the Charlie Weasley problem (Was: Under age magic - just wondering?)
justcarol67
justcarol67 at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 3 23:18:22 UTC 2009
No: HPFGUIDX 188344
Carol earlier:
>
> More precisely, Gryffindor supposedly hasn't won a Quidditch match for seven years as of SS/PS (and again, seven years as of PoA!), yet the "legendary Charlie Weasley" who "could have played for England" was Gryffindor's Seeker for several years, perhaps as many as six, and one of the Twins, IIRC, says in SS/PS, "We haven't won since Charlie left."
>
> All well and good if Charlie is considerably older than his next brother, Percy, and has been out of school for seven years as of SS/PS, but JKR has Bill, who is two years older than Charlie, remark in GoF that he's only been out of Hogwarts for five years, and JKR said in an interview that Charlie was two years older than Percy, which she later changed to three years when someone pointed out that he'd have been at Hogwarts the previous year (when Harry and Ron were ten) if that were the case.
>
> So either Charlie is about nine years older than Percy (and Bill is eleven years older) or the stint as Seeker of "the legendary Charlie Weasley" exactly coincides with the seven years that Gryffindor *lost* the Quidditch Cup to Slytherin.
>
> Janelle:
> The "Charlie Weasley problem" has bugged me, too. A while ago I made a timeline based on what is said in the books themselves (it's helped me work out lots of little mysteries!) and this is what I've discovered for sure about this one, followed by some assumptions made based off of those facts:
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<snip>
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> *Slytherin won the QUIDDITCH Cup in 1991 ("flattened in that last match by Slytherin"(SS-152)) *Gryffindor won the QUIDDITCH Cup in 1986- when Charlie Weasley was on the team, and in 1994 (The end of Harry's third year) ("Gryffindor hasn't won for seven years now"(CS-143)) ("We haven't won since Charlie left"(SS-153))
>
<snip>
> From those dates it's clear that Charlie's last year at Hogwarts had to have been 1986, which means that his first year was 1979 (assuming that he attended all 7 years)
<snip>
> Percy didn't start school until 1987, so he was never at school with Bill or Charlie which makes both of them significantly older than him. This is the only logical explanation given what we know from canon.
>
> As far as Bill saying he left five years ago as of 1995, I want to point out that he doesn't say that's when he left school- he says: "'Haven't seen this place for five years'"(GOF-616). That puts his last visit to Hogwarts back in 1990- maybe to visit Percy and/or the twins, who were all students there at that time?
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> Sorry if this is confusing- just trying to point out the timeline according to canon- not according to what Jo says in interviews. We all know that there's no way those comments are ever going to make sense!
>
Carol responds:
The thing is, though, that JKR *does* state that Charlie is only three years older than Percy (changed from two years), an age that would fit with Bill's having left Hogwarts five years before the QWT. with Fleur's attraction to Bill (which would be fine if she's, say, eighteen and he's twenty-three but odd if he's eleven years older than Percy (two years older than Charlie, who's nine years older than Percy by this timeline), which would make him about twenty-eight and Bill about thirty at the end of GoF. It would also make Bill thirty-two at the end of HBP, which makes the distinction between Lupin (age thirty-seven) and Bill in HBP rather stretched "Young and whole men do not always remain so")--JKR seems to be thinking of Bill here as no more than twenty-five (as he would be if he left Hogwarts at eighteen seven years earlier).
So, in JKR's mind (as opposed to what makes sense regarding Quidditch ("We haven't won since Charlie left" and "Gryffindor hasn't won the Quidditch Cup for seven years") Charlie is three years older than Percy and Bill five years older than Percy. But on paper, based on Quidditch, Charlie has to be nine years older than Percy and Bill eleven.
You're assuming that Charlie was on the team when Gryffindor last won the Quidditch Cup, which would be 1984 by my calculations (1991, when the characters are speaking, though the final match won't be until 1992, minus seven), but the only indication that he was on the team (aside from all the praise of his abilities) is "We haven't won since Charlie left."
I think--and no one needs to agree with me--that JKR is thinking of the seven years Charlie was in school as the *same* seven years that Quidditch did not win the Quidditch Cup, which would mean that he had just left Hogwarts the year before and is three years older than Percy (who was a fourth year when Charlie, by this calculation, was in seventh). She doesn't seem to realize that Charlie needs to have been a seventh year seven years before for her timeline to work.
Let me double-check my math. If Charlie left school seven years earlier, Percy (who's fifteen at the beginning of SS/PS would have been eight years old at the beginning of that year and nine or close to it at the end, so, assuming that Charlie left at eighteen and Percy is nine, that's nine years difference, plus two years for Bill equals eleven years difference.
Now that's a really big spread between kids when all the others are a year or two apart.
Anyway, I think that JKR gets an idea into her head (e.g., Draco has the Hand of Glory and Harry and Ron know about it) and doesn't check to see whether canon fits this idea. I think that's what happened with Charlie Weasley.
I won't even go into the ages of the older Weasleys except to say that attending Hogwarts at a time before Hagrid was gamekeeper does not fit with their getting married during VW1. The dates for DD's becoming headmaster are also contradictory--either it was right before Lupin attended school or it was before MWPP and Snape were even born when LV came to Hogwarts to apply for the DADA position.
Carol, who thinks that JKR has mastered what Orwell called "double-think" (I can't think of the other name for it), the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time and believe them both
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