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Founding Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Founders

While the books give us sufficient information to make good guesses about Godric Gryffindor, for the other three we have only geographic clues that could mean anything. Other fans with presumably more knowledge of the United Kingdom have made inferences that supposedly make sense.

Godric Gryffindor

Godric is from Old English, also dying out after the Norman Conquest.1 I am told, and the baby names etymology site seems to concur, that “Old English” essentially means “Anglo-Saxon.”2 He is supposedly from a village later renamed after him, in the West Country.3 This more or less works, the vikings might well have pushed the Anglo-Saxon west enough by the time Godric was born.4

Helga Hufflepuff

Helga is an Old Norse name, used in England “before the Norman Conquest.”5 The consensus is that she is from Wales.6 The name and location pair is a conundrum, she should be from one of the Viking invasions, but I do not know of those settling in Wales. Perhaps this is why she ended up migrating north, her family was perhaps unwelcome in their home town/village.

Rowena Ravenclaw

Rowena is an interesting name in that it apparently has an unclear etymology. I find very different explanations on different name origin sites, and Wikipedia pretty much just says unknown.7 The consensus is that she is from what is now Scotland,8 though of course that did not exist yet.9

Salazar Slytherin

Salazar is a last name from Castile.10 Vikings certainly raided the Iberian Peninsula through this century,11 my guess is that someone decided to name a child after one of the places they pillaged. As his wand is snakewood,12 which is not native to Europe, I think his Viking origin is fairly solid. I suspect he at some point joined a voyage to the new world, but given where snakewood exists, he must have heard rumours of the various civilisations further south and gone to study with them for a time. From my own knowledge of the Aztecs and Toltecs suggests that this would not have been a positive influence on his life. If he was attracted to the dark arts, it may well date from this period.

Meeting and Starting a School

That the four of them meet at all, and more, become friends, suggests that while this period of history is a series of rather small kingdoms at war in the United Kingdom, the magical civilisation must have been more broadly connected despite the non-magical politics. Otherwise the idea that Godric would make his way from the West Country in the southern most parts of England up across at least one other kingdom into a third in the tenth century is rather absurd. Why would you? There were no organised trade networks that widely spread, no real centres of scholarship in England or Scotland at all yet, and lots of very suspicious people who would dislike and probably attack you for being foreign.

My guess is that Hogwarts is in Scotland because Helga was unwelcome at home, Salazar was functionally nomadic, and of the two remaining founders, Rowena’s home in Scotland was probably more easily isolated and hidden from the non-magical population than Godric’s in the south.

  1. Behind the Name “Godric” Updated: 2020-02-04. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  2. Wikipedia “Old English Last Updated: 2021-04-19. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  3. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows p. 131. Pottermore Publishing. American Kindle Edition.↩︎

  4. Wikipedia “History of Anglo-Saxon England” Last Edited: 2021-04-21. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  5. Wikipedia “Helga” Last Edited: 2021-04-08. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  6. various, including

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  7. Wikipedia “Rowena” Last Edited: 2020-06-06. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  8. various, including

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  9. See History↩︎

  10. Wikipedia “Salazar (surname)” Last Updated: 2021-03-30. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  11. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica “Viking” Last Updated 2019-12-19. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎

  12. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” Originally published on Pottermore: 2016-06-28. Last Viewed: 2021-04-22.↩︎