How many Rons per Hermione - numerical analysis of Ron's alleged decline

[Tim Regan]

No: HPFGUIDX 81833

Hi All,

Apologies if this has been done to death already, do send me a link 
to your favourite "What happened to Ron in OotP?" thread if I'm 
repeating posts I haven't read.

I'm just finishing my second reading of OotP. I read it once fairly 
quickly and then again, more slowly, as episodic bedtime reading to 
my kids. One thing that really struck me second time through is the 
absence of Ron. He's in it less and gets fewer good lines than 
normal. Then having Hermione, Hagrid, Harry, and therefore us miss 
Ron's Quidditch success was callous on all three characters part. As 
Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club from 1959-1974 once 
said "football isn't a matter of life and death - it's much more 
than that", and I get the impression that Quidditch garners the same 
emotions in the wizarding world. It was important that H & H saw 
Grawp, but not important enough to miss Ron's moment of glory.

My only hope was that JKR was removing Ron from the picture so that 
he could attain a modicum of mystery so that Hermione would fall for 
him later. But, on running that past my wife Kate, I'm told that is 
and emotionally unlikely idea :-(

But I did want to check that my assessment of Ron's dwindling 
importance was accurate, so I've done a little numerical analysis on 
the texts.

I'll cut to the chase, the measure of the number of occurrences of 
the word "Ron" per occurrence of the word "Hermione", which I'll 
write Rons/Hermione. There are:
1) 1.59 Rons/Hermione in PS/SS
2) 2.18 Rons/Hermione in CoS
3) 1.18 Rons/Hermione in PoA
4) 1.20 Rons/Hermione in GoF
5) 1.00 Rons/Hermione in OotP
(all to two decimal places). Although by this measure the relative 
importance of Ron to Hermione is dropping, the change is not 
significant over the last thee books. And Ron is still as important 
as Hermione (i.e. his score isn't below 1.00).

I also looked at name occurrences per page (using the number of 
pages in the USA hardbacks).  Here are the numbers:
1) 4.29 Harrys, 1.39 Rons, 0.87 Hermiones
2) 4.83 Harrys, 2.04 Rons, 0.94 Hermiones
3) 4.61 Harrys, 1.74 Rons, 1.47 Hermiones
4) 4.28 Harrys, 1.42 Rons, 1.18 Hermiones
5) 4.73 Harrys, 1.50 Rons, 1.50 Hermiones
There are a couple of interesting trends in there. Firstly the 
number of occurrences of Ron's and Harry's name steadily decline 
from CoS, through PoA, to GoF. Then all three have their names used 
more per page in OotP. I guess that will be an indication of 
narrative style changes across the books.

It's a shame that Hermione was out of CoS for so long since that 
skews the occurrences of her name in any numerical analysis of CoS.

Obviously these numbers may not be accurate. My counting the 
occurrences of words in a book, or any other process one might use 
to get these figures, would be prone to error. But it does suggest 
that my reading of Ron's drastically reduced importance may be wrong.

Cheers,

Dumbledad.