Number of students at Hogwarts

[mysmacek <mysmacek@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51845

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Marie Jadewalker
<marie_mouse at h...>" <marie_mouse at h...> wrote:

> My alternative, if I force myself to reconcile her answer with the 
> fact that we only ever hear of 10 Gryffs in Harry's year (8 by name) 
> is the idea of a Baby Boom.  Since the chat was in 2000, it was after 
> GOF was released, so the canon she's speaking from has 3 classes 
> younger than Harry.  Harry is young(ish) for his class AFAIK and 
> Voldemort was defeated in October of Harry's first year.  So, er, I 
> think a baby boom as a (direct or indirect) result of the post-
> Voldemort celebrations and relative peace would make sense.  (And it 
> jives with the idea that Ron wondered if Colin and Ginny would meet, 
> even though both were first year Gryffs in COS -- if there's any 
> doubt there must be a lot more of them than there are members of 
> Harry's class that we've seen.)  As a caveat, I wonder how many 
> children named Harry, James, or Lily there are in the lower grades at 
> Hogwarts.    

Unfortunately, you are all missing my point: That the number of
*first* years during POA is less than 20. Repeat: *first* years. So we
now have another year, besides Harry's, which has this low number of
students.

Generally, I believe that the reason could be that JKR wrote the books
as if 10 * 4 * 7 students in all the different classes totalled to
cca. 1000 students in all Hogwarts - something like a reversed "bigger
inside than outside" spell of MoM cars, but created only by author's
license :-(((

Mysmacek