Luke's HP Site

The Society that Allowed Riddle

Like other fan fiction writers before me, I am curious about how Riddle came to have the power to rock magical world the way he did. Again, like others before me, it seems clear that the answer to this lies not just in his personal power or personal charisma, but at least in part in the society that he so devastated. What, then, did this society look like? Why, ultimately, was Riddle possible?

Rowling has confirmed that she deliberately drew parallels between the magical society that Harry reenters at age eleven and that of Nazi Germany.1 However, as I have noted elsewhere in these notes, Mrs. Rowling does not make incredibly consistent use of real world history, thus the parallel she is attempting to draw is flawed.2 If you strip away the magical bonds stuff that Radaslab adds3, and the technomacy stuff that Aaran St Vines adds,4, both come up with remarkably interesting solutions to this problem. Both assume that the Wizengamot is a long-standing institution in the governance of wizarding Britain, despite the fact that we can only reliably date it from 1544.5 Both assume that its membership

Both further speculate that the Potters have a hereditary seat on the Wizengamot, that said seat wields a fair amount of power, and that seat becomes central to the plot without making the story solely a political thriller. This last bit is probably the biggest problem with the scenario, Mrs. Rowling tells us that only two Potters have sat on the Wizengamot, but that both were effectively at critical times in history.6 As I state in my Potter Family notes, the coincidental timing makes me think that perhaps the Potters typically appoint proxies for some unknown reason, but that theory is a stretch. Leaving aside the exact structure of the Wizengamot, lets assume the above speculation is essentially accurate. It still does not tell us enough.

Mrs. Rowling tells us that while the blood status ideology may have started with Slytherin, it did not really gain prominence or social acceptance until the Statute of Secrecy came into effect.7 While 270 or 280 years, depending on when you date Riddle’s power base from, is a long time, it pales beside the amount of time that Jews have been used as scapegoats by various European leaders. The Nazi party was building on a well established and fairly popular prejudice. When you consider that witches and wizards may very well commonly live to be as much as 150 or 200 years old8, then the prominence of the blood status ideology came into prominence while the parents of the ruling generation were alive (at least for the first war, if not also the second). In other words, people in the magical world may not remember it being an “unusual and misguided view”,9 but the ones in charge of society remember making that view something more nearly mainstream. There should not be the cultural habit of blaming everything on them, or of dehumanising them the way we see with Jews in Germany. Excluding them from any real political power quite possibly, but within the context of some existing class structure.

  1. ↩︎

  2. I am not the first to note this, see the Author’s Note in Radaslab’s Not Normal Chapter 16: Line Continuation Published 2011-07-04. Updated: 2013-08-10. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎

  3. Radaslab. Not Normal Published 2011-07-04. Updated: 2013-08-10. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎

  4. Aaran St Vines. “Great Scott, Potter, This is War!” Published: 2006-03-07. Updated: 2009-02-15. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎

  5. Harry Potter Wiki “Wizengamot” Last Edited: 2021-07-13. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎

  6. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “The Potter Family” The J.K. Rowling Index 2015-09-22. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎

  7. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “Pure-Blood” The J.K. Rowling Index 2012-10-18. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎

  8. See the Lifespan section of my notes on Magic.↩︎

  9. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “Pure-Blood” The J.K. Rowling Index 2012-10-18. Last Viewed: 2021-10-04.↩︎