Karkaroff/transfer students

[Jamie Lipton]

No: HPFGUIDX 38200

Says Eloise:
>To be fair, his English is perfect and JKR doesn't characterise his speech
with any indications of an accent, as she does with Krum or Mme Maxime, a
fact I hadn't noticed until now. But that could just be down to education,
his time spent in the UK, (at the very least whilst he was a DE) or a
natural
facility like Crouch Sr's.

I've done a lot of (largely pointless) thinking about this, and I can't come
to a conclusion.

On the "Karkaroff is British" side, we have the following:
- he doesn't speak with an accent, whereas all of the foreigners do
- he was a Death Eater during VWI, which we're thinking was a British
phenomenon
- he does say something like "Dear old Hogwarts, how good it is to be
here," which leads the reader to think that he went there (although he could
very well still be from another country)

On the "Karkaroff is not British" side, we have:
- the fact that he is headmaster of a foreign school, and therefore must be
fluent in whatever language they speak there.  (I know the currect theory
says something about German and northern Latvia - but I heard one very
interesting theory that said Durmstrang is located in outer space :-))
- he was probably a teacher at Durmstrang a long time before becoming
Headmaster, making me think that his tenure at the school coincided with his
Death Eater years.  So was VWI really just a British disturbance?  Maybe
not.
- he is described as having a 'fruity' and 'unctuous' voice, which may be
indicative of a non-British vocal timbre
- the name "Karkaroff" is eastern European in origin, and so are all of the
names of his students.  Of the people we know who go or have gone to
Hogwarts, very few have last names that have any origin other than
British/Scottish/Irish etc.  Parvati and Cho have no doubt been discussed on
the list - I am pretty sure they were both raised, if not born, in Britain.
Probably Malfoys and Lupins once lived in France, but no longer - and as
both those names serve connotation purposes, it doesn't seem likely that JKR
meant them to convey a French origin.

Karkaroff is one of those minor characters that has to have a back story to
make sense.  Hopefully we'll see one in a future book, but in the meantime,
maybe someone on the list would like to make one up.

- Jamie