"Purebloods", "Mudbloods" and Muggle-borns

[Jesta Hijinx]

No: HPFGUIDX 59277

Greetings, all:

I've had another thought over time, and I believe I wrote a post once before 
that got bounced because my account was overfull or some such thing:

This whole issue of mudbloods, purebloods, what have you.

I think there's a really important question or two lurking at the bottom of 
this:

1)  What is the exact definition of each?

I'd say the odds that there are *any* wizards who have totally pure, 
wizard-only bloodlines that go back to the dawn of time (or even to the time 
of Hogwarts' establishment) are vanishingly small.

I have a theory that, at some point, if there's only one Muggle ancestor, 
it's basically considered to "fade back" if every line since then is 
entirely wizard, or has the same degree of regression.

I have no canonical basis for this, but I'm basing the thought on a cutoff 
degree that was established for the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act 
- you had to be at least 1/16th Native American (and one of the specified 
peoples/tribes, I believe, although Cher did a few PSAs for them on the 
strength of her Cherokee ancestry).  Less than that, you didn't get a cut of 
the pie.

Seamus Finnegan says he's "half and half" - implying that his father was 
pureblood Muggle and his mother pureblood witch.  What if that's a rough 
approximation?

2)  Although JKR doesn't get into this in what is still essentially juvenile 
fiction, what about illegitimate children, or children whose father isn't 
really who their mother says it is?  :-)  The WW seems every bit as prone to 
human temptations as we are; you can't tell me that in all their long 
history there wasn't someone who strayed one way or the other.  What if a 
child shows up thinking they have pure Muggle parents but they are actually 
the result of a liaison between their mum and a wizard?  Say, even, that she 
was a single mum and the dad married her and adopted the child as his own?

3)  And if we're doing genetic equations like this, what about the 
spontaneous wizards like Hermione, who evidently owe their powers to the 
mutation that produced wizards in the first place?  How many generations 
before their offspring count as "purebloods" if they intermarry only with 
purebloods?

Let's say that Hermione does marry Ron, eventually.  Their children, the 
first generation, are not going to be considered purebloods by those who 
count and care, no matter how brilliant Hermione is.  But that's decidedly 
not Hermione's fault.  She is what she is.

Let's say their children, we'll give them three for right now, marry - the 
first boy marries a pureblood witch with a similar background to the 
Weasleys, the girl marries a Muggle, and the second boy marries another 
"spontaneous witch" like Hermione with similar strong, brilliant powers but 
Muggle parents.  How do their children "count"?

It's really a rather fascinating train of thought once you start playing 
with it with some Mendelian graphics on paper.  :-)

***

In sum, I think that *probably* even the Malfoys might have a Muggle 
ancestor back there in the seventh or eighth generation back, if they looked 
closely enough.  If they don't, I'll bet they're an extreme rarity.

Felinia Beauclerc
House Ravenclaw

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