A follow- up question to the discussion on the Malfoys:

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

From 2007 onwards, we have, via DH (that disastrous book) and interviews, discovered the following things:

1. The Death Eaters were right. According to Rowling, there are no "Muggleborns". Every Witch or Wizard born to normal parents is a throwback to a magical ancestor. Yes, she really said that!

2. All Wizards seem to feel themselves superior to normal people. Even good-hearted types like Arthur Weasely show themselves extremely prejudiced toward non-magical human beings, as well as extremely ignorant. But-

3. I am no expert on magical history - like Harry, I missed any hints of a coherent backstory that might have been in the books. But I do get the impression that, in addition to being prejudiced, magical people might fear ordinary human beings. Perhaps the persecutions shown as laughable in Harry's textbook were actually quite serious?

4. Young Tom Riddle was fearful of being locked up in an asylum.

5. Young Gellert Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore aspired to rule over Muggles and Muggleborns.

6. Young Regulus believed Voldemort's agenda was to overthrow the stature of secrecy and have wizards take their rightful place as the lords of creation.

7. And then there's the way Dumbledore chose to raise Harry.

Where I'm going with all this? It's seemed to me for awhile now that the Death Eaters might have a point. What if every Dark Lord in the Wizarding World was either a Muggleborn or a Muggle-raised half-blood? What if Dumbledore was actually trying to create a new Dark Lord?

Think about it. Given what we see of Tommy's, Sev's, and Harry's experiences, magical children have a very hard time in the normal world. In self defense, they may well come up with grandiose theories about their specialness. And, like all magical children, they will lash out with magic at times of high stress. The future Dark Lords among them will control magic early, cling hard to their specialness, and learn contempt, as well as fear, for the normal people who don't and cant' understand them and cant' do magic, either. By the time such a child is 11, he may well be quite powerful magically and morally and emotionally quite messed up.

Thoughts?

Comments

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

My heart broke for Riddle when I read about the asylum. Imagine being a little kid and being able to do stuff that should not be possible. You want to tell people, but they will not believe you or they'll say you're crazy and lock you up, and you feel so abnormal. How can you bond and get close to anyone around you?

Imagine if a wizard family would have adopted Tom and given him a life where his gifts were nurtured, normal and cherished?

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Granted that little Tommy was a born psychopath - and he probably was - this does not have to mean that he was a born criminal. Had he been given a decent upbringing, he could have been just a somewhat unpleasant, but on-the-surface normal, wizard.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I don't have the background to comment on psychopaths, but I do believe a lot of what Tommy endured was also because he had no effective limits. My then two year sweet tempered niece once bit me because she was frustrated and cranky and had no way to express it. And then I, being an adult was able to put her in time out, and help her learn that biting won't work.

But in this case, the biting worked. The bad things happened and no consequences happened. So he kept doing it.

That's frighteningly bad for development.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Yes! This is exactly what I'm getting at, and it's oddly difficult to explain it to people. Children may be naturally good - I believe they are - but they do not naturally recognize limits. They have to be taught. A wizarding child in Tommy's situation could not be taught. The child had all the power, and the adults none. The result would naturally be a disturbed child.

Thank you.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. Kids are happiest with fair limits.

Tommy has no adult authority figures who can give him limits.
Tommy has no one who he can trust with his terrible secret, and is aware that he will likely be ridiculed, or severely punished if he does tell the truth.
Tommy has enormous frustrations because of the above and can take them out on people around him and do terrible things.

Maybe at first, he was scared, but being so isolated and alone, he just warped into a monster.

This makes me wonder how Harry turned out so uber-normal, given that he had a worse situation than Tommy (who wasn't actively abused) and yet, lashed out less.

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Basically, wizards and witches raised solely by muggles are likely to be less powerful versions of Anthony from It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby. If a significant number of magical psychopaths were being produced due to an inability to discipline them as children, it might have contributed to magic users becoming so hated and feared in general that witch hunts gained wide-spread support (beyond the more obvious religious and political considerations). What other defense did muggles have at that time? Likewise, it could explain why the witch hysteria died down after Seclusion was implemented. The magical community at large finally had a strong incentive to crack down on the worst predators, even if it was only to protect the Statute of Secrecy.

As for Harry... canon at least implies (or can be construed to) that the Horcrux affects his mental state, even disregarding Rowling's interviews. If we assume this is true, particularly for his emotional state, then the fact that Horcrux was dormant for most of childhood might have led to a general dulling of Harry's emotional responses. Thus, the root cause of his unnaturally detached affect can also be attributed to the Horcrux fragment, just like every other one of his flaws in-series /sarcasm.

[sunnyskywalker]

I think I've mentioned this before, but there's a chapter in Lyndal Roper's book Witch Craze about the "godless children" of Augsburg - that is, by the 1740s, after Seclusion would have removed trained adult witches and wizards from Muggle society, the focus there had shifted from old female witches to child witches. Some of them were accused by their parents after being utterly uncontrollable and (ostensibly) trying to kill their parents, etc. The authorities seem to have concluded that most of them were just disturbed children (after noticing that the kids were just sitting in a room when they claimed to be flying to Sabbaths), and eventually set many home. Possibly in the Potterverse the kids talked about Sabbaths because that's what they understood witches were supposed to do, and that must be what they were, so shouldn't they be going?

There were children accused before this point, too, but the shift in focus is highly suggestive in a Potterverse context. Now Muggleborn magical children had no chance of a magical relative in town teaching them what they were and how to stay in control. Instead of a lot of old ladies and some men and children occasionally getting out of control because they could (or because their Muggle neighbors thought they had when something went wrong), the children shouldered more of the blame. Because they were the only ones left to catch.

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

According to Rowling, there are no "Muggleborns". Every Witch or Wizard born to normal parents is a throwback to a magical ancestor.

Remember, you can't escape your place in the natural order of things!

3. I am no expert on magical history - like Harry, I missed any hints of a coherent backstory that might have been in the books. But I do get the impression that, in addition to being prejudiced, magical people might fear ordinary human beings. Perhaps the persecutions shown as laughable in Harry's textbook were actually quite serious?

There's definitely something Bathilda Bagshot's not telling us here. Remember in Fantastic Beasts how the wizarding family got an Order of Merlin First Class not for driving off the dragon attacking the Muggle beach, but for wiping the witnesses' memories of the event? Remember how the textbook Harry's reading at the start of PoA emphasises how silly the Muggles were that they couldn't reliably identify witches and wizards and so burned hundreds of their own kind (oh what larks!)? There's fear at the very heart of the Ministry, and the best way Dumbledore can think of alleviating this fear is by teaching the next generation not that we're weak (as Voldemort claims), but that we're stupid. Because that won't encourage Muggle-baiting tendencies in the Freds and Georges of the world, no of course not.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

There had to be a fear of witch trials - if not then it makes no sense to enact the Seclusion. I cannot believe the Wizarding World suddenly decided to go into hiding because the muggles suddenly demanded too much magic be done for them. Not after almost 300 years of witch trials.

What is really surprising to me is that JKR places the Secrecy Act so late in history.

While witch hunts in England go back to the late 10th Century - just about the time Hogwarts was founded - they weren't that frequent until later, beginning in the 14th Century and increasing in the 15th & 16th centuries, dying down for awhile only to pop back up in the 17th century - especially after King James. King James (as James VI of Scotland) wrote 'Daemonologie' in 1597 and was crowned James I of England in 1603. He played a very active role in the witch hunts of the 1600s - and in the rewrite of the Bible to include wording against witches. His reign ended in 1625. And yet the Wizarding World apparently doesn't separate from the muggle one until 1692? They put up with it for over 200 years and THEN decide to seclude themselves? Especially when one considers that the last executions for witchcraft (in England) were in 1682.

Personally, I think JKR just didn't do her homework on this one.

[oryx_leucoryx]

I thought that was 1688? Very close though.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

I like this reasoning! So, instead of the Wizarding World being late to seclude, it turns around to a lessening (in certain parts of the British Isles) of accusals simply because 'magic' has become hidden? Makes sense to me (and it means JKR did her research after all)!

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

----The Death Eaters were right. According to Rowling, there are no "Muggleborns". Every Witch or Wizard born to normal parents is a throwback to a magical ancestor. Yes, she really said that!

I believe the truth may be that everyone, both magical and non-magical, has a magical ancestor, in much the same way that probably anyone with European ancestry is descended from British royalty. (See www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-royal-we/302497/ )

Here's how it might work. Let's say that magical ability is dependent upon two genes, each with two alleles.

Gene 1 Alleles: U,u; where U is dominant for magical ability
Gene 2 Alleles: W,w; where W is dominant for magical ability

There are 16 possible combinations from these two genes. Both U and W are required for magical ability, so a wizard or witch can have the genotypes UUWW, UUWw, UuWW, or UuWw. And a squib or muggle can have the genotypes UUww, Uuww, uuWW, uuWw, and uuww.

Now, suppose that the child of two magical parents has the genotype Uuww, making her non-magical. If she marries a muggle/squib with the genotype uuww, then her children have a 50% chance of being uuww. In other words, they can have two magical ancestors yet still have completely non-magical DNA.


--- It's seemed to me for awhile now that the Death Eaters might have a point. What if every Dark Lord in the Wizarding World was either a Muggleborn or a Muggle-raised half-blood?

swythyv had some similar thoughts about this in Part II of her essay The Rule of Men (http://hp-essays.livejournal.com/209001.html), though she was focused on nature rather than nurture in her theory. She suggested that most Dark Lords are half-bloods because, due to genetics, half-bloods tend to be the most magically powerful.

I'm not sure if we have enough of a sample to determine whether Dark Lords tend to grow up in muggle environments. Voldemort was muggle-raised, but Grindelwald probably had at least one magical parent or guardian since his aunt was a witch. And Dumbledore, who almost became a Dark Lord, had two magical parents. On the other hand, Dean Thomas grew up in a mugge household, and he apparently turned out relatively sane.

[oryx_leucoryx]

but Grindelwald probably had at least one magical parent or guardian since his aunt was a witch

And attended Durmstrang, notorious for not taking in Muggle-borns.