Colin Creevey: Flint or not? (was Re: Hedwig's death)

[hp_fan_2008]

No: HPFGUIDX 183597

Carol:
> 
> Right. McGonagall says, "You, too, Creevey," when she's ordering
> underage students to go to the RoR and safety rather than fight. Jimmy
> Peakes would be a fifth-year Gryffindor, IIRC, so he's definitely
> underage and definitely under her authority. But Colin Creevey is
> either no longer a Gryffindor and therefore not bound to takeorders
> from someone who's no longer his Head of House or he's a sixth year
> and quite possibly of age (nearly three-quarters of the students in
> any given year would have their birthdays between September 1 and
> mid-May, when the battle apparently takes place).

If McGonagall is running the Hogwarts defense, then she may consider
it her responsibility to make sure that no one underage is involved.
Probably about 1 in 4 students who began in CoS would still be
underage, so it's not out of the question that Colin was. It's also
quite possible that in the previous July the heads of houses
(including McGonagall) got the birthdays of the sixth-year-to-be
students in their houses, and Colin would have been on such a list.

 
> Either Colin is still at Hogwarts and JKR, having forgotten that he's
> a Muggle-born (<Snip>), and JKR is just covering her tracks in 
> that interview (<Snip>), or McGonagall is treating a boy who has 
> not been at Hogwarts all year as if she were still his Head of 
> House and as if she knows his exact age. (Dumbledore certainly 
> didn't know Hermione's exact age when he refers to her and
> Harry as "two thirteen-year-old Wizards" in GoF, at which point
> Hermione has been fourteen for nearly nine months.) 

If she's in charge of defending Hogwarts, she may consider herself
temporarily Headmistress, and in charge of who gets to be on Hogwarts
grounds. See my comment above about McGonagall knowing Colin's exact age.

 
> Did JKR confuse Colin with Dennis (who seems to have disappeared from
> the story), thinking that *Colin* is underage as Dennis would have
> been? Or is she thinking, as she did with James in OoP, that because a
> kid is in a given year, he's a given age (fifteen in fifth year;
> sixteen in sixth year)? (<Snip>) How would McGonagall know that he was
> underage--unless, perhaps, he'd somehow been at Hogwarts all year
> despite being a Muggle-born and was too young to take the Apparition
> test in April? 

If the information about the birthdays was sent in the previous July,
then Muggle-borns would have been listed.

                    HP Fan 2008