Pottermore stuff

[oryx_leucoryx]

I looked up the spoilers site, and it looks like they took down all the direct quotes from Pottermore after having being warned about copyright infringement. I suggest we take care. Summarizing or retelling new content should be OK, but no direct quotes.

Also, looks like GOF stuff is up. Can anyone tell us if there are any tidbits?

Comments

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

But the very existence of a true half-blood means that some witch or wizard has been sufficiently degraded to mate with a muggle.

That makes perfect sense in a society that places such a divide/distinction between wizard and muggle. Oh, the muggle born would still be seen as socially inferior to a pureblood, but still 'one of us', and not a muggle animal, or mated with one. Interesting!

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Now I'm queasity contemplating another distinction--akk three cases I can think of, of literatl half-bloods, it was a witch who mated with/married a Muggle (Merope/Tom=>Tiom, Eileen/Tobias=>Severus, ?/?=>Seamus Finnegan).

Now I'm crossing this with Arsinoes de Blassenville's "Department of Unintended Consequences."

If a wizard mates with a Muggle woman, but doesn't (withing the WW) marry her/claime her offspring, the resulting child is classed as a Muggleborn. (Dean Thomas).

So maybe casual liasons between wizards and Muggles are generally winked at, so long as the wizard doesn't go so far as to marry his inferior...?

I'm American; I;m thinking about how many lighter-skinned children were born to slave mothers....

No prob, usually, just so long as they weren't acknowledged by their fathers. And so long as their white mistresses didn't go on to bear dark-skinned children....

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

If a wizard mates with a Muggle woman, but doesn't (withing the WW) marry her/claime her offspring, the resulting child is classed as a Muggleborn. (Dean Thomas).

I'm not sure you have enough cases to establish that. Dean's father ran off, didn't claim Dean, sure, but he didn't return to the wizarding world either. No-one knew the identity of Dean's father:

“Muggle-born, eh?” asked the first man.

“Not sure ,” said Dean. “My dad left my mum when I was a kid. I’ve got no
proof he was a wizard, though.”

Are there other cases of wizards siring children with muggles but not claiming them?

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

This is ages later to answer this, however, this is something JKR spoke of on her original webpage (not Pottermore).

Dean's father never actually left them. He was killed by Voldy when he refused to join him. They just never knew it. Presumably, he had hidden his marriage so well from the wizarding world that no one knew to inform them.

Fortunately, that also meant the connection was well enough hidden that Voldy didn't know about their existence to go after them.

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's why we have the infamous one-drop rule--so white masters could legitimately enslave their mixed-race children and grandchildren. It's been many years since I've read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I remember a bit where a highly intelligent "octoroon" complained about how it frustrated his his brave, noble, Gryffindorish seven-eighths Anglo-Saxon blood to be treated like a common black. (Again, quoting a 19th century novel does NOT mean I approve.) One might imagine Tom Riddle would have claimed the same, if he had ever actually experienced any oppression for being a half-blood or a supposed muggleborn. We have no evidence, of course, that Tommy ever had that problem.