The Four (Five?) Founders

[Catlady]

No: HPFGUIDX 6460

Anyone who's been taking careful notes since May '00 knows that I have a
couple of bees in my bonnet about the Founders of Hogwarts, 'the four
greatest witches and wizards of their time', and that one of these bees
came from my observation that the name of HoGwaRtS contains the initials
of the 4 canonical Founders, but also an extraneous 't' which leads me
to believe (did I mention that it is after midnight and there hasn't
been a night this week that I got more than 6 hours sleep?) that there
was a 5th Founder whose names began with T. (I think the surnames are
descriptive epithets rather than family names, like for Wendolyn the
Weird, 'the Weird' was not her family name, but that is not important
now.)

[Digression: I think the mountain behind the village is Hogmount or Mt.
Hog, and all the local features were named after it. The village is
Hogsmeade (meade = meadow), the lake (unbeknownst to modern folk) is
Hoglake, the Forbidden Forest (who knew it had a name?) is Hogwood, and
the place where the castle was built had formerly been named Hogwald.
But they changed it to Hogwarts to include all the initials because
Slytherin sulked when he noticed that 'Hogwald' contained Godric's and
Helga's initials but not his. I looked 'wald' up in the dictionary to
check this, and learned that 'wald', related to 'weald' and 'wold',
means 1) a forested area, 2) an unforested hilly area, 3) an unforested
flat area..]

And another of my hobbyhorses is my politically correct multiculturalism
that wants the Founders to represent all the major ethnic groups in
Hogwarts's service area (the island of Britain and associated isles) at
the time of the Founding ('over one thousand years ago' -- I make that
circa 960 AD, altho' this AD is not Albus Dumbledore).

When I thought that Gryffindor was Gryphon d'Or, which is French, I was
distressed because it was at least a generation too early for Normans
(they invaded in 1066), but  since my flash of divine enlightenment that
'Godric Gryffindor' was the name that Sayces had given Gruffydd Glyndwr,
so that Gryffindor is a Waugh, representative of the Brythonic Celtic
speakers and Merlin's own nationality,  I can almost make this theory
work. Rowena, I keep saying, is the Saxon because Walter Scott named his
Saxon heroine in IVANHOE Rowena. Helga is the Dane -- remember King
Canute (Knut -- are Knuds named after him?), the Danelaw, King Alfred of
the burnt oatcakes? Salazar -- surely he is a Byzantine, considering his
personality, or at best a Roman left over from Imperial days (and
therefore already centuries old and bitter). He is not a Scot, an
ethnicity that surely should be represented when founding a school in
Scotland, and would represent the Goidelic Celtic speakers. Maybe he is
a Pict: Kipling's poem "A Pict Song"' sounds nasty enough to suit  him
(I put two verses at the bottom so people can see what I am talking
about).

Which leads to the deduction that the fifth Founder was a Scot whose
name began with a T. Another lightning flash of prophecy told me that
his name was Tavish Tartanwool (as an epithet, it came from having
invented sheep that grew plaid wool) and, if his house had endured, its
banner would have been a white sheep on a plaid background. Maybe it
would at least have been given golden curly horns so the inmates could
cheer their House team "Go, Rams!" instead of 'Go, Sheep!" They'd play
in plaid Quidditch robes....

But somehow he, or at least his name and memory of him, vanished away
sometime between picking the name Hogwarts and establishing the Houses.
One presumes he was murdered. One presumes that any murder that occurred
must have been committed by Salazar. How did he persuade the other three
to put up with this, keep working with him, instead of kicking out (or
executing him) as a murderer? But they would have agreed to erase all
memory of Tavish so that future generations would not known that they
had consorted with a murderer.

We are the Little Folk--we!
   Too little to love or to hate.
Leave us alone and you'll see
   How we can drag down the State!
We are the worm in the wood!
  We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
   We are the thorn in the foot!

Mistletoe  killing  an  oak--
  Rats gnawing cables in two--
Moths making holes in a cloak--
  How they must love what they do!
Yes--and we Little Folk too,
  We are busy as they--
Working our works out of view--
  Watch, and you'll see it some day!

--
          /\ /\
           + +     Mews and views
         >> = <<         from Rita Prince Winston

                     ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
                     `6_ 6  )   `-.  (     ).`-.__.`)
                     (_Y_.)'  ._   )  `._ `. ``-..-'
                    _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' ,'
                   ((('   (((-(((''  ((((