified because his camera took the hit. He didn't just see the basilisk through the lens but its stare burnt up the film. Remember when Dumbledore opened it in the hospital wing? Justin didn't die because he saw the basilisk through Nearly Headless Nick. Sense Nick is a ghost and already dead he took the brunt of the stare.

I hope this clears it up a little bit. There was nothing to block Myrtle getting all the focus of the stare. Her glasses even if she was wearing them wouldn't have been able to lessen the "strength" of the stare. So regardless she would have died.

Just a quick comment on Myrtle wearing or not wearing her glasses when she was killed by the basilisk. As a ghost she was wearing them, so obviously she died wearing them, which means she was looking through them when she saw the basilisk. Yeah. Just had to get that out.

Im pretty much certain she had the glasses on when she saw the basilisk.
However is it possible that glases are an exception to the rule as they actually help you to see an objects so had she not had them on depending on how terrible her eyesight was she may have not actually been able to see the basalisks eyes. To those of you who don have bad eyesight this might seem silly but in actual fact with out my contacts in i cant see anything at all , well excet blurry fuzz So yeah im thinking that maybe glases are an exception to the rule, as by looking through them you can actually see better

Isobel,

Glasses would not be an exception to the natural law, that when viewing a basilisk through a form a means other than direct sight one would become petrified.

I'm not quite sure if you remember but in CoS, Colin Creevy was petrified when looking through a viewing lense on a camera. Now one could follow this with a tangent that glasses are just lenses, quite like one on a camera.

Hopefully that cleared up any misconception you may have had.

I found this quote in GOF book, chapter 12 "The Triwaizard Tournament":

"Pearly white and semi-transparents, Nick was dressed tonight in his usual doublet, but with a particularly large ruff, which served the dual purpose of looking extra-festive, and insuring that his head didn't wobble too much on his partially severed neck".

This quote shows that even though Nick is a ghost, he is able to change clothes (in this case, having a larger rough than normal in order to look 'extra-festive'. This shows that Myrtle could have died *without* her glasses on, yet still be able to wear them while she is dead. It is possible that she didn't have them on when she looked at the basilisk, but that she had them in her hand. She would then bring them into the afterlife with her, as they are still on her person when she died.... and she would be able to take them off/put them on whenever she felt like it as a ghost as well as a human.

Hope that helps!

I was just looking to see if anyone had posted something about this because I was thinking about it last night! ... weeird..!!

So anyways, I really believe that she should have been petrified with her glasses on because you obviously have to look it directly in the eye.

So. she must have taken them off when she was crying, I agree. And, good point, she could've been holding them when she died...or someone might have point them back on before she was to make her decision whether to go 'on' or not, and so she hadn't become an "inprint of a departed soul" yet...does that make sense?

Haha!

Well, the basilisk was seenthrough things ie, water, mirror, ghost and a camera. I think that Myrtle died because her glasses helped her see, without them she couldn't. Also, glasses amplify your sight, so the glasses could have amplified her image of the basilisk's eyes.
I hope this helps

Yeah i agree with most of you, she was crying and most sane people take their glasses OFF when crying, and Myrtle was crying because Olive Hornby teased her about glasses, and THEN she saw the basilisk, naked eye.

Also, because Olive Hornby teased her about her GLASSES, i believe she felt angry about herself having glasses, and therefore she took them off and she never wanted to wear them ever again and then the basilisk came whilst she wasn't wearing glasses.

...... i hope that makes sense

Also, there is a chance that she had wiped her eyes to yell at the "person" in the girls bathroom, and placed her glasses back on. There is a chance that she saw the basilisk at an angle where the glasses were not covering her eyes. It is completely possible that she was looking over the rims of her glasses and died with them on, though she still saw the basilisk with her naked eye.

I think that even though she was wearing glasses, the glasses weren't probably a big enough obstruction to her vision. She had beein crying in the stall and then heard a guy, so she look out of the stall and probably looked at it full in the face because she was angry. That's probably why she died, regardless of half-a-centimeter thick glasses.

ok, well i think that the glasses really did not effect anything if they were on or off. Glasses dont reflect anything they just allow you to see clearer. Justin was petrified because he saw him through Nearly-Headless Nick this obstruscted his vision just enough to not have been caught dead. But back to Myrtle, glasses are made for the wearer to see clearer. Glasses dont reflect light into the eye its like a big contact lense (like i said earlier).

Well... The two people who saw the Basilisk through something had their vision sort of made worse in a way. Colin saw his through a camera, and cameras sometimes make things fuzzy, or smaller. Justin Finch-Fletchey saw it through Nearly Headless Nick, which probably made his view of it a bit foggy. Moaning Myrtle saw it through glasses, which made her view of the Basilisk's eyes even beter. I'm guessing that had to do with it.

I've actually just found an interview with JKR, way back in 2005 and a reporter asked her about glasses and basilisks. Here's the quote:


[quote]Bethan Roberts reporting for The Times Educational Supplement - In the second book, if you see a basilisk and you are wearing glasses, will they protect you? And if they do, why did Moaning Myrtle die, and if they don't, why not?


JK Rowling: That is a really good question. And I have been asked that before. I had to decide the glasses couldn't protect you. I just had to, because obviously there would be quite a few people at Hogwarts who were wearing glasses and I thought that might cause me plot difficulties, so I decided that glasses alone wouldn't protect you.
But as you know, I had Justin protected by the camera lens, so I think I am open for criticism there, but the way I explained to myself he was looking through several lenses and wasn't actually seeing the thing directly, it wasn't through his eyeline, when you look through a camera you are looking through the lens, it is a little distorted. You can argue with me on that and I wouldn't blame you but that is how I explained it to my self at the time.


Hope that helps!

-Nick
HJP

Well, Myrtle was in the toilets, she was crying because she was being teased, maybe she taken her glasses off at the time she saw the basilisk's deadly glare?

Rach

x x x

As many people have said, glasses make it easier for people to see, not harder. Creevey was looking through a camera, and to the best of my understanding he had a good camera. Many people would say that a good camera wuld mean that something is clearer, to ensure that the pictures aren't blurry, but if you've ever used a nice camera, not a cheap one or a digital one, but the expensive fancy kind, you know that you have to adjust them for the image you want to take a picture of. So say that Colin was adjusting his camera when he saw the basilisk, wouldn't it then have made his vision blurry, as opposed to clearer?

Also, as Rachelle-is-a-Ravenclaw mentioned, I don't know about anybody else, but when I'm crying I normally take my glasses off so that I can wipe my eyes and so that they don't get tears all over them or whatever, and I normally wash my face off before going where people can see me to get rid of the tear marks. Myrtle says that she had been crying and then as she came out of the stall she saw it and then she died, that makes both reasons an option for why she didn't have her glasses on. She had taken them off as she opened the stall door to wipe her eyes and then rinse her face off but never made it to the sink.

~Kristina

Oh, yeah, that's true, I always take my glasses off when I'm crying. I hate it when I get tears all over them because it's really hard to get them all clean again. So that would make perfect sense that Myrtle had her glasses off when she opened the stall door and came face-to-face with the basilisk.

And yes, glasses are supposed to be able to make you see better.

I guess that pretty much explains it, glass lenses just dont protect you..
I thought maybe her glasses were off (as people have mentioned) or maybe her head was down and she looked up over her glasses (i do it sometimes) so she made direct contact?
But if JK says that glasses dont protect you then I guess theres the explanation

Whoa... I see a major flaw in the JK Rowling quote!!



Justin - Camera Lens

Wasn't it Colin who had the camera?¿?¿?¿?¿?¿?¿ (hehehe I can make upside-down question marks - ¿¿¿¿ hehehehe). And Justin the ghost?? Was that a slip of the tongue there? I caught that one right away!!

Erm I think that was just a mistake, Im guessing she was supposed to say Collin and not Justin but as she was being interiewed it probably came out without thinking or she just got them mixed up?

But cameras actually have mirrors in them to reflect the image up to the eyehole. Perhaps glasses would have intensified the death or effect.

You have a point. Mr5s. Norris saw the Basilisk's reflection which made her petrified, Justin through Nick, and Colin through the camera.

They only saw reflections and not straight in the eyes or face. Reflection can probably make them petrified but if you see the basilisk staright in the face and eyes, you would die. The reflections probably reflected the basilisk's powers back to him but the yellow eyes have no effect on him because he is the one exerting the death stare.

In Moaning Myrtle's case, she probably had her glasses off while she was crying. When the basilisk came in, she probably wiped her eyes and put her glasses on to make it look like she wasn't crying and was just using the restroom and to make whoever was in there to think that she is tough enough not to cry. And of course, if there was a boy in the girl's classroom, you would look at them in the face and tell them to get out. That' is what Moaning myrtle did and that's how she died.

Well...

Olive Hornby teased Myrtle about her GLASSES, and Myrtle probably felt angry about having classes, and therefore she took them off and wanted to throw them away, but then the basilisk came and then she saw it, naked eye. So then she died.

]It seems the answer that she was drying and took off her glasses makes sense, it's a natural thing to do, it's true her ghost has them on, those big round lenses seem to be a natural part of her appearance. She does a lot of crying and moaning as a ghost, maybe ghosts can cry without taking off their glasses...!