fox: kit fox, blue background (fox)
fox ([personal profile] fox) wrote2003-04-04 12:47 am

say

james potter
sirius black
remus lupin
peter pettigrew

... who was the fifth boy in gryffindor house that year?

update ten minutes later: immediate choice: frank longbottom. (is that a little obvious? perhaps.) but you know, it could have been bill weasley.

yes, it could. look: when harry's in his first year, we're told charlie left school seven years previously. by my calculations, that makes charlie twenty-four when harry's eleven, and we know bill is older than charlie (though we don't know by how much). (side note: if i didn't know better, i'd suspect molly weasley was arthur's second wife. not so much the age range -- a son past twenty-five and a daughter who's barely ten at the same time isn't a huge deal -- but the gap between charlie and percy, is what sets me thinking that way.) (another edit: or possibly arthur was travelling a lot when there were just the two children. or possibly there were children in between and they didn't survive, poor things. though we know nothing of the wizards' infant mortality rate.)

anyway. james and lily were at least eighteen when harry was born, but not too much older ... right? i forget how i know this, but the idea is there. and if they were just eighteen, then they'd be five years older than charlie weasley -- and bill could easily have been in their year.

and even if he wasn't in their year, he can't have been too far behind; bill (and possibly charlie) was definitely at school at the same time as james potter and the gang, eh?

[identity profile] laurakaye.livejournal.com 2003-04-04 07:07 am (UTC)(link)
I've actually always thought that there *was* another Weasley between Charlie and Percy, who was a casualty of the war in some way. Perhaps Percy's obsession with following the rules might be traced back to the trauma where big brother or sister wandered off after being told not to and was killed by Death Eaters.
ext_2233: Writing MamaDeb (Default)

[identity profile] mamadeb.livejournal.com 2003-04-04 08:31 am (UTC)(link)
Not necessarily the *fifth* - I have a feeling that Harry's year might be unusually small because of the events at the time of his birth. James and Lily's year might have been much bigger. And we also can't know if it's normal to have class evenly divided among the Houses.

Actually, I'm finding the even division insteresting by itself, as it could have been different - Harry was offered Slytherin and turned it down. We don't know if other students also received such choices because, in the book, the Choosing Hat only speaks to the student. However, the one fact we have is that Harry could have gone to Slytherin, which would have left Gryffindor short one boy and Slytherin plus one.

What I'm saying is that we cannot generalize class/House size from Harry's year, as it is probably rather unusual - I suspect that the class two years behind his was unusually large.