deathtocapslock | The Muggle-Born Population

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The Muggle-Born Population

In some interview, J.K. Rowling apparently said that Britain's wizarding population is roughly divided into 25% muggle-born, 50% half-blood, and 25% pureblood. However, while JKR may have said that 25% of witches and wizards are muggle-born, this is not what she has actually shown in canon.

In Harry's year at Hogwarts, there are only two confirmed muggle-born students in canon: Hermione Granger and Justin Finch-Fletchley. JKR's early class list also shows Hannah Abbott and Terry Boot as muggle-borns, but she apparently later either forgot this or changed her mind, for we learn in DH that some of Hannah's family is buried in a wizarding cemetery, and Terry was able to attend Hogwarts when Voldemort was in control. JKR originally imagined Harry's class as having 40 students, but only 30 students are ever mentioned in canon, and only 25 are mentioned elsewhere besides the sorting ceremony. 2 out of 40 students would mean that 5% of the class is definitely muggle-born. 2 out of 30 would mean that 6.66% is muggle-born. 2 out of 25 would make 8% of the class muggle-born. Any of these percentages is much lower than 25%.

(Note: Apparently I can't count, so I've had to change these percentages a few times. Hopefully they're correct now.)

Furthermore, (as far as I can remember) we only meet 3 other muggle-born students at Hogwarts: Penelope Clearwater and the two Creevey Brothers. And we only know of three muggle-borns from the previous generation: Lily Evans, Ted Tonks, and Dirk Cresswell. Again, these numbers suggest that the percentage of wizards and witches who are muggle-born is much lower than 25%

ETA: Oryx reminded me Add Mary McDonalds and the Mary who was on trial during the trio's Ministry invasion (though the two may be the same person, under her maiden and married names).

Another sign of a low percentage of muggle-borns is the WW's ignorance of muggle culture and technology. If muggle-borns were really 25% of the wizarding population, I believe that they would have had significantly more influence on wizarding culture. Wizards would have assimilated and adapted more muggle sports, muggle board games, film, television, etc.

The data I used for these calculations can be found here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0Asq6Ul6gdxBCdDlMRHoxU0NVaHA5SXQtQzRiRFI0Smc&output=html If the blood status is in parentheses, that means it was shown that way in JKR's notes, but unverified or contradicted in canon.

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JKR can't even count - she certainly can't calculate percentages! She probably thinks 2/40 IS 25%!

I don't think JKR particularly *cares* about the math either. At least, that's the impression her comments leave me with. And it matches the disdain for history and education on display in the books themselves.

Add Mary McDonalds and the Mary who was on trial during the trio's Ministry invasion (though the two may be the same person, under her maiden and married names).

But we see how after the exclusion of Muggle-borns Wizarding society keeps working as usual, nor does Harry notice anyone who looks like they are originally from the Muggle world in places like the QWC (where wizards were supposed to be trying to pass for Muggles).

Part of it is because Rowling thinks Muggles and Muggle-borns are too 'ordinary' and not worth writing about. But I tend think even if there were a handful of Muggle-borns among the students who didn't join the DA there weren't more than 2-3 of them in Harry's year. (Though it would be funny if all the non-Slytherins who were not in the DA were Muggle-borns.)

>>>>Add Mary McDonalds and the Mary who was on trial during the trio's Ministry invasion (though the two may be the same person, under her maiden and married names).

Oops! Thanks!

>>>>But we see how after the exclusion of Muggle-borns Wizarding society keeps working as usual

Yes, exactly! If a quarter of the population were suddenly excluded it would be a major upheaval.

>>>> But I tend think even if there were a handful of Muggle-borns among the students who didn't join the DA there weren't more than 2-3 of them in Harry's year.

I think there would most likely only be one more muggle-born in Harry's year, two at most. My theory is that if only 7.4% of the students we know about are muggle-born, then they probably only make up between 7% and 8% of the entire class... 10% at the very most.

Well, the people we don't hear about in Harry's year are the mysteriously disappearing 2 Gryffindor girls and those members of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw who were not in the DA. (As well as some of the Slytherin girls - we have interview information that Daphne was a pureblood, Milicent has a relative on the Black Family Tree but was a half-blood in the original notes, and there were another Slytherin girl or two on the notes who didn't make it to canon.)

The best I can do about the Gryffindor girls is to think they went every night to their homes in Hogsmeade so they weren't around for out-of-hours activities like the DA. (Or their families objected to Harry, but they were less voiceful about it than Seamus.) In any case, the explanation involves having magical relatives.

But in Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw - how were kids recruited to the DA? I think Hermione invited the prefects, whom she was getting to know better that year, and they invited their friends. So Ernie and Hannah invited Justin, their friend since COS (or earlier, of course). Susan may have joined as a friend, following her aunt's tales about Harry's trial, or in memory of her deceased uncle, Order member Edgar Bones (or a combination of those reasons). Zach seems to have joined like Cho, because of Cedric. They may have been on the Quidditch team together. Michael was invited by Ginny, Terry came either as Michael's or Anthony's friend. Padma didn't bring anyone new - either she mostly hangs out with her sister (and Lavender), or with the boys, or with the books in the library.

IOW those Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws who did not come to the founding meeting of the DA were the ones who were not connected socially to the prefects, the Hufflepuff Quidditch team, nor had relatives in the first Order. So there may have been more Muggle-borns among them. I'd say another 2 Muggle-borns in Hufflepuff and 1, maybe 2 in Ravenclaw, for up to 6 Muggle-borns total or 15% of 40, at my most generous.

There were three girls sorted into Ravenclaw who did not participate in the DA: Mandy Brocklehurst, Morag MacDougal, and Lisa Turpin. Mandy is listed as a half-blood on the class list. Morag's and Lisa's blood status are unknown. It's possible the they are muggle-born. On the other hand, it's possible that they weren't invited because their families were known Voldemort or Ministry sympathizers.

The other two students who were sorted were Sally-Anne Perks and a student with the last name Moon. The class list doesn't show their house or their blood status.

8 students on the class list didn't make it into canon. We know the blood status of 4 of them, and one, Kevin Entwhistle, is muggle-born in Ravenclaw.

More today...

I think 15% is still too high based on what we've see in canon. However, one thing that might be worth considering is that there are possibly a lower number of students than normal in Harry's year because of VoldWar I. If this is the case, we might see a higher than normal percentage of muggle-born students around Harry's age. Like, it might be normal to have 5 or 6 muggle-borns in every year, but might also be normal to have 50 to 60 students altogether in every year, rather than 40.

If the DEs during VoldWar I had actually been carrying out their Pureblood agenda competently, they might also have tracked down and killed every Muggle-born kid under age 11 (and thus less protected than the kids in Hogwarts 10 mos./year) they could find. (Maybe they managed to get a peek at the Hogwarts Quill records, but not long enough to catch all the names. Something, anyway.) So it might also be normal for there to be 50-60 kids per year total, with 10-15 of them Muggleborn.

that's a good point. :)

Yes, but if they didn't do that, then you might well expect a *higher* than average percentage of Muggleborns in and around Harry's year. People in the WW had probably been having fewer children during the first war, and more than that, some of the WW's children were probably killed. Neither of these two factors would've affected the number of Muggleborns, unless Muggleborns under 11 were specifically targeted.

I was thinking they could have targeted the ones under 11, if any of the DEs actually meant to stop them from ever learning about or entering the wizarding world in the first place. Whether they did so we don't know of course, but it seems like something at least one DE would have wanted to do. But there's no way to be sure.

But we see how after the exclusion of Muggle-borns Wizarding society keeps working as usual

Clever deduction!

JKR probably wanted those numbers in order to present purebloods as a privileged minority. That's my theory, anyway.

If Muggleborns are only 8-10% of the population, then halfbloods and purebloods are a higher percentage, obviously. More than that, though: the fewer Muggleborns, the fewer halfbloods with Muggleborn parents. If you're going to have even 50% of the population be halfbloods, then (assuming family size doesn't vary according to blood status, averaged out), then...

Okay, if 10% of the population is Muggleborn, then assuming no Muggleborns marry Muggles or other Muggleborns, then means only 20% of the population would have halfblood children without marrying Muggles. That's 20% second-gen halfbloods with Muggleborn ancestry, whose children will be purebloods unless they marry someone with more immediate Muggle ancestry than their own. That would leave 70% of the population as purebloods.

If a lot of witches and wizards marry Muggles, then you get a higher percentage. Although I think that the only halfbloods with Muggle parents that we *know* of are Seamus, Dean (I guess, although it isn't book canon), Severus, and Voldemort.

Magical-Muggle marriages would produce halfblood descendants for two generations, minimum, so...

(gets headache)

Well, if another 10% of non-Muggleborns married Muggles, then that would produce as many first-gen halfblood children as the Muggleborns (call it 20x), and *those* children's children would produce an additional 20x halfbloods (or more, up to 40x, but they might well marry other first-gen halfbloods or Muggleborns, whose children would be halfbloods anyway). That would lead to at least 60x halfbloods total, or up to 80x. And only 10-30x purebloods.

(I'm really not a math person myself. I think I have to stop using percentages when suddenly there are more adults having children than the total WW population, but what do I know?)

Still, that's a high number of witches and wizards marrying Muggles. So, if only 5% of non-Muggleborns married Muggles, which sounds moderately reasonable, that could produce up to an additional 20x, roughly 40% of the population. Then the breakdown would be roughly 10% Muggleborn, 40% halfblood, and 50% pureblood, with a tendency for there to be a somewhat higher percentage of purebloods than that.

Does that sound at all reasonable? Feel free to pick apart my math or anything else, I'm just thinking "out loud."

ugh, my brain hurts.

I don't know how to figure out the percentages of half-bloods and purebloods. I feel like there are too many uncertain factors.

First, the best definition we seem to have for "half-blood" is that a person has two magical grandparents.

If Severus married Lily, their children would have 1 magical grandparent.

If Severus married Narcissa, their children would have 3 magical grandparents

If Hermione married Justin, their children would still have 0 grandparents, but their grandchildren could easily have 4 magical grandparents.

If Hermione married Dudley, their children would have 0 magical grandparents, and their grandchildren would still have at least 2 muggle grandparents.

Second, we don't know anything about population growth in the WW, nor the birthrate among purebloods compared to half-bloods and muggle-born.

Third, we don't know how many muggle-born marry other muggle-born, half-bloods, or muggles, instead of purebloods.

I think it's probably safe to say that, while a majority of the population may technically be "pure," a significantly smaller percentage of purebloods have bloodlines that are completely magical for more than a few generations back.

Second, we don't know anything about population growth in the WW, nor the birthrate among purebloods compared to half-bloods and muggle-born.

Oh, absolutely. I had to assume that there was no difference in order to say anything.

Third, we don't know how many muggle-born marry other muggle-born, half-bloods, or muggles, instead of purebloods.

Also very true. I tend to think that when JKR came up with the ratios she did, she was probably figuring that most Muggleborns married someone who wasn't also a Muggleborn. (Or a Muggle.) If all Muggleborns marry non-Muggleborns, and no one in the WW marries Muggles, then the 25-50-25 fits perfectly. Even 1% of non-Muggleborns marrying Muggles produces 4x halfbloods, though.

I think it's probably safe to say that, while a majority of the population may technically be "pure," a significantly smaller percentage of purebloods have bloodlines that are completely magical for more than a few generations back.

Yeah. Even with Ernie's line in CoS, "you can trace my family back through nine generations of witches and warlocks and my blood’s as pure as anyone’s," that first part may only refer to one ancestral line after the three generations required to be a pureblood.

Yeah, like, I can accept that the Blacks are quite pure, but I bet the Weasleys have some fairly recent muggle ancestors, even though the direct Weasley line is probably quite old.

Hem, Arthur's mother was a Black, so no. And one of Molly's uncles married a Black without her getting burnt off the family tree, so I doubt that, unless the Muggle component was on Molly's maternal line.

But it's possible that Septimus's mother was a muggle-born or half-blood. After all, the Blacks Blasted Cedrella off their family tree for marrying Septimus.

Septimus was considered a blood-traitor. You can't be one without being pure-blood in the first place (or where would the treason be?).

I was under the impression that the Weasley family in general were considered blood traitors, not specifically Septimus.

I thought the traitorous part might, in part, be that the Weasley men marry muggle-born or half-blood women every few generations in order to keep the line robust. After all, it's Ron who says, "Most wizards these days are half-blood anyway. If we hadn’t married Muggles we’d’ve died out."

I thought the traitorous part might, in part, be that the Weasley men marry muggle-born or half-blood women every few generations in order to keep the line robust.

IMO blood-traitor means a pureblood who has odd, non-traditional political inclinations. The Weasleys are just like the Blacks, but with red hair and no style.

"Oh, maths!"

That was always her reaction in waving away such irritating contradictions.

Although, if this 25% thing was only in an interview, it's not really a canon fact anyway.

Oh I agree. But I've seen the 25% figure used in a few essays and discussions, so I thought it was worth discussing.

More than an interview. It was a televised special.

Oh dear, that's *embarrassing*!! Poor, poor Jo!

More reason to enjoy Danny's calculations from that pesky canon then!

Rowling seems to have started out intending to have a higher representation of students who were not from wizarding backgrounds, and got too tightly wrapped up in the story to look beyond Harry. After all, in her mind, one third of all the characters we actually pay attention to are muggle-born.

But early on in PS/SS there is a comment made in passing that in the brief period that Harry was adjusting to Hogwarts he noticed that "rather a lot" of the students were Muggle-born.

Rowling seems to have forgotten about that by the time she got solidly into the series, however. She even forgot that the Creevy brothers were supposedly Muggle-born. Since she has Minerva chivvying one of them out of the castle in the evacuation, and Colin was probably of age by that end of the year, so it was a lot more likely to be Dennis.

If 25% of the students at Hogwarts in the 90's truly were muggle-born, then I have to guess that this was a fairly recent development in wizarding society, and it's almost understandable that the purebloods were concerned.

For, if the ratio of muggle-born to other magicals has been 1:3 for several generations, then that means that the total wizarding population has grown by 33% every generation, or about every 20-25 years.

In contrast, the UK population has grown by less than 20% in the last fifty years.

(I used to know enough math to be able to compare growth rates... sigh).

I've got an essay about the rise of Muggleborns.

Of course I was arguing from a base point that for about a century after Wizarding Seclusion was imposed Muggle-borns had *not* been being brought into the ww. I'm no longer sure that that could have been the case.

But it tries to play off of the growth of recorded British population in general and comes to the rough conclusion that it would have taken some 125 years or so for the Muggle-born sector of the population to build up to a total of 25% of the wizarding population in general. And it was that build up which had the Pureblood faction's knickers in a twist. They really were losing ground in comparison with a predominantly halfblood population and that the Muggle-borns were gaining ground on them as well, was simply too much.

But my data is probably faulty, since I was using the televised information as a base point.

JKR's admitted that she hasn't re-read the books, but what about those detailed notes? Doesn't she check those either?

Well, when asked about the Amazing Vanishing Gryffindor Girls she said she'd have to dig up that notebook. Looks like the notes are in some boxes somewhere.

Sorry, scrap what I said above. I wasn't taking fertility rates into account.

She worked with these data:

Purebloods: Malfoy (S), Crabbe (S), Goyle (S), Parkinson (S), Greengrass (S), Longbottom (G), Weasley (G), Brown (G), MacDougal (R), Macmillan (H)

Halfbloods: Bulstrode (S), Potter (G), Finnigan (G), Thomas (G), Brocklehurst (R), Li (R), Abbott (H), Bones (H), Hopkins (H)

Muggleborns: Granger (G), Finch-Fletchley (H)

Unknown: Davis (S), “a girl with glasses“ (S), Parvati Patil (G), Padma Patil (R), Dunbar (G), “a ginger girl” (G), Turpin (R), Corner (R), Boot (R), Goldstein (R), Jones (H), Leanne (H)

Note: The Patil twins and Fay Dunbar are sorted as unknown, but given they knew Pansy before they started Hogwarts and some of their comments suggest they aren't familiar with Muggle technology etc., they must be either half- or purebloods. Same goes for Tracey Davis, Michael Corner, Terry Boot, Anthony Goldstein and Zacharias Smith.

So out of the total of 33 there are 10 purebloods, 9 halfbloods, 2 muggleborns and 12 students of unknown blood status (8 of whom are most likely half- or purebloods.)

Who is Fay Dunbar? The name is neither in the books nor in the infamous class list, as far as I can see. And the only Leanne we know in canon is Katie Bell's friend, so probably a Gryff from the year above Harry.

Where are the mentions of the Slytherin girl with glasses or Gryffindor ginger girl? (At least in which chapter are they mentioned?)

I've no idea, I was just citing the information my friend gave me. And they aren't exactly important anyway, are they, since we don't know their blood status and they weren't included in the calculation...

Well, I think they are your friend's characters :)

LOL are not. It took me about five seconds to look them up in HP wikia. All were mentioned in movie, videogame or interviews.

Videogames? That's no canon. Neither are movies. They aren't in the Lexicon and its definition of canon is a tad broad (includes interviews).

Depends on one's definition of canon, I suppose. I usually try to stick solely with the books, but I can see why somebody doesn't. After all, strictly speaking, the infamous AD/GG isn't canon either. But I digress. If you're interested, see danny_sparks's comments for more relevant remarks and suggestions concerning the table.

Agreed, AD/GG is as canon as HP/DM. It's a fun fan interpretation.

Hannah Abbott is an interesting case. According to the class list, she was supposed to be Muggle-born. According to interview, she was pureblood in Rowling's head. When fans confronted her with the contradiction she made her half-blood in interview. So I don't take anything outside the books as canon, though some of it may indicate Rowling's thought process at some time point or other.

It's Actually a total of 34 students, if you include Zacharias Smith on this list.

I don't quite understand how your friend settled on this list.

It looks like she included characters that appear in the films and video games. Leanne and Fay Dunbar are both in the films. And there's also a girl with glasses in Slytherin in the films.

Hopkins, Jones, and Li are three of the characters that are on the class list, but not in canon. But she didn't include the other 5 shown on the class list.

She also left out Moon and Perks, who were named in the sorting ceremony.

Zabini and Nott are also missing from this list.

Oh, plus Tracey Davis is on the class list but not in canon.

Actually, I just realized that I had included Tracey Davis as being in canon, when she's not. That changes the results of my calculations slightly.

Zabini and Nott are also missing from this list.

Yeah, I noticed that too when I first saw the table, but forgot to ask her about it later. The percentage doesn't seem perfectly correct, either. It'd need some polishing and proof-reading, but I think the table is something one can work with when trying to determine the structure of wizarding society, because Harry's year is the most complete sample we have. I won't be the one to correct the mistakes, though, I'm not nearly enough of an expert. :p

Oh, one more thing, Hopkins, Jones, Davis and Li are also not in the films or games. They're only on the class list. So I'm not sure why she included four of the students who are on the class list but not in canon but not the other 5.

Haha, I don't think I'll be able to tell you why she did this or that. My guess is, she simply wrote down all the caracters she remembered, while apparently forgetting some and adding others without realizing they weren't mentioned in the books. As I said at the begging, she was researching for a fic, and probably didn't pay it that much attention. *shrugs*

Oh I see. This is the table I made when I was writing this post. If the blood status is in parenthesis, that means that's how it was indicated in JKR's notes, but not verified in canon.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0Asq6Ul6gdxBCdDlMRHoxU0NVaHA5SXQtQzRiRFI0Smc&output=html

Oh yes, the table is a thing of beauty! :) Good work! *memories*

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The Muggle-Born Population

JKR and numeracy

Re: JKR and numeracy

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