Severus Snape: In Remembrance
Severus Snape was a half-blood wizard, born on the 9th of January 1960, to Pureblood witch Eileen Snape (formerly Eileen Prince) and Tobias Snape, a Muggle. He was raised in Spinners End, a street in Cokeworth; a Muggle inhabited area in the North of England. Snape became friends with a muggleborn witch Lily Evans (More commonly known as Lily Potter), who lived in the next street, and who had no knowledge of the Magical World, prior to meeting Snape. Snape attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from 1971-1978, where he was sorted into Slytherin House.
Snape had been, from a young age, fascinated with the Dark Arts. He knew more curses when he arrived at Hogwarts than practically all of the seventh years combined. Perhaps it was this that originally drew him to Voldemort's inner circle; the chance to see and perform spells that he had studied from his childhood days, and perhaps grown to love, in a strange, almost twisted way. Up until his fifth year, Snape remained close friends with Gryffindor sorted muggleborn, Lily Evans, despite the rivalry between the two houses. Snape cherished a deep love for Lily, whether she ever felt the same is unknown, for he never expressed his feelings to her.
Midway through his fifth year, Snape made a grave error; in front of almost half of the Hogwarts population he called Lily a 'mudblood', a highly offensive term meaning dirty blood, used by some pureblood families to describe a witch or wizard of Muggle parentage. Their friendship gone and his heart broken, Snape turned his back on the Light and joined the Death Eaters before the outbreak of the First Wizarding War, rising to become one of Voldemort's most trusted supporters. Then in 1980, at the height of Voldemort's reign of terror, Snape was asked by Voldemort to gain a teaching position at Hogwarts to spy on Dumbledore. Whilst waiting for a job interview, Snape overheard something that changed his life forever; a prophecy made by Sybil Trelawney in the wizarding pub, The Leaky Caldron. At the time, she was being interviewed by Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore. In the prophecy, Trelawney predicted that a boy born at the end of July would have the power to vanquish the Dark Lord. Snape went to Voldemort with the information. Soon after, he learned that Voldemort was going to kill the Potters. Horrified, Snape went to Dumbledore and begged him to save Lily. After Lily's death, Snape joined the Hogwarts staff, and the Order as a spy and relayed information about the Death Eaters to Dumbledore. In order to ensure that Voldemort was not suspicious of him, Snape gave Voldemort information about the Order.
Severus Snape overcame adversity during a war. He hated Harry Potter from the second he set foot in the Great Hall and Snape saw him for the first time. Snape hated Harry because he reminded him of Harry's father, James Potter. During their years at Hogwarts, James had bullied Snape constantly. The icing on the cake for Snape's hatred of James was when James married Lily. Although Snape hated James, he loved Lily and was determined to help Harry in his Horcrux hunt as a kind of tribute to her. His legacy is a message, a message that affects us all; it is not what you look like, it's what you do that counts. Snape wore a green tie. He was a Slytherin. A Slytherin who died like a Gryffindor.