A/N: This is a bit of an experiment as a chapter and I'm curious to see how you the readers react to it. And yes, I fall in the "Dumbledore manipulated people like chess pieces" camp. If you don't like that, you don't have to read further. Title from a Jethro Tull lyric.
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The Quibbler: August 2009
Revision of History of Magic Course at Hogwarts Adds New Text By War Heroine!
Article and Interview by Tracey Davis
History of Magic, the course long used as a nap time by Hogwarts students due to the drone of a ghostly instructor, has since the War been deeply overhauled by Headmistress McGonagall, the Hogwarts Board, and other concerned parties. The ghost of Cuthbert Binns (1675-1805) was, starting with the 1998-1999 year, replaced by living professor Reginald Smith. However, the overhaul did not stop with a professor who actually cared if his students slept through the lecture. Long in coming, Hermione Delacour-Granger has been working with Headmistress McGonagall, amongst others, on a new book specifically designed for the Hogwarts history curriculum, which she has been instrumental in revising. The new release is first in a series of books that will be published over the next decade as the revisions to the course are reflected in updated OWL and NEWT tests as well as the requirement for students to take all seven years of history, instead of being able to drop the course post-OWL as was previously allowed.
Headmistress McGonagall had this to say, "I long fought against the ability of students to stop taking History classes. A student without a firm grasp of our own history is simply not prepared to understand their place in magical society, nor to truly function as a citizen of Magical Britain. An Acceptable or better on both the OWL and NEWT exams is now required for graduation from Hogwarts. While Bagshot's A History of Magic has its place as a groundbreaking work, it no longer fully meets the needs of our students. As a result, I commissioned Ms. Delacour-Granger to produce a new text for the course. Her Masteries in Magical and Muggle History, as well as her position as a history-maker herself, makes her best suited for this revision."
The new text, Magical Britain in the 20th Century, starts where Bagshot's seminal text leaves off. Focusing on the rise and fall of Grindelwald as well as the two Voldemort Wars, this book is unusual in that it includes first-person interviews with many of the major and minor figures of the times, including the first ghost ever to be interviewed for a school text. It also includes what muggles call a timeline – a chronological graphic display of historical events, as well as information on how the Grindelwald War was related to the muggle Second World War, the Nazi Movement, and the Holocaust (see sidebar).
I spoke with Ms Delacour-Granger at her home in London.
TD: Tell me what you remember about the History of Magic course at Hogwarts.
HDG: I remember my friends sleeping through it. (laughs) I think I was the only Gryffindor who didn't fall asleep regularly. The only time I recall Professor Binns actually answering a question was when I asked about the Chamber of Secrets during my second year.
TD: In regards to that, how did you distance yourself enough to write about events you yourself participated in?
HDG: Well, it was a challenge. Especially as I had to sit down with various friends and relatives to interview them about different events. But a muggle proverb says that history is written by the victors, so… I did put a disclaimer in the text stating that yes, I was that Hermione Granger, and that yes I was writing about things I did. It helped that I used several different people as pre-readers.
TD: So who had read this book prior to publication?
HDG: (laughs) I used Harry [Potter] as my primary pre-reader. He always, always fell asleep during Binns' lectures unless I poked him awake. And while he does like history, to some extent, he was never fond of Bagshot's book. I think he read the first few chapters prior to the start of first year and rarely cracked it open after that unless it involved an essay or test. I figured that if I could keep him engaged in the text, it would work for any student. Luna [Lovegood-Potter] read it as well, and Fleur [Delacour-Granger], and I had Andromeda Tonks look it over. It depended on the chapters. The ones regarding the Second War I passed around quite a bit amongst my friends, especially as many of them were interviewed for that section. I interviewed the entire surviving Defense Association and Order of the Phoenix that would let me, and several of them served as pre-readers for those chapters detailing the War. In fact, you read a few chapters.
TD: I did. I've read several of the other histories of the War and you're the only one to interview or discuss any Slytherin involvement that wasn't on the side of the Death Eaters.
HDG: I've noticed that. I think it's a result of long-held prejudice. Several Slytherins at Hogwarts were key components of the Defense Association's work there. You and Daphne [Finnegan, nee Greengrass] were instrumental in distracting the Carrows and getting supplies to those who were trapped in the Room of Requirement. Some of the current histories say that every single Slytherin was escorted from the Great Hall and that none fought on the side of the Light during the Battle. I know many were sent away, we can't deny the number of Death Eaters who came from Slytherin house, but I did see quite a few current and former Slytherins fighting with me. Yourself, Daphne, her sister Astoria snuck back with Colin [Creevey, deceased], of course Professor Slughorn was there, and several of the younger Slytherins you and Daphne had protected and tutored returned to help with the wounded afterwards. Their knowledge of healing charms was life-saving.
TD: Does your book discuss that anti-Slytherin prejudice?
HDG: Yes, I think it's necessary in understanding the rise of Tom Riddle and his followers. There's an entire chapter devoted to it. I know that Hogwarts: A History states that Salazar Slytherin left the school after a disagreement over blood purity, but that's simply not supported by any of the source material from the period or soon afterwards. Slytherin only becomes associated with blood purity in the fourteenth century, during the worst of the witch burnings. Before that, it's only mentioned that he left after the death of his daughter in childbirth.
I know that the books I read prior to starting Hogwarts painted Slytherin as a dark house, a place of prejudice. And I know Harry was told, I think it was said, that there wasn't a wizard that didn't go bad that wasn't a Slytherin. I know the Muggleborn Information Packet said that a muggleborn had not been Sorted into that house in four hundred years. Apparently none of us are cunning enough. (laughs)
TD: There's something interesting about someone's Sorting in regards to Slytherin house that you include in the book.
HDG: I knew you would bring that up. While what's said under the Sorting Hat is generally considered fairly private, I don't think it's uncommon knowledge amongst my circle of friends that I was almost Sorted into Ravenclaw. What is rather uncommon knowledge, or was before today, is that Harry Potter was almost put into Slytherin House. Now, ignoring how dangerous that would have been to his health to be in the same dorm as the children of many Death Eaters who escaped prison after the First War, it would have been a good place for him, especially if Snape hadn't been his Head of House.
TD: Then why wasn't he Sorted Slytherin?
HDG: I think a simple answer is he was groomed to be in Gryffindor. And Draco Malfoy helped. Let's put it this way: Albus Dumbledore had Plans for Harry. He knew that a Slytherin Boy Who Lived would be very unsuitable for those plans. So he sent Hagrid to bring Harry to Diagon Alley. No one will say that Hagrid hasn't a big heart, but after he was framed by Tom Riddle and expelled, he developed a grudge against Slytherin as a whole. It didn't help that he was often a target for bullying and pranks by many Slytherins over the years as a halfblood. So he passed on that bit of grudge to Harry when he was explaining the Hogwarts Houses. And Harry ran into Draco Malfoy both in Diagon Alley and on the Express. Anyone who knew Malfoy will remember how he couldn't open his mouth without insulting someone. When Malfoy said he was sure to be in Slytherin, that was also off-putting to Harry. He hates bullies, and Malfoy was an obnoxious one. One of the few things Harry knew about his mother back then was that she was a muggleborn. Anyone insulting her or her heritage was bound to anger him. The Hat offered both Slytherin and Gryffindor as options. Harry has quite a lot of cunning, and a thirst to prove himself. If it had been a different time, he would have done well there. But sharing a dorm with Malfoy and what he thought would be a bunch of Dark Wizards wasn't what he wanted, so he begged for Gryffindor.
TD: There but for the stupidity of Draco Malfoy, we would have had the youngest Seeker in a century.
HDG: (laughs) Yes. Exactly. Though even if it meant the Quidditch Cup, I cannot see Snape putting aside his hatred of anyone named Potter long enough to buy Harry a broom as McGonagall did.
TD: True enough! Even the older Slytherins during my time there were surprised at the vitriol he spewed at Potter. Now, you interviewed most of the DA and the Order. Who else did you talk to?
HDG: Well, for the chapters on the Triwizard Tournament and the resurrection of Tom Riddle, I talked to all three surviving champions. Of course, it helps that I live with two of them and went to the Yule Ball with the third. I also talked to Amos and Polly Diggory. They provided me with copies of Cedric's letters and his journal for that year and pointed me to a few of his surviving friends. Overall, I interviewed the staff of Hogwarts quite a lot and the Ministry workers who survived the Wars. And the ghosts. This book is only the first part of my project. Eventually I'll finish the other texts for History Of Magic and our Hogwarts ghosts are a wonderful source for the earlier years of Magical Britain. Even if they didn't leave the castle, they heard things and could read the paper over students' shoulders. The only ghost I interviewed whose words made it into this book was Moaning Myrtle.
TD: And why her? I mean, she spends all her time in the girls' bathroom.
HDG: Actually, she does leave the bathroom at times. I know Harry encountered her in the Prefects Bath and the Black Lake during the Triwizard. But she is the first known victim of Tom Riddle. She was killed by the basilisk when he released it in 1943. It was for her death that Hagrid was framed and expelled.
TD: As someone who was a classmate of yours, I have known you since you entered the magical world. I've sat near you in classes, and we did several Ancient Runes projects together from third year onwards. However, reading the chapters regarding your Hogwarts experience, I realized I didn't know the first thing about what you went through. How did it feel to actually talk about what had happened during your Hogwarts years?
HDG: Well, Harry and I have always been fairly private people, so we tend to keep things to ourselves anyway, once events are over. But given how many incursions Riddle or his supporters made into Hogwarts while we were there, we both agreed that describing our six years together at Hogwarts was vitally important. In many ways, 1991 was the year the Second War started.
TD: I had never realized the reason you were in the Hospital Wing for several weeks second year was that you had an accident with Polyjuice Potion. How on earth did you brew that potion at thirteen? And tell us about why you did it.
HDG: I've always been a fairly deft hand at potions – surprising since I can't cook to save my life and am overall banned from the kitchen at home, except to make tea. As to why we did it – well, no one seemed to, at the time, know who the Heir of Slytherin was, who was setting about the school petrifying cats and scrawling messages on the walls. We wanted a way to question Malfoy, as he was the most vocal of the anti-muggleborn crowd. So I brewed the potion in Myrtle's bathroom, and we were prepared to turn into three of your housemates so we could question him in bodies he would talk to more openly. Unfortunately, I grabbed a cat hair instead of a human hair off of my target's robes, and Polyjuice is not designed for human-animal transformations. It took a few weeks to sort out the problem. The whole thing didn't help much either. Malfoy was rather excited about the possibility of every muggleborn in the school dying, but he hadn't a clue who it really was opening the Chamber.
TD: I've talked to several other of our classmates, and no one seemed to know how many times you nearly died in school. Now that you're a mother, how do you feel about sending your children off to Hogwarts?
HDG: Well, my nephew [Theodore Lupin] is heading there this September. But overall, it's a completely different environment now, so I have no issue with it. McGonagall has changed Hogwarts for the better. The kind of bullying and abuse that ran rampant during my years there is very simply not allowed anymore. You can't go around calling someone a mudblood, or stealing all their belongings back in the dorm, or hexing them in the hallways, and expect to go unpunished. If my class was punished the way the students are now, several would have been expelled.
TD: The chapters on your Hogwarts years and the early parts of the War, are they complete? Did you keep anything back?
HDG: Well, personal things were of course left out. Some of the particularly gruesome details were left out – it is a book written for students, after all. And some of the Dark Magic we encountered was glossed over.
TD: The infamous year in the tent, in other words? You don't mention exactly what it was you were trying to find and destroy, do you?
HDG: No, I didn't. A canny reader can get enough clues to figure it out, if you have access to the right books. Any Defense Journeyman or above, or Cursebreaker, will know exactly what we were hunting down. But a Hogwarts student does not need to know how vile the magic Tom Riddle used to survive in '81 was. We say what the objects were – Founders relics, and that they were cursed and used in rituals to prolong his existence, but we don't describe how they were made or use the word for what they were. And I hate that Dumbledore made Harry swear us to secrecy. At one point we were staying with a Cursebreaker and a Journeyman Defense Master – their help would have been invaluable if only we could have asked for it! When I finally detailed that year to my wife, she had a conniption, as she was well versed in finding, identifying, and destroying the very objects three teenagers with no formal training were wandering about the countryside to find! Given how common they are in various ancient tombs, it's one of the earliest practical things taught in a modern Defense Mastery program.
TD: Now for the more political questions. There will be grumblings that a muggleborn is writing the text for a magical history course. What do you say to that?
HDG: I would say that that attitude is the same that led me to be tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange, that led to the deaths of so many of my friends and loved ones.
TD: Not pulling any punches, are you?
HDG: No. Bigotry is bigotry, and goodness knows I've dealt with enough of it over the years. The attitude that anyone not pureblooded cannot be a full member of magical society is exactly what Tom Riddle was preaching, despite his own background. I know that to many I am an outsider in this society. I didn't know magic was real until I was eleven. Before that, my parents and I were obliviated if the magic I did was powerful enough to warrant a visit from the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad. I admit, I did not grow up within Wizarding culture. I think that was a gift – I can move comfortably within two separate societies, not something many purebloods can claim to do. And it gives me insight into both. We are not separate from muggle society, we are powerfully intertwined with it.
TD: Your book is not exactly kind to Albus Dumbledore. In fact, it is downright harsh regarding many of his major decisions and actions. Especially in regards to bigotry, and muggleborns.
HDG: Yes, it is. In fact, I think even Headmistress McGonagall was surprised by the severity of my critique. The Dumbledore apologists say that he was a powerful leader of the Light and that everything he did worked out for the best. Well I say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He may have meant the best, but his actions were unconscionable.
As Headmaster he allowed the bigotry and violence of purebloods against muggleborns and halfbloods to continue without check. Even before he had a supposedly reformed Death Eater as a Head of House, he did nothing to curb the attitudes or actions of those who eventually ended up as Death Eaters. If you look at the detention logs in the 70's through the 90's, those who were regularly punished for bullying, hexing, or attacking other students ended up in Riddle's service about eighty percent of the time – and the remaining twenty are generally revenge for or reaction to that bullying. This trend started with Dippet in the 40's and continued on until McGonagall took over. Dumbledore's constant forgiveness of students taught them that they would never be severely punished no matter what they did, and that attitude carried over into the Halls of the Wizengamot. Granted, there was a lot of bribery there as well during and after the First War, but he oversaw the entire slew of Death Eater Trials where none received the highest punishments available. And many were released with a slap on the wrist and a remonstrance to basically play nice.
I am also obviously biased given his treatment of my best friend. No child should grow up in an abusive household just because Dumbledore wanted a pliable boy desperate to escape his home life who would see the Wizarding world and Dumbledore himself as great and positive.
Even in the area of education he was abominable. Binns should have been retired by Dippet or an earlier headmaster, but Dumbledore kept him on, even as OWL and NEWT scores dropped radically in comparison to other nations' history scores. He ended the teaching of not only English and maths, but he stopped the Wizarding Cultures course that had allowed many muggleborns to successfully integrate into society. How can we avoid a societal faux pas if we don't know the first thing about the culture? Neither Harry nor I encountered basic Wizarding children's stories until I was given The Tales of Beedle the Bard at the age of seventeen, whereas that is a part of the first year Wizarding Cultures curriculum. And the Potions department under Severus Snape was the laughingstock of Europe. We won't go into the Muggle Studies program. It was a hundred years behind the times when I took the course. He never hired a muggleborn to teach it; Charity Burbage was a bright woman and cared deeply about muggle society, but she was raised magically, may she rest in peace. She didn't understand it on a very basic level and the previous instructors she learned from were even more ignorant. She simply didn't have the proper education or background to teach the course. The issue of Defense Against the Dark Arts is more subtle. There was some sort of curse or something that kept instructors from staying. However, he could have developed a standardized curriculum so our education in DADA wasn't so uneven. The only professor during my six years prior to the end of the War who followed the ICW suggested course outline was Remus Lupin.
But yes, I think Dumbledore misused a lot of his power and ability. He could have stopped Tom Riddle years before 1981. I lay the blame for a lot of deaths on his inactions. He could have properly educated his students and curbed their bullying, taught them to behave even if he couldn't change their minds. Or he could have actually punished those who attacked others. He could have not left so many of the Order of the Phoenix hanging during the first and second Wars. No protection was offered to Edgar Bones or his family, and they died. Emmaline Vance lived in a completely unwarded apartment, and she died. Let alone what he allowed to happen to the Potters, Longbottoms, and Sirius Black as part of his grand plan.
TD: The chapter on Dumbledore's roles in the First and Second Wars could be considered quite explosive. Is a school textbook really the place for it?
HDG: I thought about that long and hard when I was working on the text. But given how much of the world was hidden from me as a student of Hogwarts – how many lies we were told about magical society and recent history, how little of the information we needed was available to us – I think that it's best to tell the whole truth to our children, in an age-appropriate fashion.
TD: It's been mentioned that this is only the first book to be released as part of the restructuring of the History of Magic curriculum. What can you tell us about the others, and when they'll be available?
HDG: Yes, it is the first. Bagshot's work ends in the late 19th century, so we obviously needed a text that would cover modern Britain. The other books are in progress, and have been for awhile – parts of them are based on research I did for my mastery. I actually completed most of the work for this book while writing my thesis. I simply had to adapt it into a textbook format after we finished the revisions to the curriculum. The next books will probably be early magical history – Greece and Egypt and China, the Celts and Vikings, and whatnot. You can't understand Magical Britain if you don't place it in context of how other magical and non-magical societies were advancing or how those societies influenced ours. And I don't know how long it will take for the next book to be released. We had been planning to publish them over the next ten years, but I've got a two year old and a newborn underfoot at home, not to mention my godson, niece and nephews. Right now I'm up to my neck in dirty nappies.
TD: Last questions: I haven't seen you since Marion was born last month. How is she? And how is Rosalind at being a big sister?
HDG: Finally, the important questions! (laughs) Marion is perfect. Fairly quiet, for a newborn, but she hasn't started sleeping through the night yet, so one of us is up pretty regularly. Rosie is enthralled. She wasn't old enough to really understand when her twin cousins were born, and I doubt she'll remember this when she's older, but she's fascinated. She hasn't quite gotten that her maman's big belly produced her little sister. The sibling rivalry has yet to hit, so we're all happy as clams. I'll be even happier when we get a full night's rest.
The Quibbler thanks Hermione Delacour-Granger for taking the time for her interview. As the entire staff of this magazine was interviewed for her book, we can't offer a completely unbiased review, but we do highly suggest that our readers peruse Magical Britain in the 20th Century. It is a thoughtful and insightful look at what created the world we live in today. You can find it for sale at Flourish and Blotts, Tim's Enchantments and Rare Books, and through owl order from Cassiopeia Books, a subsidiary of Lovegood Publishing, Delphic Alley.