I know that in the first book, they have already left Hogwarts and have already established careers. Well, I guess Charlie could still be in post-secondary school, as Ron says he’s studying dragons in Romania as opposed to working with dragons. Bill is already a curse breaker for Gringotts, so I’m guessing he finished whatever additional training was needed and is into his career.
My guess is that Charlie is 18ish and fresh out of Hogwarsts and Bill is maybe 20ish? Allowing for 1½-2 yrs between kids.
Any other thoughts? Does anyone know if Ms. Rowling has commented on this?
I guess what confuses me is that Ginny says something in CofS about how she couldn’t wait to go to Hogwarts ever since Bill went there. If the timeline is right, she would have been born while he was in his 6th year. So she’d be 2, 3 at the most when he graduated. Seems a bit young to be wanting to go to school.
Of course that leaves another question…why such a big gap (9 years) between Charlie and Percy?
You can’t run very fast when you’re expecting. Perhaps Mrs. Weasly didn’t want to have another baby while You-Know-Who was still active. Hummm, but that would mean both Percy and the twins were accidental pregnancies. {Guessing!} Perhaps the older boys are from Mr Weasly’s first wife, who was killed in the dark days.
Interesting theories. I wonder if red hair is a genetic trait passed down from the father?
I think the Weaslys were in the original Order, or if not actually IN the Order, gave a lot of support to it. I’ll have to reread OofP again.
So the Weaslys must be at the very least in their late 40’s, maybe even getting onto 50. If Bill was born when Arthur was 20 that would make him 50 in 1995 which is the year book 4 is set in. This also makes the Weaslys 10 or so years older than the James, Lily, Snape group. Especially since it seems they overlap their education with Bill.
As soon as I hit submit, I had another thought. I don’t think Arthur and Molly worked with James and Lily. If they had, they would have talked to Harry about his parents, I’d think. Or at the very least they would have said something like, “We haven’t seen you since you were a baby.” I would think that with Ron and Harry being born within months of each other, Lily and Molly would have had much in commom to talk about it if they both worked for the Order.
I don’t have the book handy, but I remember in OotP, when Molly has a breakdown while trying to deal with the boggart in Sirius’s house, Lupin says something like, “You weren’t in the Order last time; you don’t know how it was. Last time they outnumbered us 20 to 1 and they just picked us off.” Paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. I’m guessing either Arthur wasn’t in the original order, either, or that he was but kept most of the goings-on secret from Molly to protect her and the kids, who would have all been toddlers and infants at the time.
Marlitharn is right, Lupin definitely has a line that confirms Molly, at least, was not in the Order the first time around. What’s more, in the picture of the original Order that Moody shows to Harry, neither Molly nor Arthur is present.
Rowling, who is notoriously lousy at numbers, said in her March 2004 World Book Day chat that Charlie is two years older than Percy and Bill is two years older than Charlie. This doesn’t quite work, because it would make Charlie a seventh-year when Harry is a first-year, but it does nix the idea that she meant for there to be large age gaps in the family. I’d put them both at a year older, so Charlie would be born around 1973 and Bill around 1971.
The Lexicon, by the way, is a wonderful resource, but it does tend to present not-fully-substantiated guesses as fact.
