Because it would be a silly, pedantic plotpoint. It's like asking why Voldemort didn't just set all of Privet Drive on fire if he cared so much about killing Harry, protections be damned. There's a million different ways in which canon plotpoints can be made to look silly - hell, all of book 4 falls under that category.

Also, how reliable is Hermione's opinion here? I get that it's Hermione. But, assuming her vision is perfect, would she actually be able to tell the difference between 20/50 vision and 20/200 vision? From her perspective, she would likely just realize that the vision is bad, but not the exact degree. And as a personal anecdote, my vision is completely terrible. Worse than 20/200. It's bad enough that without my glasses I would have to stick my face 6 inches away from my monitor to read what is on it. But, if you take my glasses off, I'd still be able to function. So it's not like Harry would just be seeing a wall of white without them. Like, I wouldn't drive without my glasses, but if it was a serious emergency, I know I'd be able to do it. You can still tell what things are, but it's a lot harder to make out detail.

 

You know what's stopping Death Eaters from summoning his glasses? Harry. The shield charm protects against summoning spells and Harry's pretty damn good at them.

 

This has been answered already and like usual, Taure does a good job of doing so here. However, I wanted to add another problem with interpreting "split" as "split down the middle."

It's the way we use words. In fact, if you have a group a twenty and say "let's split up and find xyz," usually it doesn't mean you divide into two groups. It means you split into several groups. If I'm splitting wood and hit on the very edge of the log, I still split that piece from the rest of the wood. There's been times when I was younger that I split wood and saw it split into three pieces if I hit it just right along a seam or grain.

So, there's no real reason to use "split" here in the sense of "half." Instead, it simply splits into two (or more).

 

What sort of magic would an HP wizard use to move or tunnel through earth if they, for example, had to dig a large hole or exhume a body?

 

I don't think this is the right thread for speculation, but I'd go vanishing spells.

 

The Gouging Spell. http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Gouging_Spell

Hermione uses it to help carve a path through stone for the dragon they escape on in the Deathly Hallows.

 

Does Cannon suggest that Harry is actually underfed or malnourished, or does the fact that Molly always comment on him not eating enough just mean that she's a doting mother figure?

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yjpdubg7nPY-Lz8h0qKfuzoq47L3d0kG8P4a6KpoYcY/edit
This is a google doc someone put together a while ago regarding abuse Harry suffered and did not suffer as a child. The short answer to this specific question is yes, he was underfed.

 

Was Nagini especially resilient, either to magic or mundane damage? Could she have been killed with, say, a blasting curse or by being dropped from a great height, or is she resistant because of her Horcrux status?

 

She's in the room in Godric's Hollow when Hermione uses the Blasting Curse that snapped Harry's wand, IIRC, and comes away apparently unharmed. Given that wands survive a lot of abuse over the series, the curse must be pretty potent to have broken it by accident, I would say, so for Nagini to be unharmed would suggest she's pretty tough. Of course, Voldemort was there as well, so he might have used a Shield Charm to deflect it - can't remember off the top of my head.

In the films, she definitely takes a few spells head on without noticeable harm, but that's the films.

 

I don't believe she was. If she had been, The Dark Lord wouldn't have bothered with his bubble of protection as only specific hocrux killing items could kill her.

Also Harry was a hocrux and I don't see him take a lot of punishment as if it was nothing .
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Is there a Canon explanation for why the Hogwarts school song is so badly written? How is it possible that the four smartest and most powerful witches and wizards of the era came up with this song?

 

That's the hat's invention, or at least it sounds like the hat made it up. Magical power most likely does not correlate with musical talent, at any rate.

 

Pretty much this. I suppose you could dive really deep on it, and rely on Dumbledore's assertion that "music is a magic beyond what we teach here at Hogwarts" and say that magic can't write new music, so the hat just tries to mash together bits of songs it otherwise hears while in the Head master's office throughout the year to make a song.

But, to be honest, when creating a magical device that will determine what house a student resides in for 7 years, imbuing it with musical talent is probably the last thing to be concerned about. I'd even belive the that the whole "magic hat sings a song before sorting" wasn't something planned at al, but very much the sort of quirky trait that magic objects in the Harry Potter world tend to pick up without any specific intention by their creators at all.

And, of course, being intelligent and highly skilled at something does not have relationship with the ability to compose music.

 

I'm sorry if I was unclear but I was referring to the School anthem, "Hoggy Warty Hogwarts...", not the Sorting hat's song .

 

It's not in old english, for a 1000 year old school, and it's never brought up again. I think it's 'early instalment weirdness' like the chanted curses Voldemort and Snape use. Best to ignore it, as it's just a joke moment, to establish Hogwarts' weirdness, and Dumbledore's unorthodox leadership.

I doubt there's any source that says it was written by a founder, and it's just a play on the fact that lots of old posh public schools have shitty school songs.

 

That makes sense. Thanks!

 

IIRC horcruxes aren't really any more or less resilient than regular objects. Any protections the horcruxes had were added by Voldemort himself to protect his soul.

 

Protections don't come with the creation of the Horcrux. A wizard must add them afterward. So Harry's vulnerability doesn't mean anything in terms of Nagini's.

 

Depends on what kind of protections we mean here. Horcruxes can't be completely destroyed except by the ways listed in Hermione's books. Harry can still die, but the closest he ever came to being completely destroyed was being bitten by a basilisk.

 

Those books specifically mention that they can't be destroyed in usual ways because there are protections employed and not due to innate horcruxiness.