Fanon VS Canon
Hermione is my favourite character after Severus but I agree with some of her faults listed here.
Barty Crouch Snr. treated Winky as a despised slave.
When we see Barty Crouch Snr. give Winky clothes at the World Cup he is being harsh and cold, and the impression is created that he is brutally punishing his cowering slave for having been too frightened to carry out a task he had set her. This is reinforced by later revelations about Crouch having condemned his own son to Azkaban, and having authorised the VWI Aurors to torture and kill.
If you pay close attention to what's revealed at the end of GoF, however, you find that Crouch had given Winky great authority over his household, and had let her nag and emotionally blackmail him into taking his son to the World Cup very much against his better judgment; and she had then wimped out of the arrangement she herself had insisted on, with potentially disastrous consequences. Although Crouch's subsequent treatment of her was harsh, it was not the harshness of a control freak who had been disobeyed by a subordinate, but of a man who had placed great trust in somebody and been badly let down.
House-elves are child-like.
House-elves are often portrayed as simple-minded, and this goes with the idea that Winky must be a pathetic victim rather than an adult woman who insisted on responsibilities which she then welched on. This is based in part on the fact that the first elf we meet, Dobby, is a bit of a twit who tends to overthink the problem, and on their disjointed way of speaking. Yet the traditional folkloric creature they are based on, the hob, house-brownie or gruagach, is a kind of semi-domesticated ogre, quite strong and fierce, very proud and not at all child-like. Even the elves' habit of punishing themselves if they feel they've done wrong is not actually any madder or more childish than Catholic monks scourging themselves in penance for unclean thoughts.
Nightfall Rising has pointed out that the house-elves' dialogue ceases to sound at all child-like if you imagine it in a Jamaican accent. This suggests that their odd way of speaking isn't a sign of childishness or stupidity but is an adult patois or pidgen, a localised dialect of English spoken by a group who were trying to be bilingual, but whose own original language is so structurally different from English that their version of English comes out a bit grammatically peculiar.
It's an interesting fact that despite widespread and rather patronizing sympathy for the elves, I have never seen any fanfic which was written before DH, and which portrayed Kreacher in a sympathic light. In pre-DH fanfics he is always either played as a villain, or killed off to get rid of him. The morality of the Potter books is often rather dubious - sneering at people who are overweight, playing Hagrid's bigotry against Muggles for laughs, giving the Trio and the Twins a free pardon for what is often quite appalling behaviour including kidnap and deliberately scarring somebody's face - but as far as Kreacher goes, JKR undoubtedly has the moral high ground and has dealt with him with more kindness and generosity than any of her fen.
Chocolate Frogs are animated.
This is another thing which exists only in the films. In the books Chocolate Frogs are just frog-shaped chocolate bars, although there is a sweet called a Peppermint Toad which creates a hopping sensation in the stomach after it is eaten.
Quote from Naaga on May 22, 2023, 2:04 pmChocolate Frogs are animated.
This is another thing which exists only in the films. In the books Chocolate Frogs are just frog-shaped chocolate bars, although there is a sweet called a Peppermint Toad which creates a hopping sensation in the stomach after it is eaten.
MY LIFE IS A LIE
Golden Galleons.
I go into this in more detail in my essay on British references in the Harry Potter books, but basically there is a lot of confusion about the value of magical versus Muggle money, and fanwriters tend to either wildly over- or under-estimate the value of a Galleon.
Rowling has said on her website that a Galleon is worth £5 in Muggle money, and in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them film script it says that £174m equates to about 34m Galleons, which indeed makes a Galleon just over £5. However, the conversion rates on the backs of the original 2001 printings of the Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them booklets have it as £3. This could reflect fluctuations in value over time, or it could mean that a Galleon is worth £5 in equivalent purchasing power but only £3 on the exchange rate when spent in the Muggle world. The latter would mean that wizard money would lose much of its value when converted to pounds, which would help to keep the wizarding world isolated.
To give an idea of scale, at the time that the Potter books are set in a loaf of bread would have been about 60p (with 100p in a £1), a paperback book maybe £5, a one-bedroom flat in a medium-priced area about £50,000, a bus fare for a journey of around five miles maybe £1.20. A normal annual salary for an office worker outside London at that time would probably have been about £19,000, but both salaries and prices were and are significantly higher in London.
What a Galleon cannot be, despite its portrayal in fanfic, is made of solid gold in any normal sense. An amount of even low-carat gold small enough to be worth only £3 in 1990s Muggle London would be so tiny that a gust of wind could blow it away, whereas we know that Gallleons are both large in diameter (the Muggle Mr Roberts at the World Cup compares them to hubcaps, although we know that's an exaggeration since they fit into pockets), and thick enough that, like real British pound coins, they can have writing around the edge. Galleons must be either gold-coloured, like the Muggle £1 coin, or at a pinch gold-plated or made of a small amount of real gold which has been magically inflated in some way without gaining mass.
It is quite possible that JK herself initially vaguelly thought of the coins as real gold and silver, before she hsd to decide on an exchange rate. When Hermione hands out the DA fake Galleons in OotP, Ron "became very excited when he first saw the basket and was convinced she was actually giving out gold." But since it makes no sense for the coins to be actual gold, perhaps we can assume that wizwitches use "gold" loosely to mean mobney, just as Muggles sometimes call all money silver or brass.
On Pottermore, there's a reference to James "explaining about Gringotts, and the fortune his parents had saved there, in solid gold." Again, Rowling probably is thinking of Galleons as real gold, but Pottermore is only canon if it doesn't clash with the published books, and the exchange rate of Gl1=£3 is printed on the FB and QTtA booklets. We must assume therefore that the Potters have ingots or golden goblets and plates in their vaults as well as coin.
Real British money coloured bronze, gold and silver, from VISITLONDON.COMThe same issues apply to the idea that Sickles are made of real silver. The simplest explanation is that, like real British coins, they are simply gold and silver coloured.
Incidentally, and despite Jo Rowling's well-known problems with maths, the value of a Galleon as £5 appears to have been carefully selected. A Galleon is 493 Knuts, so if a Galleon is worth £5 in purchasing power a Knut is almost exactly 1p. It is very unlikely that this came about by accident - especially as Ron refers to something as "not exactly ten a Knut", echoing the real British expression "ten a penny".
There are some problems however with the prices of things in the wizarding world. The issue of what Ollivander lives on if wands only cost seven Galleons can be explained by saying that school wands are subsidized by the Ministry, and/or that Ollivander also makes specialist wands used by adults for particular tasks and that these are much more expensive. That we see owls being paid variously five Knuts and one Knut for the Prophet just suggests that, like the daily free British paper Metro, The Daily Prophet derives its income from advertising. However, unicorn horns at twenty-one Galleons and beetle-eyes at five Knuts a scoop and a pile of sweets for eleven Sickles and seven Knuts do seem improbably cheap - but we must remember that magical manufacturing processes are going to reduce the cost of producing things such as sweets, which will require fewer staff and less machinery than in the Muggle world.
My own HC about Galleons is that the goblins seed each coin with a tiny mote of gold and use their own brand of magic to make the whole thing take up gold's colour, sheen and just-about immunity to corrosion, but not its weight and softness.
I don't know if I posted this here before or only on Reddit.
This is first time I've seen this and this HC seems fair and compliant.
My headcanon is Galleon are metal alloys of gold or other substances which replicate gold colour either through metallurgy or magically imbibed with gold coating. They are a type of token coin.
Token coins are coin whose face value is greater than intrinsic value of the metal of coin. Example are most of current coins like silver Dime of current era.
Full bodied coin are coin whose intrinsic metal value is greater than face value of coin. Gold coins of Romans and silver Dime pre 1967 which used to be pure silver are examples.
Starving in Knockturn Alley.
This one is not so much fanon versus canon as fanon versus reality. There is a recurring theme in fanfics in which somebody, usually Snape, falls on such hard times in the wizarding world that they end up forced to choose between becoming a prostitute in Knockturn Alley or starving to death. The Diagon/Knockturn Alley complex is treated as an isolated bubble, divorced from the Muggle London which surrounds it, but if you know the area - and I knew it very well in the 1980s - this plot only works if you come up with a reason why the starving person can't just walk out through the door of the Leaky Cauldron and into the Muggle world. Especially if he's Snape, who knows the Muggle world so well.
[We actually see something like it in DH, with the Muggle-borns who really ought to know how to survive in Muggle London yet are stranded in Diagon Alley, so it's an idea which has some canon support. But the Muggle-borns have been deprived of their wands and so possibly can't get out through the hole in the wall that leads to The Leaky Cauldron. Or perhaps they go out but come back, drawn to the magical world.]
Any starving person entering Muggle London in the Charing Cross area where the Leaky Cauldron appears to be situated would find (in the 1980s, and probably still today) the following within a radius of about a quarter of a mile:
¤ A catering van which handed out free hot soup and coffee to the homeless every evening.
St Martin-in-the-Fields from Trafalgar Sq, from Daily Photos & Frugal Travel Tips: the homeless are or used to be allowed to kip in the crypt¤ A church which allowed the homeless to sleep in its crypt. ¤ A weekly open-air fruit-and-veg market from which food could easily be pilfered. ¤ Hordes of tourists willing to give money to beggars and even more money to people who could busk with a convincing act - such as doing real magic but dressing it up to look like very good sleight-of-hand stage magic. ¤ At least two very good and very, very cheap all-you-can-eat restaurants (one Italian, one Chinese) in which to spend the proceeds of busking. [If you want local colour, outside the Italian one there was sometimes a young woman who busked by doing a dance act with a python, whom she would allow you to stroke.] ¤ A large Chinatown with its own internal rules where a willing worker would probably be able to get a job as a waiter or kitchen assistant without involving any tedious paperwork. ¤ The wide shallow fountains of Trafalgar Square, littered with coins thrown in by people making a wish. You wouldn't make your fortune there because the denominations are usually small, but you could easily collect enough for a sandwich, especially if you had a wand and could Accio coins without having to get wet. ¤ As a last resort, vast flocks of Trafalgar Square pigeons who could potentially be nobbled and put in a pie. These have largely been chased away nowadays, but there used to be vendors selling little cups of grain with which to feed the pigeons, who would then swoop down and perch on you. You could probably manage to be fairly hungry in the Charing Cross area in the 1980s if you were unsuccessful at busking, since the mobile soup kitchen was only there in the evenings and the fruit market was only once a week, but actually starving to the point of desperation would take real effort.
