Ogg the gamekeeper

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 158355

I realize that I've just been talking about the willing suspension of
disbelief (Coleridge on the brain for some reason), but the
inconsistency with Ogg the gamekeeper really bothers me.

Hagrid implies in GoF that he was made gamekeeper *immediately* after
his expulsion in 1943: 

"Dumbledore was the one who stuck up for me after Dad went [i.e., did
in Hagrid's second year]. Got me the gamekeeper job. . . . Trusts
people, he does. . . . Gives 'em second chances" (GoF Am. ed. 455,
italics in original).

The juxtaposition suggests that the parentless boy was made gamekeeper
(as a "second chance" after bringing Aragog into the school) so that
he wouldn't have to leave Hogwarts. I think we can take that idea with
a grain of salt--gamekeeper at thirteen? Maybe assistant gamekeeper
under "a man called Ogg," who, according to Molly Weasley, was
gamekeeper when she was at Hogwarts. Also, as we know, Dumbledore
wasn't headmaster at that time: Armando Dippet was. So possibly Hagrid
became gamekeeper, as opposed to assistant gamekeeper, when Dumbledore
became headmaster. Certainly Hagrid was gamekeeper by the time
Snape/MWPP were in school (ca. 1970-1977) since Dumbledore mentions
receiving letters notes from "countless" parents who remember Hagrid
as gamekeeper from their own Hogwarts days (453). But the dates for
Dumbledore's headmastership are problematic as well, as are the dates
for the Weasley parents' attendance at Hogwarts.

We learn in HBP that Molly and Arthur got married immediately after
they left school when Voldemort was taking over, which would mean that
they married at seventeen or eighteen in about 1970, so they would
have started school in about 1963. 

Let's suppose that Hagrid was assistant gamekeeper until about 1947,
when he would have come of age, and definitely gamekeeper from 1970
onward (about the same time that Dumbledore became headmaster,
according to Lupin). Alternatively, he might have been gamekeeper from
ca. 1956 onward (the other possible date for DD becoming headmaster,
if we follow the dates for McGonagall becoming Transfiguration teacher
in December 1956, IIRC, and Riddle/Voldemort's failed application for
the DADA position, which must have happened ca. 1957-59).

If Molly and Arthur attended school any time between, say, 1944 and
1956, I can see them being somehow being oblivious to the existence of
the gigantic young assistant gamekeeper, but if they started school in
1963, when Hagrid was about forty, surely he would already have been
gamekeeper and Ogg would be long gone, in which case, Molly would have
no memories of Ogg to reminisce about.

Maybe JKR should just write Ogg out of the book (he's only mentioned
in GoF, the same book in which Hagrid implies that he's been
gamekeeper since his expulsion (although that implication could just
be a misleading juxtaposition). Still, though, I can't account for Ogg
being the gamekeeper before Hagrid and Molly Weasley remembering him
if she's about seven years older than Snape/MWPP and Hagrid is only a
few years younger than Riddle/Voldemort (about 64-65 in GoF, compared
with 35-36 for Snape, making Molly about 42-43 at that time). 

Carol, thinking that JKR can't be *that* bad at math and must simply
have forgotten to do a basic consistency check before submitting the
manuscript