[HPforGrownups] Re: So Exactly how many students ARE there at Hogwartz?

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 191557

On 12/19/2011 6:19 PM, pippin_999 wrote:
> Bart:
>       It appears like it's more like 40 or so students each year attend
> Hogwarts (4-6 of each gender in each house)..
> Pippin:
> This is one of those issues where JKR has simply thrown her hands in the air and admitted that there's no way to get the numbers to reconcile.
>
> She decided she'd need forty named students in Harry's year to tell the story, and so at some point long before the first book was published she sat down and made a list of them. They weren't supposed to be *only*  forty first years. She thought the school itself had about a thousand students and that's the number she gave in interviews. But she never worked out the discrepancies.  There's no telling where all the "extra" students are supposed to sleep and so on -- her mind, she says, doesn't work like that.

Bart:
     And if JKR didn't base her plot lines on the readers following tiny 
details in the story, that would be OK. However, it's been a while since 
I said this, so, once again:

"There are three kinds of people in the world; those who can count, and 
those who can't." - J. K. Rowling

     Bart
>