James Potter

Families

Married

• Spouse: Lily J Evans
• Children:
  • Harry James Potter

Parents

• Family: Married
  • Father: Fleamont Potter
  • Mother: Euphemia Potter

Analysis

James Potter is one of the more controversial figures in the Harry Potter series. There is so little information about him, that both fan fiction authors and just opinion pieces and commentators are working with an almost blank slate.

From the books

Harry remembered that his father had been pure-blood,¹

James Potter

Born 27 March 1960

Died 31 October 1981²

“Who wants to be in Slytherin? I think I’d leave, wouldn’t you?” James asked the boy lounging on the seats opposite him, and with a jolt, Harry realized that it was Sirius. Sirius did not smile.

“My whole family have been in Slytherin,” he said.

“Blimey,” said James, “and I thought you seemed all right!”

Sirius grinned. “Maybe I’ll break the tradition. Where are you heading, if you’ve got the choice?”

James lifted an invisible sword. “‘Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!’ Like my dad.”³

…

“Where’re you hoping to go, seeing as you’re neither?” interjected Sirius.

James roared with laughter. Lily sat up, rather flushed, and looked from James to Sirius in dislike.

“Come on, Severus, let’s find another compartment.”

“Oooooo . . .”

James and Sirius imitated her lofty voice; James tried to trip Snape as he passed.

“See ya, Snivellus!” a voice called, as the compartment door slammed. . . .⁴

James, like Ron, grew up thinking ill of Slytherin. I sometimes wonder if that is really the root of most of the controversy between Lily and James. We cannot know from cannon, but imagine a Lily who is very loyal, perhaps slightly irrationally so, to her friends, and one who holds grudges. The combination is not unbelievable. James has just insulted her best friend, and will go on to pick on him unmercifully. Perhaps Lily cannot really see James with an unbiased eye until after she herself has fallen out with Snape?

"Quirrell said he hates me because he hated my father. Is that true?”

“Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr. Malfoy. And then, your father did something Snape could never forgive.”

“What?”

“He saved his life.”⁵

but your father, who’d heard what Sirius had done, went after Snape and pulled him back,⁶

“Your father would have been proud,” she said. “He was an excellent Quidditch player himself.”⁷

“I have no hesitation in saying that James would have been highly disappointed if his son had never found any of the secret passages out of the castle.”⁸

“Black and Potter. Ringleaders of their little gang. Both very bright, of course exceptionally bright, in fact but I don’t think we’ve ever had such a pair of troublemakers”⁹

It is interesting that so many people assume that James was a total idiot. I do not think that a realistic take on his character - I do not think anyone would say that McGonagall is given to false or light praise. We know he was good at transfiguration, but I think most people dismiss that because his only known accomplishment is the animagus transformation, and Pettigrew also accomplished that. My take is that it is actually a testament to James' skills that he was able to coach the unskilled Pettigrew through the process. I take it as a given that [Sirius] did not have the patience even pre-Azkaban, to help their slower less capable roommate through this achievement. I also wonder what other classes he took, and which ones he did how well at. Did he take Ancient Runes or Arithmancy? Who was top of the year at Defence? James' father was famous for potion making, perhaps James did not inherit all of his father's skills, but it seems unlikely that he did poorly at the subject - his father would have tutored him over the summers should he have needed it. Snape and Lily are prodigies, and Snape seems to expect everyone to find potions as intuitive as he does, so I take any disparagement he makes with a fairly large and active amount of suspicion.

“I’m bored,” said Sirius. “Wish it was full moon.”

“You might,” said Lupin darkly from behind his book. “We’ve still got Transfiguration, if you’re bored you could test me ... Here.” He held out his book.

Sirius snorted. “I don’t need to look at that rubbish, I know it all.”

“This’ll liven you up, Padfoot,” said James quietly. “Look who it is ...”¹⁰

I would have to find the citation, but I know I am not alone in wondering if this memory was tampered with. The fact that [Lupin] and [Sirius] would not deny anything in the brief fireplace conversation suggests that it is at best based on something factual, but then so too are the best lies. It would be a more cunning and effective plan to subtlety twist the memory to put James in a worse light, portray Snape as a more innocent victim, but leave the core events sufficiently in place so that when Harry describes what he sees, it rings true to those who witnessed it. The fact that the pensieve clearly shows the tampering in Slughorn's memory does not mean it is a foolproof means of doing so.¹¹

Harry wondered why James didn’t tell Wormtail to get a grip on himself, but James seemed to be enjoying the attention. Harry noticed his father had a habit of rumpling up his hair as though to make sure it did not get too tidy, and also that he kept looking over at the girls by the water’s edge.¹²

Harry has not noticed at this point that his mother is one of those girls. Is James enjoying the attention because he wants anyone's attention, or is he enjoying it as a (probably mistaken) indication that what he is doing might attract Lily's? Perception is everything, and Snape's memory does not really tell us what is going on in James' head.

Lily, whose furious expression had twitched for an instant as though she was going to smile, said, “Let him down!”¹³

She did not like James' behaviour, but she was not fully immune to the humour in the situation either. At least some of her behaviour is a false front, probably because she feels she should behave that way, or because she feels she needs to behave that way to get the results she wants.

Lupin burst out laughing. “Sometimes you remind me a lot of James. He called it my ‘furry little problem’ in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit.”¹⁴

From Pottermore:

WAND: Eleven inches, mahogany¹⁵

Eleven inches is about average for a wand, it does not tell us much about James. The wood, mahogany, is not one listed on Pottermore's page about wand woods.¹⁶

Euphemia and Fleamont Potter tried and failed for many years to bring a child into the world before baby James came along. They were much older, and wealthy, so James grew up in a doting environment without the compromise of siblings, in a home without material limits.¹⁷

Fleamont and Euphemia lived long enough to see James marry a Muggle-born girl called Lily Evans, but not to meet their grandson, Harry. Dragon pox carried them off within days of each other, due to their advanced age, and James Potter then inherited Ignotus Peverell’s Invisibility Cloak.¹⁸

When did he get the Cloak

In book three, [Lupin] refers to seeing James use the cloak many times.¹⁹ At first I was inclined to disregard this, the fact that [Lupin] knows that you still show up on the Marauder's Map implies that it was at school, but does not prove that. For all we know the two got curious when James inherited the cloak after graduation and tested the cloak against the charms they had used. After all, while they had lost the map, as the creators, they could have recreated enough of its detection mechanisms to prove the test case, or alternately there may have been multiple copies of the map originally, only one of which was seized.²⁰ However, further down, he definitively places the cloak in James' possession by at least their fifth year, as it was used to get out of the castle each full moon.²¹

Given that he would not officially inherit the Cloak until his father dies, why was such a valuable heirloom sent with an irresponsible child to school? This is pure speculation, but one possibility is that James was not as irresponsible as he is made out to be. By 1975 the Riddle's violence was no doubt ramping up, if not already in full swing. We know, reference my discussion of James above, and my discussion of Snape, that some of the Slytherin students are experimenting with dark magic. Perhaps Fleamont sent his son to school with the cloak as an additional layer of protection for a beloved, and yes, somewhat spoiled heir, knowing the boy (James) was feuding with such evil already. Despite his many illicit forays out after curfew, this supposedly irresponsible boy kept the Cloak out of larcenous²² enemy hands, despite the fact that he supposedly has no cunning or intelligence.

Pure Speculation

Consider some of the stuff Harry goes through in Books 1 and 2. Given that, Ian Hycrest speculates that with Dumbledore and McGonagall even more distracted by the more active war that was then going on, and with Slughorn trying to avoid Riddle's notice,²³ there were probably students openly planning on becoming Death Eaters, and openly preparing for their proposed careers, probably with no real repercussions.²⁴ In such an environment, James Potter, who hated the dark arts,²⁵ may have had reasons for his pranks that Snape and Lily were unwilling to acknowledge. He may, per Mr. Hycrest's theory, have been guilty of poor targeting and have occasionally over-reacted, but he was reacting not instigating.

I am inclined to believe this view. James was, in his own mind, a sort of Robin Hood (who some believe may have been an earl) enacting humorous vigilante justice on those who practice dark magic. James knew his friends well, so he motivates [Sirius] by playing off the other's boredom rather than appealing to justice or chivalry. Appealing to boredom is more likely to actually motivate. Like the real Robin Hood, James refuses to take himself seriously, and speaks flippantly of the revenge (he thinks of it as justice) he enacts against them. Those like Lily who have emotional attachments to the victims of this outlaw justice are disinclined to see beyond or beneath the light talk to the serious purpose beyond/behind it.

Later, in sixth and seventh year, when Lily's perception is no longer being continuously twisted by her need to defend Snape, she begins to see him differently. Perhaps too, her comments by the lake in fifth year stung, and he abandoned some of the flippancy that made up part of his Robin Hood personae. Not that he took his vengeance less seriously, but that he became less obvious, less open, about taking it.

We know that [Lupin] was chosen as prefect in fifth year, but that James gets the position as head boy in seventh. Lets assume for now that this is not a nefarious plot by [Dumbledore] playing matchmaker. Not because I believe him incapable of doing so, but because I believe him more likely to try to play matchmaker between James and [Sirius] (to redeem [Sirius]), or between Lily and Snape (because he ([Dumbledore]) believes both that she should forgive Snape and that the relationship will be the redemption of Snape). The latter is more [Dumbledore]'s style, while the former is more typical of what I take as his tone-deaf nature when it comes to the true reality of love and other people's relationships.²⁶ Why then does James get the position in seventh year?

The encounter in tunnel where he saves Snape no doubt does have something to do with it. It is clear that Dumbledore believes that James was innocent, even though Snape insists that both [Sirius] and James were coequal collaborators. I think this incident is, however, necessary but insufficient to explain the choice. James had already received a reward for the action that had happened, when the choice for head boy was made, over a year ago. His rescue of an enemy probably made him eligible for the position, made Dumbledore rethink and revisit his mental impression of the young James Potter, but I doubt this represents a second reward for the one action. Rather, I suspect that there is something going on in the void of information we have surrounding James Potter. Something his bitter rival (Snape) does not care to share, and no one else bothers to mention (just as no one bothers to tell Harry anything of note about Lily). In my mind there are two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive, they might both be true.

1. James is in fact the Robin Hood type figure he sees himself as. More, much of the younger students across three of the four houses also see him this way. He is their protector, the one they turn to when the staff continuously fails to hold the dark in check.
2. After the phenomenal OWL results that would later cause her to name him one of the cleverest students in the school, McGonagall has been using him as a tutor for students struggling with transfiguration (and perhaps other subjects?). Perhaps this was her way of trying to keep him too busy to cause trouble. Either way, James, familiar with coaching those struggling from his (successful) efforts at helping Pettigrew with the animagus transformation, is wildly successful as a tutor of the easier age-appropriate magics.

If either or both of these is true, James might well have been something of a peer leader across the school despite not being a prefect. As such he might well have been an obvious choice to an unbiased observer no matter how much Snape resents the choice. Either or both of these might also have influenced Lily to begin to reevaluate him as soon as her friendship with Snape was (pardon the pun) severed. For I refuse to believe that his (Snape's) continual influence, proclaiming his own innocence (which she wanted to believe) and Potter's guilt had no effect on the impression that lead to the one encounter between them we see in Snape's memory.