Head Boy an' Girl

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

Now, yer mum an’ dad were as good a witch an’ wizard as I ever knew. Head boy an’ girl at Hogwarts in their day!

--PS chapt. 4 Many of us have questioned how James (and, to a lesser extent, Lily) could have been head boy, given everything we've been told about his behavior as a teenager. But I'm wondering... are we absolutely certain that he actually was head boy?

It occurred to me this morning that the only mention of James and Lily as having been head boy and girl in the entire series is Hagrid's statement above, which he makes soon after delivering Harry his Hogwarts letter. We are told multiple times in multiple books that Tom, Bill, and Percy were all head boys, but it is never once stated again that James and Lily were head boy and girl, not even when the trio is looking through an old list of head boys in chapter 13 of CoS.

We know that Hagrid is not the most reliable source of information. Just a few hours later, he will tell Harry, "There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin," completely glossing over the fact that man who betrayed Harry's family was a Gryffindor. When he declares that James and Lily were head boy and girl, he is in the midst of countering Petunia's claims that they were strange and abnormal freaks who got themselves blown up. Could he be lying here... or, umm, exaggerating the truth a bit? (They weren't really head boy and girl, but they should've been, given how totally awesome they were).

After all, it is Hagrid's assigned duty to make sure that Harry agrees to go to Hogwarts and follows in his parents' footsteps... including, eventually, the whole getting themselves blown up part.

Comments

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Quite true, but then she is as erratic about the prices of things in the ww as she is with anything else that comes out in numbers, and I suspect she keeps forgetting just how much a galleon is supposed to be worth, or how many of them one can reasonably stack without falling over.

In any case, wizarding galleons certainly don't seem to be worth *anything* like their intrinsic value in gold ought to be, and either they are some alloy with really very little actual gold in it, or the goblins are making out like bandits.