hair color was Weasley nationality (very long post)

[dtbonett]

No: HPFGUIDX 80075

Sarah wrote:

> I've always assumed that red-hair or white blonde hair 
> was common in England before the Normans with their French brown 
> hair came and invaded. 

This is a common mistake being made here.  The 'Normans' were not
darker than the "English" (whatever that was at the point, already
very mixed actually, dark-haired Celts and Picts and fair Angles,
Saxons and Danes, plus a lot of other peoples as well).  The Normans
were "Northmen" who had only left Scandinavia a generation or two
previously and had been given the land of Normandy as a bribe to stop
them from continuing to harass the French, and would have been tall,
fair-haired people, in spite of all the movies which show them as
having black hair and moustaches, in contrast to blond 'Saxons' (no
such thing really as a 'Saxon' in England by 1066). The Norman
conquest was not considered to be some sort of ethnic invasion at the
time-- we owe that myth to Walter Scott writing FICTION 800 years
after the fact and putting in nineteenth century preoccupations about
nationalism which didn't exist at the time of the Conquest. 

Red hair is a mutation of blond hair, and not separate racially or
ethnically.  Scotland has the greatest proportion in the world, I
believe, of redheads, something like 10%. I think JK Rowling made the
Weasleys redheaded just simply because she is a redhead.  She has dyed
her hair blond since becoming famous, she says to make herself a
little less noticeable.  I think that's a shame, as red hair is so
attractive, isn't it?

Queen Elizabeth I, possibly the world's most famous redhead, had a
blond father (Henry VIII) and a mother who was a very, very dark
brunette (Anne Boleyn, famous for her black eyes).  She was the usual
mishmosh of different backgrounds that you find in England, with
Plantagenet (Norman, that is) and Welsh (Celtic) ancestry on her
father's side; her mother, being non-royal would have been more
"English".  The family genetics are very convuluted because Dad had so
many wives, but the two other sibling who survived were blond, Mary I
taking after her blonde Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon (like lot
of blondes, Mary's hair gradually darkened to a light brown once she
was past adolescence) and  Edward, who didn't live past adolescence,
and had a fair mother, also "English" Jane Seymour.

In answer to the rest of your post:
 >We've got three pure-blood families that we 
> know of: the Malfoys, the Blacks, and the Weasleys.  The Blacks go 
> back to the Middle Ages, and their family motto is in French, so my 
> guess is that they came to England along with the Normans, or 
> shortly thereafter.
> invasion with their extremely light hair.  Well, Anglo-Saxons with 
> Latin first names.  Hm, that doesn't seem to fit very well, does 
> it.  And the Weasleys seem to be one of the original inhabitants of 
> England, which does go along with the Arthurian names that the 
> Weasley children all have.  
1. The Black family motto being in French means nothing. Mottos are
always in French (well, sometimes in Latin). Doesn't mean anything
about your heritage.  I don't think we know what they are, although
Jim Dale, for some reason, has given cousin Bellatrix some of sort of
strange vaguely Eastern European sounding accent, I don't know why.
(That accent isn't French).
2.  "Malfoy" on the other hand, is about as Norman French a name as
you can get.  French translations of the book spell if "Malefoy" which
would make it even more medieval and ancient and aristocratic in
sound.  But they are certainly not more ancient than the Blacks.
3.  "ARthurian' names are also meaningless.  What we think of as
'Arthurian' names are mostly from 12th century France, when the French
took the originally British legends about King Arthur, Frenchified
them and made them popular all over Europe in the form we currently
know, sending them back to England in the new form. None of what we
think of as ARthurian names would have been familiar to the 'original'
inhabitants of Britain.  "Gawain' and "Kay" and "Guinevere" (it would
be Gwenhumara) are names from the Welsh versions of Arthur (in the
Mabinogion) which predate the Frenchification. But "Perceval" (which
other than 'Arthur' is the only Arthurian name in the Weasley family,
except if Ginny is a Guinevere) is definitely medieval French, as is
"Lancelot" (never existed in early "British" forms of the legend) and
most others. The original Arthur, BTW, was most probably a Roman 'dux
bellorum' or Duke of War, who fought to keep the Saxon invaders out of
a Britain that the Romans had only recently left, and succeeded in
delaying their taking over the country for perhaps a generation.

I don't think that Rowling intends us to take any of the old wizarding
families as being from different ancestries than the others--I think
what she wants us to get is that the Weasleys have made themselves
declasse (as did Sirius), because they are so accepting of new
(Muggle) blood.  I don't think that they are less aristocratic though
than the Malfoys and the Blacks--remember aristocracy doesn't mean
money, it means a certain bloodline, which the Weasleys definitely
have, she keeps repeating that they are 'purebloods' which is clearly
the only important thing to snobs in the wizarding world.  I don't
think the hair color tells you anything much at all about family
background, even less than it actually does in our world, in spite of
how hopeful Hitler got about it.  (I've always wondered how he
reconciled himself to exterminating all those blond Poles, while being
allied to Italians? and Japanese?  Among many other discrepancies?)

DBonett, who is a history professor and therefore it is in my nature
to be boring. Perhaps I am related to Professor Binns.