Have you all seen this post by Shyfoxling?

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

I'm Dreamwidth friends with her so I noticed she was exploring Pottermore.

What she found was this.

I left a comment at the bottom of the page with my initial thoughts, but now I'm torn between that and WHYYY DID ROWLING THINK THIS NEEDED TO BE EXPANDED UPON?!

Still more credence for the theory that Rowling has the mental maturity of a twelve-year-old?

Comments

[robina1984.livejournal.com]

Well, before plumbing, they had to do something, right? And honestly, it doesn't sound that bad, looking at the time period. The real question is: if they could just make stuff disappear, why switch to plumbing? Possibly the stench stuck around even after the offending substance vanished?

[darth-eldritch.livejournal.com]

Maybe they don't even lift their robes.

OMG, too funny. I was thinking the same.

[melaniedavidson.livejournal.com]

...I don't think I'd trust untrained* students to be ABLE to do that without accidentally making it huge or exploding it or something.

*Hur, hur.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

This is unbelievable! It isn't even historically correct.

LONG before actual 'plumbing' arrived, castles had separate rooms for the necessary relieving of one's self. Usually referred to as the 'garde-robe' or sometimes as a 'privy'.

They were often no more than a seat of stone (or fancy ones might have wood on top of the stone of the castle wall) with a hole that overhangs into open air - jutting out from the castle wall, sometimes over a moat. Now - it should be admitted that there might be more than one seat in a room, so you might be sitting with other people (just as you do in the new-fangled plumbing-equipped bathrooms of today's Hogwarts - just without dividing partitions. But that is little different from the wall of urinals in a men's room.

Note that by the time of Henry VIII, the 'necessary' at Hampton Court even had brick-lined drains which took the 'waste to the River Thames - so Hogwarts wouldn't have needed to wait until the 18th century to get 'plumbing' - the facilities just wouldn't have 'flushed'. But we have a canon spell for making water pour out of one's wand, so that would have been enough. Altho' I'm sure the merfolk would have complained about anything emptying into the Lake.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Vanishing spells are taught in 5th year. What did the younger students do? Did they leave messes for the house-elves to clean up?

[oryx_leucoryx]

this was a rare instance of wizards copying Muggles

A rare case? What about the train? Newspapers? Printing presses? A significant part of wizarding technology is derived from the Muggle version, with some silly magic stuff on top.

BTW is her timing of 18th century correct? I just read terry Pratchett's Dodger, which is set in the early years of Queen Victoria's realm and richer folk flushing their waste into the sewers (designed by the Romans as storm drains) is described as something relatively new.

[ladyzenobia.livejournal.com]

...Slytherin was forced out of the school by the other three founders

Ah, so he didn't leave because the other founders were letting muggleborns in. He was actually forced out. I wonder why? Could be that he was getting too obsessed with the dark arts, but the sorting hat does say that all four founders were locked in a bitter power struggle and the hat should know, having been there. So did they gang up on Slytherin, or what?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Oh, another thing: So at least in the 18th century there were Gaunts at Hogwarts. I wonder if the last 2 generations of them still went there or if they preferred homeschooling. Was Dumbles teaching when Merope attended Hogwarts (if she did) in the 1920s, or was he still researching alchemy?

[night-axe.livejournal.com]

No surprise that wizards haven't figured out what medieval Muggles knew about the uses of human urine and feces in agriculture and (the former) in the tanning and textile industries. Tons of valuable fertilizer vanished. What a waste. *rimshot*

What I want to know is where stuff goes after you vanish it. Are its atoms dispersed in the earth's atmosphere? In that case I'ld guess we're breathing more poo than oxygen by now. Or does it go into another dimension? Is there a parallel universe full of wizarding crap? These people just don't care, do they.
/Dept. of Overthinking

[kahran042]

I'd say that it either suggests that she has the mental maturity of a twelve-year-old, assumes her audience does, or a little of both.

[sunnyskywalker]

Wait, wait. Didn't Dumbledore say in GoF that he'd found the RoR as a room full of chamberpots? Are we really supposed to believe that his default image of "place to go to the bathroom" is a chamberpot because his mother used one as a girl in the Muggle world (assuming she came from somewhere which hadn't gotten plumbing yet - probably a safe assumption)? Did she introduce them to the Dumbledore home for the kiddies? Or, if it's Hogwarts itself interpreting "place to go to the bathroom" as "room full of chamberpots," then why does the castle think of chamberpots if they were never wizarding standard?

Because it just plain makes more sense if chamberpots were still in common use in the wizarding world in Dumbledore's youth. Some places might have fancy plumbing, but most people still used chamberpots. Possibly wizarding chamberpots had charms on them which automatically vanished human waste (and perhaps only human waste).

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Make that a four-year-old. They are the ones obsessed with poopy jokes.

Honestly, how crass. The other things that stood out - no surprise! - was the denigration of Salazar Slytherin and the putting down of Muggles. Honestly, Wizards copy Muggles all the time!