Hogwarts & Muggles: On the enrollment of Muggle-born students.

Way back in a very early interview, Rowling stated that every year Professor McGonagall consulted the Hogwarts enrollment list and sent letters to everyone who was turning 11 that year. At that point we did not know whether Ms Rowling was referring to the academic year or the calendar year.

Since an update to Rowling’s original website of December 10, 2004, the question is tacitly resolved. Ms Rowling meant the academic year. Which is to say; September 2 to the following September 1.

Since it is unlikely that Hogwarts would have any Muggle-born students at all, let alone as much as 25% of its enrollment, if all letters were delivered by owl, I — and rather a lot of other fans — thought that we must assume some simplification had been applied to this explanation. Ms Rowling later confirmed that this was indeed the case. Muggle-born candidates’ letters are hand-delivered by a special messenger.

Apparently as recently as the late 1930s this task was performed by the Hogwarts staff. As the British population, and presumably, the Hogwarts enrollment have increased it is uncertain whether this is still the case. Rowling’s adjusted population estimate, scaling the total wizarding population of Great Britain back to around 3,000, suggests that it probably could be. It is amusing to wonder whether Minerva’s occasional visits at #12, looking rather odd in Muggle dress, during the early chapters of OotP were drop-ins made during her summer delivery schedule of Hogwarts letters to prospective Muggle-born students. But we will probably never be told for certain, one way or the other.

Given the course of scientific rationalism that Muggle understanding has been encouraged to adopt over the past 300 years, the current-day discovery among the Muggles of Great Britain of magical ability in one of their children is far less likely to “freak them out”, than might have been the case a couple of hundred years ago. Particularly if the person to contact them is careful about selecting euphemisms which march in step with current buzzwords. In the course of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince we were shown that — at least back in the late 1930s — rather more devious methods were also employed to assure the cooperation of these children’s guardians. Hogwarts and the wizarding world definitely wants these children.

Of course our own view of the matter was of how Albus Dumbledore was demonstrated to operate. Albus has probably always been a law unto himself.

In Tom Riddle’s day, and almost certainly even now, in addition to the Hogwarts Quill which records magical births onto the enrollment list, the Hogwarts Library also included a collection of books of wizarding families, i.e., genealogies, from which Tom was able eventually to trace his grandfather Marvolo Gaunt. It is probable that at that time, and perhaps to the present day such reference books are also used to determine which of the children recorded on the enrollment list are likely to be Muggle-born, whose families will need to be contacted in person.

Such reference books are probably also used to determine if or to what degree a pair of youngsters who might have formed an attachment may be related to one another. Although the gene pool of the British wizarding world is probably more varied today than it has ever been, among a significant minority of even the present day students this is still likely to be a very real consideration.

I’ve always been of the opinion that Harry’s was probably rather a special case. Even though he was raised in the Muggle world, by Muggle relatives, those relatives were assumed to be “informed” Muggles and Harry himself is not Muggle-born. Consequently, when it was time for his Hogwarts letter to be sent the usual wizarding procedure was followed. Which seems to have been a mistake all round.

In Harry’s case, the failure to receive a return owl set whoever was in charge of the matter (and it really does not sound at all as if this was Professor McGonagall, it’s not at all in her style) into silly-ass bureaucrat mode; escalating a repetition of an action that is clearly not getting a response to the point of absurdity. It is possible that no human agency was actually involved once the original message was sent. It could have been generated by a complex charm which repeats until a response is received. I rather expect that it was Mrs Figg on the other end of the communication line, who alerted Dumbledore from Little Whinging that the Dursleys were being inundated with owls and that Vernon Dursley had taken his family, and Harry off on holiday to get away from them. Prompting Dumbledore to send Hagrid to settle the matter in person.

• • • •

In the case of authentic Muggle-borns, such as Hermione Granger, there would have to be a different procedure. One that would cover all of the ramifications in more depth, since their families can be presumed to know nothing of what sending a child to Hogwarts entails. We were told (in another early Rowling interview) that about 25% of the student body is Muggle-born, so, taking Rowling’s statement that she invented an incoming class of 40 in Harry’s year, this would entail about 10 new students every year.

In the 1930s, as we have seen, the staff of Hogwarts itself took this duty on themselves during the long summer break. If we really are only talking about a dozen or so students, this may still be the case.

An alternate possibility, however, is that since Hogwarts is administered — at least to some degree — and its test scores overseen by the MoM; in these days there may now be a small (i.e., 1 person) Division of the Educational Dept. or a Unit of the Muggle Liaisons office (perhaps a little larger, 2-3 people,) which now research the names recorded by the Hogwarts quill to identify, flag and contact the families of the actual Muggle-born candidates.

Such a Ministry Division, if such a Division exists, would need to be in correspondence with the Deputy Headmaster/Headmistress, at some point earlier in the year, so there would be no duplication of effort. The Deputy Head sends out the standard Hogwarts letters to the wizarding families, the annual supplies list to families of currently enrolled students, and the families of “informed” Muggles and halfbloods. As has always traditionally been the case.

Conversely, Professor Marchbanks and her colleagues in the Examinations Department at the Ministry (which definitely exists in canon) may be in charge of sending out all of the owls to all of the current Hogwarts students as well as their test results, leaving only the prospective first-years’ letters inviting them to attend Hogwarts the responsibility of the Deputy Headmaster or Headmistress.

The letters to new Muggle-born candidates are most likely to be sent out either the summer before the child is old enough to start school or at a point shortly before the prospective student’s 11th birthday. At this point we do not know for certain which method is currently in use. It is not likely that Rowling will stop to clarify this matter now that she has finished the series.

In the case of children with summer birthdays, this initial letter is combined with the annual school supplies list, as it was in Harry’s case, and that of Ginny Weasley. In the case of a child with a winter birthday, it is possible that the initial Hogwarts letter is sent out at or about the time of the child’s last birthday prior to their first Hogwarts term (their 11th) and the supplies list is sent out separately the following summer, along with those of the other students who are already enrolled. In the case of wizarding-born candidates this would be a fairly routine matter.

It is strongly suggested that all prospective Muggle-born (or Muggle-raised) students’ letters are delivered in the summer. This was certainly the case in the late 1930s. Or, at any rate, we were shown that Tom Riddle, who we know to have been born on December 31, received his Hogwarts letter, along with his first year books and supplies list, upon a day for which there was no mention of snow, rain, cold, or Christmas decorations, when Albus Dumbledore appeared at his orphanage, in person, which would not very well have taken place at a time that classes were in session. He might perhaps have done so during Christmas (or Easter) break, but he would have hardly included the supplies list and the funds to purchase those supplies some 9 months before Tom would have been able to start school.

In the case of Muggle-born students today, the child’s family may be contacted in person prior to the child’s 11th birthday and the first visit into the wizarding world is arranged soon afterward, the student’s first set of standard texts (which, except for that year’s DADA text, has probably been formalized for decades), and the student is encouraged to take the books home and familiarize themselves with the material in advance. This may have been the case with Miss Granger, whose claim to have memorized all of their course books is more easily believed if she had been given most of the previous year to do it. Since most such children’s birthdays would be taking place during the school year, such interviews, if conducted by school staff, would be conducted on weekends.

Whoever the responsibility falls upon, the messenger’s duty is to hand-deliver the Hogwarts letter and give the family a soothing and encouraging talk about their child’s “rare gifts”, informing them that a place for him has been reserved at an exclusive boarding school in Scotland where he may learn valuable training for the proper use and control of this talent. In most cases the family is flattered and intrigued, if bemused. As Rowling pointed out, the child’s family will have usually been aware of at least something strange happening related to this child over the past 10 years.

Under normal circumstances, upon a family’s agreement to permit their child to attend Hogwarts, the representative makes another appointment with the family to escort the child and his or her parents to Diagon Alley in order to lead them through the procedure of changing currency at Gringotts, and to buy the child a wand and either some background materials concerning the wizarding world, and/or their first set of school supplies. This escort also teaches the child how to get into the wizarding world himself for future trips.

Typically, the only people who still freak out are the bonafide religious (or some other variety of mixed) nuts, and even some of those may sometimes be persuaded with a little additional care and finesse in handling. As we saw in the case of Tom Riddle, some of these measures may approach extreme levels of manipulation.

In the rare cases where the family adamantly refuses to permit their child to attend Hogwarts, the Ministry representative casts an Obliviate; and a notice is forwarded to the Department of Accidental Magic Reversal to monitor the site. It is possible that upon attaining his majority, the child of such a family will be approached again, individually, and informed of the KwickSpell correspondence courses. Given the effort that Dumbledore expended on ensuring that Tom Riddle should be permitted to attend Hogwarts, it is unlikely that many magical children are denied their magical training. Except perhaps in cases of physical infirmity or other medical issues.

Rowling does state, however, that not all magical children in Great Britain do attend Hogwarts. Which may mean only that they are sent to Beaubatons or Durmstrang instead. Or even those uncommon magical children who are educated at home. It is probable that in this case, the child still sits the standardized tests for qualification as witches or wizards. Probably by appointment at the Ministry.

Regarding Hogwarts Term Dates and Cut-off Ages:

It is now clear that the current 3-term system, its dates and the cut-off ages for each year’s students have been set to coincide with the term dates and cut-off ages of the most prominent mundane British boarding schools.

Over the “3-year summer” between Harry’s years 4 & 5, various Brits on my discussion lists were diligent in explaining that under the regulations of the English educational system, all children must have reached the proper school-starting age (6 years, I believe) by September 1 in order to commence school in a given year. If the child’s birthday falls on Sept 2, they must wait to start in the following year. It is almost unheard of for a child’s family to manage to get the educational authorities to make an exception. The child’s entry into secondary school follows upon the same principle.

Prior to December 2004, almost all of Ms Rowling’s statements seemed to have been geared to the reading that Hermione was the youngest of the trio. Indeed, in her World Book Day interview of March, 2004, she went so far as to state that Hermione had started school early because of her intelligence (and, evidently, the fact that she had parents willing to jump through the proper hoops to make it possible).

If such had indeed been the case, it would have added another layer of complexity to the situation in that the Ministry representatives would need to notify the parents of any Muggle-born witch or wizard who started early during the year before they would have normally been eligible to enroll. The ww has no advance warning if a child has started Muggle school early.

In view of the above information: as of March 2004, we concluded that we had been unambiguously informed by Ms Rowling that Hermione is the youngest of the Trio. I personally was inclined to believe that this may have been an unfortunate decision on Ms Rowling’s part. But she had apparently made it plain that she meant it like that, so we were forced to accept it.

Since that point Ms Rowling evidently rethought that statement, for in her website update of December 10, 2004 in the FAQ entry asking whether Hermione was nearly 11 or nearly 12 when she started Hogwarts Ms Rowling even more unambiguously stated that she was nearly 12, since you have to be at least 11 to attend Hogwarts. Which, if taken in conjunction with the March statement that she “started early” only suggests that Hermione might have had an extra year of Muggle secondary school before starting Hogwarts. Ergo: Hermione is not the youngest of the trio. She is the oldest. All timelines claiming the contrary had now been rendered simply, wrong.

Unless, that is, JKR decides to flip-flop on the issue again. (Given that she has now shown Hermione passing her Apparition test in the middle of 6th year, I suspect we can safely accept that she is the eldest of the three.)

This statement also complies with what she had already shown us in the text. Both Cedric Diggory and Angelina Johnson were 17-year-old 6th year students by the time of the commencement of the TriWizard Tournament at the end of October, and Angelina, at least had her birthday just the previous week.

Otherwise, any discontinuity with the academic year and birthday “cut-off” dates — which would occur with at least some regularity — would be bound to have led to at least occasional conflicts with the Muggle educational system, and if this is the case, it would be astonishing if nothing was done to remedy it and bring the Hogwarts academic year into compliance with what has been standard practice for at least a quarter of its students.

In the theoretical, and very rare case of wizarding children (halfbloods) attending Muggle primary schools, this might well be facilitated by a Ministry requirement that any family which enrolls its children into the Muggle school system should file this information with the Ministry, which would ensure that the proper measures should be taken to coordinate the dates of Hogwarts attendance, as well as to alert the Department of Accidental Magic Reversal that they should have some form of monitoring set up at the school in order to run damage control in case of breakthroughs. For a few months this indeed seemed to be a possibility. Rowling did state that some magical children did attend Muggle primary schools.

As has so often turned out to be the case, Ms Rowling did not stand by this statement either. Ms Rowling has since indicated that virtually all wizarding children who end up attending Muggle school are, in fact, Muggle-born.

We have also been given some indications either in interviews, or on the original official website that a wizarding-born child in a Muggle primary school may not be not merely rare but actually prohibited. Given the determination of the Ministry to keep it’s constituency separate from Muggle society, despite the fact that the majority of wizards do not, and are unable to actually live completely separate from it, it very much appears that any wizarding couple who produces children is automatically constrained to educate them at home at their own expense and on their own responsibility, or to make other arrangements for their education without Ministry supervision or assistance, in the absence of any recognized wizarding primary schools.

In short, the Ministry of Magic takes no interest whatsoever in education, per se. Only in its constituency’s magical training.

Except, of course, in the case of Harry Potter.

It was perhaps due to some oversight that no monitoring of his school site appears to have taken place, and that Harry Potter, a known wizarding child was actually permitted to be enrolled in a Muggle school.

But then, there is always the possibility that Potter’s exact whereabouts were being kept under wraps and information concerning his location was not released to the relevant Ministry departments until after Potter was formally enrolled at Hogwarts. As Professor Snape so frequently has pointed out, the normal rules do not always seem to apply to Potter.

Regarding Early School-Leaving:

This particular issue has nothing to do with the Muggle-born experience of Hogwarts, but it is the most appropriate place to tuck it into the collection.

It has been speculated that since one must receive qualifying scores in the standardized OWL exams in order to continue study in most of the subjects offered by Hogwarts at NEWT-level, it is probable that at least some Hogwarts students do not continue their formal education beyond 5th year.

Ms Rowling does not ever openly state this particular option within the course of the text until Book 5, when she hands us the Weasley twins’ flamboyant school-leaving before sitting the NEWTs, and later, Harry’s stated intention to not return to school for his 7th year.

Nevertheless, while Harry may have chosen to drop out, he did not flunk out. Nor has his family withdrawn him, as was briefly the case of several of his classmates at various points of the series.

Squinting between the lines, amid the usual brangle over the scrambled statements regarding the birth dates of the Weasley children, it is possible to speculate that the twins may not have been the first children in the family to have left school after their OWLs. If Charlie had done the same, with the blessings of Professors McGonagall and Kettleburn, in order to take a prestigious trainee post at the Dragon reservation in Romania much of the contradiction and muddle over the Weasley children’s ages evaporates. This is examined more closely in the essay entitled ‘The Weasley Calendar’.

And, for that matter, it is virtually required to speculate that Andromeda Black must have eloped with Ted Tonks and not returned to school after her OWLs if we dismiss the dates on the Black family tapestry sketch in order to fudge matters enough for Bellatrix to have still been at school, even if for only one year, at the same time as a Marauder cohort which was born in 1960.

Rowling also gives us a strongly-implied example of at least one other possible Hogwarts dropout. Probably a more representative example.

And yes, I do mean poor, feckless Stan Shunpike.

Stan Shunpike has never had any difficulty recognizing Harry Potter once he was introduced to him. Stan is quite chuffed about knowing such a celebrity as Harry Potter, in fact.

But he didn’t recognize him the first time Harry boarded the Knight bus in the summer before his 3rd year, and identified himself as Neville Longbottom.

Why not? Harry had not exactly kept a low profile throughout his first two years at Hogwarts. In the first place, like every other student, he was Sorted in the full sight of the entire school, by name, AS a major celebrity, upon whom everyone’s attention was fully focused. And then he was brought to public attention again as one of the three students who had lost Gryffindor 150 points by being caught out of bounds. He was also brought to the attention of the whole school at the end of the year by Dumbledore’s grand points reward after the Philosopher’s Stone brouhaha. The outcome of which had been known throughout the entire school by the time Harry woke up in the Hospital wing.

He was also the youngest student to have become a Seeker on a House team in a century.

In year two he was thrown into the limelight again by the Heir of Slytherin nonsense, and again at the end of the year after destroying the Basilisk.

And only a few weeks later Stan doesn’t recognize him.

Well, hey, Stan’s out of school, right?

Absolutely.

But if Stan was only 21 at the time of his arrest in ’96, at the beginning of Harry’s 6th year, he would have only been 18 when Harry first boarded the Knight bus in the summer before his 3rd. i.e., he would have only just finished his 7th year at Hogwarts. He would have been right there at Hogwarts for Harry Potter’s first two years.

But Stan didn’t recognize him.

If he was only 21 in 1996, Stan Shunpike ought to have been starting his 6th year in Harry’s 1st year. Stan’s 7th year ought to have been the Year of the Basilisk. Harry Potter got a lot of attention during those two years.

And Shunpike flatly didn’t recognize Harry Potter.

He’d never seen him before in his life

Ergo: Stan was lo longer at Hogwarts by the time Harry started there.

Well, hey, he’s a young fool, but he isn’t subnormal. He’s a qualified wizard. He probably scraped an Acceptable in a couple of his OWLs. But an Acceptable won’t butter any parsnips if you want to study Transfigurations, or Charms, or, ghod help us, Potions at NEWT level.

We don’t really know for certain whether there is much that a meager Acceptable on the OWLs would qualify you to continue studying. Although we do learn in passing that remedial classes are available for some subjects, so it is hypothetically possible for a student to return for a 6th, or possibly even a 7th year in order to study to sit the OWLs again in hopes of passing them on a second try. But such remedial classes seem to be held separately from the regular 5th year classes, for we never actually encountered such a student. Perhaps, above the 5th year, rather than being split by House, there are only two classes available, NEWT-level, and remedial OWL-level. And we do not know just which fields offer remedial OWL-level classes. Not all of them are likely to.

And I suspect that not all students are prepared to make the attempt, either.

Well, after all, the prospect of returning to Hogwarts to sit and listen to Binns drone on about Goblin wars is hardly a compelling prospect, is it?

Indeed, even the restriction of being unable to openly use magic for the a few months of one’s first year after one drops out after sitting the OWLs in one’s first attempt is less likely to feel unproductive than that.

Ruminations on a Hat:

My own reading of the matter is that any “default” placements at Hogwarts are probably judged on a one-to-one basis on the part of the Hat and the student under examination may end up being sent anywhere. Despite Helga’s stated willingness to train any child who needed it, if modern Hogwarts has anything like a “catch-all” House it is certainly not Hufflepuff, whose requirements demand a degree of willing self-effacement that is really not all that common in adolescents.

For that matter, Helga *herself* didn’t just adopt the students that caught none of the other three founders’ attention. I’m sure that when she was given any say in the matter, Helga, like Godric, Rowena and Salazar would have actively selected her students, and Helga didn’t select for duffers. If modern Hufflepuff is at all to the pattern, Helga was very carefully selecting for “team players” and “team builders” from whom her collection of defaults could learn by example. Neville, amiably off inside his own head, is not even close to being Hufflepuff material. The off-in-their-own-little-world types, like Neville, do much better when thrown to the lions than to the badgers, who tend to regard non-participation in peer activities in the light of a mortal sin.

What is more; regardless of how the Founders may have selected their students during their own lives, when it came to “programing” the Hat, we have already seen what appears to be some indication that the Founders’ personal preferences were forced to undertake a certain degree of translation, and to recalibrate to select from a broader interpretation of each Founder’s underlying priorities.

Every Founder was alert to spotting the exceptional students of their own day. But, even among wizards, the majority of children are not particularly exceptional. Or, not at as early an age as 11. When it came time to develop a “selection engine” to be installed in an inanimate object, it was ultimately necessary to distill each House Founder’s selection criteria through a definition of what each House actually taught its students about the way to get on in life. And — from that — to attempt to reverse-engineer the willingness and ability to absorb these particular “lessons” into something that would show up as a subject’s overriding personal goal in a form that would be identifiable even by the definitions of a pre-teen child of yet unformed taste and immature personality.

• • • •

Before any child could be assigned to any House, it must be clear to the selection “engine” what it is that the child wants from life, and how well his desire matches up to the four Houses’ individual lessons. The surface interpretation that the Sorting Hat is a personality identifier falls apart immediately upon any sort of close examination. After all, it is obvious to any reader that all of the children in any of the Houses are not all of the same personality type.

Clearly what is being Sorted is not the sort of person you are, but the sort of qualities you value, and the kind of things you want.

The results in both Helga and Salazar’s cases came out looking very different from the conscious judgment that either of those Founders had actually used themselves. And even Godric and Rowena’s priorities underwent a considerable degree of redefinition. I rather imagine that all four of the Founders came out of the Hat project feeling a little bemused.

In Slytherin’s case the result of this refining process seems to have been particularly inconsistent with his alleged personal preferences. Unless Rowling is playing some form of double-bluff with us. She is at her most conspicuously self-contradictory best when she is laying out the values of Slytherin House. For example:

Slytherin is presumably the “house of the pureblood”. We have been told repeatedly that Salazar himself preferred to teach only those students whose families came from the longest tradition of magical ability. However, it took until Harry’s fifth year before the Sorting Hat ever bothered to mention that criterion when it sang about the qualities that it used to sort the new First years. Or at least mention it in our hearing.

And how often do we remember that the Hat long predates the establishment of any sort of magically hidden wizarding world?

So just what does the Hat do? Look into the kids’ heads to see if it can find a genealogy chart? I tend to doubt that. And if it does, why has it never come out and said so before?

I suspect that if wizarding background is used as a sorting criterion at all it takes a distant last place in priority. Particularly since the Hat is known to have sorted at least one Muggle-raised halfblood who could have known no more about the wizarding world than Harry did when he first arrived, into Slytherin House. It took Tom Riddle to the end of his 4th year before he finally traced his mother’s family. Not much of a chance of the Hat Sorting him by the knowledge of his illustrious wizarding heritage.

• • • •

Never mind. There is more confusion to come. The whole problem of defining the “quintessential Slytherin” obviously cannot be served by an examination of bloodlines alone. It is much more complex than that.

Slytherin is also said to be the “Dark Arts” house. Well, that’s okay too. No particular contradiction there, either. In fact it tends to support my own contention that the Dark Arts are a largely-obsolete wizarding tradition which has been superseded by the safer methods of modern day wizardry. Consequently, it would usually be only those families with the longest established wizarding traditions who still tend to gravitate toward them.

More recent implications in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, however, suggest that Rowling, and indeed the wizarding world itself draws NO well-defined distinction between “Dark” and “Light” magic. That, in fact, Harry and his friends may have been learning Dark magic right along with everything else with the full approval of their instructors. Ms Rowling also now appears to have never had any intention of clearing this issue up. Which leaves us with a distinct impression that “Dark” magic is whatever she and the Ministry of Magic happen to disapprove of in a given week. Apparently you are just supposed to instinctively “know” whether a given spell is Dark or Light; on alternate Tuesdays.

And, then, Rowling outdoes herself and tells us that the primary criterion the Hat uses for sorting these kids is “ambition”. Ambition? WTF?! Explain to me, please, what ambition has to do with either the Dark Arts specifically OR with being of pureblooded ancestry? In particular, what possible association can ambition have with one’s ancestry?

It would seem to me that any effect that being a pureblood might have upon one’s ambition would most likely be to lessen it. If you have already “arrived,” at the pinnacle of existence just by being born into the proper family, what more is necessary? A sense of entitlement is not ambition. (“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”) And it is this indolent sense of entitlement that shines right through what we’ve been shown of the current members of the House’s behavior.

“Ambition” seems to be diametrically opposed to the kind of “Slytherin manner” demonstrated by Malfoy and his goons. Now, the Twins’ statement that Percy Weasley is ambitious I can accept with alacrity. No question about that at all. But Draco? I don’t get it. What is Rowling thinking?

And not being satisfied with that, Rowling has managed to further muddy the waters by confusing the issue even further over the course of the series by further conflating the Slytherin “ambition” with the willingness to use any means to hand in order to “win”. For, from where we have been standing the students of Hogwarts who seem to be the most obsessed with the idea of “winning” are the Gryffindors!

It is enough to make one wonder whether Slytherin himself was already gone from the school by the time the Hat was “programed”, and the other three cobbled the sorting criteria for his House together in committee. That would hardly have made it any more contradictory.

Or, alternately, to make one wonder whether something has gone a bit screwy with the Hat.

Hold that thought.

• • • •

Since the release of HBP, we have finally been given a clear indication of why the Slytherin House of today is so throughly screwed up. It’s clearly still suffering from the Riddle effect. Tom Riddle waltzed into Slytherin House nearly 60 years ago, and proceeded to enthrall not just everyone in his own year, but everyone in the adjacent years, reel in kids from a 2-3 years ahead of him, and serve as a role model for everyone who came afterwards. As well as to pretty throughly bamboozle the staff.

Not all of those other Slytherin kids at that time were Death Eater material, any more than all Slytherin kids are Death Eater material now. But it seems to have never occurred to them to oppose him. And there were enough of them who were of the proper temperament for him to chose to cultivate, and to ensure that they and their descendants would be the dominant faction in that House for generations to come. Slytherin House today is not what it was in 1937, before Riddle was Sorted there. And he, and his followers, and their descendants are not a true portrait of what the House typically produced prior to that date.

And I began to think that the fact that this distortion was still in operation as late as the 1990s could well be a clue to a possible discovery slated for Book 7

Well, that was no such luck. Nevertheless, it was a fun theory while it lasted. It lives over in the 7th Son collection now. But I’ll give it a bit of a reprise, here.

• • • •

Now that we’ve met Slughorn, it’s become even more obvious that Tom Riddle waltzed in and stole his House right out from under him.

He intended to do it literally, too. How long do you think Slughorn would have continued to be Head of Slytherin if Dippett had given Tom the DADA position when he first asked for it at the age of 18?

For that matter, how long would Albus have survived as Deputy Head?

Or survived at all?

But there are more ways to skin a cat than swinging it around by the tail. Dippitt listened to Albus in ’45, and sent Tom off to get some experience in the field. By the time Tom risked his return to the Wizarding World (his appearance was deteriorating beyond the point that he could readily continue to move openly among the Muggles), he discovered that he had tarried too long, and that Dumbledore was now Headmaster. There was no way that Albus Dumbledore would have permitted Tom Riddle to run at large in his school.

But Tom had made important plans for the school. It held a crucial role in his design to dominate the wizarding world by subverting its young. And he wasn’t prepared to give those plans up. I think that he was forced to make alternate arrangements.

Potterverse axiom #1: whenever anything has been shown to have taken place over the course of the series. It is exponentially more likely than not to be shown to have happened again.

In Goblet of Fire Barty Crouch Jr allegedly hoodwinked a powerful magical object; Confunding it into forgetting that only three schools compete in the TriWizard Tournament, to enable it to select Harry’s name, which was entered as that of a student of a bogus fourth school. Or at any rate that is how he claimed the ruse must have been accomplished.

I thought we might have another powerful magical object suffering under a Confundus, or other misdirecting charm.

I suspected that Tom Riddle had nobbled the Sorting Hat.

For that matter, I thought we may have watched him do it, when he came to ask Albus for the DADA position. The Hat sits on a shelf behind Albus’s desk. Harry thought he saw Voldemort go for his concealed wand at one point during the interview.

At first we all thought that he was jinxing the DADA position. For that matter; until Rowling pooh-poohed the idea, I seriously thought that he may have been turning the Hat into a Horcrux (a theory which no longer works with how I now believe a Horcrux is created, but that was then).

Well, Rowling publicly called a halt to the Sorting Hat Horcrux theory in her Christmas day update of her official site in 2005. The Sorting Hat is definitely not a Horcrux.

But, it took another six weeks before it finally sunk in that she never said that the Sorting Hat had definitely not been tampered with.

(For the record, it still may have been. We’ve never been told it wasn’t.)

And I also suspected that by the end of Book 6 out of 7, we probably already had all the puzzle pieces we needed to figure it out.

In fact, we’d had some of those pieces for a Long Time now.

And we had done nothing but complain about them.

• • • •

Readers have been carping and creebing for years about the depiction of Slytherin House and it’s alumni. Ever since about Book 2. (We mostly just accepted it in Book 1. Despite Hagrid’s grumblings on the subject, Harry saw very little of Slytherin House in book 1. Just Malfoy and his goons, and the Quidditch team. And Snape who went out of his way to be combative.)

We have, since that point, been told outright that people tagged along after Riddle for a pretty wide variety of personal reasons.

With that in mind, doesn’t it begin to look just a bit suspicious that despite a wide variety of reasons to cluster around young Tom Riddle, such a large percentage of Voldemort’s “future followers” have been Sorted into only one House?

In my own case I have been grousing for years that Malfoy’s assumption of “entitlement” hasn’t anything to do with ambition. Not by my reckoning.

It finally caught up to me that this might not just be shoddy reasoning; it could be a CLUE.

Or it certainly ought to be.

Tom isn’t a bit like Harry. Harry just rolls with the punches, Tom makes plans. Grandiose, complex, elaborate plans. Even back when he was Harry’s age he made plans. The only thing those two really seem to have in common is dark hair, Parseltongue (which in Harry’s case was pasted on) and an attachment to Hogwarts.

Oh, and they both are descended from the Peverill brothers, which may not be all that unusual by this time. They also both look just like their fathers. But they are hardly the only boys in the Potterverse to do that.

But in this case, I think that I may have slightly overestimated young Tom Riddle’s degree of wickedness. I have since conceded that when he first asked Dippett for the DADA position he may indeed have wanted no more than to forever remain at Hogwarts.

Oh, well, yes, he eventually wanted to be Headmaster, too. And he fully intended to become so as soon as he could manage it. But at that point he may have had no definite plans related to World Domination.™ He was a sociopath, a murderer at least three times over, had at the very least orchestrated the death of a fellow student, and had already performed the ultimate evil of creating a Horcrux thereby, but there was still something a bit like innocence left to him. He may have still had the vague intention of making everyone fear him someday, but he had clearly developed a taste for being lauded and admired, which wasn»t really compatible with that, so inspiring fear was not his first priority, at the present. I also rather think that World Domination™ was a bee that only got into his bonnet once he left school and realized just how few wizards there are. While he was still at Hogwarts, his Ultima Thule was to stay there.

While I am inclined to think that Albus was probably correct that Tom eventually would have chosen to move on, Albus might just as easily have been mistaken. The Headmaster of Hogwarts is a position of considerable power in the wizarding world, after all. Tom wanted it. He intended that Hogwarts Castle should be his own.

And in any case; it’s pretty clear that, at Harry’s age, Tom Riddle had no intention of ever leaving the school. He wanted to stay there forever.

We need to ask ourselves the same question that Albus asked Riddle. Why did he travel so far on a nasty winter night to ask for a teaching position that he didn’t really want, and could have no expectation of being given?

And for that matter, why did he jinx the DADA position? What did he accomplish by that apart from petty spite?

• • • •

As to the first question; For several months I thought his original intention may have been to kill Dumbledore that very night and create a Horcrux from his death. And that he’d gotten cold feet.

It’s still a possibility. He had been away for quite some time, hadn’t he? And for that matter, he shows a definite pattern of liking to have other people do his dirty work. So far as we know, at that point he had never yet killed a wizard face-to-face, had he? He’d killed at least three Muggles. He’d caused the deaths of two witches, by indirect means, but we don’t know of any point that he had stood up in front of a witch or wizard and tried to kill them in a fair fight.

But by the time DHs came out I was no longer so sure. Tom had to have had a reason to set up that interview. He had something to accomplish by that meeting. And murdering Albus Dumbledore would have been an awfully chancy thing to try to carry off. Even if the Horcrux-creation spell does typically destroy the body of its victim (as it did his own body in Godric’s Hollow) leaving no trace of the death. And simple hit-and-run killings are not really that much in Tom Riddle’s style. If he intended to murder Albus Dumbledore he would have spun some kind of a long-range, Byzantine plot about it. (Well, he did, didn’t he?)

He also must have known he wasn’t going to get that teaching position.

So what did the interview accomplish? What did he get from that interview that he would probably not have been able to get without it?

Well, that’s an easy question to answer:

He got access to Hogwarts.

• • • •

For some as yet undisclosed reason, he needed access to Hogwarts. He had something planned that he had to get set up at the school.

So he had to make some kind of arrangement that would enable him to accomplish what he intended to accomplish (i.e., setting a trap; hiding a Horcrux; setting the school up as his recruiting base, whatever) at long-distance.

So why should he curse the DADA position while he was about it?

How about as a diversion?

He couldn’t count on Albus not noticing a twitch of his hand toward his wand, so he needed to give Albus some other reason to account for it. He slung the Diadem into the Room of Hidden Things on the way to or from the main staircase, and cursed the DADA position (or maybe just the classroom) on his way down the stairs to the Entrance Hall, but that is not necessarily what we saw him do in Albus’s office. What we don’t know is whether Albus really bought the story of the curse being the purpose of that visit or not. Although he claimed to.

But the jinx on the DADA position would have become apparent by the end of June, whereas the Sorting Hat wouldn’t be used until the following September. And Albus is a busy man. If Riddle did tamper with the Sorting Hat, he may have slipped that one past Albus.

So. How does this work? Is the Hat aware that it has been tampered with?

Indications to this point suggest that it probably is not. And the tampering was, in this case, a remarkably subtle piece of work for Riddle, whose usual style is generally much more flashy.

I think that whatever it is that Riddle did convinces the Hat to read a desire for power over others as “ambition”.

That would cover most of the bases.

“Power over others” is not a traditional sorting criterion. All four Houses teach their students how to influence others, each one through different techniques. Either through ties of trust and affection, or from acknowledged intellectual superiority, admiration for “worthy”, or daring deeds, or just the sense of sticking with a winner. Crude power over other people in itself is not something that I think any of the Founders considered a worthwhile goal on its own. Their attitudes all seem to have been much more akin to; “if you build it, they will come.”

But Riddle does consider it a worthwhile goal. Power over others is what Tom Riddle is all about.

The truly ambitious would still be Sorted into Slytherin, anyway. Riddle’s tampering doesn’t do anything to make the Hat read only the desire for power over others as ambition.

And from the outside, a desire to put others in your power probably does look like ambition, but it really isn’t the same thing. And while it could perhaps be interpreted as a form of ambition, it isn’t either the purest, or the highest form.

But since Tom meddled with the Hat, quite a number of potential bullies land in Slytherin who might otherwise have landed somewhere else. Not all bullies, by any means. The ones who indulge in bullying chiefly for the attention it attracts, and the admiration of the crowd — rather than for the actual power involved — still usually manage to land in Gryffindor. These are probably also the ones who most quickly outgrow the tendency to bully as they get older. Although not always.

More to the point: a hell of a lot of damaged kids who read “power over others” as the surest form of protection for themselves and control over their own situations (which accounts for a fairly major percentage of the aforementioned bullies, too) now landed in Slytherin who really might have otherwise landed elsewhere.

And those are kids that Voldemort can use.

And, had he got that DADA post, when he first asked Dippett for it, once he had managed to edge Horace Slughorn out of the way as Head of Slytherin they would all have come to him.

Quite a few of them still do. Eventually.

Tom Riddle absolutely didn’t learn the lesson that poor Sluggy tries so hard to teach his kids. Riddle totally misses the whole point of noblesse oblige. But he learned the technique. He saw how it was done. He would have set up his own club.

Well, after all, he did. Didn’t he?

The fact remains that despite anomalies like Pettigrew, and probably a handful of others, that for such a high a percentage of all of the Death Eaters who have ever been were originally Slytherins for it not to start looking a bit suspicious. And enlisting a “hereditary” following by signing up the 2nd and 3rd generations of the same few families does not altogether account for it. And, at that, even though while just about all DEs are ex-Slyths, not all ex-Slyths are even close to being DEs. In fact only a minority of them are.

But, close to forty years of that kind of very slight shift in the priorities for Sorting kids has set its stamp on the character of the House.

The Hat has to go.

Or at least be returned to its original state.

Rowling claimed that the Founders would have some part to play in Book 7..

And the only real way to the Founders is through the Hat.

(ETA: I guess this was another mostly abandoned intention on Rowling’s part, the story of Helena Ravenclaw and the Baron hardly qualifies as tales of the Founders.)