Gryffin - Four Elements - Sports - Slytherin - Lily - Snape

[Catlady]

No: HPFGUIDX 14028

Amanda wrote:
> Griffins more correctly are the front half of an eagle and the
> back half of a lion. Their forward limbs are the legs and claws of an
> eagle, and they have wings. They do have tufty feathery ears, though.

Just as tigers (500 lb stripy pussy cats with big fangs and claws) don't
look anything like tygres (heraldic monsters), so feathery furry
heraldic griffins disguise the fact that gryphons were really dinosaurs,
Oviraptors from the Flaming Cliffs area (in Altai Mountains IIRC) in
Mongolia....  Gold nuggets and fossils erode out of the windworn
cliffsides, some of the oviraptor fossils are found nowdays sitting on
their eggs in their nests (therefore the name 'egg-thief' when it was
not known that the eggs were their own), the Mongolians were perfectly
capable of recognizing nesting like a bird, huge beak and huge claws,
and quadruped bone structure. And it was up there on the cliff where it
couldn't go without wings... so they told themselves they were lucky
that they didn't stumble over the LIVE ones and told the Scythians who
traded to the Black Sea Greeks  (and some people to the east who traded
to China) that only very special people could pick up the gold where it
was scattered on the ground, because it was guarded by dangerous
gryphons (named, it says, from the Greek word for 'grabber' because of
those claws). This doesn't have to be in the OT group until Monday.

Btw, I am for no canonical reason convinced that Godric Gryffindor's
name had nothing to do with any golden griffin (maybe a red griffin:
Dai?), but actually he was a Welshman named Gryffydd Glyndwr and the
Sais couldn't pronounce his name right so they called him Godric
Gryffindor and he put up with it. Long time members of the group will
wearily recognize the beginning of my oft-repeated rant about the
ethnicity of the Founders.

Amanda Lewanski and Margaret Dean wrote:
> Lion/Gryffindor/fire
> Eagle/Ravenclaw/air
> Badger/Hufflepuff/earth
> Snake/Slytherin/water

I mouthed off at length about the Elements-Houses back when this club
was on Yahoo. Check HPfGU-Archives post # 2802 and 2638 and hpa post #
(looks like 1423, but I can't' read my own writing). Courage-Fire,
Intellectualism-Air, Loyalty/Patience/Hard Work-Earth and
Deviousness-Water are all fitting assignments (devious water, it's very
good at finding the loophole in any obstacle that was put in its path),
altho' I am both a Scorpio and a Water being and resent JKR choosing one
Element to be Evil and the others to be Good.

Fire-red, Air-blue, Earth-yellow, Water-green are the colors assigned
(to those Houses according to canon) to the Elements by some Wiccan
trads I know, altho' there are many different possible assignments of
colors to Elements. The Four Elements come from ancient Greeks
philosophers and were part of science and medicine as well as magic and
philosophy until WELL INTO Christian times, so they are NOT in HP as a
Wiccan reference.

Paula Gryffindor wings909 (are you Paula Leiberman?) wrote:
> Maybe one day in the future, we might actually be
> able to PLAY [Quidditch] instead of reading about it.

One of the Stephanies on this list is already playing Quidditch. See
post 9216 for Backyard Quidditch (which uses a trampoline to make the
broomstick-riding players fly).

Scott wrote:
> So do you think there are other sports we don't know of  yet,
> or is Quidditch it? Do you think that the kids ever play a good
> ol' game of Rugby?

Rena answered:
>I think there could be hippogriff (sp?) racing, (comparable to horse
>  racing), watergames/swimming, (snip)
> Even in Quidditch the wizards try to use spells (e.g. the bludger
> which focused on Harry),

I think they MUST play some kind of football (rugby, soccer, or
american) as well as running footraces, climbing trees, and brawling:
healthy kids who are full of energy want to do physical things, not just
magical things. For older kids, there could be HORSE riding and racing:
most modern Muggles ride horses for fun not for transportation. I
believe there is broomstick racing, and I like the idea of broomstick
obstacle racing that I learned in a fanfic. The use of spells in sports
is Cheating and should be stopped by the referee in official
competition, or by running to parents in childish games. The Bludger
that was aimed at Harry was trying to murder him, not just to win the
match.

btw, on the matter of what Sirius did between PoA and GoF, I think he
got a lot of outdoor exercise: walking, running, swimming, rockclimbing
(mostly solitary outdoor exercise, and who really believes that Sirius
wouldn't be so foolish as to go rockclimbing without a buddy?). Most
people hearing of that would think that he simply missed the outdoors
after so many years locked in a cell, and he would tell anyone who asked
that he needed to get really good at running, swimming, and climbing in
case he ever needed to escape from Azkaban again, but if Remus were
around, he would secretly know that Sirius' real goal was to get his
beautiful figure back (and he doesn't want to admit to being so vain,
which is why he doesn't work out with weights: motive too obvious).

Persephone Kate Slytherin wrote:
>  Also, it's strange that 'all' Death Eaters, 'cept Wormtail, are
> Slytherins.  That seams improbable that they are all Slytherins.

Agree! If all Death Eaters were Slytherins, it would have been a lot
easier for Arthur Weasley to have known whom he could or couldn't trust
during the Bad Times.

> I think that the Griffyndors are made out to be the brave heroes
> in the book and the Slytherins are the evil bad guys.  This in its
> self seems wrong because most of the traits of the Griffyndors
> are rather impulsive, they tend to do things without thinking, but
> because they are brave, they're good.  And the Slytherins are more
> ambitious and cunning, which seams to be a bad trait.

Yes. We are shown a world in which all Gryffindors are good and
good-looking and all Slytherins are evil and (except for Draco) ugly,
because we are shown it from Harry's and JKR's POV, and they both are
Gryffindors, and there is a traditional, perhaps instinctive, enmity
between Gryffindors and Slytherins. If JKR were an outsider instead of a
Gryffindor, she might blow Harry's mind by revealing that some
Slytherins are virtuous and even heroic, just as she revealed that Snape
is on the Light Side and saving Harry's life. Mind you, I do believe old
Salazar must have been evil to have hidden a basilisk in the basement.

Christian Stubo wrote post # 39000, a round enough number to be worthy
of this lovely post on heraldry, biohazardous foodstuffs, and
marvelously named warSHIPs, especially HMS Gay Viking.

Vlatka wrote:
> I would greatly appreciate if anyone can send me
> more links to similar thought provoking reviews

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/files/ESSAYS%20-%20Peg%20Kerr/

That's the Folder in the Files section of this egroup for Peg Kerr's
essays on the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues in relation
to HP.

Penny wrote:
> Neil may understand.  *I* do not.  The shipping posts are clearly
> labelled (95% of the time)

Well, I admit I was expressing negative emotion rather than making a
constructive suggestion. More negative emotion: laboring through the
quarrels of the shippers made me wish that Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny,
and Draco will ALL die in Book 7, so that ALL shippers will be
disappointed.

However, it is true that good subject lines don't do me a whole lot of
good as I read the posts on the website, by clicking the NEXT button,
and the website's NEXT button doesn't sort posts by subject line as a
good e-mail pgm does. In theory, I could look at the subject line and
immediately click NEXT again, but sometimes it takes significant time
for each post to come up...

Margaret Dean wrote:
> Though it's surprising, when you come to think about it, how
> little =else= the Dursleys managed to beat out of Harry, (snip)
> So . . . was Lily's love protecting him from evils other than
> Voldemort's?  Did he (being magical), somehow "know" throughout
> his childhood that someone did indeed love him, though none of
> the living, breathing people around him ever showed it?

In my baseless opinion, oh yes indeed. Lily in her death managed not
only to shelter baby Harry with her body or levitate him aside or
something (yes, it was not moving him physically out of the line of the
curse that saved him, but surely it would have been maternal instinct to
do so) but also to put an image of herself into his mind, an image of a
loving mother who would hug him when he was particularly miserable with
the Dursleys and whisper to him that TV and books and school lessons
were telling the truth when they said there were better places to live,
and who made him resist the Imperius Curse. In paraphrase, when "Moody"
put the Imperius Curse on him, he felt all muddled and cozy and was
about to obey when A VOICE IN HIS HEAD said No.

JKR might believe that she represented Harry's own thought as a voice in
his head because that is an old literary cliche (and I myself usually
think in spoken words, i.e. voices, usually my own), but I believe it
was really Lily's voice. I just realized this minute that that would
explain why we see Harry thinking about and wishing for James so much
more than for Lily: Lily in his head was wishing for James, not for
herself.

Eccleston wrote:
> In reality, in England, a child who was forced to sleep in a
> cupboard under the stairs and wear the clothes Harry does,
> would have ended up with Social Services getting interested.

In USA, sometimes prosperous suburban couples are able to keep extreme
child abuse concealed for a long time. Maybe even in England, the
Dursleys kept much of their treatment of Harry a secret.

Margaret Dean  wrote of Snape possibly dying to save Harry and defeat
Voldemort:
> The more so because Snape would thus be canceling out his own
> burdensome (as he sees it) debt to Harry's father . . . and he's also
> a character who wouldn't necessarily =mind= the fact that he was
> laying a certain, similar amount of guilt on Harry.

I think, unless Snape had a LOT of time to think about what he was
doing, he would not be thinking of that silly debt to Harry's father,
but rather of his duty to serve the Light, fight the Dark, and make
Dumbledore proud of him, and he would not be thinking of making Harry
feel guilty, but rather that death would release him from his own burden
of guilt. And horrible memories. And hated job.

Justin Raines wrote:
> as anyone ever noticed that the shape of Harry's scar, often refered
> to as lightning shaped, could have a dual meaning?  I just had an
> epiphany that it could mean something extra.  I found that it also
> could be representative of the old Anglo-Saxon rule called Sigel.
> This ancient rune symbolized Victory.  (snip)
> Another funny  thing about this rune is that they usually have dual
> meanings, one positive and one negative, but his rune only has a
> positive meaning.

I'm not up on Anglo-Saxon runes, but the related Norse rune named Sig (a
word for victory, used in names like Sig-fried), which sounds like S and
looks like a lightning bolt, was used in pairs as the logo of Hitler's
SS. I'd say that even if this rune originally had no negative meaning,
Hitler gave it one.
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