Ollivander's est382BC/Riddle's name&colors/Rooster egg/Draco sweets/pedigree

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 46725

OLLIVANDER

Audra wrote:

<< Second, I don't remember ever reading anything about Ollivander 
making the first-ever wands, or that there was a "Before
Wand-period." 
(snip) and Ollivander's is in Britain. So are we to assume that wands 
originated in Britain and spread to wizards all over the world? Or 
furthermore, did wizards themselves originate in Britain and spread 
to different parts of Europe and the world? I would think that magic 
folk would have also existed in Africa, for example, but did they use 
wands or any sort of tools to channel magic? And if not, were they 
not as powerful as British wizards who used wands? I'm not a history 
buff, so I don't know exactly what was going on in the world in 382 
BC when an Ollivander supposedly started making wands. I wonder if 
there was any significance to that specific year? I was able to find 
a few sources that say that say (in the real world at least) that the 
Druids in Britain were the first to use wands, and they go back as 
early as 500 BC. This means that the original Ollivander was probably 
a Druid. >>

According to me, just because the Ollivander family has been in 
the wand business since 382 BCE doesn't mean that the Ollivanders 
invented wands. I assume that wands were invented during the later 
Paleolithic, perhaps by the Cro-Magnons. One of the artifact types 
found in association with the art caves found in Europe (IIRC 50,000 
to 30,000 years ago) are decoratively (and probably symbolically) 
carved bones which archaeologists call "batons". I think they could 
be ancient wands. I think wands were invented in Africa, original 
home of mankind, and wand technology was carried by early wizards to 
wherever they roamed with their Muggle tribes, but the wood or other 
material from which the oldest wands were made has disintegrated over 
the millennia.

I have no trouble believing that the first Ollivander to go into the 
wand business was a Druid; after all, one of the Famous Wizard cards 
in Book 1 is Cliodna the Druidess (known to Muggles as the goddess 
Cliodna). However, I also think it is possible that the first 
Ollivander wand-maker started the business in Greece or Macedonia 
and a later Ollivander emigrated to Britain. I have no reason for 
this theory except the -ander suffix is the English form of Greek 
suffix -andros, as in Alexander and Meander. Btw the -andros suffix 
means "man" or "men" and "Alexander" means "he repels men", not in 
the sense that he has troubling scoring at gay baths, but in the 
sense that when he goes into battle, the enemies either die, faint 
from fear, or run away. 

Eloise wrote:

<< or the British wizarding community was in much closer contact with 
the wizarding communities of other, more civilised societies than the 
rest of the population. >>

Why not? They also had castles and flush toilets much earlier than 
Muggles did. 

<< But there IMHO, there's considerable doubt as to whether it would 
have been possible to assign a precise date to the setting up of a 
British wand-makers back in the pre-Roman Iron Age as Britain had no 
direct connection with a literate, calendar-using society which could 
have recorded this. >>

Either Mr. Ollivander himself or the Ollivander family had magic 
enough to keep one business going continually for over two thousand 
years; surely they also had enough *magic* to record each passing 
year, with its weather, eclipses, deaths and births in the family, 
wars and plagues and famines in the Muggle community. Then they could 
count backwards assigned year numbers when the BC/AD calendar became 
widely popular. If we assert that they didn't have enough magic to 
invent writing by magic, we can assert that they did have enough 
magic to store audio records in some kind of artifact.

RIDDLE'S NAME

Phyllis wrote:

<< I wonder whether Riddle's name was familiar to Harry because Harry 
might have heard his parents talking about Riddle when he was a baby. 
The name could therefore be in his subconscious somewhere. >>

I am certain (for no reason except my own omniscence) that Harry 
vaguely recognised the name "Tom Riddle" because familiarity with 
that name is one of the things that Voldemort left in Harry, along 
with Parselmouth, an extra intensification of his magic ability, and 
I always wonder if that is why Harry is a "natural" Seeker who knew 
how to fly a broom without one lesson. Harry would *hate* it if he 
found that his one talent he's proud of actually came from Voldemort.

Megalynn wrote:

<< It is, however, inspired by the movie. In the Chamber scenes, 
Riddle is wearing Ravenclaw colors. His tie is blue and his patch has 
an R on it. I know I not mistaken because I stared at it the entire 
time in disbelief. >>

In chat this afternoon, when I said that Riddle's tie had looked 
green and silver to me, but Grey Wolf said it looked grey and silver 
to him, Meg supplied the following URL of evidence: 

http://us.imdb.com/EGallery?source=ss&group=0295297&photo=HP2SP-2935.j
pg&path=pgallery&path_key=Coulson,+Christian

Katze asked:

<< I also have to ask - how does a Rooster lay an egg, and can you 
get a toad to sit still atop an egg long enough for it to hatch? >>

Back in the days when I was in elementary school (in those days, a 
basilisk was different from and worse than a cockatrice), my text 
book said that Real Life roosters do occasionally lay infertile, 
undersized eggs. I sujppose it takes magic to make a toad nest a 
bird's egg.

It's hard to remember so far back, but I *think* the cockatrice was 
hatched from a rooster's egg nested by the rooster, and was a snake 
or lizard with a rooster head that spat deadly venom at anyone who 
encountered it, and the basilisk was born from the cockatrice's egg 
nested by a toad and looked like a cockatrice except it had a toad's 
head with those deadly eyes on the other end than the rooster head.

DRACO'S TREATS 

Jazmyn wrote:

<< And.. Malfoy secretly pays his house elves so they have money 
to get him all his favorite treats, plus gives them time off for 
shopping for them? ;) >>

No, they cook the sweets in the well-equipped Malfoy Manor kitchen.

Yenny Gama wrote:

<< What if Lily was a Salazar Slytherin descendant and James was a 
Godric Gryffindor descendant. >>

I am convinced that Lily had pure Muggle ancestry. 

It would contradict JKR's moral about not judging people by their 
pedigree to make the Muggle-born great witches (Lily and Hermione) 
secretly wizard-bred.