[HPforGrownups] Re: Schooldays

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 55572

On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Steve wrote:

> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "The Fox" <the_fox01 at h...> wrote:
> > From: "Steve" <bboy_mn at y...>
> > 
> > >someone else said:
> > >>...edited...
> > >>... what are the odds that Arthur, Lucius and James all went to 
> > > >school together?
> > >>...edited...
> > >
> > >bboy_mn:
> > >
> > >What are the odds? Zero, in my book.
> > >
> > >Arthur and Molly - close in age to Prof. McGonagall (about 70), 
> > > older than >Hagrid, probably older than Voldemort
> > 
> > I agree with you that Arthur and James couldn't have gone to school 
> > together.  But, dude -- you like the odds that a 70-year-old Molly
> > Weasley has a ten-year-old child?  :-)
> > 
> > Fox
> 
> bboy_mn:
> Remember that Wizards live about twice as long as Muggles, so in
> Muggle years (relative to a muggle lifespan) Molly is between 35 and
> 40 years old. So yes, I believe she could easily have a 10 year old kid. 

But her oldest child appears to be in his mid-20s.  Since we know Arthur
and Molly were together while still in school, assuming they are 70ish now
would raise the question of why they waited so long (mid-40s) to start
their family.  They don't seem to have waited until they made their
fortune before having kids, and they clearly like having lots of children
running around, so why wait 20+ years to start a family?

Plus, I have issues with the idea of dividing a witch's or wizard's by two
to get their "real" age.  If we just divide the ages of magical people in
half to get their "muggle years" (kind of like "dog years"), then since
Hogwarts students finish up at age 17 or 18, most witches and wizards have
finished their formal educations when they are only 9ish, relatively
speaking.  But Percy and Oliver certainly didn't seem that immature during
their seventh year.  I think it is more consistent with what we see in the
book to assume wizard life cycles proceed at the same rate as muggle life
cycles, except that the end of life is postponed quite a while.

> Logically, if they can live twice as long, the child bearing years are
> also twices as long. At age 70, Arthur and Molly are on the low end of
>  middle age.

I don't think it works that neatly.  In pre-industrial societies life
spans were often half of what they are now in industrialized countries.  
That doesn't mean the women went through menopause at around 25 instead of
50-ish.  Similarly, I don't think we can assume that just because wizards
live longer than muggles, their childbearing years also last
proportionally longer.  A woman goes through menopause when her ovaries
start to run out of usable eggs.  Unless magical women are born with many
more eggs than muggle women (which seems strange to me -- what's the
connection between magic and egg quantities?) then the span of child
bearing years ought to be about the same for both groups.

If Molly Weasly had her first child, Bill, in her early to mid-20s and her
last, Ginny, about 16 years later -- a reasonable hypothesis, given the
facts we know -- then Ginny would have been born during Molly's late 30s
or early 40s, about when her fertility could be expected to start
declining.  It's possible they simply decided that seven kids was enough
and started using contraceptives after Ginny.  However, the age span of
their kids would fit neatly into the normal (non-magical) span of child
bearing years.


----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"