The Sorting Hat/Crookshanks

[flying_ford_anglia]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C3407
From: flying_ford_anglia
Subject: The Sorting Hat/Crookshanks
Date: 7/6/00 12:53 am  (ET)

While we're speculating about Crookshanks - who, I must agree, is more
than a plain old cat - does anyone have a theory about The Sorting
Hat? JKR has said that it is a character in its own right and that we
would find out more about it later in the series.

I like the idea of a trapped spirit - perhaps that of the former
headmaster (whose name escapes me), who was around when Dumbledore was
a young teacher.

Has there always been a Sorting Hat? If not, how were the students sorted
before it was created?

On Crookshanks and transfiguration:.

I've just finished another Diana Wynne Jones Chrestomanci book, and in
that there is a cat called Fiddle, which was not only created from a
violin, but which holds one of the lives of the nine-lived enchanter
Cat Chant, the main character in the book. At one point, Cat touches
Fiddle's head and can feel the wood of the violin under his fur. Creepy.

I know that's a different author and a different book, but it reminds me
of mention, here, of transiguration of living creatures from inanimate
objects (mice from snuff boxes etc.), and presumably in the opposite
direction.

In short, I wouldn't trust anything to be what, or who, we think it is!

Neil