[HPforGrownups] Where's Durmstrang?

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 48438

At 15:04 17/12/02 +0000, Janet Anderson wrote:
> >This therefore begs a completely different question: why does Krum, from
> >southern Europe, attend a school in northern Europe? The Muggle cultures
> >involved have very little in common, and it's likely that the wizarding
> >cultures would be equally incompatible. It seems likely that there is a
> >sizable wizarding community in southern Europe: enough to warrant
> >maintaining a school. So I repeat: why does Krum attend a school such a
> >distance from his home turf?
>
>Just because it's likely that there's a sizable wizarding community in
>southern Europe (and I think so too) doesn't mean there's a school there.
>Hogwarts seems to be it for the United Kingdom; perhaps Durmstrang is the
>closest school to Krum's home.

This is something I forgot to mention in my previous post: to give US 
residents with limited knowledge of European geography some kind of 
comparison, to confuse Albania with the Arctic circle, and the social, 
cultural, geographical (and climactic!) differences involved, is akin to 
confusing Nebraska and Alaska (without the benefit of similar-sounding 
names)... And that's not taking into account a whole new language.

Comparing the whole of Europe (or the USA) to the length of the UK is 
frankly just a bit disingenuous. After all, we know of Beauxbatons 
(presumably somewhere in France), and the distance between that and 
Hogwarts is little more than half the distance between Krum's home and 
Durmstrang's probable location. And the cultural shift is even smaller.

So my doubts remain: why does Krum travel 2,000 miles to go to school?

And on a separate but related issue, Angela asked:

>There is a good chance that Durmstrang is unplottable, a concept I have a 
>hard time with.  Does that mean that it has a definite geographic location 
>(ie, Northern Russia) but can't be pinpointed exacly by latitude or 
>longitude, or can it be COMPLETELY off the map, and all of our 
>geographical knowledge comes to naught?

The way I see "unplottablity", it's not about some kind of "alternative 
geography" or parallel dimension. Buildings and other artifacts could be 
fitted on Muggle maps, *if* they could be identified. The issue as I see it 
is that unplottable areas are "shielded", rather than non-existent, to 
Muggles. For instance, the main defence for the QWC pitch was that any 
Muggle coming close would suddenly remember they need to be elsewhere.

"Unplottablity" therefore comes not from the place not being identfiable in 
terms of latitude and longitude, but from its contours being 
unidentifiable, and thus there is no object to be plotted.

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who's prepared to admit to being a bit surprised by 
the level of repetition in posts on this subject...