Deathly Hallows, Chapter 26: Gringotts

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

HRH and Griphook are finalizing their plans to attack Gringotts. Hermione will Polyjuice herself as Bella. Hermione’s wand was lost at the Malfoys’, and she doesn’t like Bella’s wand that she’s carrying as part of her disguise. She says it doesn’t work right and feels like a piece of Bella. Harry restrains himself from pointing out she sounds like him with his borrowed wand, figuring he’d better not pick a fight with her right now. Gee, ya think?

It’s really not the same situation, though. I can see where a wand that had killed and tortured multiple people would make a person uncomfortable about using it. Even if there were nothing wrong with the wand itself, the knowledge of such a history could produce profound psychological discomfort in the user. Harry would probably not want to use the knife that killed Dobby, either; that’s not the fault of the knife, but of his own discomfort.

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11 Magical Schools

[oryx_leucoryx]

The recent Pottermore blurb about Durmstrang says, "Durmstrang once had the darkest reputation of all eleven wizarding schools, though this was never entirely merited." IOW there are 11 wizarding schools worldwide. I find this number surprisingly small, considering that the magical population served by Hogwarts comes from a population of roughly 64 million (UK) plus 4.7 million (Ireland) totaling some 69 million, out of a global population of about 7 billion, so just under 1%. I was expecting there to be several dozens of schools, not fewer than one dozen. (Yes, we only knew about 2 other schools in Europe, but surely those were merely the oldest ones, and additional schools could have been founded over the centuries?)

So how do we reconcile these?

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