Duffers

[Ffred Clegg]

No: HPFGUIDX 188557

1a. Re: Duffers
    Posted by: "potioncat" willsonkmom at msn.com potioncat
    Date: Mon Nov 30, 2009 6:40 am ((PST))

>I think the most recent sorting hat song, "Good Hufflepuff, she took the rest and taught them all she knew," makes the house seem dummed down to >many readers. Helga, it seems, did not judge her students on bravery, wit or blood status. She was willing to teach anyone who wanted to learn. Again, >bravery, wit and blood status have nothing to do with magical potential. Hers is a "just" method of teaching. Hufflepuff's standards aren't low, they are just >and patient and welcoming.

Haven't posted for yonks but had to respond on this one.

Let's zoom back 1100 years and think in terms of how human beings lived at the time of the Founders (and by extension how the WW lived).

Look at a year's intake to Hogwarts.

On one side are the wizard-born children, they probably already know each other, are smartly dressed and discussing life in general in Latin, the lingua franca of the educated.

On the other side are the muggle-borns, barefoot, smelly, illiterate peasants who speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Anglo-Saxon, Middle Welsh, Cornish, Cumbrian, Gaelic, Pictish. They are terrified (because the priest has told them that witches and wizards will eat them, sacrifice them to Satan, or whatever, just before someone came along and snatched them off on a broomstick), uncomprehending, don't even know the rules for participating in polite society.

Personally I'm not that surprised that Slytherin ended up just wanting to take the purebloods ("But Godric, how can you teach them the three* uses of dragon's blood when they don't even know the one use of fleabane or what a garderobe is for?")

*more have been discovered since...

Meanwhile Helga was busy reassuring the youngsters that they would be ok, buddying them up with older students from their locality who could show them the ropes, clean them up a bit.

She ranks high in my estimation.

cheers

Ffred