update

[fox]

having chatted some with ellen_fremedon, done a little more math, and recalled some more details, i retract the earlier claim that bill weasley could have been in the same year as james and lily potter.

in the first place, it's mathematically unlikely or impossible -- ginny can remember bill being at hogwarts, so he can't have left much more than eight years before harry and ron got there (ginny being a year younger than ron and probably not remembering much before she was two-ish), and james and lily can't have been that young. if they had harry when they were eighteen (which is absolutely the lower limit), they'd have left twelve years before harry got there -- and it's more likely that they were closer to twenty. so bill may have been a first year at hogwarts in james and lily's final year, but even that's not for certain; he may have missed them altogether.

besides which, of course -- and shame on all of you for not pointing this out to me [g] -- james potter was head boy, and so was bill weasley. so they couldn't possibly have been in the same year, even if all the math i've just done is (as ron would say) rubbish.

Comments

[thalia]

I think your math is right, and an important corollary is that Ron's parents are *not* the same age as James, Remus, Sirius and Snape. I'm *so* tired of seeing stories where the Marauders, and Snape, and Arthur and Molly Weasley, and Lucius Malfoy, are all the same year. Doesn't work--definitely not for the Weasleys, and I'd guess that Malfoy is older, too; he doesn't seem like the type to have a kid at 20.

</rant>

Good catch on the Head Boy thing, though; I never even thought of that.

Oh, and PS: I'm *shocked* that you're (a) straight and (b) nice. Who'd've thought?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

let's do more math, then, shall we?

figuring that bill is, at a minimum, thirteen years older than harry; and molly and arthur are, at a minimum, twenty years older than bill (assuming they were in the same year); then molly and arthur are thirty-three years older than harry and something between ten and fifteen years older than james, lily, remus, sirius, pettigrew, and snape.

we just have no idea about lucius malfoy. he could be the same age as that crowd, though it's more likely (as you say) that he's a little older; my personal feeling, though, is that he's probably closer to molly and arthur's age. in the first place, there's long-standing animosity between lucius and arthur -- granted, they both work at the ministry, but it makes sense to me that they'd have hated each other's guts since they were at school together. besides that, though, my current pet theory is that draco isn't an only child: he's by far the youngest of something like four children, and the next one above him is nine or ten years older. if there are three malfoy children in the upper deck, say nine, eleven, and thirteen years older than draco, that'd make the oldest about the same age as bill weasley -- which would make lucius and narcissa about the same age as molly and arthur (again, assuming the couples are the same age -- and even if molly and arthur were in the same year, i'd bet money that narcissa's a couple years younger than lucius).

[thalia]

I agree that it would make sense for Lucius and Arthur to be the same year. And I like your Draco theory; that hadn't occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense. The way he behaves, he could easily be the youngest child, with a pretty big gap between him and the next-oldest. I bet you're right about Narcissa, too--Lucius is definitely the type to marry a younger woman.

About the Head Boy thing, though... are you sure James was Head Boy? I just searched the books (I have them in .txt files; want them?), and I couldn't find any mention of that. The only Head Boys I could find were Percy, Bill, and Tom Riddle.

I just hope JKR gives us some more facts in book 5; it's getting really hard to sort out fanon from canon at this point.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

the lexicon says he was head boy in his last year; they don't give a cite for that, but they don't cite fanon -- they're a shade more permissive on what's strictly canon than i am (the. books. full. stop.), but they tend to specify when something they're citing is an interview with JKR or some such thing, which they consider almost as reliable as the books themselves, whereas i don't want to hear it until it's published. and i distinctly recall dumbledore saying james and lily were head boy and head girl.

interestingly, what we don't know for a solid, book-published fact is that either of them was actually in gryffindor.

[thalia]

Aha! You're right; Hagrid says it, early in book one: "Now, yer mum an' dad were as good a witch an' wizard as I ever knew. Head boy an' girl at Hogwarts in their day!" Don't know how I missed that yesterday, but it was driving me nuts.

You're right about not knowing that they were in Gryffindor, but I'm sure they were. JKR has to have *something* in mind with the different houses and their prejudices, but I don't know what she's going to do with it.

I'm with you on canon, incidentally. The books, and nothing else. She's said some interesting things in interviews, but I'm waiting to see how it all fits together in the books.

71 more days! Yay!