Marauders dates: discovering RL = werewolf, werewolf prank against SS, becoming animagi, making map

[smallbrownfrog]

The one source for any of these dates that I see listed in the lexicon is the quote from POA: "It took them the best part of three years to work out how to do it." [how to become animagi] and "Finally, in our fifth year, they managed it

Comments

[shyfoxling]

You didn't provide a link to the Lexicon page in question, so I'm not sure how narrow they make it, but keep in mind the Lexicon does also use extracanonical sources. (For example, I think they used to take JKR at her original word that Dumbledore was something like 150 years old and only later revised it downwards to his 110s or so.) But I think in terms of canon, broad ranges of a year or so may be all you can get in some cases.

The quote you cite means that James et al. must have discovered Remus was a werewolf sometime in their second year (or, possibly, they discovered it sooner but did not determine what to do about it until later). I can't think of a way to narrow it further.

Given the sequence in "The Prince's Tale", the "werewolf prank" would seem to be prior to June 1976, but we don't know definitely whether it was before or after the point in fifth year when James et al. managed their Animagus transformations. (Those might not all have been at exactly the same time during the year, either.) If "a few years" means e.g. 3 have passed since Severus and Lily's sorting in the scene in question, they might not even be fifth years yet. (If not, it does shed somewhat more heroic light on James's going in after Severus.)