Lupin and Sirius age. Was: Re: Harry & Draco friends, is he really that rotten?

[hp_lexicon]

No: HPFGUIDX 100058

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" 
<dumbledore11214 at y...> wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Metylda <bamf505 at y...> wrote:
> > It would help if we knew at what age Lily and James
> > got married - to see how long after Hogwarts they were
> > married, and then had Harry.  Are we ever given the
> > present ages of Lupin or Sirius in the books?

The best clue from the books themselves is something Harry "thinks" 
to himself after seeing his father and the others taking their OWLs:

     He could abandon the plan and simply learn 
     to live with the memory of what his father 
     had done on a summer's day more than twenty 
     years ago
 (OP chap 29, "Career Advice")

Since James was the same age in the Pensieve scene as Harry is in 
book five, we know that James is "more than twenty years" older than 
his son. The trick, of course, is figuring out what "more than 
twenty" means in this case.

It's safe to say that it doesn't mean just any number more than 
twenty, no matter how large. In fact, it's more than likely that the 
phrase means a number fairly close to twenty, or the phrase would 
be "almost thirty years." It's a reasonable guess to place that 
number between 21 and 25 years. 

We know that James, Sirius, and the others were in the same year, so 
we can say that they are now between 21 and 25 years older than 
Harry, (or would be, if they were alive). That means that they are 
between the ages of 36 and 40 right now. Since Rowling said in an 
interview just after the release of book four that Snape was "35 or 
36," we can adjust that estimate toward the low end.

With all that, we know that Remus, Peter, and Snape are all about 36 
or 37 at this point in the story, about four or five years younger 
than Lucius and a bit more than twenty years older than Harry and 
his friends. FRom that we can also determine that James and Lily 
were about 21 or 22 when they had Harry.

Steve
The Lexicon