Rowling's Pottermore Notes

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

I'm not a member of Pottermore, so I'm glad that some bloggers have been collecting Rowling's notes from the site. The notes don't have that many surprises, but a few things did jump out at me.


According to one of the Slytherin Prefects, Merlin was a Slytherin. I'm hoping that we're supposed to take this tidbit with a grain of salt since I'm pretty sure that Merlin lived several centuries before Hogwarts was founded, even in the Potterverse.

In a 2007 web chat, Rowling said that Quirrell was previously the Muggle Studies professor, probably because fans had been asking how Percy had had him as a teacher before if the DADA professor changed every year. But she says nothing about him teaching Muggle Studies in his backstory on Pottermore. I suspect the truth may be that she didn't figure out the details of the DADA curse until after PS was published.

I think some of the most interesting new information comes from McGonagall's Backstory. Apparently, like Severus, Minerva had a muggle father. Her mother kept her wand locked away and didn't reveal to her husband that she was a witch until after Minerva was born. Also, I'm guessing that Rowling must have said something in the past about Minerva being around 70 years old, for most fans seemed to have believed that Minerva's years at Hogwarts had overlapped with Tom Riddle's. However, it now appears from her backstory on Pottermore that Minerva didn't start at Hogwarts until 1947, two years after Tom finished, for she started teaching at the school two years after she graduated, and we know from OotP that she started teaching in December of 1956.


In a note on the history of the Sorting Hat, Rowling writes:

The Sorting Hat is notorious for refusing to admit it has made a mistake in its sorting of a student. On those occasions when Slytherins behave altruistically or selflessly, when Ravenclaws flunk all their exams, when Hufflepuffs prove lazy yet academically gifted and when Gryffindors exhibit cowardice, the Hat steadfastly backs its original decision. On balance, however, the Hat has made remarkably few errors of judgement over the many centuries it has been at work.

So, in other words, Slytherins really are all evil? I think it's rather disturbing that this appears on an official fansite where all members are sorted by a personality quiz into one of the four houses, including Slytherin.

Comments

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Slytherin!Merlin: Oh dear, maths.

Maybe "Slytherin" was once a generic term for Parselmouths which was later confused for Salazar's surname due to his fame and the epithet's strong association with him.

I once suggested Slytherin might originally have been the highest-status house because it carried on the spiritual legacy of the Druids, who were called "adders." Pre-Christian Britons considered snakes symbols of wisdom and fertility. It wasn't until Christianity took over, with its inherited prejudices against snakes, that snakes came to be seen as negative.

[sunnyskywalker]

Oh, I like that! Slytherin House preserving Druidic knowledge, which apparently involved at least some magic (not that we have super-reliable sources...). And you would have to be ambitious to take on a 20 year course of study, I would think. This presumes that they kept Druidic traditions alive in some form for centuries after the island was supposedly converted, but especially in the Potterverse where you can have ghosts to advise you about things that happened ages ago, this doesn't seem too hard to manage.

"Salazar" was a Basque surname. The Arabs called them "majus," wizards, and they apparently had some sort of snakey deity called Sugaar and a sea serpent deity called Herensuge. So maybe our Salazar Slytherin's father was a Basque priest/wizard who moved to Britain and married into a family with equivalent status to his, one of those Slytherins/Druids.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

That would make a great fanfic!

Re Sugaar, this is from Wiki: In one myth Sugaar seduces a Scottish princess in the village of Mundaka to father the mythical first Lord of Biscay, Jaun Zuria. This legend is believed to be a fabrication made to legitimate the Lordship of Biscay as a separate state from Navarre, because there is no historical account of such a lord.

So there's a Scottish connection there already. Interestingly enough, Sugaar is a fire deity who makes thunderstorms with his mate, Mari. Since they combine fire and water, they're sort of a Gryffindor/Slytherin hybrid.

[sunnyskywalker]

Fire/Water - very nice!

Interestingly, one version of the Jaun Zuria story comes from "15th century warlord Lope García de Salázar." Distant cousins?