Sharing blood (Re: Key points in CoS)

[Iris FT]

No: HPFGUIDX 46679


 
  
 

 

 The debate concerning hair, eyes, sharing blood is very interesting, and I think those who initiated it pointed something that could turn into a key narrative element.

But I’ve got to start from the beginning.

Last summer, I worked  on an analyse of Rowling’s books as a modern version of classic tragedy, in the antique Greek way. My analysing line was that Harry was living so many painful experiences because, as a tragic hero, he had to pay for a fault his ancestors had committed many time before he was born, and that weighed on him like a malediction. The entire story would have been based upon how Harry would break or not the malediction and redeem his ancestors. The problem was that I had no idea of what kind of an original fault could have initiated the malediction.

This questioning about hair's colour, eye's colour, bloodlines, heirs, etc, maybe gave me an answer. There it is.

When I worked on Harry being a modern version of Greek tragic hero, I was thinking in Oedipus. It’s easy to make a comparison, there are some similitude between them. They both were brought up ignoring who they were really, they both had to face a sphinx; it’s also possible that Harry, the same as Oedipus, was the subject of an oracle before he was born (cf Professor Trelawney puzzling first prediction). Well, in Oedipus’s case, heir of the Royal House of Thebes, the malediction came from several faults his ancestors committed: Cadmos had killed a giant serpent that was a “son” of Ares (an ancestor for the Basilisk?), Europa, Semele, Jocasta had had adulterine or incestuous relationships, his own father had tried to kill him. After what the poor guy killed his father and married his mother, as everybody knows.

Okay, I won’t start an analyse of this last aspect of the story from the perspective of the Potter books, though it is very interesting (see Isabelle Smadja’s essay on the topic).

What I would like to debate is the possibility of adulterine or incestuous relationship in Harry’s bloodline. That would explain why hair and eyes are so important in the description of the most important characters of the story.

Vinnia wrote that green could be Slytherin’s colour because Salazar Slytherin had green eyes.

In that case, it could mean that Gryffindor’s colour is red because of Godric Gryffindor’s hair.

What about jet-black? Well, if you look at Hufflepuff ‘s shield, you can see a black badger on it. Now, what do we know about Helga Hufflepuff? In GoF, the Sorting Hat called her “Sweet Hufflepuff”. Does it mean she was a handsome young lady when the Hogwarts Four founded the school? Would it be wrong to say that in that case, there was not only an ideological, but also a love rivalry between Godric and Salazar? That Helga married Godric, and gave him a child? That Salazar, using an artifice of his own (why not Polyjuice, after all, it could be one of his inventions if we consider that on of its ingredients is snake skin), took Godric aspect in order to make love with Helga, just as Zeus did with Alcmena (she was queen of Thebes, so a relative to Oedipus), or just like Uther Pendragon did with Igraine? That Helga gave birth to an illegitimate child?

Two bloodlines, a legitimate one and an illegitimate one. That’s the motor of many stories, of many villain-who-wants-to-kill-the heir-in –order-to-take-the-power (cf The Prisoner of Zenda, with Black Michael trying to kill Red Rudolph).

That would explain the similitude between many of the main characters of Harry Potter  :Harry , Tom, Severus and Sirius sharing the same jet-black hair; young Dumbledore, Lily and the Weasleys sharing the same red hair. (By this way, it would fit better if Salazar’s hair were black, and if the colour of his shield were green because he chose it as respects to green-eyed Helga.)

The WW is a small world. Ron says in CoS that wizards had to marry muggles to survive, and that many wizarding families have muggle blood. Is it wrong to think that before they stated marrying muggkes, wizards used to marry wizards, the same way noble families did in Europe? In that case, they would be all relatives.

 That would also mean that Harry shares the two bloodlines, and that he is at the same time the heir of Gryffindor and the heir of Slytherin.

But of course, that’s just a theory. Any thoughts about this?

 

Iris 



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