Harry Potter--Durmstrang

[orthent]

Do we have any definite canon to say that Durmstrang does not admit Muggle-borns? I remember Draco saying that his father considered sending him to Durmstrang, but IIRC, that was because the Dark Arts were taught there, rather than because the student body was all-pureblood.

Comments

[lunelight]

I'm looking through chapter 11, and I think I found it - it's mentioned by Malfoy on the Hogwarts Express, and the exact quote is:

"...Father actually considered sending me to Durmstrang rather than Hogwarts, you know. He knows the headmaster, you see. Well, you know his opinion of Dumbledore - that man's such a Mudblood-lover - and Durmstrang doesn't admit that sort of riffraff."

- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Scholastic 2000 hardcover edition, pg. 165.

[orthent]

Aha, thanks! My copy of GoF is at the bottom of a box right now, but I honestly didn't remember this part of the exchange.

[snowflakie06]

I could see it being canon as long as Karkaroff was the headmaster. However, I'm not sure once Karkaroff was no longer the headmaster as things may have changed.

[orthent]

The timeframe I have in mind is about 1850 through maybe 1918, so as i_paint_the_sky points out, this could be a loophole, with the admissions policy changing sometime afterward.

Of course it's not outside the realm of possibility that the OC I had in mind could have been educated somewhere else--Hogwarts or Beauxbatons, even. He's actually half-blood, a wizard alienist practicing at a magical hospital in Vienna in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and I'd wanted him to have a fairly prestigious education.

[askerian]

Well, one of the main (read, not openly racist) objections to muggleborns in magical schools is that they don't know the traditions of wizardkind. You could always argue that as a half-blood, he was raised like a wizard, in the old wizarding tradition of his ancestors, and so that makes him admissible to Durmstrang. Or maybe they just didn't talk about the nonmagical parent much, and let people assume he/she was just from some obscure, unimportant wizard family.

[orthent]

Blah, and I wasn't thinking very carefully about this character and his history, either. Considering it now, I don't see why he couldn't go to Durmstrang, though he might still be considered half-blood and "not really our sort" by some people. (IIRC, Tom calls Harry half-blood, so apparently to at least some people, you can be half-blood even if you have two magical parents, if one of them was Muggleborn.) The problem, if there is one, would have arisen earlier in his family history, with his father or grandfather