[HPforGrownups] Would Hagrid be considered a half-blood?

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 57677

On Mon, 12 May 2003, bowlwoman wrote:

> Do the terms pure-blood, half-blood and mudblood refer to the 
> wizarding community when talking only about their heritage with 
> Muggles, or does it also refer to children of wizards and non-
> Muggle/non-wizard folk?
> 
> Specifically, I'm asking if Hagrid (and possibly Madame Maxime) would 
> be considered a half-blood because he had one parent who was a wizard 
> and one who was a giant.  The references I've seen define "half-
> blood" as a wizard/witch of mixed parentage with one of those parents 
> being a MUGGLE.  Hagrid's other parent wasn't a Muggle, she was a 
> giant.  Would these terms then still apply to him or is this all a 
> mute point because giants are so feared and shunned in the WW that 
> the fact Hagrid is half giant negates the whole issue (he's at the 
> bottom of the totem pole anyway).

Hagrid certainly isn't a pureblood (having a witch and a wizard as
parents) and he certainly isn't a mudblood, or muggle-born if you're
polite (having two muggles as parents).  But I really don't know whether
cross-bred witches and wizards count as half-bloods or are their own
separate category.

My personal feeling is that not-strictly-human witches and wizards would
generally fall in their own category.  The purebloodists seem primarily
prejudiced against muggles and wizards with muggle connections.  Whether a
cross-bred wizard would be stigmatized would depend on just which magical
creature they are descended from, i.e. giants are stigmatized, therefore
half-giants are as well; veela are not stigmatized, therefore half-veela
are not either.

> I don't know if any other inter-species breeding (man, that sounds so 
> callous!) has occured or will occur in the WW, but I would love to 
> see the impact it has on the purity of blood question.

We do know of one other person who is not entirely human.  Fleur Delacour
(and presumably her little sister as well) is at least one-quarter veela,
since she tells Ollivander that the veela hair in her wand came from her
grandmother.  We haven't seen anyone make reference to the purity of her
blood, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much stigma against being
part-veela as there is against being part-giant.  Fleur certainly has no
problem telling a room full of people, including a reporter, about her
veela heritage, and in fact I thought she seemed rather proud of her
grandmother in that scene.

----
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"