Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.
Note: This is an experimental piece (as of 2nd January, 2022) and a one-shot. A version of it was posted by me last year on a different website under my penname there.
Warning: This piece is a PARODY, and is rated as 'M' to be on the safe side on account of references to hyper-inflation of the economic variety, and possible future expansions of this project.
Sunday, 9th January, 1977
"Do you know what day it is today?"
Lily Evans, sixth year Gryffindor pupil and prefect, stared at the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry across his desk, wondering why he'd asked her that question?
"It's the ninth, sir. Of January. And a Sunday." she said, hoping that this was the information or response which he was seeking.
"Ah." said Professor Dumbledore. "But it is more than just that. I have belatedly gotten word that the goblins are making trouble."
He looked at her.
"Uh, they are?" Lily said.
Professor Dumbledore sighed, as if this was the kind of response that he had been expecting, but hoping not to receive.
"Do you know what Creaothceann is, Miss Evans?" Professor Dumbledore looked at her.
"Something to do with the goblins?" Lily hazarded wildly.
"Creaothceann, Miss Evans, as you would know, had you been paying attention in History of Magic classes, was something which almost wiped witches and wizards out half a millennium ago, although it was a symptom, rather than the root cause." Professor Dumbledore said. "It was a popular sport played by witches and wizards in which it was entirely normal for only two out of the twelve participants to start off to survive, and it was popular for several hundred years. It spread worldwide and killed, by a considerable margin, far more witches and wizards than any other single cause in the entire known history of magic. Even Dragon Pox deaths come at least an order of magnitude in terms of casualties below that of the death toll claimed by Creaothceann. Deaths of witches and wizards inflicted by muggle witch-hunts utterly paled by comparison. And this, Miss Evans, was something which witches and wizards did voluntarily to themselves. We are individually and collectively capable of acts of suicidal madness which would make a metaphorical lemming blink in surprise. We are, in short, all idiots, and I cannot, alas, entirely exclude myself from that statement. I certainly had moments of extreme folly in my own youth."
Lily suspected that, although Professor Dumbledore no doubt had a point about the majority of witches and wizards, he was being somewhat modest there on his own account – it wasn't possible for him, surely, to have done anything silly, was it? She struggled to think of anything idiotic which Professor Dumbledore might have done, but only mad ideas like him falling in love with Gellert Grindelwald and plotting to conquer the world with him would come to her, and that was hardly plausible.
"If you say so sir." she responded, easily.
She was pretty certain that Professor Dumbledore was no more of an idiot than she herself was.
"Anyway: we are capable of great idiocy." Professor Dumbledore said. "And unfortunately an Heir of Godric Gryffindor has at long last surfaced. The line was believed to have gone extinct, centuries ago, at least as far as anyone capable of utilising a wand goes – there were rumours of some men and women of squib descent who had melted into the muggle population – and that there were no witches or wizards of known descent from him, who could be considered as actual living breathing legal entities, rather than clever hypotheticals and fictions, was as solid a fact as one could wish for, at least up until earlier today. That was when the goblins struck, and at this point, we start to run into severe problems caused by that witch and wizard idiocy which I believe I may have mentioned." Professor Dumbledore took a photograph – a magical one with slightly moving figures in it – and pushed it across the desk to her. "Do you know what that is, Miss Evans?"
Lily studied the picture.
"It looks like a bank vault full of gold to me, sir." she said. "There are a couple of goblins in what look like Gringotts uniforms in the picture." She paused a moment, then added: "And it looks like a very big bank vault."
"Alas, that is indeed what it is." Professor Dumbledore. "I must ask you now if you know about muggle history, and in particular Weimar Germany?"
"What's Weimar Germany?" Lily stared at him, hopelessly lost.
"Weimar Germany conducted an experiment with printing money, Miss Evans." Professor Dumbledore said. "They owed a lot of people a lot of money, and so the government thought, naturally, that by printing money it would solve their problems. Witches and Wizards do not have a complete monopoly on idiocy. The problem which Weimar Germany discovered was that the more of their money that there was, the less and less that money was worth, and the more of it that they made, the more worthless it became. In the end it was cheaper for muggles in Weimar Germany to burn banknotes to cook or to stay warm than the coal which those banknotes could have bought. Now, in the magical world, we have been carrying out our own version of printing money for hundreds of years; my colleague Nicolas Flamel has manufactured truly eye-watering quantities of gold over time, to keep the magical economy going. The thing is, in our case, it has not gone wrong up until today, because a rather clever mechanism called 'Gryffindor Scutage' has sucked excess quantities of gold out of circulation, and deposited them in vaults assigned to the ownership of the believed-to-be-non-existent Heir of Gryffindor."
The headmaster paused and added a quick aside here: "Note that in Wizarding law, for a number of reasons, property must 'belong' to someone, but the law does not care if the 'someone' to whom property is assigned is someone who exists solely as a hereditary title of a believed extinct line – it has a hypothetical entity to place on legal documents of all kinds."
And then he cleared his throat, drew a long breath, and resumed his main explanation: "At any rate, as a result of this scutage, we have never had too much money in circulation, so we have largely avoided the economic troubles of the Weimar Republic. I apologise for my wordiness, here, Miss Evans, but I am trying to give you as clear an explanation as I can manage leading into a crucial point: that Gringotts in London has twelve vaults full of gold like the one in this picture, the contents of which belong to 'The Heir of Gryffindor' and there are more in other places in the world. This is not the end of our problems, however, although the problems if an Heir emerged and started spending even a tenth of this might well be ruinous. Things are very tight here in Wizarding Britain in the Wizengamot, at present, with the war on, and unfortunately the Heir of Gryffindor has control of four Wizengamot votes, at least one of which is currently being used by a wizard prudent in their use of it and generally supportive of the current Ministry. These votes will all come under the control of the Heir of Gryffindor that the goblins have discovered, who may not be as supportive of the current Ministry. And even if those four votes should prove not sufficient in and of themselves to overturn the current Ministry, the Heir of Gryffindor has certain traditions and privileges which have accumulated over the centuries and which would allow him – if he so desired – to overturn current rulings and bans and to install, say, Lord Voldemort as an active member of the Wizengamot if he so desired. Unfortunately, the belief that there was no actual Heir of Gryffindor, and that there never would be one again, led to the Wizengamot and Ministry devising all sorts of political and legal devices relating to said Heir, as a convenience and in the certainty that the position never would be filled again."
Lily's head was starting to ache. She was sure that she'd lost track of several important details, and wished she had one of those muggle cassette recorder devices that she could use to go back over that long explanation several times; but as it was, she hoped that she had got the gist of it.
"I think I get what you're saying, sir – that it's potentially very bad news that there is an heir, but just who is it, and what's it got to do with me?"
"The Heir of Gryffindor," Professor Dumbledore said, "with tremendous financial and political clout is, it turns out, the half-blood son of a muggle who was descended from one of those squibs I referred to earlier and which muggle married a witch. The muggle's name is Tobias Snape, and his son, the Heir, is called Severus. He is in your year, I believe, and you are at least loosely acquainted with him."
"What? Snivellus?" Lily exploded. "Him? That slimy serpent; that muggle-born hater; that junior Death Eater? Him, The Heir of Gryffindor?"
"You exaggerate, fortunately, or at least I hope so, on at least one of those points." Professor Dumbledore said. "You are correct, however, in your assessment that the situation is grave. Fortunately, although Severus came of age, and should have come into his inheritance today, the goblins are playing games of their own, for their own ends, and we have a little time to make what we can of this mess; the result of hundreds of years of witch and wizard idiocy and laziness. The goblins are heavily involved in things, as the original makers of the artefact known as The Sword of Gryffindor, which is important to things, and they have on a technicality been able to erect impediments until Easter, when Mr. Snape must with their assistance select a consort. You come of age as a witch at the end of this month, Miss Evans, and I believe, with your cooperation, that we might try to make the best of a bad situation if you apply to be considered as a possible consort – although I fear that there will be competition, not least from those directly allied to the Death Eater cause, and it would without doubt require uncommon bravery and personal courage for a witch to walk into this with her eyes open as to what was taking place."
"I'll do it." Lily said, through gritted teeth.
Author Notes (to be updated as necessary, depending on early reviews)
As a reminder, this piece is identified as 'parody'.
Quite a few of the cool writers out there have written fanfictions of varying qualities where someone-or-other (often Harry Potter) turns out to be an 'Heir of Gryffindor' so I thought it might be interesting for me to give the idea a go as parody. So regular features which show up in 'Heir of Gryffindor' fanfictions (that I have noticed) have been checked off, such as scheming Albus, mountains of gold in bank vaults, critical votes in the Wizengamot, and the goblins being involved in some capacity and - since this is parody after all - the 'Heir of Gryffindor' turns out to be Severus Snape.
For those interested, Creaothceann is mentioned in the 2001 charity publication Quidditch through the Ages, along with the eye-watering casualty count amongst participants that Albus Dumbledore gives in this piece. To briefly summarise, Creaothceann involved witches and wizards flying on broomsticks with cauldrons strapped to their heads, trying to catch falling rocks in the cauldrons on their heads...
Weimar Germany in the real world had a problem with hyper-inflation in between the First and Second World Wars, contributed to substantially by runaway printing of bank notes. If Nicolas Flamel is assumed to have been manufacturing large quantities of gold in the Wizarding World, by use of his Philosopher's Stone, it seems to me that some kind of mechanisms must have become necessary to remove gold from circulation in the Wizarding World to avoid the value of gold collapsing and potentially taking out the global wizarding economy (or at least those parts of it which involved gold as currency or trade good) with it.
As far as I know, at the time of the writing of these Author Notes in January 2022, there is no 'Heir or Gryffindor' identified in the actual original books, although given that there is mention of at least one 'Heir of Slytherin', it is understandable why other fanfiction writers before me have extrapolated and run with the existence of such a thing.
Yes Albus is telling Lily that he wants to try and ship her with Severus Snape, by means of this goblin run 'consort selection' process (although 'contest' would be a more accurate description than 'process'.) Albus (since this is parody, and Albus is in 'manipulative schemer' mode) is actually by no means counting on Lily somehow winning the contest, but Albus wants an obvious candidate associated with him entered, since that will be expected by the goblins, and he will want it to look as if he has made some effort, so that the goblins hopefully (from Albus' point of view) will not be looking for whatever else it is which Albus has planned. Lily doesn't have a clue that Albus could be scheming anything, and trusts her headmaster implicitly.
This piece is an experimental one-shot.