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The Catlady wrote:
JKR said in an interview long ago that there is a magic quill that writes down the name of every magic child born in the UK. Once a year, McGonagall looks in the quill's book for all the children that 'are' 11 that 'year' and addresses Hogwarts admission letters to them.
This is yet another of those questions—much like "how many students at Hogwarts?"—on which I tend to disbelieve the author's answer as given in interview because it seems so difficult to reconcile with my reading of the actual canon. I'm not quite sure that I can believe that birth is when the name appears.
Aldrea touched on my reasons why when she wrote:
Hagrid's remark..something like "He's had his name down since he was a baby!"...would that be because of Harry's whole deflection thing agianst Voldie?
That was certainly my reading. Hagrid says this as if it is not at all usual for a child to have had their name down for Hogwarts since birth. I tend to agree with Aldrea's suggestion that a child's name first appears in the book not at birth, but rather at the moment that the child first manifests his or her magical talent.
However, if we want to be able to reconcile JKR's statement as given in interview with this idea, then Aldrea suggested a terrific way to do so:
I think someone said earlier it writes down the name when magical children are "born"... could born be used in a sort of spiritual sense? Like when the Magical Moment, the moment when the child first uses some sort of magic, -that's- when they are "born" as a wizard?
Sure! That works for me.
The Catlady wrote:
I am worried how such a system could deal with Muggle-born magic children who emigrated with their parents to UK after birth but before age 11.
Hmmm. Well, it's a Magical Quill, isn't it? It has a mystic ability to detect magical children. So I'm willing to accept that it might also be able to just know which magical children would be living in Britain at the age of eleven and which would not.
It's a bit creepy, that, admittedly, since it raises some troubling questions of predestination and free will -- but then, so do Trelawney's "true prophecies."
This touches on the question of why families are not notified the instant that their child's name goes down in that book, to save them the apprehension over their child's eventual future. My gut feeling about this is that the stewards of the Quill deliberately eschew such a policy on the very grounds of that thorny predestination/free will question. Had Neville's family already known that he was "magical enough" to go to Hogwarts, for example, would they have spent so much time trying to badger some magic out of him? And if they hadn't done so, then would he have qualified for Hogwarts?
I don't think that the Keepers of the Quill know the answers to those thorny questions any more than any of the rest of us can, and I suspect that this is the reason that McGonagall only ordinarily checks the book for the names of those children that are eleven "that year." Harry Potter was likely an exception, as his eventual magical status would have been a question of particular interest for the wizarding world as a whole. Hagrid therefore knew that his name had been in the book since he was a baby, but he would not have had this type of knowledge about a less famous or portentious child.
David suggested a rather more ugly reason, though, why the staff of Hogwarts might not want to let parents know about their children's magical status.
He wrote:
IOW, most magic reflects the intention of the wizard or witch. This is apparently not the case with birth, in the sense that neither wizards nor Muggles have any way of influencing whether their offspring are magical. (It has occurred to me that the reason Squibs are rare might be infanticide: what do you suppose the Malfoys would do if they had a Squib baby? The Fudges?)
Well, if they could tell from the beginning that a child was a Squib, then I think that many families probably would leave it on a mountainside to die, or (if we were talking about the Malfoys) possibly even use it in some nasty Dark ritual. At the very least, I suspect that many of those "Fine Old Wizarding Families" would put a non-magical child up for Muggle adoption -- and then try to hide the evidence that the child had ever even existed.
But I don't get the impression that most magical children first manifest their talent early enough in life for this to be a feasible policy. Neville admittedly does seem to have been an unusually late bloomer, but Hagrid speaks of Harry's name being down for Hogwarts since infancy as if this is quite unusual as well. My conclusion is therefore that most magical children first manifest their gift later than infancy, but well before the age of eight (which is when Great Uncle Algie finally browbeat some magic out of poor Neville by dropping him out of that window). I'd guess that the norm is for children to do their first bit of magic somewhere around toddlerhood.
JKR has also intimated that people can sometimes show their first signs of magic quite late in life. This interests me very much. Does the wizarding world have any type of formalized "adult education" for extraordinarily late-blooming ex-Squibs? Or are they forced to see to their own training as best they can, relying on sorry excuses like Filch's Kwikspell Correspondence Course if they cannot afford private tutelage? Rather hard luck on them, isn't it?
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on July 5, 2002 6:47 PM
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