death to capslock

Now that we have this shiny new Dreamwidth edition of DTCL, I thought we ought to inaugurate it with shiny new content! Well, it's new, anyway. Good comments might make it shiny ;-)

So, thought experiment time! One of Jodel’s Red Hen essays noted that if Rowling wanted half-baked WWII parallels, the series might work better if it were actually set between World Wars. The series already has a sense of “past-ness” (jolly good boarding school romps, Molly Weasley knitting and talking about “scarlet women”), and we hardly spend any time in the Muggle world anyway, so brief mentions of Muggle technology could easily be changed to accommodate a 1930s setting. But that's just a couple of surface details. What else would have to change, and would it work? ( Read more... )

A bit of silliness.

I stumbled across the blog post "The meaning of Expecto Patronum: From Hogwarts to Ancient Rome," which discusses the meaning of "patronus" in ancient Rome, and notes that a patron is more like a (legal) Mafia don bribing officials to protect you from the law than a sparkly representation of your soul protecting you against supernatural evil. Which is an interesting choice for the spell, "unless she really intended for Harry Potter to be calling on The Godfather," as the author says.

Of course, others have noted the similarities of the Roman patronage system to modern wizarding Britain. For example, pharnabazus's 2004 series Expecto Patronus: or how the wizarding world really works. It holds up pretty well despite being written before book six. Dumbledore as a powerful wizarding patron with many clients, which makes him a political heavyweight other patron-networks in the Ministry might reasonably conclude is a threat to their own influence, seems just as accurate after book seven.

Coincidentally, I've been re-watching series one of the original British House of Cards. If you want patronage networks and backroom backstabbing, here you go! Chief Whip Francis Urquhart is such a nice, grandfatherly fellow who appears above all that petty factionalism and can explain how destroying his rivals' reputations and the occasional straight-up murder is really for the greater good. ("This is a mercy killing.") And he knows absolutely everyone's dirty little secrets and how to manipulate them. How very...familiar. Not that I'm saying Dumbledore would ever spike someone's cocaine with rat poison, oh no. He would never--just ask him! And I'm sure it's a total coincidence how many powerful young witches and wizards who threaten his position or don't obey him completely end up dead or otherwise neutralized. Honest.

Still, it raises a probably-most-irrelevant question: is the position of Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot roughly equivalent to Speaker of the House of Commons or Lord Speaker, as I think most fans have assumed, or is it the equivalent of being Chief Whip? I mean, I'm sure Dumbledore knows as much as he can about Wizengamot members regardless, but it would be amusing if his actual job was to know everything and use it to pressure them into voting the "right" way for his faction.

Dumbledore: a version of Francis Urquhart who decided that controlling people behind the scenes was actually a much better job than being the top boss after all?

By Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Fair use, Link

"You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment."

Occasionally, something on Pottermore actually makes sense and supplements what's in the books rather than breaking all of time and space. Here's one that I think works: Ignatia Wildsmith (1227-1320) invented Floo Powder some time in the 13th century.

What other things happened around this time?

• The Golden Snidget was used in Quidditch for the first time in 1269 and quickly became an integral part of the game;
  
• The first Triwizard Tournament was played around 1294;
  
• The Black family allegedly started marrying only other magical people.

Let's say Ignatia invented Floo Powder around 1260 and started marketing it pretty quickly. Within a few years, Quidditch development goes from introducing and refining new elements over the course of a couple of centuries to the latest addition becoming so popular so quickly that the Snidget is an endangered species within decades. After about 35 years, they organize a major international sports tournament with wizards on the Continent and probably Scandinavia.

This is about what you'd expect if travel suddenly became easier and faster. Anyone--not just those who can Apparate, but sick people, children, magically weak people, groups of people too large to side-along all at once, etc.--can suddenly instantly transport themselves at least anywhere in Britain. (We don't know the limits of Floo travel, but the kids Floo from either London or Ottery-St.-Catchpole, I can't remember which, to Hogwarts at one point. So it's at least that far.) And suddenly, they can chat with each other in real time instead of having to wait for an owl to arrive with a letter. We know how much cars, airplanes, and telephones have changed our own societies; imagine if we had (smoky, awkward versions of) FaceTime and Star Trek transporters seven hundred years ago.

This also makes a plausible turning point toward wizards separating from Muggle society. They went to magic school before, and had a national (or possibly international, depending on how much of the British Isles the Wizards' Council covered) magical advisory council. But they still lived in Muggle communities for the most part, and were limited in how much they could visit and communicate with other magical people once they'd graduated. So they had lots of reasons to integrate into Muggle society, marry Muggles, etc., even if they did also have their far-flung alumni/hobby community with a few traditions of its own. But once it became easy even for (temporary or permanent) non-Apparaters to visit their children even if they'd married people hundreds of miles away, well, that opens up some possibilities. Now marrying your school sweetheart doesn't mean losing your family support system--Mum can still help watch the baby even if she lives in Devon and you live in Yorkshire. A family of wizarding apothecaries can make a marriage alliance with another such family instead of whoever is available locally. And if you didn't meet someone at school, now you have more opportunities to meet someone at one of those increasingly well-attended sports games instead.

I doubt that the Blacks really have no Muggle or Muggle-born marriage partners going that far back, but I can believe that they started strongly preferring magical spouses and seeing themselves as set apart from their Muggle neighbors around that time.

And after a couple of centuries of the magical community growing increasingly defined and separate, you get witch hunts...

It probably isn't perfect, but this bit of backstory works well enough that I wonder if it happened by accident, or if someone other than Rowling made up the date.

A while back, I read Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History by Owen Davies, and I've been mulling over how the author's contentions might fit into the Potterverse.

To (very, very) briefly summarize, Davies says that the cunning folk were distinct from other classes of magic workers (though there is always some overlap). For instance, he contrasts them with those who were solely fortune-tellers and with charmers, who depended entirely on using a magical artifact of some sort for their work. He defines the cunning folk as the more full-service magic workers: they could find lost objects, help you scry for your true love, perform love charms/potions, heal, and--this is one of the biggest services--protect you against malevolent witchcraft.

One of the really interesting points Davies makes is that whatever the church said, most of the common people were insistent that the cunning folk were not witches. He claims that according to the records he studied, cunning folk were rarely prosecuted for witchcraft, and their neighbors often defended them. He also hypothesizes that the final decline of the profession in the late 19th/early 20th centuries was due to people no longer believing in witchcraft as a cause of many problems (even if they did believe in other occult phenomena) and so no longer needing anti-witch services.

(Other points of interest: they charged for their work, but often had another profession; they were often of the artisan/trade classes rather than farmers and laborers; they were usually at least semi-literate and used this as a mark of distinction; cunning men outnumbered cunning women; though many were rural, some worked in cities too; they usually worked alone unless training their children in the business.)

Pre-Statute of Secrecy, of course, this is no problem. The father in "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" was probably the local cunning man, and he earned enough to allow his son to attend the full seven years at Hogwarts (whether or not they charged at the time, losing his son's labor for so long could be tough on the household). Said son then proved to be too high-and-mighty after his fancy education and needed to be taught a lesson about the value of work. Oh, and sure, do some good for the neighbors in the bargain.

But after? The idea of magic workers being paid for performing magic who are not witches, absolutely not, post-Statute of Secrecy, raises some interesting questions.( Read more... )

I'm re-reading PS/SS, specifically paying attention to things which are part of the overall 7-book plot but which Harry (and we, back in the day) didn't have enough information to flag as relevant. Absolutely fascinating, and I'm sure I'll be posting about some of that soon. This isn't that time, or not exactly. I was also paying closer attention to wizard/Muggle relations, and so I stopped at this little exchange:

"And you could ask your parents if they know who Flamel is," said Ron. "It'd be safe to ask them."

"Very safe, as they're both dentists," said Hermione.

I can't help but picture the AU where she does ask, and her father says, "Flamel? Wasn't there something about him in that history program on the telly last night?" And her mother replies, "Yes, something about alchemy, wasn't it? Was he really a wizard, Hermione dear? How exciting!" And then Hermione comes back after the break all bright-eyed, very pleased as she shows the boys her photocopies of Flamel's entry in her Muggle library's encyclopedia. "No wonder he wasn't in any of the books on modern magical discoveries, he was born so long ago that witches and wizards still lived openly among Muggles, can you imagine? Do you think alchemists can really make a Philosopher's Stone?" Which reminds Harry of Flamel and Dumbledore's alchemical partnership on the Chocolate Frog Card, and off they go.

The schedule of events would hardly be different from the actual book, but the kids would have discovered that Muggles aren't just helpless, pitiable lumps. Wouldn't that have been something.

On oneandthetruth's last DH chapter commentary, an interesting thread compared the Mirror of Erised to the Resurrection Stone in its seductive (and potentially deadly) powers of showing something/someone you want.

There's another object somewhat like that: the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. There are voices coming from behind the Veil - voices Luna believes to be those of the dead - and Harry feels tempted to walk through it.

Well, okay, Harry is being trained to have a death wish. But maybe that just means he's more susceptible.

The Department of Mysteries is a research facility. One which we know has produced tangible items now available for (restricted) public use, such as Time-Turners. (Whether they invented them or improved on an existing idea, we don't know.) I seriously doubt they've only produced one artifact ever. So what else might they have made?

They also have the locked room full of either love or Amortensia, depending whom you ask. The Mirror's ability to reflect your heart's desire is suggestively similar to the potion's ability to reflect the scent of what you desire.

A big glass mirror sounds like a relatively recent invention (unless you posit a long history of magical glassmaking, but wizards seem to adapt Muggle technology more often than the other way around). I propose that the Mirror of Erised is a product of the Department of Mysteries, combining attributes of Amortensia and the Veil which the DoM was able to partially replicate/adapt after long study.

Next question: are the Stone and the Veil related? Maybe Mr. Death, whoever he was, created both, and the DoM only got ahold of one of them. Whether this makes the Veil a fourth Hallow, left out of Beedle's version for numerical reasons, is not clear. Possibly it's a super-Hallow, and you can be Master of Death^TM with it alone? Or it's a death-related magical... thing... which shares some properties with the Hallows, but it isn't the same class of artifact and mastery isn't an issue in its case.

Or maybe the Veil is more ancient and the Stone is a portable adaptation created centuries ago by the DoM's first head researcher, Johannus Mors, along with a couple of other powerful items which also escaped the premises and have not been replicated. (And Death took the second lab assistant for his own...)

Thoughts? Fanfic links?