What is in the locked room in the Department of Mysteries?

Question

In Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, Harry encounters a locked room in the Department of Mysteries. Dumbledore hints later that this room holds the emotion of love. Is this confirmed anywhere? How does a room 'hold' an emotion?

Answer 1

J.K. Rowling addresses the "Love Room" at the Department of Mysteries in an interview with The Leaky Cauldron. The emotion of love is studied in the Love Room; however, as JKR has said as well, love induced by a love potion, Amortentia for example, is not truly love. However, inducing the effects of love is the best the Unspeakables (the wizarding "researchers" who work in the Department of Mysteries) can do in order to study it.

SU: Well, we have a lot of questions still for you, Jo. Like stuff about that mysterious Department of Mysteries. Can you tell us what was in the Love room? (MA: Oh yeah.) I mean…

MA: (laughs) We’ll just call it the Love room.

JKR: (laughs) What was that mysterious room we don’t know what it was in- the Love room? Yes, it was the…

SU: Yeah. (All laugh) Thank you. (JKR: Well…) See, I told you, I’m in Hufflepuff, you know I’m not…

JKR: No, no, no, I think what’s in the Love room, it’s the place where they study what love means. So that room, I believe, would have at its center a kind of fountain or well containing a love potion, a very powerful love potion. You know that the first time they ever enter Slughorn’s Potions (SU: Yes.) class, and he starts talking about Amortentia, the love potion, and he says it’s the most dangerous one in the room, well, that’s what they would have found in the Love room.

SU: Oh…

JN: Interesting.

JKR: So you would see wizards and witches taking it, they would study the effects. The room of course has to be locked. And, you know, again, there’s this thread running through the books, what love does, and it raises people to the heights of absolute heroism, (SU: It does.) as in Lily, Harry, Neville, and it also leads them into acts of foolishness and even evil, which is Bellatrix and also Dumbledore. He became foolish, he lost his center, his moral center, when he became infatuated. So that’s what it does, that’s what makes it dangerous. In Bellatrix it was- as I think is clear, but I doubt that people will be particularly shocked to hear- because I’m sure they’ve deduced that Bellatrix is madly romantically in love with Voldemort. This is, that’s the obsession of her life.

_{CHAT WITH J.K. ROWLING - POTTERCAST 131 FROM THE LEAKY CAULDRON 01.02.08}

The door to the Love Room would, of course, have to be kept locked, in order to keep the love-potion-infused subjects from running amok through the entire Department of Mysteries. I think J.K. Rowling's point above is that love makes people do unimaginable things, for both good and bad.