If it is in a bin marked laundry it is obviously not meant for the house elves use, but for being laundered. Simple way to get around it.
Could be. And recall that a student can be at Hogwarts for at least two years without ever realizing that the elves exist. . .
Because people are terrible witnesses? If nothing else, if they were considered iron clad what would happen if you were to have someone use a memory charm on you to make yourself look innocent?
-Joe
i’m not exactly disagreeing with you here, but in the book hermione mentions that professor mcgonagall had to write the ministry several times on her behalf to get the time turner approved for her to use. mcgonagall went out of her way because hermione was an exceptional student and knew she could be trusted to use the thing properly. in other words, they weren’t just handing these things out to anyone. hermione was probably the only one in the school using one that year.
As for Hermione freeing the elves is it ever stated she could have freed them anyway? The elves could have stopped cleaning Gryfindor Tower simply because they were pissed at her trying to manipulate their lives.
Yes, that’s true. Still kind of a crazy thing to put in the hands of a teenager, but thinking about it the wizarding community has different attitudes towards danger than us. Which does make a degree of sense, as each wizard or witch is basically a bomb waiting to go off anyway, if they can’t learn to control themselves.
This thread reminds me of the Sluggy Freelance arc. When Torg (or Riff?) discovers the existence of the Time Turner, he practically screams at Hermione, “You had the ability to travel through time, and you used it to do extra school work?!”
It also reminds me of “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which I’m going to go read again right now.
It’s suggested in the books that it’s dangerous to attempt to change the past, and it wasn’t clear to me that such a thing was even possible. In Azkaban it seems that Harry and Hermione do not actually change the past.
Aside from whatever risks and technical difficulties may be involved in using Time Turners, we’re also shown throughout the series that the wizard government and justice system is at best inept and at worst outright corrupt. No one was going to put much effort into defending someone who seemed as guilty as Sirius Black.
i’m pretty sure that actually does happen at some point. dobby has to clean the gryffindor common room on his own because the other elves refused due to all the hats hermione let lying around. as for whether she was authorized to free them, the elves served hogwarts rather than a specific wizarding family so i suppose the students could be considered their masters/mistresses as well as the staff.
Probably not, because then most elves would’ve been freed accidentally, I’d imagine. But again, I’m guessing they were just pissed at her assumptions, and Hermione was so caught up with her cause, she didn’t actually stop to think that perhaps she didn’t actually have the authority to free them. She was fourteen, after all. Hermione may be intelligent, yes, but fourteen year olds aren’t always that logical.
I believe it specificually said that the elves were insulted by her actions, not that they couldn’t clean the room.
i never said they couldn’t clean the room, but that they refused to, and the book says that specifically, and also that the elves were insulted, as you mentioned:
“[Winky] still does not care for clothes, Harry Potter. Nor do the other house-elves. None of them will clean Gryffindor Tower anymore, not with the hats and socks hidden everywhere, they finds them insulting, sir. Dobby does it all himself, but Dobby does not mind, sir, for he always hopes to meet Harry Potter…”
although it never mentions whether the elves would actually have been freed if they’d taken the clothes, just that they found it insulting, so that’s still up for speculation.
Even with all of the explanation of the rules of “ownership” when it comes to clothing and having an elf magically (heh) come upon a sock or something and touching and suddenly being free…it still makes no sense. How is that any way to base a system of caste/ownership/labor when you could lose half your force by blind luck or chance.
well, the elves working at the school are rarely seen by students. hermione is shocked to find out in goblet of fire that elves work in the kitchen and clean the common rooms and such, and mentions she’s never seen an elf in the school before. they seem to only venture out after everyone’s in bed to clean the rooms, and the students don’t usually go into the kitchens, so not much chance of the elves being freed accidentally. as has been pointed out, dobby is unusual for wanting freedom, the other elves don’t seem to want it, and so would avoid taking clothes, which i doubt would get left around much in the common rooms anyway.
nearly all books create unanswered questions. why didn’t voldemort make his own sorcerer’s stone? dumbledore explained why but WHY didn’t he when it would have helped him survive? i’m sure he would have made one if he set his mind to it. would it have helped when he discovered that harry was hunting horcruxes and he was down to just nagini and himself/harry?
as dealth with in this thread, a wizard master can be tricked into releasing his elf (anyone used to contracts and agreements knows a transaction must be made airtight and proofed against error or fraud.) one would think an elf may be released only by willful and expressed consent.
time turners. we know there are time turners and they can somehow be used (authorized or otherwise) by wizards. if JKR tried to develop this concept, there would have been 10 HP books at least.
a department of mysteries. is that all voldemort can concern himself with, prophecies?
horcruxes, portraits, photos. superficially explained and applied as against their real potential.
wand loyalty and relation. too wooly.
And Dobby still wanted to work, after being freed. At one point he told Harry that Dumbledore had offered him a day off each week, and Dobby negotiated that to one day off per month.
I think you’re looking at it from the wrong end. The way it’s explained to Hermione in later books (and what JKRowling said in some interviews) is that it starts with the Elves wanting to serve people. Even Dobby wants still to help Harry and work for him. In book 7, after Harry treats Kreacher better (and they come to terms about Regulus on their side), even Kreacher takes good care of the “mudbloods” because they’re his master.
So the contract starts out with this, elves serving wizards, wizards treating elves decently. Every contract can be broken in some way, but under usual circumstances neither the Elves nor the wizards want it. It’s not a complete analogy to US slavery (though there are resemblances) because of the magical nature of the Elves making them want to help, and they only want to be treated well.
So the contract to be broken requires intent, in this case, Dobby wanting to be free.
Remember that when Dobby showed up in Harrys bedroom at the beginning of the book, and Harry wanted to know how to help him? There’s no office at the ministry misused Elves can complain to (though the Epilogue at Book 7 makes me think that Hermione has created something like this, to ensure fairness when it doesn’t work), and Dobby says that his masters are very careful to not pass even one sock to him.
Remember also that Ron said that Elves come with big manors - they belong to proud, old families (or castle like Hogwarts). So everybody in the family grows up with the rules of “Don’t give clothes to the Elf” and the Elves themselves don’t want to be freed, so they don’t accept laundry as clothes, or stuff lying around as clothes, just as part of their duties of cleaning up and washing stuff.
Because Nicholas Flamel spent years making it; because the stone is in a different class than the Horcruxes: the stone is more of an alchemical project, so would be undertaken most likely by someone like Snape (Half-blood Prince) who’s interested in potions and just wants to see what’s possible and loves to experiment; the horcruxes are related to spells, which is what Voldemort’s path and his talents were. Showing his strength to the Wizard community by mastering spells fits his psyche, not mucking about with potions.
By the time Voldemort was reborn, he had a lot of other things to do besides spending years on a frustrating search for the stone (we can assume that when Dumbledore told Harry that Flamel had destroyed the stone, he’d also destroyed all notes on how to make one). And we know that some portions take months to make even if you know how to make them.
Besides, going for a fall-back solution while working his way back to the top again doesn’t fit Voldemort’s personality; he’s the evil mastermind, who doesn’t have self-doubts that his enemies might in any way win, or even figure out that he made Horcruxes and where they might be hidden.
By the time he finally realizes that Harry is on a Horcrux quest - that’s after the break-in at Gringotts - time is running very quickly. Making the stone at that point is just not an option anymore. (And to Voldemort, it looks like by killing Snape for mastery of the Elder Wand, and by demanding Harry for the lives of the others, he’s about to win; it’s a last -second reversal of everything he overlooked coming together to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat for Harry (or vice versa for Voldemort).
Transactions in the wizard world work different, because magic works different. We see both intentful, purposeful magic, but also wild, uncontrolled magic.
And again, Dobby is an extreme case because he deliberatly wants to be free, both other wizards like Hagrid and other elves say they don’t want to be freed. So “tricking into release” only works in this exception. Because the rules were written with the assumption “Elves don’t want to be freed, Wizards don’t want to free elves” they were written loosly and not strongly.
I also assume that with Hermione working at the Ministry later, rules were changed and an office for Elves to bring complaints was created.
Rowling has made clear in interviews that the time turners are under ministry control because, (Hermione herself mentions that most stories of their use end up badly, with death or insanity), and even the highly experienced wizards at the ministry are aware of how quickly things can go wrong during their use.
If you look at the stable time loop created at the end of PoA, you can see that it only worked because the loop was already there (HRH1 noticed HH2, without knowing it).
And really, if you look at Hermione in the books, McGonagall is right in her assessment that she is probably the only student in several years mature enough to not fool around with it or cheat, only to visit more classes and do homework, because that’s how Hermione is wired.
That’s explained in the text: he wants the prophecy to know why Harry resisted him for so long, and how to beat him.
And even for Voldemort, breaking into the ministry is not a good move where he can dawdle.
Once he has taken the ministry through his cronies in Book 7, we don’t know what he does with this dept., but he probably feels that secure and safe that extraordinary means are not necessary.
I don’t know what you mean “against their potential”. We see a whole world through the eyes of a teenager - obviously many things pass him by. The best illustration of how difficult it is to think of everything that’s possible is for me in PS, when HRH fall through the trapdoor onto the plants. Hermione realizes she needs light … and wonders about where to find matches, until Ron yells at her that she’s a witch, she can use a spell.
To me, that’s a wonderful realistic portrayal of somebody who’d grown up in a muggle household and is very logic- and science-oriented would react in such a situation (we get a different reaction from Ron being astonished at muggle things working without magic).
In addition, this is a small world - there are only about 1300 or so wizards in all of Britain (even taking into account that Rowling sucks at Math and multiply by one or two digits, it’s still smaller than the muggle world by far).
Lastly, if you look at the real muggle world, there are many technologies not widely used, many techniques and methods not applied, for various reasons. Some methods can’t be transplanted from one culture, some things don’t work in different climates, some people are too ideologically set to consider alternatives, some people don’t want to change methods if they loose power…
Why shouldn’t these reasons apply to the adults in the wizard world with their power struggle, too?
That’s because it’s not been extensively studied and there are conflicting theories; and because Dumbledore suspects that the Elder Wand follows different rules than normal wands.
It’s like complaining that quantum mechanics or chaos theory is wooly when a High School senior can’t fully understand it, and only 10 experts in the whole world may fully get it.
For a moment, I read that last word as “weird”. Which also works.
Wow…helluva job there constanze! Very impressed!
Mostly it just lets the victim know how disappointed you are with him.