Actually, Hermione’s referred to as looking like “a cross between a gypsy and a fllthy Scotch-Irish”. Harry “looks suspiciously like he’s got a drop of Spic in him” and Ron’s introduced as “an annoying little Ginger, probably a Scandahoovian one”.
Or is that from my own fanfic? …Naaah, I’m just pointing out that the books are pretty aracial, if that’s a word.
They celebrate them in a secular way.
Even if you’re wizards, you need something to make the Jews feel left out.
The goblins that run Gringotts are surely Jews.
I feel that it’s worthy of mention that Voldemort’s followers were obsessed with “pureblood” ancestry, when Voldemort himself was half-muggle. It’s a bit like the way that Hitler’s followers ignored the fact that he was hardly the stereotypical blonde blue-eyed Aryan.
Rowling was pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of bigotry to her young readers, and I commend her for it.
She also skewered sensationalist tabloid media quite well with the Rita Skeeter journalist character. Good advice to her young audience that they shouldn’t believe everything they read.
That is a huge contrast to the Enid Blyton books I read as a kid in the late 1970s, books that Rowling was accused of plagiarising. I went back and read those for a laugh in the early '90s and the racism was simply jaw-dropping. Every villain was described as “swarthy”, and on page 2 of “Mr Galliano’s Circus” a young girl introduces the young boy protagonist to her performing circus dogs: “N****r, Darky, and Boy”. Fucking unbelievable.
The books are written from the perspective that there’s an afterlife. You can stay behind as a ghost or move on. Only wizards can become ghosts.
While I think racism naturally comes to mind for American readers when thinking about the term Mudblood, I’ve always read it as more about the endemic classism of the British aristocracy. It has nothing to do with economic class, since the Weasleys are pure-blood but quite poor. Rowling is actually fairly explicit in mentioning in the books that there are very few pure-bloods left, and that without half-bloods (one wizarding parent) and mudbloods (zero wizarding parents), the wizarding community would die off pretty quickly.
Someone upthread mentioned Prince William and Kate Middleton’s upcoming blessed event to show that the Brits don’t make the distinction. But the fact that she’s a “commoner” was highly newsworthy throughout their courtship, so I don’t think that distinction is really gone, it’s just been mitigated by modern reality.
Certainly, there are parallels between hereditary classism and racism, but, given the history of class in Britain, I’m thinking the former was more pertinent to Rowling.
The two big holidays we see in the books and movies were also big holidays/celebrations long before Christianity – as are the “Easter holidays” they go home for in at least one of the books.
I can’t find it now, but there is/was a website that compared different editions of the HP books and noted what changes had been made. As Rowling mentioned, her editor felt the first book was a bit too long and several minor cuts to the text were made. As best as I can remember, the other cuts weren’t anything particularly interesting, just trimming adjectives and things like that. The first book wasn’t published in the US until it had already been successful in the UK, so Rowling’s US publishers weren’t as concerned about the word count.
IIRC, for later books in the series the only difference between the UK and US texts were Americanizing the spelling and some words/expressions, like changing “jumper” to “sweater”.
The Weasleys are not pureblood. They’re a very old wizarding family, but someone (Hagrid?) makes a comment that the Weasleys are a bunch of “blood traitors.” The comment’s made partly to express the ugliness of people who care about such things, not that the speaker cares about such things. I’ll try to dig up the quote. However, the Weasleys seem to have had a number of Muggle-borns marry into the family.
Out of curiosity, is the eponymous stone referred to as ‘Sorcerers’ or ‘Philosophers’ in the text of the US edition? Is it just the use in the title that’s changed?
That’s not how I remember it. Ron said that his entire family was magical except for a second or third cousin, who was an accountant. They were pretty much by definition a pureblood family, and I think he or someone else refers to him as a pureblood at least once in the books. They are also blood traitors (according to those people who care), because they’re purebloods who sympathize with the non-magical.
That’s it exactly-- they’re all magical. That’s not the same as pureblood. Hermione is magical too, but most certainly not a pureblood.
I think this is a distinction without a difference. Let’s assume that this pureblood thing is an allegory of the British aristocracy, on which point I admit I may be wrong. All the people who have hereditary titles could, theoretically, trace their ancestry back to people who didn’t, since the titles were acquired in the first place by conquest or conferral of title by someone who already had one or watery tarts handing out swords or whatever. But after some number of generations, everyone (or at least all the other nobility) considers these titles as justifiably conferred by God (or watery tarts) from time immemorial. An “old wizarding family” with only magical members (which I read as all ancestors that they can remember for generations) is by definition pureblood.
This, of course, exposes the hypocrisy of the whole thing, since “we can’t remember any non-magical ancestors” does not equal “there have been no non-magical ancestors”. And that’s why the sensible wizards (our heroes) have no problem with Muggle-born wizards, since hereditary aristocracy/purebloodedness is really an artificial social construct.
I know, but Ron indicates that the vast majority of his ancestors are magical, meaning that he’s about as pureblood as it gets (since, as he points out, there are no true pureblood families anymore). If his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents are magical (and it must go back that far, since the Weasleys are related to the Blacks), then how is his family not pureblood?
What’s your definition of pureblood if it’s not “multiple generations of only magical people (as far as we know) giving birth to magical offspring”?
ETA: As RickG said, the whole thing is dumb anyway. It’s a artificial construct.
As the German joke went back then: Every Aryan ought to be as thin as Goering, as tall as Goebbels and as blonde as Hitler.
I agree with this. The Weasleys were pureblood, poor but unprejudiced, while the Malfoys were pureblood, rich and prejudiced.
I think you’re misinterpreting “blood traitors”. That was how the Death Eater bunch would characterize them. It actually suggests that the bigot brigade considered the Weasleys to be pureblooded, but traitors to their bloodlines for siding with muggles and mixed-blood magic folk.
Of course there are. Where do you think BLACK Magic comes from?
No, it’s throughout the text. The UK and US releases of the first movie also differ in this way.
Well, at least Harry’s parents did, since there is a New Testament verse carved into their gravestone.
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” — 1 Corinthians 15:26
The Weasleys absolutely are pureblood. For example, check out Chamber of Secrets after Ginny is taken into the Chamber: