Religion, Wizard genesis, Mars is bright

[Ellen Fremedon]

No: HPFGUIDX 40800


Hi--  delurking here.  This caught my attention:

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., dfrankiswork at n... wrote, in the discussion of 
Wizarding Genetics:

>...the Hogwarts Quill, IIRC, goes into action at birth, not conception.

<snip>

>...neither wizards nor Muggles have any way of influencing
>whether their offspring are magical.  (It has occurred to me that the
>reason Squibs are rare might be infanticide: what do you suppose the
>Malfoys would do if they had a Squib baby?  The Fudges?)


...and I got to thinking--  The Hogwarts Quill knows whether a child is 
magical at birth, but it doesn't seem that the child's own family knows 
until they begin (or don't begin) manifesting some magic.  Remember that 
Neville's family worried that Neville was a Squib, tried (successfully) to 
shock him into showing his magic, and were relieved when he got his Hogwarts 
letter.

	Which I find kind of surprising.  I can see that Hogwarts, for whatever 
reason, might have a policy of not revealing who's in the book until the 
letters go out, but you would think that whatever magical-child- detecting 
charm has been performed on the Hogwarts Quill could be duplicated by 
someone else--  that, say, the Longbottoms, purebloods
all, could have had some more reliable way of finding out whether Neville 
was really a wizard than dangling him out the window by his ankles.

Just my two knuts.
Ellen

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thaet mon eathe tosliteth		thaette naefre gesomnad waes
								--"Wulf and Eadwacer"

Ellen's stories live here:  http://www.geocities.com/ellen_fremedon


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