Current Events > Re reading Harry Potter with my kiddo and *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just realized Harry and Voldemort are distant cousins

In HBP when Dumbledore is giving Harry Voldemorts backstory, Marvolo Gaunt (Voldemorts grandfather) talks about how he's descended from the Peverells.

In DH, we just read about the Hallows in chapters 22 and 23, and Harry realizes he's descended from the 3rd brother, Ignotus.


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Tbf, with how some wizard families like to keep their bloodline pure, I'm sure most of them closely related.

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Aren't a bunch of wizards incestuous
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Eh, in LOTR Aragorn and Arwen are cousins as well.

Didn't stop them.

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Smashingpmkns posted...

Aren't a bunch of wizards incestuous

Sirius or Remus make a comment about how some of the big pureblood families tend to interbreed a lot.

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Rharyx211 posted...

Tbf, with how some wizard families like to keep their bloodline pure, I'm sure most of them closely related.

Sirius says as much in Order of the Phoenix. Ron, Sirius, Harry, Voldemort, Draco, and Neville are all related to one another, albeit pretty distantly in some cases.

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Pandamonic posted...

Eh, in LOTR Aragorn and Arwen are cousins as well.

Didn't stop them.

Erm isn't Aragorn clearly a human while Arwen is an elf? At least in the movies they were played by
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There's like, 5 entire families in the entire harry potter world, lol

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Even putting aside that pureblood families in Harry Potter are acknowledged in the story to intermingle a lot, that's also a very distant relation. The Peverell brothers lived and died a few hundred years before the story is set.

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saspa posted...

Erm isn't Aragorn clearly a human while Arwen is an elf? At least in the movies they were played by

Aragorn is like 1/128th elf

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pinky0926 posted...

There's like, 5 entire families in the entire harry potter world, lol

28, actually

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saspa posted...

Erm isn't Aragorn clearly a human while Arwen is an elf? At least in the movies they were played by

Yes.

Aragorn is a descendant from Arwen's uncle iirc, Elrond's brother. Their father was human and their mother was an elf. They both got to choose if they wanted to be elven or human. Elrond chose to be an elf. His brother chose to be human. He also was the first king of Numenor iirc. And Aragorn descended from him.
So Aragorn and Arwen are cousins a couple of hundred times removed or so.

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jeffhardyb0yz posted...

Feels like it doesnt hold as much weight in the HP world as the wizard world isnt super populous. Think theres only 3,000 in the UK

Hmm there's got to be more than that; there are around 40 kids entering into the school per year, but most wizard families home educate iirc.

Shit maybe it is that small a number though, I'd have to look at RL metrics.

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Rowling said that she figures there's only about 3k in the UK (ha), but that obviously makes zero sense.

From the HP wiki:

There was some confusion regarding the population of the wizarding world. The year Harry Potter entered Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, there were forty students that started school. This seems to indicate a very low birth rate, or a very low number of witches and wizards in Great Britain and Ireland, or a combination of both. Also, J. K. Rowling has stated that she imagines the wizarding population of the U.K. to be around 3,000. This estimate, although seemingly small, was understandable; a larger population would be far harder to hide from Muggles. However, she also stated that the number of students attending Hogwarts was around 1,000, which seems inconsistent with the 3,000 population estimate. Harry once observed in one Quidditch match that three-quarters of the stadium was supporting Gryffindor, while the Slytherin supporters numbered around 200. There were a large number of government departments, and Harry Potter observes hundreds of witches and wizards in the Ministry of Magic's Atrium alone. This would appear to be too large for such a small population. The Quidditch World Cup stadium could hold 100,000 and was built by a Ministry task force of five hundred. It seems very unlikely that a sixth of the entire country worked for a full year on one single project, though it was possible that the Ministry could had hired out from other countries.

If one were to extrapolate from Rowling's statement that 1,000 students were at Hogwarts at a given time, however, a more sensible number seems to suggest itself: Given that 1,000 students spread over 7 years would make a class size each year of about 143 students, that nearly every young wizard and witch in Britain appears to attend Hogwarts, and that wizards and witches seem to live around 100 years if they don't die by unnatural causes, 1,000 Hogwarts students would put the total wizarding population in Britain at 12,000 to 15,000a number that would support almost all details known about the wizarding world.

If the wizarding population was 15,000 then the Muggle to wizard ratio was about 4,150 to 1. This means that the current world wizarding population was roughly 1.6 to 1.7 million. If this ratio was true then unless something was drastically different a thousand years ago there were less then 900 wizards and witches in all of Britain when Hogwarts was founded. 9 students per year, tops.

In the last 1990s, 755-year-old Barry Winkle invited "every wizard and witch he had ever known" to a massive party, with 30 million wizards attending it. That would suggest a much bigger number of wizards worldwide, but it likely included ghosts.

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Basically, Rowling can't maths
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Rowling is good at broad-strokes world building but massively fucks up the details of it.

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pegusus123456 posted...

Rowling said that she figures there's only about 3k in the UK (ha), but that obviously makes zero sense.

From the HP wiki:

Some of that is booty ass math extrapolation but there is undoubtedly something to the logic. The number of wizards must be under a million and muggle-borns are very rare and probably related to wizards anyways to some degree

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