The Hogwarts Houses and Medieval Society
Nov. 30th, 2012 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerA lot of these ideas have appeared in various discussions, and I decided to roll them all up in one place.
fialleril mentioned recently that Gryffindor House’s values seem like the odd man out at Hogwarts. Hard work, wit, and ambition and cunning are all potentially useful academic qualities, but how are daring, nerve, and chivalry going to help you on your exams? Are they really the House of Jocks?
But we considered them in light of when Hogwarts was founded, and in fact, all four Houses might work quite well as segments of the medieval society in which they were founded.
Gryffindor’s artifact is a sword which appears under conditions of need and valor, he valued the “brave at heart,” the House ghost is Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, and the Sorting Hat says one attribute of Gryffindors is chivalry. Now, the Hat is a thousand years old. When it says chivalry, it doesn’t mean being polite and holding doors open for people; it means the medieval code of knightly chivalry. (Or at least that Gryffindors hold it as an ideal, whether or not they actually live up to it…) So Gryffindors are knights, including dukes and such too since they also ostensibly followed the code and rode off on the Crusades starting – what do you know – about nine hundred years ago, not too long after the founding of Hogwarts. Godric started out valuing courage, perhaps especially in battle, and Gryffindor House refined its values as knightly chivalry developed.
Ravenclaw values wit and learning. Clerical scholars, perhaps? (They even attract the occasional mystics, as demonstrated by modern-day Luna Lovegood.) Rowena’s artifact was a diadem, usually associated with royalty, which may indicate that she came from a royal family herself – which would make sense if she were an abbess or held some other high position in a convent where she honed her wit and learning, since many religious houses were highly selective and only accepted wealthy, well-born girls who could contribute large sums of money or land.
Hufflepuff, aka “the rest” or “the lot,” have their homes down by the kitchens, near the House-Elves, and are associated with the earth and Herbology and cooking charms. Well, who are “the rest,” once you take out the knights and nobles and scholars? Artisans. Shopkeepers. Yeoman farmers. Poor wandering friars. Serfs. This makes sense of their reputed loyalty, which doesn’t seem like much use on exams either and is not necessarily connected to hard work. No wonder the other Houses still see Hufflepuff as the house of losers. No wonder Neville, the talented Herbology student who initially is no good at combat (unlike his brave Gryffindor warrior parents), thinks he should have been in Hufflepuff. No wonder his grandmother finds this so disappointing: he’s acting below his station. (Intriguingly, Helga said she would “treat them just the same,” which makes you wonder if she had some radical ideas about egalitarianism.)
Slytherin, now, doesn’t quite seem to fit. In the present day, they seem to be the House of wealthy aristocrats. But ambition and cunning are not traditional aristocratic values – no, that would be Gryffindor’s chivalry. If you go by medieval stereotypes, Slytherin ought to be the House of Jewish merchants.
And you know, maybe they were. Groups can change their images and values in relatively short time. The Democratic Party in the US, for instance, started out as weak in New England and strong in the South, aligned with the interests of farmers and working people (including Irish Catholics), pro-Mexican War (to take the land for Anglo-American farmers), anti-aristocrat, anti-immigration, and increasingly pro-slavery and pro-segregation. As recently as 1948, Southern “Dixiecrats” temporarily split with the party because they thought it was getting too soft with all these ideas about racial integration in the military and such. Now, you can see some points of connection and how they could lead to the changes we saw – the focus on working classes and government measures to help increase equality and opportunity for them, for instance – but does a Southern-based, anti-immigration, pro-segregation, pro-war-for-land party sound much like the public image of the Democratic Party today? And Slytherin House has had a thousand years to slowly shift and change.
So, what did the original Slytherin House look like? In a previous post, I speculated based on his name that Salazar Slytherin was of Basque ancestry, and that he or his not-too-distant ancestors were probably church scholars or merchants because those professions offered opportunities for travel. So. Whatever religion Salazar himself professed, it would be plausible for him to have had contacts among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim merchants and/or scholars in Spain and possibly elsewhere. When he and his friends started a school, he was comfortable teaching students with similar backgrounds and values. Slytherin House might have kept in touch with his foreign contacts; those contacts had access to some great libraries (and perhaps some goblin craftsmen), after all. Jews and Muslims fleeing during the centuries of the Reconquista might have considered Hogsmeade – and Hogwarts – an option rather than simply moving further south in Spain, and found a welcome with their friends in Slytherin House. Jews from communities along the Rhine being attacked by Crusaders might have had similar ideas.
They might have kept in touch for other reasons as well. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, written in the seventeenth century by a German-Jewish businesswoman, depicts (among other things) contemporary marriage practices of European Jewish merchant families. A crucial point is just how widely Gluckel and her husband searched for suitable partners for their children: the kids married as far away as France and the Netherlands. This had many advantages, including having a place to stay when traveling (many inns did not accept Jews) – and a place to flee to, if necessary. Now, this is much later than early Slytherin House, but I haven’t found anything which says 11th-century Jews never married outside their local communities despite traveling all over the place on business. (Seriously, they were in Egypt and India and everywhere. And Arab merchants got all the way to China. See Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350 by Janet Abu-Lughod, among other things, for more.) Jewish and Muslim Slytherins might well have considered their co-religionists from the Continent and North Africa good marriage partners too.
There is still the Sorting Hat’s comment that Salazar Slytherin wanted to teach “those whose ancestry is purest,” which doesn’t sound like he meant those with the most Jews in the family. If my speculations on Slytherin’s origins among the magic-dominant Basque community and/or Danny Sparks’s ideas on “purity” relating more to moral standing and/or type of magic used are anywhere near the mark, then he might have meant that he wanted to teach kids from families known to be morally upstanding and/or with a history of participation in and allegiance to the magical community. This could be for a variety of reasons, from security – likely a concern, given Binns’s comment that Sal didn’t “trust” Muggleborns – to finding it easier to teach kids who already have some magical understanding.
Add it all together and we start seeing how Slytherin and Gryffindor Houses could have ended up with their current reputations. Gryffindors might well have valued a noble heritage, but magic would be only one factor in defining “nobility.” Titles and land would be just as attractive, and Muggles would be as likely to have those as magicals, if not more. And the rest make such good subjects and tenants! Slytherins would have motive to be wary of Muggles long before the witch-burnings started – the Muggles were already out to get them. Preserving their traditions, including via carefully marrying only within certain circles, would be something they became known for, above and beyond simply marrying people of the “right” class as Gryffindors also did. It just wasn’t the “blood purity” Slytherins are known for today. They also would have had reasons for an Eastern European connection which appears to have been preserved to this day – hello there, Dolohov and Durmstrang buddies! And Slytherin was the odd House out, the suspect House, the House of foreigners and heretics. You know. Those people of low cunning who control all the money and want to rule us all. How quickly “cunning” in the old sense of being knowledgeable could have shifted to “cunning” in today’s sense, if Slytherin House was associated with the stereotypes held about Jews.
I want to emphasize that these House associations wouldn’t have been very rigid. Not all Slytherins were Jewish merchants, obviously, and not all magical Jews were Slytherins. Those with a more scholarly bent might just as well have ended up in Ravenclaw. (Given that Houses often run in families, it is interesting to note that Anthony Goldstein, who was there in seventh year and therefore not Muggleborn, is in Ravenclaw.) Some nobles, like the Bloody Baron, ended up in Slytherin rather than Gryffindor. (As a side note, the Baron, who was around during the generation after the Founders, might have been in just the right period to ambitiously go on the First Crusade to win fame and fortune and, incidentally, mix with a bunch of foreigners.) Ravenclaw, if it had a tendency to attract clerical scholars, would also have international ties, given that the Christian Church also cut across national boundaries. Some serfs would have ended up in Gryffindor, some nobles would have been Hufflepuffs (Loyaulte me lie, anyone?), some Gryffindor nobles would have gone on Crusades or held lands in both England and France and so had lots of foreign ties, etc. All that is necessary for this idea to work is that Slytherin House have a Founder with foreign “heretic” connections and a very slight bias toward welcoming such witches and wizards. Just enough to get the reputation.
Over the centuries, any initial associations would be bound to shift, especially given the tiny size of the English wizarding community. A foreign wife now and then would not make it much less insular. The occasional Jewish wizard might convert and, if he had wealth or useful ties, marry into a traditional Gryffindor family, bringing his mistrust of Muggle society to mix with their ideas about noble blood. Mistrust of Muggles would easily have led to mistrust of Muggle-borns – can you trust their families not to break out the pitchforks if they hear about a family of Jews who are also witches? There’s a reason to marry within the magical community which has nothing to do with blood purity, at least not initially.
After centuries of this – and especially after the witch craze, when all witches and wizards started seeing Muggles as potentially dangerous , and the resultant Statute of Secrecy, which isolated the wizarding community even more – it would hardly be surprising if “preserving traditional values and the family” shifted in a more strongly anti-Muggle direction. And so you end up with a few “old” families determined to marry only those from other magical families, mistrustful of Muggles, with a lot of money and a belief that their noble heritage makes them better than everyone else. Their ancestors might not have recognized these new Slytherins.
Meanwhile, other old families such as the Longbottoms, Potters, Weasleys, and Prewetts remained traditionally Gryffindor, also continued to marry only other magicals (until James broke tradition in the Potter line, but Frank, Alice, Molly, and Arthur all made Pureblood marriages), and to this day still mistrust foreigners and believe that those swarming, stupid (but quaint!) Muggles should be protected and worthy Muggleborns incorporated as useful members of society. (They make good sidekicks and helpmeets when they’re appropriately grateful to their Gryffindor sponsors!) Hufflepuff remains a House of stay-at-home follower types who are known for being good with their hands and are looked down on by the other Houses. Ravenclaws are still scholarly with the occasional mystic and an international bent – the natural hosts for visiting Beaubatons students.
And Slytherins, enough of them having social-climbed successfully, are now the snobby aristocrats – while simultaneously still being known and loathed as the sneaky, cowardly lowlifes who look like monkeys or bats and have big noses and greasy hair and conspire for world domination, even as they supposedly already rule it. Except if they did, why would a total outsider like Hermione clue in almost immediately that Gryffindor was supposed to be the “best” house? Slytherins do in fact control a lot these days, but Gryffindors still have a decent lock on their traditional position as the arbiters of what constitutes nobility in the wizarding world. And they still despise those untrustworthy, quasi-foreign social climbers.
fialleril mentioned recently that Gryffindor House’s values seem like the odd man out at Hogwarts. Hard work, wit, and ambition and cunning are all potentially useful academic qualities, but how are daring, nerve, and chivalry going to help you on your exams? Are they really the House of Jocks?But we considered them in light of when Hogwarts was founded, and in fact, all four Houses might work quite well as segments of the medieval society in which they were founded.
Gryffindor’s artifact is a sword which appears under conditions of need and valor, he valued the “brave at heart,” the House ghost is Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, and the Sorting Hat says one attribute of Gryffindors is chivalry. Now, the Hat is a thousand years old. When it says chivalry, it doesn’t mean being polite and holding doors open for people; it means the medieval code of knightly chivalry. (Or at least that Gryffindors hold it as an ideal, whether or not they actually live up to it…) So Gryffindors are knights, including dukes and such too since they also ostensibly followed the code and rode off on the Crusades starting – what do you know – about nine hundred years ago, not too long after the founding of Hogwarts. Godric started out valuing courage, perhaps especially in battle, and Gryffindor House refined its values as knightly chivalry developed.
Ravenclaw values wit and learning. Clerical scholars, perhaps? (They even attract the occasional mystics, as demonstrated by modern-day Luna Lovegood.) Rowena’s artifact was a diadem, usually associated with royalty, which may indicate that she came from a royal family herself – which would make sense if she were an abbess or held some other high position in a convent where she honed her wit and learning, since many religious houses were highly selective and only accepted wealthy, well-born girls who could contribute large sums of money or land.
Hufflepuff, aka “the rest” or “the lot,” have their homes down by the kitchens, near the House-Elves, and are associated with the earth and Herbology and cooking charms. Well, who are “the rest,” once you take out the knights and nobles and scholars? Artisans. Shopkeepers. Yeoman farmers. Poor wandering friars. Serfs. This makes sense of their reputed loyalty, which doesn’t seem like much use on exams either and is not necessarily connected to hard work. No wonder the other Houses still see Hufflepuff as the house of losers. No wonder Neville, the talented Herbology student who initially is no good at combat (unlike his brave Gryffindor warrior parents), thinks he should have been in Hufflepuff. No wonder his grandmother finds this so disappointing: he’s acting below his station. (Intriguingly, Helga said she would “treat them just the same,” which makes you wonder if she had some radical ideas about egalitarianism.)
Slytherin, now, doesn’t quite seem to fit. In the present day, they seem to be the House of wealthy aristocrats. But ambition and cunning are not traditional aristocratic values – no, that would be Gryffindor’s chivalry. If you go by medieval stereotypes, Slytherin ought to be the House of Jewish merchants.
And you know, maybe they were. Groups can change their images and values in relatively short time. The Democratic Party in the US, for instance, started out as weak in New England and strong in the South, aligned with the interests of farmers and working people (including Irish Catholics), pro-Mexican War (to take the land for Anglo-American farmers), anti-aristocrat, anti-immigration, and increasingly pro-slavery and pro-segregation. As recently as 1948, Southern “Dixiecrats” temporarily split with the party because they thought it was getting too soft with all these ideas about racial integration in the military and such. Now, you can see some points of connection and how they could lead to the changes we saw – the focus on working classes and government measures to help increase equality and opportunity for them, for instance – but does a Southern-based, anti-immigration, pro-segregation, pro-war-for-land party sound much like the public image of the Democratic Party today? And Slytherin House has had a thousand years to slowly shift and change.
So, what did the original Slytherin House look like? In a previous post, I speculated based on his name that Salazar Slytherin was of Basque ancestry, and that he or his not-too-distant ancestors were probably church scholars or merchants because those professions offered opportunities for travel. So. Whatever religion Salazar himself professed, it would be plausible for him to have had contacts among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim merchants and/or scholars in Spain and possibly elsewhere. When he and his friends started a school, he was comfortable teaching students with similar backgrounds and values. Slytherin House might have kept in touch with his foreign contacts; those contacts had access to some great libraries (and perhaps some goblin craftsmen), after all. Jews and Muslims fleeing during the centuries of the Reconquista might have considered Hogsmeade – and Hogwarts – an option rather than simply moving further south in Spain, and found a welcome with their friends in Slytherin House. Jews from communities along the Rhine being attacked by Crusaders might have had similar ideas.
They might have kept in touch for other reasons as well. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, written in the seventeenth century by a German-Jewish businesswoman, depicts (among other things) contemporary marriage practices of European Jewish merchant families. A crucial point is just how widely Gluckel and her husband searched for suitable partners for their children: the kids married as far away as France and the Netherlands. This had many advantages, including having a place to stay when traveling (many inns did not accept Jews) – and a place to flee to, if necessary. Now, this is much later than early Slytherin House, but I haven’t found anything which says 11th-century Jews never married outside their local communities despite traveling all over the place on business. (Seriously, they were in Egypt and India and everywhere. And Arab merchants got all the way to China. See Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350 by Janet Abu-Lughod, among other things, for more.) Jewish and Muslim Slytherins might well have considered their co-religionists from the Continent and North Africa good marriage partners too.
There is still the Sorting Hat’s comment that Salazar Slytherin wanted to teach “those whose ancestry is purest,” which doesn’t sound like he meant those with the most Jews in the family. If my speculations on Slytherin’s origins among the magic-dominant Basque community and/or Danny Sparks’s ideas on “purity” relating more to moral standing and/or type of magic used are anywhere near the mark, then he might have meant that he wanted to teach kids from families known to be morally upstanding and/or with a history of participation in and allegiance to the magical community. This could be for a variety of reasons, from security – likely a concern, given Binns’s comment that Sal didn’t “trust” Muggleborns – to finding it easier to teach kids who already have some magical understanding.
Add it all together and we start seeing how Slytherin and Gryffindor Houses could have ended up with their current reputations. Gryffindors might well have valued a noble heritage, but magic would be only one factor in defining “nobility.” Titles and land would be just as attractive, and Muggles would be as likely to have those as magicals, if not more. And the rest make such good subjects and tenants! Slytherins would have motive to be wary of Muggles long before the witch-burnings started – the Muggles were already out to get them. Preserving their traditions, including via carefully marrying only within certain circles, would be something they became known for, above and beyond simply marrying people of the “right” class as Gryffindors also did. It just wasn’t the “blood purity” Slytherins are known for today. They also would have had reasons for an Eastern European connection which appears to have been preserved to this day – hello there, Dolohov and Durmstrang buddies! And Slytherin was the odd House out, the suspect House, the House of foreigners and heretics. You know. Those people of low cunning who control all the money and want to rule us all. How quickly “cunning” in the old sense of being knowledgeable could have shifted to “cunning” in today’s sense, if Slytherin House was associated with the stereotypes held about Jews.
I want to emphasize that these House associations wouldn’t have been very rigid. Not all Slytherins were Jewish merchants, obviously, and not all magical Jews were Slytherins. Those with a more scholarly bent might just as well have ended up in Ravenclaw. (Given that Houses often run in families, it is interesting to note that Anthony Goldstein, who was there in seventh year and therefore not Muggleborn, is in Ravenclaw.) Some nobles, like the Bloody Baron, ended up in Slytherin rather than Gryffindor. (As a side note, the Baron, who was around during the generation after the Founders, might have been in just the right period to ambitiously go on the First Crusade to win fame and fortune and, incidentally, mix with a bunch of foreigners.) Ravenclaw, if it had a tendency to attract clerical scholars, would also have international ties, given that the Christian Church also cut across national boundaries. Some serfs would have ended up in Gryffindor, some nobles would have been Hufflepuffs (Loyaulte me lie, anyone?), some Gryffindor nobles would have gone on Crusades or held lands in both England and France and so had lots of foreign ties, etc. All that is necessary for this idea to work is that Slytherin House have a Founder with foreign “heretic” connections and a very slight bias toward welcoming such witches and wizards. Just enough to get the reputation.
Over the centuries, any initial associations would be bound to shift, especially given the tiny size of the English wizarding community. A foreign wife now and then would not make it much less insular. The occasional Jewish wizard might convert and, if he had wealth or useful ties, marry into a traditional Gryffindor family, bringing his mistrust of Muggle society to mix with their ideas about noble blood. Mistrust of Muggles would easily have led to mistrust of Muggle-borns – can you trust their families not to break out the pitchforks if they hear about a family of Jews who are also witches? There’s a reason to marry within the magical community which has nothing to do with blood purity, at least not initially.
After centuries of this – and especially after the witch craze, when all witches and wizards started seeing Muggles as potentially dangerous , and the resultant Statute of Secrecy, which isolated the wizarding community even more – it would hardly be surprising if “preserving traditional values and the family” shifted in a more strongly anti-Muggle direction. And so you end up with a few “old” families determined to marry only those from other magical families, mistrustful of Muggles, with a lot of money and a belief that their noble heritage makes them better than everyone else. Their ancestors might not have recognized these new Slytherins.
Meanwhile, other old families such as the Longbottoms, Potters, Weasleys, and Prewetts remained traditionally Gryffindor, also continued to marry only other magicals (until James broke tradition in the Potter line, but Frank, Alice, Molly, and Arthur all made Pureblood marriages), and to this day still mistrust foreigners and believe that those swarming, stupid (but quaint!) Muggles should be protected and worthy Muggleborns incorporated as useful members of society. (They make good sidekicks and helpmeets when they’re appropriately grateful to their Gryffindor sponsors!) Hufflepuff remains a House of stay-at-home follower types who are known for being good with their hands and are looked down on by the other Houses. Ravenclaws are still scholarly with the occasional mystic and an international bent – the natural hosts for visiting Beaubatons students.
And Slytherins, enough of them having social-climbed successfully, are now the snobby aristocrats – while simultaneously still being known and loathed as the sneaky, cowardly lowlifes who look like monkeys or bats and have big noses and greasy hair and conspire for world domination, even as they supposedly already rule it. Except if they did, why would a total outsider like Hermione clue in almost immediately that Gryffindor was supposed to be the “best” house? Slytherins do in fact control a lot these days, but Gryffindors still have a decent lock on their traditional position as the arbiters of what constitutes nobility in the wizarding world. And they still despise those untrustworthy, quasi-foreign social climbers.
