Goblet of Fire: Page 191
The Fat Lady's sense of humor, Hogwarts password infrastructure, a deep dive on the dormitories, and all-talk no-action Ron.
Welcome back! Happy Monday morning, and the very best of weeks to you! This week, we’ve got a bit of an extended edition, and deep dives into a few pressing questions: how does everyone know the password? Are Hogwarts students in the same dormitory every year, or do they rotate? That, and more…enjoy!
If you’ve read the Harry Potter series, there’s a thing you’ve probably noticed: with each successive book, the reader gets a new introduction to the basic outline of the wizarding world, but each book, that recap gets shorter. So, for instance, in book two, you get something like “Harry Potter was a wizard, fresh from his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,” and a whole section about Hogwarts and Voldemort and all the important players, but in book three, while most of the same information comes through, it’s a lot more condensed and brief. By book four, you barely get any recap at all.
Page 191 of Goblet of Fire reminds me of that fact, because here’s how it starts:
“-which was concealed behind a large portrait of a fat lady in a pink silk dress.”
Obviously, they’re talking about the entrance to the Gryffindor Common Room; it’s the end of the welcoming feast, and the Gryffindors are going to bed. But why does Rowling feel like at this particular moment, we’ll have forgotten about the Fat Lady? Maybe it was just necessary for the flow of the writing, but I’m not wrong, am I, that it comes off a little bit awkward?
Here’s another thing about the Fat Lady: one of the main complaints about the film series is that it doesn’t include Peeves. But to my mind, the film series also doesn’t come close to doing the Fat Lady justice. In the films, we barely see her; pretty much all she does is say “password?” In the books, though, she’s a fairly well-developed character. She has a sense of humor, enjoys raiding other paintings for centuries-old wine with her friend Vi from the next painting over, and can be unbelievably petty when she gets annoyed. There are so many great Fat Lady moments that get glossed over in the movies (not to mention Sir Cadogan, but that’s a whole different story): “Lairy Fights, that’s the one!;” “I was annoyed because you woke me up, the password is still ‘tapeworm’!;” the moment in book six when Harry has a detention so he can’t play in the Quidditch final, and he comes back to discover the result, and the Fat Lady just says “you’ll see.”
This, I think, is actually just a small part of my larger complaint about the films: they don’t really capture Rowling’s writing at its funniest. When is she at her most comedic? The Dursleys; Peeves; some Fred and George moments; little witty quips from Dumbledore and McGonagall; that kind of thing. There are some, to be sure; I’m not saying the films are completely joyless. But there are a lot of funny moments in the books that either aren’t funny in the movies, or aren’t in them at all.
When the Fat Lady asks what the password is, George says “Balderdash…a prefect downstairs told me.” This whole topic has been discussed ad infinitum, but I think it’s time someone out together a definitive examination of the whole password process.
First off, it’s important to note that not every house needs to disseminate a fresh password at the start of every new school year. In Hufflepuff, the secret entry is always the same (you knock on a wall to the rhythm of “Hel-ga Hu-ffle-puff”), so worst case, most of the house will know the way into the common room, and can help out any stragglers. In Ravenclaw, meanwhile, you just have to answer a riddle, so there’s nothing a prefect can tell you that will help.
Gryffindor and Slytherin though…the passwords change all the time, and the prefects have to escort the first-years, so clearly, prefects can’t just walk around giving out the password left and right to anyone who needs it. That squares with what we see: it looks like one (or more) of the prefects has basically gone around the Great Hall and given the password out to a bunch of Gryffindors, hoping that they’ll spread it wide enough that it will get to everyone else in the house. That fits with what we see in book two (“wattlebird”) and book three (“Mimbulus Mimbletonia”), and there’s no reason to think there’s any other system in place.
The question is, where do the prefects get the passwords in the first place? It’s not like they have a meeting with their respective common room guardians before dinner. The only thing I can think of is that on that prefects’ meeting on the train, all the prefects in the houses that require a password get the first one, then pass it on to the rest of their house. It’s sort of strange, since that means the Fat Lady and that blank stretch of wall that guards the Slytherin common room have submitted their passwords in writing in advance, which just seems a tad mundane…but there’s no reason it can’t be true.
My one other question about passwords: what about when the password changes during the year? This never becomes a big problem — the only person who has any issue with remembering passwords is Neville, and that’s just because he’s forgetful — so I’m going to assume that there is some kind of system in place. The astute podcasters of MuggleCast recently pointed out that maybe password changes are announced on the Common Room notice board, which would be a perfect system for keeping them secret from anyone outside the house while making sure they get to everybody within the house. The only issue I can imagine with that is that people aren’t checking the notice board every single day, are they? This actually isn’t that big a problem: if the passwords change on some kind of regular schedule (under the Fat Lady, say, they might change every Sunday, even though we know that Sir Cadogan goes a little overboard and changes them several times a day), then everyone would know to check for the new password every week on a given day. Even if the changes aren’t regularly scheduled like that, if you make sure that the password change notices are bright and visible, then enough people will see them that they’ll make their way to the rest of the house.
There are different kinds of plot holes and logistics issues in the Harry Potter series. Some are inconsistencies with the way magic works; some are just things that don’t quite add up. But there’s also another kind, which describes the whole password issue perfectly: the plot holes that arise when people don’t understand how something happened because they’re unwilling to consider non-magical explanations. If this was a series that took place at a boarding school in Iowa, and everyone in a given dorm knew their door code, it wouldn’t be too hard to think of the explanation: they post notices, they send out emails, the leaders of the dorm tell everyone else. That same thing can be true at Hogwarts, but it’s hard to think of it, because we expect everything about Hogwarts to somehow be fantastical. This doesn’t have to.
As the group enters the common room, they see the familiar comfortable chairs and a crackling fire; Hermione glances at it darkly and says “slave labor.” Then she bids them goodnight, disappearing through the doorway to the girls’ dormitory.
Here’s another thing. Well, actually, two other things, but here’s the first. Is each year of each house in the same dormitory every year, or is there some sort of rotation? The way I see it, there are two ways it could work: either A) there are seven dormitories, each incoming first-year class gets assigned to whichever one is empty, and stays in that one throughout their seven years at Hogwarts, or B) there are seven dormitories, each new first-year class starts in the same one, then moves to the second-year dormitory the next year, then the third-year dorm, etc. I honestly don’t know which one it is, since we only see the inside of the dormitories; we never get anything like “Harry climbed the stairs, passing his familiar third-year dormitory and ascending to the next floor where he’d never been before.”
I’m genuinely interested in hearing about this: which do you think it is? On the one hand, the “stay in the same dorm for seven years” theory might make sense, for a few reasons. For one, Harry, Ron, Seamus, Neville, and Dean (but particularly Harry and Ron, who we are usually watching) never seem to have any trouble finding the dorm, and always give similar descriptions of where it is. For another, they seem to become familiar with the contents itself after a while. In book seven, for instance, Harry describes “his four-poster,” even though he hasn’t spent a night at Hogwarts that year, implying that he’s gotten used to the same four-poster over the years and that it’s still available in his seventh.
On the other hand, there’s also evidence in favor of the “move every year” theory. Just circumstantially, wouldn’t it be strange if the first-years had to climb seven floors to get to their dormitory, while the seventh-years were right near common room level? Further, if all seven dorms are identical, that might be enough to give Harry and the rest of the boys that sense of familiarity that they have. The fact that they never have trouble finding their new dorms could be something as simple as the dorms having signs outside saying something like “FOURTH YEARS HERE.” So let me know which one you think it is, or if it’s somehow already been solved and I don’t know about the solution. I want to get to the bottom of this.
This book doesn’t do anything to solve it: all it says is “Harry, Ron, and Neville climbed up the last, spiral staircase until they reached their own dormitory, which was situated at the top of the tower.” Are they always at the top of the tower, or is this just the fourth-year dorm every year? We don’t know, although I would very tentatively say that it’s probably a rotation…except maybe not? Even in this one sentence, there’s evidence both ways. By noting the specific location, Rowling might be emphasizing that the location is different than it’s been in the past, which would mean it’s a rotation…but by saying “their own dormitory,” she expresses that they have a longstanding connection to it, which undercuts the rotation theory. Also, if it’s a rotation, why would the fourth-year dorm, effectively the midpoint of the Hogwarts experience, be all the way at the top? We really have absolutely no idea.
Here’s the other thing, which isn’t so much a plot hole as just something it’s interesting to think about (which plot holes sometimes are). Obviously, for every student in the second year and higher, the House Elves know exactly where they and their luggage should go. But as far as first-years are concerned, nobody has any idea. So as the sorting is going on, here’s what must be happening: the lead house-elf is watching, and as each student gets sorted, that elf needs to make sure that the student’s luggage gets brought up to the right dormitory. That’s canon. It has to be. Not only that, the house elves also need to make sure that there are the right number of beds in each dormitory, because unless I’m wrong, nobody knows the respective house numbers until the end of the sorting. There’s probably some kind of flexible undetectable expansion charm on all the first-year dormitories, so that if there’s a weird sorting class one year and Ravenclaw ends up with 11 first-year boys instead of five, they don’t have to scramble to fit everyone in.
Weirdly, we get another piece of incredibly tenuous evidence right in the next paragraph. Harry and Ron are greeting Dean and Seamus after not seeing them for the summer, and the narrator describes their various dorm decorations:
Seamus had pinned his Ireland rosette to his headboard, and Dean had tacked up a poster of Viktor Krum over his bedside table. His old poster of the West Ham football team was pinned right next to it.
Do you see it? All the decorations from the Quidditch World Cup — in other words, the decorations that they couldn’t have had before this school year — are described using the active voice. “Seamus had pinned..” and “Dean had tacked.” But when we get to the West Ham poster, it’s different: “His old poster of the West Ham football team was pinned right next to it.”
In other words, while we know what Seamus and Dean have only just put up their new quidditch stuff, Rowling leaves the door open that maybe the West Ham poster was already there, pinned up from a previous year. If that’s true, of course, it proves the “same dorm” theory, unless there’s some strange process of bed moving going on. But it might just be a coincidence of language, which obviously wouldn’t prove anything. I have to say that this tilts me toward the “same dorm” theory — again, very tentatively.
They get into bed, noticing that despite the storm outside, someone — presumably the house elves — has warmed their beds, and are quite pleasantly falling asleep while the rain rages outside. We all know the feeling. As they’re drifting off to sleep, we get one more exchange:
“I might go in for it, you know,” Ron said sleepily through the darkness, “if Fred and George find out how to…the tournament…you never know, do you?”
The whole attitude towards the tournament is interesting: all the would-be underage entrants are concerned entirely with Dumbledore’s physical barriers to entry, and not at all with his anger if they do manage to enter, or indeed get chosen. If one of them manages to sneak past whatever protections Dumbledore draws up, do they plan to just have Dumbledore and the entire school be furious at them for a year? Obviously, that does happen to Harry, but it’s different: most importantly, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and a lot of other people actually do believe that he didn’t put his name in. If he had put his name in, or if, say, George had entered and been chosen, they would never believe him. They can’t prevent him from competing, but what they can do is judge him incredibly harshly, as Karkaroff does to Harry. They can basically lose the tournament for him the moment it starts.
Obviously, Fred and George are the only ones that we know of who actually try to get past Dumbledore’s age line, so Ron is probably just blowing smoke. It’s easy to say “maybe I’ll do it,” but when Fred and George are pouring the aging potion, neither Harry nor Ron takes a glass. For now, they’re all talk and no action. Hell, they still might not even know what dormitory they’re in.