Dumbledore's age (Was:Stereotypes- Q & A: (was: Re: I am so happy,

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 178474

bamf wrote:
<snip>
> Unless anyone can point me to DD's age, as I remember JKR saying
150, but have been hearing rumors to the contrary. The historian in me
is curious, especially in regards to the clothing...

Carol responds:

I was going to answer offlist because there's not much info to make up
a post, but I found that I had more to say than I thought, so here goes. 

JKR did say twice in interviews that DD was "about 150" (at least,
that's how it was transcribed), but his Wizard of the Month card on
JKR's website gave his birth and death dates as 1881-1996, which would
make him closer to 115 (though, of course, she got the death year
wrong: it should be 1997). If DD had a late summer birthday, which
seems to be the case with his leaving school at seventeen and still
being seventeen during his two-month friendship with GG, he would have
died at 115, going on 116 (June 1997). That, of course, fits with
Molly's Auntie Muriel, who several times gives her own age as 107,
having known the teenage DD (or known *of* him through her mother)
when she was a child than the "about 150" figure would.

There used to be a link to the archived Wizards of the Month on Leaky,
but they're still converting that part of the site to some new
software or format or something, so the best I can give you is the
text portion of DD's card from the Lexicon:

"September 2007 = Albus Dumbledore 1881-1996
"Brilliant and often controversial headmaster of Hogwarts School of
Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore is most famous for his 1945
defeat of Grindelwald and his steadfast championing of Harry Potter,
the Boy Who Lived. Dumbledore's self-proclaimed proudest achievement,
however, was featuring on a Famous Wizards Chocolate Frog Card."

http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/sources/jkr.com/jkr-com-wotm.html

Carol, who thought of Buster Brown when she read the descriptions of
Albus and Aberforth as children but realizes that Buster was created
slightly later (1902) than the DD boys' childhood

http://z.about.com/d/collectibles/1/0/8/O/3/busterbrowndolls.jpg