Durmstrang's location

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 38290

I'm the one that wrote the article (it now appears on the HP Lexicon) about
languages of instruction at Durmstrang, so I'll tackle the question of its
location.  We know (or believe, at least---Ron may not be a reliable witness
and the Durmstrang students themselves are silent on this subject) that it's
near glaciers, and in a mountainous area, probably close to the sea.  From
things that Viktor Krum says, it's probably pretty far north.

Taking the above as given, we are basically down to only a few locations,
most of them in Norway.  Northern Norway is an excellent place to go if you
want to be left alone; the population is scattered and thin on the ground
and the terrain is rugged enough to hide a great many things.

The heavily-Slavic student body might tend to militate against this, but
Durmstrang could have originally been located somewhere in Eastern Europe,
with the language of instruction German at first, shifting to one of the
Slavic languages as time went on.  However, there is another possibility:
Svalbard!

Svalbard, for those of you not familiar with it, is an archipelago north of
Norway in the Arctic. (A lot of the action in _Northern Lights/The Golden
Compass_ in the _His Dark Materials_ trilogy takes place there)   It has a
smallish permanent population, as well as (these days) hosting Arctic
tourism.  It is rather mountainous and has lots of glaciers, has huge areas
that nobody visits much, is cold and dark (obviously!) _and has had, at
various times, considerable Russian presence._  If I were looking for a
place where wizards could learn magic in peace, one of the less-visited
islands of the archipelago would strike me as nearly ideal.

As for how the students get there---they could use a variant on the
Durmstrang ship, boarding it at some location they can all get to (Vienna,
in the Danube, is one good possibility for the
Eastern-Europeans-outside-Russia, while the Russians could board the ship
(or another like it) in many places in Russia.  You could have half a dozen
ships, one for the Eastern Europeans, one from St. Petersburg or Kaliningrad
for the Baltic-area students, one from Moscow, one from Siberia, and so on.

Even though the school's probably on Norwegian territory, it may not get
many Norwegian or other European students.  Remember, in canon, Durmstrang,
Hogwarts and Beauxbatons are the three largest schools of magic in Europe.
They wouldn't've said that if other, smaller, schools didn't exist.  I
wouldn't be surprised to find out about an "Escuela por Magica y Brujeria"
in Spain or Portugal somewhere, to serve the Iberian magic community's
educational needs, as well as Italian schools, and several in Southeastern
Europe, possibly concentrating on several different styles and traditions of
magic---Slavic, Vlach (Romanian), Greek and Turkish/Islamic.  Another school
where the language of instruction is Scandinavian might well be found in an
isolated Norwegian valley or lonely fjord, serving the specific needs of
students from the Scandinavian countries who don't want to go to Durmstrang.