Slytherins: selfish, not evil + Ariana raped?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 174314

> Bart:
> > However, one factor I had not considered until now was that this
took place in the mid-19th century

Maven: 
> Wizards may be longer-lived than Muggles, but not THAT much
longer-lived. Work it backward from Dumbledore's defeat of Grindelwald
and capture of his wand - in 1945, as we are explicitly told more than
once. He delayed that meeting for "five years" after Ariana died. She
died quite young (16? 20? Check the details). There's simply no way
the attack that disastrously damaged her can be pushed back past about
the 1920's.

Carol responds:
Bart is right. The attack almost certainly takes place in the mid-19th
century.

Dumbledore is something like 150 years old in the HP books. Let's say
that he's 150 in the first book, which starts in 1991. He seems to
have a summer birthday like Harry (he leaves Hogwarts before he turns
eighteen) so he would be 150 for that entire school year. That would
mean he was born in the summer of 1841. Aberforth is three years
younger and would have been born around 1844. Ariana is six years old
when the Muggle boys attack her and, IIRC, only seven when she dies,
apparently ten years younger than Albus (born c. 1851). Albus has
finished school and says that he'll take care of her, which he manages
to do, according to Aberforth, for about three weeks. He is still
seventeen when he meets the sixteen-year-old Grindelwald and they
spend two months together before Aberforth expresses his view to
Albus, Gellert Crucios him, they get into a duel, Arizna is killed in
the crossfire, and Gellert, knowing he'll be suspected and probably
genuinely guilty, flees. By my calculations, the year is 1859, shortly
before or just after Dumbledore's eighteenth birthday. (Oops. Minor
detail wrong here. Maybe she's eleven years younger than Albus or died
when she was eight. But the numbers are roughly accurate, and math is
not JKR's forte.)

Gellert Grindelwald has been expelled from Durmstrang and can't return
for his final year, but it doesn't matter. He has other plans. The
first step is stealing the Elder Wand from Gregorovitch, which he does
while h'es still a boy or at least a very young man. It will be a long
time before this merry-faced boy with grandiose ideas about the right
of wizards to rule Muggles for "the greater good" starts building his
own prisons (and perhaps concentration camps).

Dumbledore does not go after him five years after Ariana's death, when
they are twenty-one and twenty-two respectively. He turns, as far as I
can tell, a blind eye to Grindelwald's atrocities, and waits five
years after the Ministry begs him to go after his former friend. And
even then, he can't bring himself to kill him. In 1945, aged by my
calculations about 103 (DD is about 104), he is defeated and sent to
his own prison, Nurmgard. (We have seen Dumbledore at about that age,
with Tom Riddle, in CoS.) Maybe fear that Tom Riddle would become
another Dark wizard pushed Dumbledore finally to confront and defeat
his one-time friend, about 86 years too late. And the wizened old
wizard who laughs in Voldemort's face, taunting him that he will never
be the master of the Elder wand, is about 156, the same age DD was
when he died if DD was 150 in the first book.

To return to the attack on Ariana, which must have occurred in about
1859, is that it is not rape but an attack by three slightly older
boys on a helpless little girl. Aberforth says they're afraid of her
magic and are trying to force or stifle it out of her; I pictured them
stoning her or choking her, shades of what medieval people would have
done to a witch. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch (sorceress) to live. I
very much doubt that these boys are teenage gangmembers, as you seem
to imply. They're children; they've seen another child who's
different, and they're afraid of her. their fear turns to fury and
they get carried away--the mob mentality.) My impression was that the
boys were about twelve years old, maybe even younger. Twelve-year-olds
have been known to kill six-year-olds, and three on one would be
terrifying for a little girl who can't control her magic.

On a side note, you may be confusing Dumbledore's age with Tom
Riddle's (Tom was born December 31, 1927, by my calculations.)
Dumbledore is, of course, much older.

Carol, who is still putting the pieces together and needs to go back
for quotes