Rowling's Pottermore Notes

[danajsparks]

I'm not a member of Pottermore, so I'm glad that some bloggers have been collecting Rowling's notes from the site. The notes don't have that many surprises, but a few things did jump out at me.

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

Slytherin!Merlin: Oh dear, maths.

Maybe "Slytherin" was once a generic term for Parselmouths which was later confused for Salazar's surname due to his fame and the epithet's strong association with him.

The thing that caught me about the McGonagall backstory was that it said she was offered a Transfiguration job under the head of the department, Dumbledore - which makes it sound like at this time Hogwarts was doing the sensible thing and having more than one teacher per subject. Maybe they did have a population crash at some point, although I'm no longer convinced it was war-related (since it doesn't seem to have been much of a war). Old inbred Pureblood families declining in fertility and dying off?

[oneandthetruth]

Slytherin!Merlin: Oh dear, maths.

Maybe "Slytherin" was once a generic term for Parselmouths which was later confused for Salazar's surname due to his fame and the epithet's strong association with him.

I once suggested Slytherin might originally have been the highest-status house because it carried on the spiritual legacy of the Druids, who were called "adders." Pre-Christian Britons considered snakes symbols of wisdom and fertility. It wasn't until Christianity took over, with its inherited prejudices against snakes, that snakes came to be seen as negative.

[sunnyskywalker]

Oh, I like that! Slytherin House preserving Druidic knowledge, which apparently involved at least some magic (not that we have super-reliable sources...). And you would have to be ambitious to take on a 20 year course of study, I would think. This presumes that they kept Druidic traditions alive in some form for centuries after the island was supposedly converted, but especially in the Potterverse where you can have ghosts to advise you about things that happened ages ago, this doesn't seem too hard to manage.

"Salazar" was a Basque surname. The Arabs called them "majus," wizards, and they apparently had some sort of snakey deity called Sugaar and a sea serpent deity called Herensuge. So maybe our Salazar Slytherin's father was a Basque priest/wizard who moved to Britain and married into a family with equivalent status to his, one of those Slytherins/Druids.

[oneandthetruth]

That would make a great fanfic!

Re Sugaar, this is from Wiki: In one myth Sugaar seduces a Scottish princess in the village of Mundaka to father the mythical first Lord of Biscay, Jaun Zuria. This legend is believed to be a fabrication made to legitimate the Lordship of Biscay as a separate state from Navarre, because there is no historical account of such a lord.

So there's a Scottish connection there already. Interestingly enough, Sugaar is a fire deity who makes thunderstorms with his mate, Mari. Since they combine fire and water, they're sort of a Gryffindor/Slytherin hybrid.

[sunnyskywalker]

Fire/Water - very nice!

Interestingly, one version of the Jaun Zuria story comes from "15th century warlord Lope García de Salázar." Distant cousins?