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Post by Author By Night on Feb 15, 2009 11:19:06 GMT -5
What would wizarding Britain have been like in 992 AD? Were they scattered about, or huddled in small villages? Did any muggles know about them, or were they always in hiding?
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Post by doriscrockford on Feb 22, 2009 18:03:07 GMT -5
This is a really interesting question. My initial guess was that wizards were scattered throughout the country, some being persecuted for their oddness, others (who have perhaps used their abilities more efficiently) revered as leaders, healers or farmers. But we are told it's rare for wizard families to have squib family members, so maybe there were wizarding villages at this early age (where was Merlin reputedly from?) and if so, I think they must have kept the truth about their abilities at least partially secret.
I loved Arabella's story about the Four Founders and would be interested in other fics about this era (hint, hint).
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Post by loreleilynn on Feb 22, 2009 18:56:53 GMT -5
I wrote a fic where Helga decided to start a school because she thought most wizarding parents were doing a poor job educating their children at home. By attracting experts in various fields to one place, all wizard children would learn more. It never made it into my story, but I imagined that the village of Hogsmeade developed AFTER the school was started and got its name from the fact the butcher's wife brewed the best mead and founded the Hog's Head pub.
I also like the idea that many early medieval rulers would have had court wizards. However, the mistrust of wizards by the common people led to the witch hunts and the end of the practice by the Renaissance. (I liked the bit in "Beadle the Bard" about Henry VI's insanity.)
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Post by vegablack on Mar 10, 2009 17:21:51 GMT -5
I think at times the leaders themselves would have instigated attacks. Not all of such acts are instigated by the mob. Prince John drove the Jews out of Britain as an act of state to strengthen himself. The French Monarch King Philip was completely behind the destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar because he owed them so much money. The other monarchs helped him because they realized that they could seize their abundant property if they were destroyed as heretics. Isabella of Spain drove the Jews out of Spain as part of a program of creating national unity -- one God, one faith, one monarch. The massacre of the French protestants during the St. Bartholomew's day massacre was ordered by the Catherine D'Medici and her son the reigning monarch partly in response to anti-protestant feeling and resentment of tolerance in the Parisian mob and partly for political gain.
In all these instances the leader had previously been tolerant to the attacked people and then chose himself to turn on them
Perhaps rulers who viewed the wizards as a whole or a particular wizard instigated a campaign of terror against witches.
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Post by MWPP on Mar 10, 2009 19:11:40 GMT -5
Beowulf is set around the end of the 900s, and assorted Scandinavians were regularly invading to wreak havoc around then, so fortresses and "huddled together" would be the order of the day. Here's a fun site with some thumbnails of the time. And it is right at the cross-over between The Dark Ages and Medieval times. Anyhow, that would explain why The Founders created a fortress with tricky access for the school to be in. Even though that's all muggle history, it influences a lot in JKR's stories. [For one thing, it explains why Tom Riddle had so much time to discover so much at Hogwarts. It would have been the time when the Muggle world was involved in the second Great War and Dumbledore was fretting over what to do about Grindelwald...but that's not this thread.] People were changing from unwritten and uneducated to much more finessed ways of life, so this could be why Hogwarts was created at that particular point in time. There was a lot of emphasis on learning and keeping track of that learning from Alfred the Great and onward. .
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Post by vegablack on Mar 11, 2009 11:00:46 GMT -5
Good point about the events of the period of the founding. This explains a lot about why the students were taught in an inaccessible protected place.
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Post by kelleypen on Mar 15, 2009 9:35:37 GMT -5
doris crawford,
Antoniaeast ,or lilytarn is her lj fic depository, has some wonderful founder ficlets. I keep trying to get her to write more.
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Post by doriscrockford on Mar 18, 2009 6:20:52 GMT -5
Thanks, kelleypen. You get a karma point for that.
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Post by queenie on Apr 9, 2009 13:28:59 GMT -5
In my fanfic, The Ollivander Children, I have an invented book called The Ballad of Lady Wren Ravenclaw and Good Sister Helga (A Historie of No Little Importance) written by Allison Bath. It's meant to be a sort of Canterbury Tales-esque retelling of the early lives of Rowena Ravenclaw and Helga Hufflepuff - Middle English language, iambic pentameter, the works. I also treat it as sort of a Wizarding Anne of Green Gables in terms of its intended audience and the beloved 'classic' status that it's gained over the years.
Now, no excerpts from the book appear in the story, but I do have a bit of a history developed for them. Helga, for example, was a foundling left on the steps of a convent, and was raised to be a nun until Rowena found her. I thought that Helga's values would have been compatible with early life in a convent. Rowena Ravenclaw, on the other hand, I figured was married at a young age to a man much older than she (in a Wife of Bath sort of way), a man who did not know she was a witch. Eventually he dies, but she's pregnant with his child (hence Helena Ravenclaw.)
... Now that I think about it, that's pretty mature stuff for an Anne of Green Gables parallel to deal with. But, that's my idea for what two of the Founders' early lives might have been like. What do you think?
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Post by vegablack on Apr 17, 2009 13:34:39 GMT -5
Sounds great to me. Wizards would have been ahead of their time if they had literature for children written that early. The plot sounds fine to me for the story. Maybe it became beloved by teens in our time. The way Gulliver's travels was written for adults but now is rewritten for kids.
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