Why Would Anyone Go to School with a
Slytherin?
THE WRITER PICO IYER, WHO ATTENDED two of
Britain’s older boarding schools, the Dragon School and Eton, says
“much in the Harry Potter universe can seem familiar”:
Here are all the rites I remember as vividly as lemon drops: the cryptic list of instructions that would appear through the mail, describing what we must—and mustn’t—bring to school (the point of all the rules being not to make order so much as to enforce obedience); the trip to dusty old shops with creaky family names—New & Lingwood or Alden & Blackwell—where aged men would fit us out with the approved uniform and equipment, as they had done for our fathers and our fathers’ fathers; the special school train that would be waiting in a London station to transport us to our
Hogwarts is located in Scotland. Its appearance is not modeled on a real
building, says J. K. Rowling. The design comes from her
imagination.
It’s fitting that Harry begins each school year
with a ride on the Hogwarts Express. J. K.
Rowling thought up the stories during a train ride.
One could even say that the stranger the detail in
Rowling’s world, the closer it is to something as everyday to us as
gruel. Harry plays Quidditch, a peculiar game featuring “Bludgers”
and “Chasers” and “Quaffles”; we had three brutal sports not played
in any other school, the most savage of which had “walls” and
“behinds” and no official goal scored since 1909. At Harry’s
school, inscrutably, “the third-floor corridor on the right-hand
side is out of bounds”; at Eton, we were not allowed to walk on one
side of the main road through town (for reasons that were not
forthcoming). As for ghosts, we ate and slept and studied around
busts and portraits and the scribbled desktop signatures of [the
British prime ministers] Gladstone, Wellington and Pitt the
Elder.
But some people say that Hogwarts is quite different from most boarding schools. It is pleasant: the food is delicious and Harry sleeps in a four-poster bed. It is lenient: though disobedience may cost a few house points, the teachers are very forgiving. Most of all, Dumbledore has made it a place of eminent fairness.
Given how agreeable the school can be, one has
to wonder what the Slytherins are doing there. Every bit of trouble
seems to start with a Slytherin. There doesn’t seem to be a decent
student in that house. Its philosophy seems to be the same dark
thought expressed by Quirrell in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: “There is
no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek
it.” Salazar Slytherin, the Hogwarts founder for whom the house was
named, was so devious he even built the Chamber of Secrets under
the school without telling the
other founders. So wouldn’t it make sense to just get rid of
them?
J. K. Rowling has a soft spot for Kings Cross station in London, where the Hogwarts
Express stops, because that is where her mother and father
met.
See also: Durmstrang
Names
Actually, that would seem to be the opposite of
J. K. Rowling’s philosophy. In fact, the presence of Slytherins at
Hogwarts seems to say a lot about her ideas of good and evil.
Within the walls of Hogwarts, Dumbledore has
created an appealing ideal. Evil is not pushed away fearfully; or
simply met with force. It is to be countered with compassion. More
than once, Dumbledore has demonstrated a strong faith that fallen
wizards can redeem themselves.
Each of the four founders of Hogwarts had
individual qualities that form part of a balanced whole. Even
Slytherin’s ambition can be directed toward good—provided it is
balanced with the characteristics displayed by the others. It is
part of reality, part of every individual—just as Harry has a bit
of Voldemort in him. Trying to eliminate it would be silly, as well
as impossible.
For the many teachers and students who fail to
understand the role Hogwarts plays in bringing those qualities
together, the Sorting Hat’s new song in Phoenix—which expresses concern about splitting the
students in the first place—sends a clear message: don’t let small
differences divide you.