Fanon versus canon

When we speak about amateur, not-for-profit fanfiction and fanart based around a published work, canon is the information about characters, events and background contained in the body of official, published material. It may also include supplemental works such as official websites and statements made by the author at interview, although the latter can be a bit problematic with Harry Potter because the books have a strong mystery/spy thriller aspect, and prior to the publication of the last book some of JK Rowling's pronouncements were deliberately intended to throw readers off the scent, rather than to enlighten them.

Fanon, on the other hand, refers to background information about the characters and setting which does not derive from canon but which has been repeated in fanfiction so often that readers of fanfiction tend to accept it as established fact. In many cases readers wrongly believe this information to be canon, vaguely assuming that they, or the fanwriter they are reading, must have read it somewhere in the source texts. When I first started reading and writing Potter fanfics, for example, I assumed that the widespread belief that a high proportion of the Death Eaters were recreational torturers must be supported by the books, and so I used it myself, perpetuating the fanon - it took several re-readings to realize that there's very little in the books to say either way. I also put them in white masks because everybody else did, and gave Lucius long hair, not realising that these things belong only to the films; I accepted as canon the in-fact-completely-unsupported idea that after the werewolf "prank" young Severus was punished and Sirius wasn't; and it wasn't until I started researching for this essay that I realised that the universal belief that Snape is biased against Gryffindors exists only in fanfiction. [Canon Snape has a thing about the Trio and Neville, not about Gryffindors as such.]

Some fanon is "canon-compatible". This means that although it isn't actively supported by canon, it isn't contradicted by it either. Some is "canon-shafted" - that is, it was canon-compatible when it was written, but new canon material has appeared since which contradicts it. All fanon, and all fanwriting which isn't directly supported by canon, is in danger of getting canon-shafted at some point in the future, if the author or their authorized successor decides to add some new material.

Some fanon (such as the idea that Vernon Dursley regularly beats Harry) flatly contradicts canon and has done since its inception. Some (such as the idea that Snape's title of "Potions master" means that he is a world-class authority rather than a simple schoolteacher, or that Hermione is the cleverest witch of her era, or the belief in magical "life debts", or that the Salem Witches' Institute is a school) contradicts canon by accident, as a result of a simple misunderstanding of something in the source material.

Sometimes, even details which were intentionally "AU" (Alternate Universe) and against canon when first devised become so widespread as to become fanon. The first person to write a fanfic in which the Dursleys abused Harry so violently that he needed to be rescued by Snape at point of death was probably well aware that this was an AU, "what if" scenario, but the idea made for such an engaging, vivid story-arc that it spread across the fandom and spawned so many imitations that the idea that the Dursleys were seriously physically (as opposed to emotionally, which they certainly are) abusive came to be vaguely assumed to be canon.

You may also hear the expression "head canon", which refers to a combination of canon and fanon which a particular individual uses as the basis for their understanding of canon and for any fanfics which they may write. A given person's head canon can be anything from strictly canon-compatible all the way to the wildly AU in which Harry is a magical entity with wings.

If one is going to analyse a story, even in the privacy of one's own head, it's important to have a firm grip on the difference between canon and fanon, between one's own "head canon" and the source material, and between canon scenarios, the merely canon-compatible and ones which flatly contradict canon. All too often, arguments based on unsupported fanon are used to "prove" points because somebody has assumed that that fanon is canon. Dumbledore in particular seems prone to this.

Various factions declare Dumbledore to be a terrible person because of the "fact" that after the werewolf incident young Severus was punished and Sirius wasn't; because he allowed Snape to teach despite his being obviously biased against Gryffindors; because he repeatedly sent Harry back to the Dursleys to be starved and beaten. Yet all these things - who was or wasn't punished after the werewolf "prank"; Snape's house-bias; serious physical abuse by the Dursleys - exist only in fanon: some of them might be true but we have no canon on whether they are or not, and the idea that the Dursleys actively beat Harry isn't even canon-compatible. We cannot say "Dumbledore must be a bad person because he did X" if X has not been shown to have happened in canon; we can only say "In fanfics in which Dumbledore does X, the fact that he does X must make him a bad person for the purposes of that fanfic".

portrait of Richard III wearing a gold brocade jacket and looking to his right

Near-contemporary portrait of Richard III held by the Society of Antiquaries, and possibly copied from a lost original painted from life.

This failure to distinguish between canon and the merely canon-compatible extends into the real world, with serious repercussions for scholarship. What we know about the accession of Richard III, for example - the "canon" of his story - is that he appeared initially to be proceeding as expected with arranging the coronation of his nephew, the son of his late brother Edward IV and Edward's queen Elizabeth Woodville (whom Edward had wed in haste and semi-secrecy because she refused to have sex with him unless he married her first). Then a Bishop Stillington claimed that he knew that Edward IV's marriage to Woodville had been bigamous, because Edward had previously secretly married a Lady Eleanor Butler (who had refused to have sex with him unless he married her first, iirc, although it's possible that's my own forgotten assumption) and this first wife was still alive and still his wife when he married Woodville, making his children illegitimate. Some evidence we don't know about was presented to parliament, and parliament believed that evidence (or at least acted as if it did) and asked Richard to become king instead. Richard initially demurred but finally agreed to accept the throne, and the grounds for his doing so were set out in a legal act called Titulus Regius. This is canon - this is what we know actually happened.

There is a small amount of evidence that this story about Eleanor Butler was true. It was consistent with Edward's known behaviour patterns; Stillington had been treated by Edward as some sort of political hot potato for reasons which were never explained; parliament was convinced by his story, or at least found it convenient to be convinced; and the Tudor regime later suppressed the record of what Stillington had really said (just one summary of the real content of Titulus Regius survived the purge) and then circulated an edited version which claimed that Stillington had claimed Edward had married one Elizabeth Lucy - apparently because they could prove he hadn't been married to Lucy, but couldn't prove he hadn't been married to Butler.

Nevertheless, the evidence is rather weak and it is quite possible that Richard himself planned the sequence of events and put Stillington up to it, and Parliament went along with it because they didn't want a child king - that version of events is canon-compatible. But we have no evidence that Richard did plan it himself - although canon-compatible, that version of events is not canon. Yet almost without exception populist commentators describe Richard as having masterminded a coup - generally without telling their audience that there's even any other possibility, or mentioning that there was ever any question about the nephew's legitimacy. In scholarly historical research, as so often in Potter fandom, a canon-compatible fanon is being treated as if it were canon.

In the case of the Harry Potter books, the situation is complicated by the films, which have a certain amount of authorisation and input from Rowling, but which differ from the books so markedly not only in plot and physical layout but in the characterisations of Harry, Snape, Hermione and Hagrid that they have to be regarded as an Alternate Universe story. You could see them either as a very fancy fanfic or as a wholly separate, alternate set of canon, in the same way that there are, for example, many different and mutually exclusive retellings of the Arthurian mythos or the Robin Hood legend

In the books, for example, Hogsmeade is full of little thatched cottages and the station is a very long way outside the village; in the films, the village seems to be made up entirely of towering Black Forest-style buildings with high, concave multi-dormered tiled roofs, and the station is inside the village. Snape and the Marauders seem to be about fifteen years older in the films, relative to Harry, than they are in the books and the "present day" action is evidently shifted forward some years, because the Millennium Bridge (started in 1998 and not properly opened until 2002) appears in a scene which in the books happens in 1996.

Film Harry is a sweet, unassuming innocent who nevertheless hesitates and agonizes before giving up on the certainty of Tri-Wizard glory in order to save Cedric from the Acromantula, and who enjoys the star status which being the Chosen One gives him; book Harry is hard-boiled and semi-delinquent but he is badly freaked out by the idea that he might be the Chosen One, is almost totally devoid of self-interest, and rushes to Cedric's aid without a moment's hesitation. Film Snape is confident, emotionally-repressed, heavily-built and middle-aged; book Snape is skinny and scared, emotionally labile and barely into his thirties when we first see him. Film Hermione is po-faced and prim and proper; book Hermione has a pronounced streak of semi-criminal ruthlessness and is snogging an eighteen-year-old international sports star when she's fifteen.

It is very unwise to treat details in the films as canon in the book universe, or vice versa, as the two universes contradict each other at too many points. A whole extra layer of fanon has been added by people assuming that something which is true in the films - that Lily is especially kind; that the Death Eaters wear white masks; that Voldemort likes to torture people until they beg for death; that chocolate frogs are animated etc. etc. - must also be true in the books, even when in some cases it actively contradicts them.

Then there're the films Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and its sequels and the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The stance taken by the Harry Potter Lexicon after the release of the first FB film was that the original script of FB was canon because it was written by Rowling herself, but any differences between the script and the film(s), and any details which aren't in the script and which aren't compatible with the books, belong to the film universe. This however has been complicated by the second film, The Crimes of Grindelwald, in which Minerva McGonagall apears in her 30s in 1927. We know from what she says to Umbridge in OotP that McGonagall began teaching at Hogwarts in 1956, and the long essay on her back-story which appeared on Pottermore clearly showed her finishing school only two years earlier, placing her birth in 1935/36. Even Rowling's original and vague estimate that she was about 70 in GoF would only place her birthdate circa 1924. Harry's Minerva did have a great-grandmother called Minerva, according to Pottermore, but she would have to have been born no later than circa 1880, and she was on the mother's side, the magical side, so it would be a colossal coincidence if her surname just happened to be McGonagall too. So at least the second FB film, and probably all of them, can only exist in the film universe, and that must apply to the scripts too.

The status of Cursed Child is even more complex. Since it has a black Hermione it cannot be in the same universe as the films, unless you divorce the story being told from the actors telling it. Rowling has said that it should be regarded as canon, suggesting she thinks of it as being in the same universe as the books, but the plot of the play hinges on at least three major plot points about the way Potterverse magic works which are diametrically opposed to the way magic works in the books. Even if you can square a black and, importantly, black-haired Hermione with the description of her in the books as having brown hair and as looking white or pink when very stressed, it's difficult to think of a way round these other much more important and glaring anomalies, or with the way in which the play trashes most of the characters to give us thick!Hermione, whiny!Harry, evil!Cedric etc..

So, either it's just a glorified AU fanfic, or the play represents a third universe, so different from the other two in its underlying structure that you can't even say that anything similar could have happened in the book universe. This, at least, means this can't be the Hermione of the books, so it really doesn't matter whether she matches book-Hermione physically or not, so long as she has her trademark bushy hair.

Another complication is JK Rowling's poor maths skills, which can result in flatly contradictory information. For example it's absolutely categorically stated in the books that Harry's second year at Hogwarts begins in autumn 1992, which definitely places Dumbledore's death in 1997; but because Rowling has difficulty thinking about the eight-month offset between the academic and calendar years, on her website she originally had Dumbledore dying in 1996, and she drew up a Weasley family tree which had Fred dying in 1997. She also initially announced that young Albus Severus Potter was starting at Hogwarts on 1^st September 2016, until the Twitterati pointed out that she was a year early.

Now Dumbledore's death has been corrected to 1997 on Pottermore but they've got the date wrong - unless they're saying that Snape faked Dumbledore's death but he died a few weeks later anyway. In HBP Ginny was revising for OWLs as they "moved into June", and then the events which lead up to Dumbledore's death happen on "one such evening", so at least a few days have passed since the start of June. But it's still before the exams, which normally begin during the second week of June, and there are still three term-time Saturdays (during which Harry expects to have detention with Snape) to come before the end of the summer term, which normally occurs on the last weekend in June or first weekend in July. "'You still got detention with Snape this Saturday?' Ron continued. // 'Yeah, and the Saturday after that, and the Saturday after that,' sighed Harry."

It's unlikely Harry would be serving detention on the last weekend of term when they are all preparing to catch the train home, so there must be three weeks plus at least one day (because today must be at least one day before that first Saturday) to go before the end of term, and even if the end of term is a few days into July, as sometimes happens, the day of Dumbledore's fall from the Astronomy Tower cannot be any later than the second week in June and preferably early that week, since it's before the exams start. So Dumbledore fell and presumably died between about the night of 3^rd/4^th June and the night of 7^th/8^th June 1997 - yet Pottermore gives the date of his death as 30^th June.

The research behind some Pottermore articles is also sometimes wildly off. This is what Paul Johnson of Quora has to say about Pottermore's article about the origins of the Hogwarts Express:

[According to Pottermore] it's a 4-6-0 Hall Class steam locomotive, model number GWR 5900, said to have been built in *Crewe* by Muggle railway engineers in *1827*. The Hall class locomotives were designed in *1924* by Charles Collett, chief engineer with the GWR, and built at the GWR works at *Swindon*. Crewe was the site of the LMS works, deadly rivals of the GWR, who would never have been allowed to work on a GWR engine, and the Crewe works wasn't even built until 1845. So we have a GWR locomotive, built at the LMS works and painted in LMS colours, built 97 years before it was invented and 18 years before the factory existed.

1827 was two years before the Rainhill Trials, before even Stephenson's Rocket had been built, and so the construction of the Hogwarts Express locomotive, as described in the text, is pretty much the equivalent of getting the Wright Brothers to build a Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet in their bicycle shop at Kitty Hawk.

There's no doubt in the books that The Leaky Cauldron is either directly on Charing Cross Road or at the near end of one of the side streets leading off it, because we're told three times that Harry is on Charing Cross Road, looking at the pub. But a so-called Leaky Cauldron fact file on Pottermore says that the pub is on Drury Lane - which is 500+ yards from Charing Cross Road, and parallel to it, so there's no way Harry could stand in Charing Cross Road and see anything in Drury Lane.

Another disappointing development is that essays posted to Pottermore after about June 2016 cannot really be considered even secondary canon, or at least its pronouncements are optional. This is because from summer 2016 onwards Pottermore has abandoned the distinction between the books and the films. Essays published after that point, therefore, are trying to fit in with a universe in which The Burrow was both destroyed and not destroyed; in which Lily and James died both at 21 and in their 30s; in which HBP starts both in 1996 and in 2002+; in which Snape died both in the Shrieking Shack and in the boathouse; in which Hogsmeade station is both at the centre of the village and a 20-minute walk outside it, and so on.

This page lists some common ideas about the Potterverse which are often assumed to be canon and therefore "really true" (allowing for the fact that the whole thing is fiction!), but which are actually fanon, as well as some standard plots which depend on fanon-based situations. It examines what canon evidence exists for or against each fanon idea. More items of fanon will be added as I think of them or people suggest them. There is a certain amount of repetition because some points (such as the reasons why Snape might be Neville's Boggart) relate to more than one fanon idea, and I have to allow for the fact that readers may look only at particular fanons which interest them, rather than reading the whole article.

The article also looks at some instances of alternate pairs of fanon, where characters tend to be portrayed in extreme ways, saintly or evil, instead of the mixed, ambiguous characters they nearly all are in the books. Often this comes about when fanwriters take sides between characters who are at odds in the books, so you find that many people who like James portray Snape as evil, many people who like Snape portray Dumbledore as evil and so on.

A disproportionate number of the fanon points listed below have to do with Snape. This is in part due to the fact that he's my favourite character (closely followed by Luna and Neville) and was actually based on a friend of mine, and so I read more fanfic and come across more fanon about him than about other characters. But it's also because his true loyalties are pivotal to the spy-thriller aspect of the story, and so a sense of mystery and uncertainty is deliberately created around him right up until Harry reviews "The Prince's Tale", and fan writers have rushed to fill in the blanks.

The mystery element means that much of what is going on in the story in general, and in Snape's arc in particular, only becomes apparent with hindsight, and many people never re-read and revise their ideas in the light of new knowledge. Many fanon ideas about Snape came about because Rowling deliberately presented misleading information about him early on in the series, and some fanficcers became so wedded to it that they couldn't give it up even when it was clearly canon-shafted by later books and revealed to have been misleading. So we have ficcers still convinced that e.g. the cause of the enmity between young Severus and James was that Severus was jealous of James's popularity and sporting prowess, because Remus Lupin said so in PoA, and they became so used to thinking of that as canon that they haven't processed the fact that developments in later books show that Remus was lying, because we see that it was James who first started to pick on Severus, and that he did so just because Severus wanted to be in Slytherin (and was working class and friends with an actual girl, possibly).

In the same way many ficcers seem to have been reluctant to accept that Dumbledore was gay, some out of prejudice but some because they had written him as McGonagall's lover, and had become so wedded to their own portrayal of him that they couldn't accept that it had been canon-shafted. And you have to get all the way to the seventh book to learn that Snape's instant dislike of Harry in the first book probably was as much due to the fact that, to a Legilimens, the Horcrux-bearing, snake-whispering kid smelled like the next Dark Lord as it was to his resemblance to James.

In canon the Dursleys are significantly emotionally abusive towards Harry, making a very clear difference between him and Dudley and reminding Harry at every turn that they put up with rather than love him, and they are somewhat physically neglectful, but aside from periodically getting roughed up by Dudley's gang there is no evidence that there is much in the way of physical abuse. Vernon at one point loses his rag to the point of seizing Harry by the throat, which is quite bad, and he does once threaten to "knock the stuffing out of" Harry when Harry blackmails him by threatening to tell Vernon's sister Marge (of whom Vernon is evidently quite scared) about Hogwarts; but when Harry accidentally treads on Vernon's face or tries to wrest his letters from him he doesn't seem to be afraid that Vernon will do anything worse than shout at him, and Vernon says that Harry might have turned out better if he had beaten him. So the idea that Vernon is routinely extremely violent towards Harry is not only not canon, it's not canon-compatible.

It's apparent that Vernon gives Harry the occasional clout, because when they are discussing careers in OotP Harry says 'You'd need more than a good sense of fun to liaise with my uncle ... Good sense of when to duck, more like.' But that suggests a spur of the moment thing which is easily avoided, and that once Harry has avoided it it isn't pursued - not the sort of tied-to-a-bed-and-thrashed-with-a-belt scenario so common in fanfiction. It's Marge who believes in formally beating little boys - which suggests that that's what her and Vernon's parents believed, and that Vernon himself is an abuse survivor with no proper rôle model for being a good father/uncle. His fear of upsetting Marge, which led to the only incident we see where he threatens to beat Harry up, may mean that she's older than him and joined in in hurting him as a child, and although he is protective of Petunia he is also very afraid of telling her anything which may offend her, even though (according to Pottermore) she was his secretary when they met, and is probably several years younger than him. [Their son was born in summer 1980 so they were an item by autumn 1979, when Tuney was about twenty-one, and when she was twenty-one Vernon was of sufficient rank to have his own secretary.] He may have been raised by a scary woman - perhaps his father travelled in drills and was often away. There is absolutely no sign in the books that Harry himself has been battered into submission: far from it.

A former social-worker has suggested that Harry's stoicism when Umbridge uses the Blood-Quill on him and his reluctance to tell his friends about it is a sign that he's used to being severely physically abused, but I don't find this convincing when set against the evidence that Vernon has never done to Harry anything which Vernon would classify as a beating, and ten-year-old Harry's complete unconcern about treading on Vernon's face or instructing him to make Dudley get the post. I've always had quite a high pain-threshhold and an ability to brush off mild to moderate pain and just keep going which I attribute in part to the fact that I wasn't hit as a child, with the result that pain has no negative emotional associations for me, other than being painful. I find being hit by somebody during an altercation no different, emotionally, from stubbing my toe.

And Harry is very self-contained: he doesn't come across as somebody who craves emotional support and validation in a situation in which he already knows he's in the right. It's unlikely his friends could do anything practical to help, but they might get hurt trying to, and he'd be more likely to be irritated than bolstered by people being excessively sympathetic and going "Oh you poor thing", which would just add another burden on top of the original problem, and leave him feeling responsible for having upset them.

Given that Marge probably got her ideas about beating little boys from their parents, I would say, rather, that it's Vernon who is the battered child who puts a bold, blustering face on things and pretends that everything in his birth family is fine, but who has no clear idea what's expected of him as a parent and is so afraid of his sister that he panics at the idea of making her angry with him. And Petunia sneers at the magic-using "freak" to get back at the parents who (by her own account) treated her as second-rate because she didn't have magic like her sister. Harry and Dudley are collateral damage - second-generation children raised by adults who have no idea how to be good parents and instead spoil one child and neglect the other.

It's not surprizing Dudley hated Harry. Toddlers commonly resent the arrival of a new child, and this wasn't even a baby he could lord it over but a stranger his own age: one who was both cleverer and better looking than him, and seemed to have creepy mysterious powers. Vernon and Petunia should have built bridges between the boys by telling Dudley how lucky he was to have a playmate always available, but instead they reassured him by making Harry a second-class citizen. Duj has suggested that Petunia's resentment of Harry may have been fed by the fact that he looked better in Dudley's clothes than Dudley did - a pretty green-eyed magical child, like the sister she both loved, resented and mourned - and if she has any idea of why the Potters were targeted, which we don't know, then Harry is in some degree the cause of that sister's death.

Incidentally, somebody whose name I didn't catch pointed out on the net that Dudley's cast-offs, even if they were too big for Harry, probably were at least of fairly good quality. We'd be talking Marks & Spencer's and Burberry, not Primark and Matalan.

The Dursleys make Harry sleep in the understair cupboard but it's big enough to hold Harry, Vernon and a bed at the same time without apparent difficulty. We know that an actual off-the-floor bed is meant, not just a matress or bedroll on the floor, because Harry loses his socks under it and when he finds them there's a spider on one of them, which would be most unlikely if the sock had been pressed flat against the floor. So it's a proper bed, and even if it's a small child's bed it'll be at least 55" by 27" and if a camp bed, 6ft by 2ft, plus space to crane over and rummage underneath it. So Harry's cupboard must be able to accommodate a bed at least 55" long plus two people, one of them a very bulky adult man, and must be the size of a small room - albeit a windowless room which presumably has a severely sloping ceiling at the stair end, and is only full-height for a few feet at the other end. It's described as dark, but must be badly lit rather than unlit (unless Harry is using a torch in there), because Harry is able to see to find his socks and to pick a spider off them.

It could at a pinch be only about 6ft by 4ft if you assume that Harry sat on the bed and Vernon stood with his knees pressed against the side of the bed. Otherwise, it sounds as if it probably resembles the understair cupboard at a cottage where I used to live, which extended along under the upstairs landing and was about 12ft long by just under 4ft wide. That may still sound tiny to Americans and Australians, but some older houses here in Scotland include windowless internal rooms of about that size, and they are regarded as suitable for use as bedrooms. When I was looking to rent a place I viewed a modern house just outside Edinburgh which included a room which was being advertised as a child's bedroom and which, OK, did have a window, but which proved to be around 5ft square and mainly occupied by a 30"-square wooden box containing a water tank, leaving just an L-shaped area of floor-space, 30" wide and wrapped around two sides of the tank. Harry's cupboard-room would probably be considered adequate and even rather cute for a child's bedroom if it were all that was available and was properly lit and decorated: it's the fact that he is given this tiny room while Dudley has two full-sized rooms and that little effort has apparently been made to make it comfortable which is cruel.

When Harry is sent to his cupboard with "no meals" after vanishing the glass on the python enclosure at the zoo - an act which was potentially life-threatening, albeit not deliberate - he waits until the Dursleys have gone to bed and then raids the kitchen, so he's not locked in, and not going hungry for more than a few hours. Nor is he routinely shut in his cupboard, as opposed to just sleeping there. After the python incident he was confined to his cupboard from Dudley's birthday on 30^th June until just after the end of term, so around three weeks, but we are told that this is the longest period for which he has ever been confined, and we can see that he isn't locked in even then (although we are told that on a previous occasion he had been locked in, at least briefly, after the incident where he levitated onto the school roof). And since school was still in session for all but the last few days, and the Dursleys probably wouldn't want to explain his absence from school, he was probably still going to school every day and eating school meals, as well as raiding the kitchen every night, even assuming that "no meals" applied to more than the first night.

The evidence that Harry is routinely seriously underfed is weak. He is small for his age, and Dumbledore says that he "arrived at Hogwarts, neither as happy nor as well-nourished as I would have liked". In DH Harry thinks that "he had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys'". But he can hardly be desperately hungry, because in PoA we see him choose to abandon his breakfast toast in order to speak to Vernon about his Hogsmeade form, and a few days later he leaves the table early, without dessert, to avoid Marge. In the first book he is described as always small and skinny for his age (which if literally true would have to mean he had been small and skinny when he lived with his parents, as well), but the authorial voice suggests that this skinniness may be due to living in a dark cupboard - there's no mention of malnutrition as such. When he arrives at his first Sorting Feast we are told that "The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he'd never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted".

What we actually see is that Harry is bought a less expensive ice cream than Dudley is at the zoo (bearing in mind that both tickets to London Zoo and any food bought there are startlingly expensive, so having to buy an extra ticket for Harry would have seriously impacted the Dursleys' budget for the day). He is sent upstairs with "two slices of bread and a lump of cheese" on the day of the dinner party, but then Dudley too is probably only given a snack, since he is to wait at table, and both boys would probably have dined on leftovers after the party if things hadn't gone pear-shaped. And this is Britian, where "a lumpo of cheese" would probably mean a chunk of cheddar about the size of a lemon. He is locked in his bedroom for three days and fed three small, inadequate meals a day after the Dursleys wrongly believe that he has deliberately wrecked the party on which the family's financial future depends. Other than that he seems to eat the same as the rest of the family, although the comment at the Sorting Feast suggests that Dudley scarfs all the second helpings, so Harry doesn't get to load up as much as a growing boy would like.

At the start of GoF Harry is on short commons because Dudley is on a strict diet and the rest of the family is expected to support him by dieting too, even though Harry and Tuney don't need to; but this is a hunger which they all share (although Harry's portions are even smaller than Dudley's). Harry has emergency food stored under the floorboards in his room, sent to him by his friends, but we're told that "The moment he had got wind of the fact that he was expected to survive the summer on carrot sticks, Harry had sent Hedwig to his friends with pleas for help", so clearly he hadn't expected to be seriously underfed, until he learned that the whole family was expected to go on a sympathy-diet.

Even when they are on the island and have almost nothing to eat, Harry is fed the same amount as Dudley and the adults, although he does get the worst sleeping-accommodation. In fact it is Harry whom we see eat sausages - and presumably some of his birthday cake, although that's not described - in front of the others when they are hungry, although that isn't his fault, because Vernon orders his family not to eat what Hagrid has brought. In the case of sausages made by Hagrid, that's probably very wise.

In the first book, Petunia orders Harry to do the bacon for breakfast on Dudley's birthday while she does other things, and Harry ends up frying the eggs as well. We never see him cook on any other occasion, and Petunia has to ask him to do it as a special act, so it's clearly not routine for Harry to cook the breakfast. On the other hand the fact that she trusts him to cook unsupervised at age ten does suggest that he has done so often enough to be in practice. When Harry cooks breakfast he evidently serves himself a good-sized portion, since he has to "wolf it down" before Dudley knocks over the table.

We have no input as to whether, when Harry cooked before, he cooked for the whole family, or whether it was a case of Petunia leaving him to cook his own breakfast when she was busy.

The idea that Harry does a lot of very heavy chores rests on one incident when he is sent to tidy the garden before an important dinner party, and told he won't get fed until he finishes. This is a big job for a barely-twelve-year-old and might be said to support the idea that he is given heavy chores at other times, but note that Harry is given this job as a punishment for threatening Dudley with his wand, and on this occasion Dudley is also given chores: he has to wait at table.

Harry does say in CoS that he has had a lot of practice cleaning things the Muggle way at the Dursleys' house, but we don't know if this was more than you would expect a child to do. You would think that if he really did a lot of cleaning, his cupboard would be less spidery. After the scene with Hagrid in the first book it says that "... Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon didn’t [cut] force him to do anything or shout at him" any more, but then in the next paragraph it says that "Aunt Petunia didn’t come in to hoover any more, because Hedwig kept bringing back dead mice." So even if Harry got stuck with doing some cleaning before Hagrid arrived, or even a lot of cleaning, he clearly hadn't been doing all the housework in the way so beloved of fanfiction. And in fact, when he says that he has had a lot of practice cleaning, he and Ron are talking specifically about cleaning silver trophies. This is a job which is time-consuming but not heavy. It would make sense that Petunia would do the hoovering etc and leave Harry to sit at the kitchen table and polish the silver and brass.

We also don't have clear evidence that Dudley is not given this sort of job, other than the general fact that he's a spoilt brat and would probably be more trouble than he's worth, as a worker. In fact, right in the first book we see Vernon tell Dudley to go get the post (that is, from the front door mat, about 20ft away), then Dudley says to make Harry do it, and Harry says to make Dudley do it... Vernon eventually comes down on Dudley's side and tells him to poke Harry with his Smeltings stick, but his first thought had been to give the task to Dudley, and Harry certainly shows no fear of any severe consequences for instructing Vernon to stick with that original thought.

The gardening scene is really at the core of the fanon idea of house-elf!Harry. On the face of it, it does look bad. Petunia aims a blow at Harry's head with a frying pan, which he ducks - one of only two instances of physical violence by Vernon and Petunia which we see (the other being Vernon gripping Harry's throat), and one which could have done very serious damage if the blow had connected. She then orders Harry to weed the garden and tells him he won't get fed until he finishes. But all this is presented as being a punishment for Harry threatening Dudley with magic. We know he was only pretending, but Petunia doesn't and as far as she is concerned Harry has just done the equivalent of pointing a loaded gun at Dudley and threatening to pull the trigger. The dinner party is vitally important to the family's future, it might enable them to have actual holidays in the future, and as far as we see Petunia is doing all the cooking and preparation on her own and is probably more than somewhat hysterical when she tries to swat Harry. Vernon actually says to Harry, as he is on his way out to collect his and Dudley's dinner jackets (apparently hired, another sign the family is not all that well off), "You stay out of your aunt's way when she's cleaning". As far as we see, up to the point at which Harry gave her an excuse to dump the job on him, she'd been planning to do the garden herself as well.

Obviously, there is a certain amount of leeway as to how abusive/demanding you want the Dursleys to have been, and a Harry who has to do a lot of chores or who is frequently sent to bed without supper is just about canon-compatible. But the common belief that it's established canon that Harry was hideously ill-treated (over and above being verbally hectored and emotionally oppressed) is just not true.

The Dursleys do have every reason to resent Harry's presence, although none of it is his fault and they shouldn't take it out on him. They've been landed with an extra child who may at any moment cause some deadly magical side-effect (if he had vanished the glass restraining a cobra or a large crocodile instead of a python, Dudley would probably have died); whose mere presence puts their and their child's lives in danger by embroiling them in a murderous war they cannot even understand, except that it killed Petunia's sister and brother-in-law; almost every wizard they meet treats them with contempt and often with great brutality; and so far as we see they are never even given any money to help with the cost of raising Harry, although his father's family were rich. They know it, too - according to Pottermore James swanked about his wealth in front of the Dursleys, and Rowling has said that Vernon resented Harry because he disliked James. This incident was primarily Vernon's fault - he accused James of being an unemployed layabout, so James was justified in making it clear that he didn't work because he was too rich to need to - and in any case it's unfair of Vernon to blame the son for the father, just as it's unfair for Hagrid to attack Dudley because he dislikes Vernon. But given that the prequelette which JK wrote for charity shows James and Sirius baiting and mocking two innocent Muggle policemen, James probably really rubbed Vernon's nose in his superiority and wealth.

Petunia is about two years older than Lily, so she was around twenty-two when Dudley was born, and probably twenty-one when he was conceived. In a discussion on Loose Canon, among other things about whether Vernon is related to the owners of Grunnings (according to Pottermore Petunia was his secretary when Dudley was conceived and she herself was twenty-one or younger, and in PS we're told Vernon was a director when Dudley was sixteen months old, so either he's a lot older than his wife or he's a brilliant employee or he's related to the boss), maidofkent said:

"While being only 23 doesn't excuse Petunia's treatment of Harry - many young women would have done a perfectly fine job of raising both him and Dudley - it is a rather different picture than the middle-aged harridan I think most people visualise. She has had a problematic upbringing, where her parents, if not openly preferring pretty, talented Lily, certainly make much of her, and do not seem to have made Petunia feel special. They then must have died when Petunia was in her late teens to very early twenties, she has a demanding baby whom she and Vernon are making more demanding by the day, she has just learned by letter that her little sister has been killed by the magic Petunia both wants and hates, and now has to raise a probably magic child alongside the one she adores but can't really cope with. Although she manages Vernon in later life, it's possible her early marriage wasn't a bed of roses since he is a bully. It's rather similar to visualising Snape as a mature confident bully rather than the immature, nervy young man he was.

"[cut] the early 80s were a time of global recession when a lot of small businesses closed in Britain, so it's possible Vernon was under some strain keeping Grunnings afloat. In that case, the sudden arrival of Harry would have caused further strain. They would have needed at least a double buggy so Petunia could get to the shops, probably another car seat, double the nappies - since Dudley was probably at least one baby size bigger than Harry, the habit of dressing Harry in Dudley's out-grown clothes would have started early. Of course Harry, suddenly bereft of Mummy and Daddy would probably have screamed when (and if) Petunia cuddled/fed him, and woken at night weeping for Lily and James, poor child. It wouldn't have been easy, and that's without all the emotional baggage Petunia brings with her. Of course, none of this is insurmountable, and many people would have surmounted it, but it does give some background to Petunia's neglect."

duj added "And don't forget that putting a toddler used to magical entertainments, remedies and solutions in a non-magical home meant no more baby-broom or books with moving pictures, Mercurochrome on his cuts and scratches instead of instant-action potions, etc. Some quite ordinary household activities would have upset and/or angered him, and he couldn't even tell them why." I suggested that they probably started off with both babies in one nursery room, but if Harry's nightmares about red eyes and green lights and his mother screaming woke him up crying he would of course wake Dudley and set him yelling too, so he may have been moved to the cupboard in the first place because it was far away enough from the nursery that he wouldn't keep setting Dudley off in the middle of the night. A walk-in cupboard would have been adequate for a baby in a cot, and then Dudley colonised the spare bedroom as well as the nursery and it became too much trouble to evict him and move Harry back upstairs.

The Dursleys are not very well-off. We can see this because in GoF we're told that they never take Harry on holiday, preferring to leave him with Mrs Figg, but in PS Harry expects to see Mrs Figg one day a year, on Dudley's birthday. Clearly, holidays are a very rare event for the Dursleys; and either they usually take Harry with them when they take Dudley on an outing, except for Dudley's birthday treat, or they only take Dudley out once a year, on his birthday. Also, in CoS recently-twelve-year-old Harry says that the Dursleys haven't given him pocket money for about six years, meaning that they did give him pocket money when he was five or six. It may be that they stopped because he had started to manifest wandless magic and they were punishing him for it - or they may have become poorer at that point.

Or perhaps that was the point at which they began to save for Dudley's fees at Smeltings, which probably take up a third to half of Vernon's income. The business-dinner which Dobby ruined, which would have given them the means to go on holiday every year, must have been vitally important and longed-for so it's not surprising that, for once, they really did become quite physically abusive and underfed Harry for a few days when they believed that he had intentionally sabotaged their chances out of spite.

If indeed they only take Dudley out once a year when they are small, it's understandable that part of his birthday treat is to have a day without the cousin he so much dislikes. But if they were playing fair they would follow up by taking Harry out for a treat on his birthday.

Against this, in DH Harry looks around the Dursleys' house and thinks that "Long ago, when he had been left alone while the Dursleys went out to enjoy themselves, the hours of solitude had been a rare treat: pausing only to sneak something tasty from the fridge he had rushed upstairs to play on Dudley’s computer, or put on the television and flicked through the channels to his heart’s content." This sounds as if they went out more often than once a year, but then you have to wonder why they would leave Harry with Mrs Figg on Dudley's birthday, and not for other outings. It makes sense to assume that when Harry was very young they either took him with them on outings or left him at Mrs Figg's (and if they left him at Mrs Figg's every time they went out, they went out very rarely), but once he was older they left him at home on his own - and perhaps were slightly better off and able to go out more often. Also, of course, once Harry was eleven and up they would make more of an effort to go out with Dudley during the holidays, because he like Harry was away at boarding school most of the year.

Of course, it is unfair of them to blame and punish Harry for involuntary wandless magic he isn't even sure he's done (leaving aside the fact that in the case of the dinner party fiasco, it wasn't him). Yet from their point of view, it's reasonable to blame him, because, as duj has pointed out, their experience of wandless childhood magic comes mainly from Lily who had an extraordinary degree of power and control, and probably did every magical thing she did deliberately. No-one, so far as we know, ever gives the Dursleys a book on what to expect from a growing magical child, or any guidance, so they're pretty-well bound to assume Lily was the norm and Harry must know what he's doing. But we don't find out about Lily's preternatural control until the final book, by which time fanon had firmly established that the Dursleys were just being unreasonable.

In addition, maidofkent points out that "Vernon only finds out that Harry is forbidden to do magic at home at the start of CoS, when Harry receives his warning from the Ministry. Yet Vernon is married to the sister of a Muggle-born witch. Why didn't Petunia reassure Vernon and Dudders that Harry would be unable to inflict any magical harm on them during the holidays? // Petunia states that Lily carried out some acts of magic at home, and JKR has said in interview that Lily received some minor warnings for doing this. It looks as if either Lily herself kept quiet both about the prohibition and the warnings she received, or Petunia knew about the prohibition, but considered that as Lily had only ever received 'taps on the wrist', that the Ministry would not seriously intervene. She has listened to Severus telling Lily that the Dementors are reserved for 'very bad stuff' and this does not include magic out of school. // So, this is another reason for the Dursleys to be concerned over Harry's magic."

Furthermore, what little contact they do have with the wizarding world doesn't provide a good rôle model. They see Hagrid attack Dudley without provocation and afflict him with a painful and humiliating pig's tail which they then have to pay a private surgeon to remove, just to punish the boy for being fat and to get at Vernon; they see the Twins use Dudley as an experimental animal and risk choking him with a monstrously enlarged tongue. It must be clear to them both that their beloved son is in extreme danger from the magical world, and that wizards regard it as quite normal to punish a small child for the sins of its parents, so they are doing to Harry what they see wizards do to Dudley (albeit that they did it first).

drawing of longhaired white cat, sitting with its back to the audience and looking back over its shoulder

Clearly, Harry doesn't hate his life with the Dursleys all that much, since he dreads visiting Mrs Figg who is perfectly pleasant to him, but boring. Whatever he feels about the Dursleys, he finds being with them more enjoyable than looking at photographs of cats, which surely wouldn't be the case if they seriously starved or beat him. Mrs Figg does believe that the Dursleys have an active spite against Harry and wouldn't send him round to her if they thought he enjoyed it, but it seems to me more likely that if they thought it was fun, Dudley would insist on coming too. When Petunia tries to dye Dudley's old uniform grey for Harry she reassures him, rather hopelessly, that it will be fine and will look the same as everyone else's so she's not being spiteful to him - she probably just can't afford a new uniform for him. She could, of course, if she didn't over-indulge Dudley to such an extent but Dudley uses his jealousy of Harry as a means of bullying his parents, and I suppose they would feel that they didn't want Harry's presence to cause their son to have less than he would otherwise have done.

The fact that they try to keep Harry away from magic and away from Hogwarts is as likely to be protective of Harry as of themselves - especially when you consider how much they clearly dislike having Harry around, and yet they prefer to send him to a local comprehensive which will have him at home under their feet every day until he's at least sixteen, rather than send him away to boarding school. They know, after all, that it was getting involved with the wizarding world which led to the death of Petunia's sister, and have probably been told, at least vaguely, that the same force which killed Lily may come after Harry - since Petunia seems to know something about the Blood-Wards and the fact that Harry's living with them protects both Harry and themselves from some serious danger. And really, they're right to worry, since Dumbledore already has ambitions to train Harry up to be a close-to-kamikaze soldier.

The standard plot where Vernon abuses Harry so badly that he has to be rescued by Snape at point of death is wildly off-canon, but could be made to work if you have Marge (who is so keen on beating little boys) or Dudley or a member of Dudley's gang injure Harry, and Vernon and Petunia anxiously trying to cover it up and just hoping Harry will get better without a doctor because they don't want Marge or Dudley to go to gaol. JKR has drawn parallels between Dudley and James, by giving Dudley a sidekick called Piers (an antique form of the name Peter) who is described as rat-like and who helps to hold down Dudley's victims, so there could be some Muggle equivalent of the werewolf incident - Dudley's gang might cause Harry to be hit by a car, for example.

There are also many fanfics in which the Dursleys take Harry somewhere and abandon him, presumably inspired by the bit in the first book where Vernon drops Harry at King's Cross and then drives off without waiting to see if he finds his train, and is laughing at the idea that there might not be a train. This is a peculiar scene, because if there had been no train, Harry might have gone to the police to get a lift home, potentially getting the Dursleys into trouble.

However, Vernon knows that the magical world exists and probably knows that his sister-in-law used to get to Hogwarts by train. He knows that Diagon Alley exists, and assuming he talks to his wife at all he probably knows roughly where it is (since it's pretty-well a "given" that Lily would have babbled to her family about her exciting trip t o London when she was eleven, and would have found being in London nearly as thrilling as being in the magical world). From King's Cross, had there been no train, Harry could have walked to Diagon Alley in less than an hour, and Vernon would almost certainly know that. He could have walked to St Mungo's in half an hour. The fact that Harry can get to the Dursleys from Diagon Alley via Paddington Station means that Little Whinging must be in the extreme north of Surrey, close to Heathrow Airport, so if he had had to Harry could have walked from King's Cross all the way to Privet Drive in around seven hours.

It's unlikely that Vernon really thought there wouldn't be a train, since he knows Hogwarts is real - it's more likely that he was fantasizing out loud, or winding Harry up. But even if he did think there might not be a train, he wouldn't have expected that he would be losing Harry by abandoning him - just subjecting him to the tedious nuisance of a long walk. If Vernon understands that Harry has money in the bank, it wouldn't even be the long walk to Little Whinging - just about a 45-minute walk to Gringott's to get some of his G alleons changed for Muggle money so he could get the train home.

I've seen somebody suggest on Quora that Rowling's intention in writing the Dursleys and showing us these brief, limited scenes of abuse is to hint to us that in fact far worse abuse takes place behind the scenes where we can't see it and that the Dursleys are monsters. It's not in itself an impossible idea - I suspect she may mean us to suspect that more goes on in the Snape household than just shouting, for example. But if you're going to try to guess at authorial intent you have to ask why the author would include this or that scene or piece of information. In the case of the Dursleys, you have to ask why, if Rowling's purpose was to hint to us that the Dursleys are far more abusive than she has shown, would she have gone to the trouble of also telling us that Vernon considers himself never to have beaten Harry, that the only heavy chore which we see Harry being given is a punishment for misbehaviour and that Harry prefers being with the Dursleys to looking at pictures of cats? On the contrary, the only coherent motive for including those points is surely to establish that the Dursleys are not very much more abusive than she has shown.

Incidentally, a reviewer of this essay has complained online that I have fallen into the trap of seeing only two options - in this case, that if the Dursleys aren't the violently abusive monsters of fanfic they must barely be abusive at all. This is to miss the point by a mile. It's established in canon that the Dursleys are quite emotionally abusive to Harry, and at least somewhat physically neglectful; that at age ten Harry has cooked the breakfast often enough to know how to do it without further instruction; and that at just-turned-twelve he is punished for threatening Dudley by being given a gardening chore which is really too heavy for his age. We see two instances of limited physical violence: one where Vernon grabs Harry's throat and one where Petunia - under great provocation - swats at him with a frying pan. It's also established canon that Vernon believes himself never to have beaten Harry, as far as whatever his own definition of "beaten" goes; that Harry behaves as if he has no physical fear of Vernon; that Harry doesn't cook the breakfast every day but has to be specifically instructed to do it for a special occasion; and that we see quite a lot of Harry at the Dursleys' house and never see him asked to do any chores apart from one instance of cooking breakfast, one instance of fetching the post, and the gardening scene.

Obviously, in between the canon facts there's a lot of leeway. Vernon might clip Harry round the ear on a regular basis but not think of this as beating him; Harry might really be given a lot of chores which we don't see, and so on. But only those things which are established in canon can be used as firm evidence for anything else in canon. We cannot say e.g. that canon Dumbledore is a bad person because he sends Harry to a place where he will be hit and made to do regular heavy chores, when the idea that Harry is hit by the Dursleys and made to do regular heavy chores is only canon-compatible, not actual canon. Otherwise, we're falling into the same logic trap as the populist historians who reason that because Richard III might have master-minded his own accession, he must have done so, and then use this possible but almost totally unsupported idea that he was a ruthless cllmber to "prove" that he murdered his nephews.

As a baby Dudley's head looked like "a large pink beach-ball wearing different-coloured bobble hats" and he is described as "large" in all the photographs of him as a small child. He is a very fat ten-year-old and has probably been fat for some time, since we are told that Harry wears Dudley's cast-off clothes which are four times too big for him, and it sounds as if this is meant to be a long-term thing. We're told that ten-year-old Harry is small and skinny for his age, so we can say, very loosely, that if Harry is half the clothes-size of an average ten-year-old, Dudley must be twice the average size. Even if he's tall for his age he must also be pretty fat, and indeed he is described as waddling, as looking like a pig in a wig etc..

Many fanfics, and the films, therefore portray Dudley as fat wherever he appears. In canon, however, he's only fat until the start of GoF, at which point he is put on a strict diet on the orders of the Smeltings school nurse. Following this he takes up boxing and in the later books he is beefy and muscular (possibly also between the ears), not fat.

The Weasleys certainly seem to regard Harry as almost an extra son, and indeed Molly seems more attentive to Harry's needs than she is to Ron's. But canon Harry doesn't really reciprocate (and perhaps he is right to distrust Molly's favouritism, which probably contains elements of pity and celebrity-worship).

We see this very clearly in the scene in DH after the Trio Apparate away from the attack on the Weasley wedding, and Arthur's Patronus meets them at Grimmauld Place to tell them that the family have survived. Ron is quite undone with relief, and so is Hermione, even though Molly was quite unpleasant to her in fourth year when the Prophet suggested she had toyed with Harry's affections. But Harry has to think about Ginny, specifically, before he can share their excitement. "'It's your family, 'course you're worried. I'd feel the same way.' He thought of Ginny. 'I do feel the same way.'" He's quite explicit that he would feel the same overwhelming relief if Molly and Arthur were his own family, but as they aren't, he doesn't, except as regards Ginny.

Molly of the books is very protective of her family, but she's also shrill and overbearing and not very interested in what they themselves want, treating them a bit like pets rather than adults, or as extensions of her own ambitions. She's still trying to control what Bill wears, for example, even though he's an adult, and makes it clear she's not keen on Fleur, up until the family bonding scene in the hospital wing at the end of HBP.

Although she occasionally shouts at the Twins she doesn't seem to have done much to control their behaviour when they were younger. To some extent this is quite understandable, because her two brothers were killed when the Twins were toddlers and so she would have been very dazed and distracted, possibly for years. Nevertheless, the Twins seem to have been allowed to persecute both Percy and Ron, and the only time that we know an adult intervened, it was Arthur.

Either Molly plays favourites or she's offhand with all her children. She sends Ron off on his first day at Hogwarts - his first long period away from her, when she isn't going to see him again for months - with sandwiches he hates, and can't be bothered to remember that he hates them, or to make any kind of effort for him even in this important rite of passage. [N.B. British corned beef is nothing like American corned beef. It's a greyish-pink, fibrous thing which comes in cans and is laden with fat and salt - the only thing to be said for it is that it's easy to slice.] She makes a huge difference between Famous Harry and Ron, buying Harry fancy dress-robes which match his pretty eyes, while kitting Ron out in shabby, ridiculous robes in a colour he hates. OK, Harry is paying for his own robes, but Molly spends a lot of time on them and, OK, for Ron she had to get what she could afford - but she didn't even bother to take the lace off and tidy them up. She seemed to want him to look ridiculous, or at least not to care if he did.

On the other hand, when Ron becomes prefect and reflects honour on her she is overjoyed - but then she treats the Twins as non-persons, saying that "everyone in the family" has now been a prefect, and when George says "What are Fred and I, next-door neighbours?" she not only doesn't answer but physically pushes him out of the way so she can continue to pay attention to Ron. In this scene she at least asks Ron what colour pyjamas he'd like, even before hearing that he is to be a prefect, but she is still packing him maroon socks - so even when he is fifteen she still doesn't know, or doesn't care, that he hates maroon.

drawing of two large brightly-patterned Easter eggs and one small plain chocolate egg

She plays favourites in other ways - with Harry always the favourite. A woman of her age and experience ought surely to know that the press can't be trusted, yet she believes without confirmation Witch Weekly's claim that Hermione has been toying with Harry's affections, and deliberately shows hostility to her by making it obvious she favours her much less than the others, sending her a tiny plain Easter egg while sending Harry and Ron huge ones full of toffees. In fact, she's doing to Hermione a toned-down version of what the Dursleys do to Harry, when they shower Dudley with presents and give Harry a packet of tissues, to let him know how much less they care about him. She also doesn't hesitate to humiliate her children by sending them Howlers.

In fact, Ron's childhood doesn't seem to have been a whole lot better than Harry's. Whilst Molly isn't, so far as we see, outright emotionally abusive to any of her children the way the Dursleys are to Harry, she's emotionally neglectful, and either makes a clear difference between Ron and the others or ignores all their preferences and personalities.

While we don't know whether the Twins persecuted Ron as relentlessly as Dudley did Harry, or tried to prevent him from having friends, their attacks on him were magically assisted and considerably nastier than anything we know Dudley to have done. They beat baby Ron's pet to death for fun (it's mentioned in the Fantastic Beasts booklet - he had a pet Puffskein but the Twins used it for Bludger practice). They burned a hole through his tongue. They traumatized him for life by turning his teddy bear into a giant spider in his arms. They tried to get him to take an Unbreakable Vow which could have killed him - the only incident we know they were severely punished for, and that was by Arthur.

Even as adults they are still unpleasant to Ron, refusing him a family discount at their joke shop in quite a sneering way while making it very obvious that they prefer Famous Harry to Ron. In fact the only people in the family who seem to show any care for Ron are Arthur and Percy. It may not be very nice of Percy to advise Ron to dump Harry but it's not unreasonable for him to suspect Harry of being a bit of a fabulist, since Ron is, and at least his motivation is care for Ron.

Percy also is treated very coldly and almost abusively by his family, and not just by the Twins. Nobody gives him the chance to say whether he lied to them about why he was bringing Scrimgeour to the house at Christmas, or whether it was Scrimgeour who had lied to him - they just assume that Percy is the one at fault, and reject and ostracise him because of it.

If you want to be charitable, however, then you can say that as with Snape and Lily, the death of Molly's brothers is only ten years ago when we first meet her, and she may still be suffering from depression. Her favouring of Harry could be genuine gratitude for his saving the world from Voldemort.

There's a common assumption in fandom that Fabian and Gideon Prewett, Molly's brothers, were twins like Fred and George. In fact we're simply told that they were her and each other's brothers. Nor do we know whether they were older or younger than Molly or one of each. All we know is that as at August/September 1981, when the brothers were killed, they were old enough to be Order members, and Molly was in her late twenties or early thirties.

What we are told in canon is that Harry wears glasses, and that his sight is blurry without them. It is almost universally assumed in the fandom that this means that Harry is short-sighted. However, Harry is able to look down from the considerable height of his dormitory window and see by moonlight that a smallish animal is walking across the lawn, and at one point he lies on his bed and looks at the stars through a window which isn't even next to his bed, both without his glasses.

drawing of round gold wire-rimmed spectacles

This suggests that he is actually long-sighted (he has hyperopia, not myopia), as you would expect a good Seeker to be. The blurriness without glasses, even at a distance, probably comes about because hyperopia forces the eye to work extra-hard in order to focus, so the eyes easily become tired, and/or he may have a severe astigmatism as well as the hyperopia.

Indeed, since Harry seems to wear glasses while playing Quidditch, there probably is more to it than just hyperopia, which on its own ought to be useful in catching the Snitch. We must assume he has an astigmatism.

Canon supports the idea that Harry is at least bisexual, since he seems to be very aware of other men's appearance and whether he thinks they are handsome or not (really because he is the viewpoint character of a straight woman). But the idea that his friends might be shocked by this is a serious cultural anomaly, since few people in Muggle Britain have been seriously prejudiced against gays since the 1970s, and to admit to such a prejudice would be like holding up a banner saying "I belong to a very low social class". As for the wizarding world, not even Rita Skeeter tries to make any capital out of the fact that teen!Dumbles was in love with another boy - only out of the identity of the boy. If your plot requires Ron and Hermione to be angry with gay!Harry, have him deceive or two-time Ginny.

Whatever the precise nature of young Snape's relationship with Lily, his attraction to her certainly isn't simply sexual, since it begins when he is nine. Later on, however, especially in the courtyard scene, he seems a bit jealous and doesn't like the idea of James fancying Lily or Lily being pally with James - and his reactions suggest that that's not just because James is a bully, or because he is afraid that Remus is a threat to her. And there seems to be a definite sexual frisson between him and Narcissa Malfoy in the Spinner's End scene. Although you can come up with alternative explanations for that super-charged scene where Snape gazes down into Narcissa's upturned face, it's pretty clear Rowling herself intends there to be a definite sexual frisson.

He's really extremely unlikely to be gay, given what we see in canon - at most he'd have to be bi. However, not only is there a sexual frisson between Snape and Narcissa and between Snape and Lily, there doesn't seem to be one between him and any of the male characters, unless you count barely-controlled hostility as a sexual frisson.

James Potter certainly seems to have assumed that young Sev was straight, or at most bi - since Rowling has said that James's persecution of Severus was partly due to James's sexual jealousy of Sev's friendship with Lily.

A bisexual male friend said to me that in his opinion, as somebody with a fully functioning gaydar, Snape is about as obviously straight as it's possible for a fictional character to be. His main reason was that, he said, gay or bi men are "always looking" when they see any other even half-attractive man and always thinking "Would I?", even if the answer is "Not in a million years." There is no suggestion in the books that when Snape looks at the supposedly very beautiful Lockhart he thinks anything other than "What a twat", or that when Horace Slughorn flings an arm round him he thinks anything more than "This is my friend. My friend is very drunk."

Nightfall Rising raised the possibility that Snape might be "demi-sexual", that is, only likely to fancy people or be able to assess their attractiveness if he already has a close, warm emotional tie with them, so that he wouldn't assess Lockhart in a sexual way even if he's gay or bi. However, he clearly does have quite close ties with Slughorn, since he comes to Slughorn's party and allows drunk!Sluggy to fling an arm around him without trying to gnaw it off at the elbow. After the killing of Dumbledore, when the staff are expressing amazement at Snape's actions, all the other staff come out with variants on a theme of "Dumbledore trusted him and I trusted Dumbledore's judgement": only Slughorn speaks of his direct, personal trust in Snape himself ("I thought I knew him"). And yet there is no sense of sexual frisson that I can see between Snape and Slughorn, and a strong one between Snape and Narcissa (whom he also probably knows well). Demi or not, the evidence still tends to indicate that Snape is straight.

The same bisexual friend commented that the gay men and gay relationships portrayed in slash fanfiction rarely bear much resemblance to real gay men and gay relationships (any more than the *!*!* Hawt Girl-on-Girl Action *!*!* stories you might find in a lads' mag resemble real lesbians), so the fact that Snape doesn't in any way resemble a real gay man doesn't preclude the possibility of his fitting into the mould of the fake gay men found in fanfiction. But one certainly cannot argue "Canon Snape is gay and therefore X", when canon Snape is so clearly intended to be straight and making him anything else requires so much special pleading.

The same bi friend (above) who said that Snape was straight also said that it was very unlikely that Snape would be - as often portrayed in fanfiction - into bondage or sado-masochism, because he doesn't seem to be nearly physical enough for those sort of games, and his working life is so filled with complex, stress-filled game-playing that he would want to escape into simplicity in his leisure time. Snape in his opinion would want a straightforward uncomplicated roll in the hay, or wine and candlelight, not whips and handcuffs. John Nettleship, JK Rowling's Chemistry master who she has admitted was the main inspiration for Snape - and who was as straight as it is humanly possible to be - agreed with this wholeheartedly.

Snape is often accused of being a sadist because he has a mean streak in his social interactions, and he's certainly quite verbally spiteful and a bit of a gloater, but that seems to be as far as it goes. He protects the students from physical harm, including preventing the other Death Eaters from Cruciating Harry at the end of HBP, and although he thinks he wants Sirius destroyed by Dementors (because he believes him to be out to kill Harry) he automatically conjures a stretcher on which to carry him, instead of treating him as roughly as Sirius treated him. Laineth points out that Snape's inclusion, among the memories he gave to Harry, of the scene where he cut George's ear off served no purpose other than to let Harry know that it had been an accident (and that he had tried to protect Remus) - even on his deathbed it mattered to him to let a fellow Order member know that he hadn't injured another member deliberately.

If Snape had been a physical sadist he would presumably have had ample opportunity to express it when he was a Death Eater, and yet he made so little impression as a Death Eater that Sirius, an Order member, hadn't heard even a sniff of a rumour that he was one, and according to Bellatrix his reputation among Voldemort's minions is that he is all talk and no action. If anything, his devotion to Lily and his loyalty to Dumbledore, even when we see Dumbledore emotionally abuse him, might suggest a touch of masochism - at minimum, a lack of self-interest to rival Harry's.

Personally I think that the key lies in the fact that Snape was Sorted into Slytherin, even though he has the characteristics of the other houses (loyalty, courage, intellectual curiosity....) and doesn't seem very ambitious. With the talents that we see that he has for devising new spells and potions, if he was ambitious he ought to be a celebrated, wealthy inventor by now, doing a little teaching on the side. The solution, in my opinion, is that he is hugely competitive on a personal level, and the Hat interpreted that as ambition of a sort (along with the fact that Slytherin was what he wanted, of course). So he doesn't actually want to kill Sirius once he knows he's not a threat to Harry, he doesn't even seem to want to kill Peter, but he wants to make them admit that he's better than them, and when he is spiteful it isn't because he has a very strong urge to hurt - if he had, he would surely have had a different and much more awful reputation as a Death Eater - but because spiteful gloating is a way of keeping score. As an academically brilliant boy who was sneered at almost from birth for being an ugly little guttersnipe from the wrong side of the tracks, he must have grown up almost from birth feeling that he had something to prove.

It's canon that Snape is a powerful Occlumens, a mind-occluder, who is able to conceal his true feelings and allegiance from a very powerful Legilimens, or mind-reader. During the Occlumency lessons Snape rails against "Fools who wear their hearts proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked so easily – weak people, in other words" who will be "easy prey" for Voldemort's Legilimency. But he says this while he is white in the face and visibly angry and shaken after seeing Cedric's corpse in Harry's memory, and a few minutes later Harry asks Snape about the Department of Mysteries and watches him for a reaction, and "Snape looked agitated; but when he spoke again he sounded as though he was trying to appear cool and unconcerned." He's really not doing that great a job if Harry - not noted for his emotional acumen - can still see what he's feeling. In HBP, Harry watches Snape talking to Draco and observes "And why was Snape looking at Malfoy as though both angry and ... was it possible? ... a little afraid? // But almost before Harry had registered what he had seen [cut] Snape's face was smoothly inscrutable again."

Snape clearly tries hard to suppress or re-channel his emotions, and is able to do so well enough to fool Voldemort. Nevertheless we see him flushing and blenching, shaking and snarling, and at times verging on outright hysteria, especially in the Shrieking Shack when he faces Remus and Sirius again and must be terrified half out of his mind. We see him incoherent with emotion, traumatized by the false accusation of "Coward", and sobbing his heart out after reading Lily's letter in which she speaks about being visited by Peter who was about to betray her. [It's not clear, incidentally, whether Lily's letter was crumpled by Snape, or by Sirius - who had equal reason to be grief-stricken and enraged at the thought of Peter being welcomed by his beloved James and then betraying him to his death.] We see his younger self pleading for Lily's life and devastated by her death, howling with grief. That his emotions are so obvious, even though he is an Occlumens who works hard at suppressing his emotions, surely shows that he is at heart an extremely emotional person.

One of the reasons I say that the films and the film characters are so different from the books that they have to be treated as different stories is the way film Snape is played as this stern, confident, emotionally reserved middle-aged man whose feelings are buried so deep that they barely show as the subtlest flicker. According to The Daily Mail (15/01/2016, part of a memorial article following Rickman's death) "A 2008 experiment by a linguist and a sound engineer at Sheffield University found the 'perfect' male voice, in terms of conveying self-confidence and generating trust, was a hybrid of those of [Jeremy] Irons and Rickman" - but book Snape is nervy and distrusted. Apparently Rickman himself chose to dress Snape in tight sleeves and lots of buttons to symbolise his emotional repression: this was after reading only the first three books, but once the style of the film Snape had been established he was stuck that way. This was a tragically wasted opportunity, since Rickman showed in Galaxy Quest how well he could play a nervy, intense, ill-mannered, insecure, proud but emotionally labile, sour and abrasive yet caring book-Snape-like character.

It's said that Rowling herself picked Rickman to play Snape, so you might think that Rickman's Snape was what she had in mind, even if it doesn't fit what she actually wrote. After all she has said that Harry would never turn his back on somebody in pain, so that's clearly how she thinks of him, even though in the books he does so repeatedly. In Snape's case, however, I think the discrepancy is to do with the fact that Rowling has admitted that he was based on John Nettleship, her old Chemistry teacher. Physically, Snape in the books is John made (even) skinnier, scruffier, twitchier and less handsome. Rickman bore some resemblance to John, which I assume is what made Rowling choose him, but he was John made less skinny, less scruffy, less twitchy and about equally handsome. As a result book!Snape and film!Snape both look quite a lot like John, but not much like each other.

drawing of heart-shaped wreath of assorted buttons

The idea that Snape wears multiple layers of clothing, culminating in a frock coat and lots of buttons which echo his supposed inner repression, belongs only to the films, and to fanon derived from the films - and perhaps to the mistaken idea that the dungeons must be cold, although in fact the deeper you go into the earth the warmer it gets. Book Snape wears robes and a cloak. At sixteen, in June, he wears nothing under his robes except underpants - or at least, he has no trousers on, although a shirt or vest (US singlet) is possible. As an adult we see him pull his robes up above the knee to bare his Fluffy-bitten leg for bandaging, and again there's no suggestion of also having to roll up trousers, even though this is in November. This is really what you would expect of someone who does a lot of work in a Potions lab., for the same reason that my very Snape-like Chemistry mistress Mrs Styles banned the wearing of trousers in the lab.. If you splash yourself with something hot or corrosive loose fabrics can be pulled away from the body at once, taking most of the chemical with them, but any tight leggings will clamp the corrosive substance against your skin.

This is an interesting one because it's so deeply established that fanon builds upon fanon, until even most people who like Snape believe that he is always handing out detentions, taking large numbers of points, even manhandling students, although they seek to excuse him for it. Yet, this is almost 100% pure fanon. Snape in the books is substantially less punitive than McGonagall, generally takes points in quite small numbers, and is never seen to take points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio, apart from one incident where he takes 10 collective points from Harry, Ron and Neville for brawling. He is never seen to lay hands on a student, except when he hauls Harry out of his Pensieve: it is McGonagall, not Snape, who seizes a student (Draco) by the ear and physically grapples with him.

This fanon probably came about because Snape is very often seen taking points from the Trio, in a niggly sort of way, and people didn't notice how small the number of points he was taking was - and also because it is stated in GoF that "Snape loved taking points from Harry, and had certainly never missed an opportunity to give him punishments", although this is not actually borne out by the text.

Canon Snape is verbally aggressive, ill-mannered, confrontational and nagging, and quite a negative person. He seldom praises a student, and then only in a grudging, northern way (he comes from the sort of area where "not bad" is the height of praise), he frequently takes small numbers of points - sometimes apparently just because he is in a bad mood and looking for someone to take it out on - and I don't recall him ever giving out points; but the idea that he repeatedly takes large numbers of points or hands out detentions to a greater extent than other teachers is pure fanon.

Over the course of the books, we see Snape take 277 points as compared with McGonagall's 235, but these include an exceptional 70 points taken from Harry at the start of HBP when Snape was in an unusually bad mood, having been unexpectedly bounced out at by a Patronus resembling the werewolf which had once nearly eaten him, and then forced to abandon both his dinner and his newly Sorted first-years - not to mention that Draco may have already warned him that Harry was trying to ruin their carefully laid plans.

Snape's point-taking as recorded in the books breaks down as follows: one lot of 70 points; one lot of 50 points; two lots of 25 points (in the form of 50 points split across two people); seven lots of 10 points; five lots of 5 points; three lots of 3⅓ points; two single points; plus there was one occasion where he was planning to take 10 points but was distracted by McGonagall's intervention. 253²⁄₃ of those points are taken from the Trio, 3⅓ from Neville and the remaining 20 from Hufflepuff and/or Ravenclaw (different editions differ as to the house allegiances of the canoodling couple in the rose garden). Except for the one incident where he takes 10 collective points from Harry, Ron and Neville for brawling no points are taken from any Gryffindor other than the Trio. His most typical number of points taken is 10 and his average just under 14.

McGonagall's point-taking breaks down as follows: four lots of 50 points; one lot of 20 points; three lots of 5 points. 70 of those points are taken from Draco, and the remaining 165 from assorted Gryffindors - 110 from the Trio, 50 from Neville and 5 from Angelina Johnson. Her most typical number of points taken is 50 and her average 29. She also seems to be more controlling than Snape: after the Norbert incident she initially says that she will take 50 points from Gryffindor, then trebles it to 50 points each apparently just because Harry made a small noise of protest.

However, although she takes more than twice as many points at a time as Snape, we see her take points in far fewer lots than Snape - eight lots of points spread across five occasions, to his nineteen lots (or sixteen if you consider that he took fifty points spread across two people, and ten across three) distributed across twelve occasions - which goes some way to explaining how he is portrayed in fanon.

Harry has a joint Gryffindor/Slytherin class with Snape and seems to have only Gryffindor-only classes with McGonagall, which explains why he mainly sees them take points from Slytherin and Gryffindor: he rarely sees them interact with the other houses. You could argue these results two ways.

You could say that the fact that McGonagall takes points mainly from her own house and Snape takes points mainly from a rival house shows that McGonagall is fair-minded and Snape is biased.

Alternatively you could say that the fact that even McGonagall, their house-mistress, takes a lot of points from the Trio, and we never see Snape take any points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio (except for the brawling incident), shows that both teachers honestly consider the Trio to be especially badly behaved and take points from them accordingly. You could say that we just don't know how many points McGonagall (who according to Pottermore has a lifelong grudge against Slytherin because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was about eighteen) takes from Slytherin in class, since Harry does not witness her teaching Slytherins, and that Snape takes no points from his Slytherins in class because they are well-behaved, or he at least thinks they are. At least twice we see Slytherins wait until Snape's back is turned before misbehaving in class, so they evidently think he'll punish them if he catches them at it.

As for detentions, at the end of HBP Snape gives Harry six or seven detentions for slashing Draco, but McGonagall says that this is lenient and she would have recommended expulsion if it were up to her. Neither of them knows Harry was acting in self-defence, and it's reasonable for both to assume that he was trying to kill Draco, because his godfather Sirius had tried to kill Snape at school, and his friends the Twins had carried out a life-threatening attack which left Montague seriously injured the previous year. In fact Harry is much better than Sirius and the Twins and seemed cautiously sympathetic to Draco's tears until Draco tried to Cruciate him - but Snape and McGonagall don't know that. Snape seems cruel when he forces Harry to go over James's and Sirius's detention notes and forego courting Ginny, especially as by this point Snape believes (not entirely correctly) that Dumbledore has raised Harry to die: but not knowing that Draco had tried to Cruciate Harry, he must believe that Harry has turned into a carbon copy of Sirius and tried to murder a Slytherin classmate, and that his grief and anger over Harry's fate had been wasted on an unworthy object.

Pause for a moment to consider what McGonagall would do to any student who pulled that "There's no need to call me 'Sir'" stunt on her - but Snape settles for a detention (one of only two detentions we see him give to Harry, prior to the Sectumsempra incident), and doesn't even seem all that angry. [This scene may be based on a real incident in which John Nettleship, Rowling's own Chemistry master who she has admitted was a major inspiration for Snape, discovered that a student had drawn a wild, snarling caricature of him - and thought it was a hoot.]

Snape's questioning of Harry in their first lesson together is often held up as an example of his being unfairly harsh, but in fact the internal evidence (see below) indicates that the questions he is asking Harry relate to a first-year textbook which Harry has in fact read. So although his reference to "our new celebrity" is a bit spiteful, his quizzing of Harry is perfectly reasonable, and if Harry had been polite and said "I'm sorry sir, I did read the book but I don't remember that bit" Snape would probably just have harrumphed and accepted it.

Really, the story of Harry and Severus is one of crossed purposes and missing information. If, right at the outset, somebody had said to Snape "Harry's uncle is very shouty and overbearing, so don't push too hard or he'll automatically dig his heels in", and had said to Harry "Snape is going to be a bit twitchy around you because your dad bullied him the way Dudley bullies you, so make nice and try not to put his back up", they would probably have got on fine. But by the time each of them found out what the other one's problem was, they were locked in a feedback loop of "I hate you because you hate me because I hate you."

Snape is, of course, sometimes punitive and unfair in the way he takes points from people for doing something one week, and for not doing it another week. This is probably because he's so tired he can't remember what he said the week before - bearing in mind not only his gruelling schedule (see below for how we know he is working about a 100-hour week) but the fact that he is mainly based on John Nettleship, who at the time Rowling knew him was half out of his mind with severe chronic insomnia. It seems fairly clear, for example, that when Snape asks the class how to tell the difference between a ghost and an Inferius, and then gets angry when Harry very reasonably replies that one is transparent and the other isn't, he mistakenly believes himself to have said "What is the difference...?" rather than "How can you tell the difference...?" There may also be an element of looking for any excuse to deduct points from anybody who gets in his way when he's exhausted, on the principle that he can reduce his stress by passing it on to other people.

As the teacher of a subject which is compulsory right through from first year to fifth year, Snape has to teach 24 classes a week. In Harry's year, for example, he teaches one two-hour and one one-hour class for combined Slytherin and Gryffindor students, and the same for combined Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. He does the same for every year from years 1-5, and then probably one two-hour and one one-hour class for students from all four houses in each of years 6 and 7. That's 36 hours in the classroom, plus preparation for those classes - if we assume 15 minutes to prepare for each class that's another 6 hours. Then even if he only sets an essay for each student once a fortnight there are about 650 students at Hogwarts and he's teaching about 520 of them, so that's 260 essays a week, so even if he only spends 10 minutes on each essay that's another 43 hours. OK, he doesn't have to commute, and he doesn't have to cook or clean or shop unless he wants to, but he (and every other teacher who teaches a subject which is compulsory from first year, except Hooch) is working about an 85-hour week just teaching his subject, and then on top of that he has his duties as Head of House - which must surely take up at least several hours - and in the later books his duties for the Order and for Voldemort.

Only McGonagall - who has her duties as Deputy Head in place of Snape's need to put in time pretending to be serving Voldemort, and who appears to teach some single-house classes as well - has a schedule which is as gruelling as Snape's. It's not surprising if Snape is irritable and sometimes inconsistent, and McGonagall seems to have little interest in (or energy for) pastoral care of her house students.

Prior to the Sectumsempra incident, over the course of six years we see Snape give out just seven detentions. Of those seven detentions two are to Slytherins and five to Gryffindors, including two to Harry and one to Neville. In addition we see him once give lines to Vincent Crabbe, a Slytherin, so if you count that as a detention-type punishment as well, Snape's detentions split as five to Gryffindors and three to Slytherins, which hardly suggests massive bias.

[I suspect that the reason Snape is perfectly willing to give his Slytherins detention, but doesn't take house points from them, is because he is very competitive and wants to win the House Cup and then gloat at McGonagall. In addition to the two detentions he gives to Harry there is an incident where he tells Harry to tidy the desks after class, but there's nothing to say whether this is any kind of punishment or just Harry's turn on some sort of rota.]

Over the same period we see McGonagall give out twenty-two detentions, of which six are to Slytherins and the remaining eighteen to Gryffindors. These include seven to Harry and two to Neville. In addition we see her punish Neville for writing the common room passwords down by cancelling his Hogsmeade visits for the rest of the year and forcing him to stand outside in the corridor and wait for a classmate to let him in to the Gryffindor common room, for weeks, at a time when she believes that a mentally deranged mass-murderer is roaming the halls of Hogwarts with a big knife, paying especial attention to Gryffindor [OK, there are security trolls around, but it must still have been terrifying and at least somewhat dangerous].

You can say that there's a selection bias, because heads of house are mainly responsible for disciplining their own house, and so Gryffindors get to see McGonagall give detentions to Gryffindors; but the fact that both McGonagall and Snape hand out roughly three quarters of their detentions (not counting Vincent's lines) to Gryffindors and a quarter to Slytherins does tend to suggest that they both have the same opinion of the two houses' relative incidence of misbehaviour.

Indeed, if you include Vincent's lines as a detention Snape only gives 62% of his detentions to Gryffindor - a smaller proportion than McGonagall does. This may be because Harry apparently only sees her teach Gryffindors-only classes, but nevertheless McGonagall certainly appears more punitive than Snape and she also takes greater risks with student safety. Some of Snape's detentions have a petty element which suggests that the dirt-poor, working-class half-blood likes to take the rich spoilt pure-bloods down a peg or two by making them do house elf work, but they aren't dangerous. McGonagall on the other hand sends four first-years into the Forbidden Forest by night when she probably knows that Voldemort is around (and Hagrid then sends two of them off unsupervised into a wood which he knows holds giant man-eating spiders); she forces Neville to stand outside in the corridor when she believes that there is a mass-murderer on the loose; and when she sees false!Moody repeatedly slamming ferret!Draco against a stone floor as he screams in pain, she protests at the Transfiguration but not the savage beating, and allows Draco to be dragged away by his abuser without even checking him for broken bones or internal injuries first.

Snape is the more nitpicking and hyper-critical of the two but he and McGonagall both embarrass Neville in front of the class, Snape by warning Lockhart that Neville is potentially dangerous in a duel (which is rude of him, but may well be a sincere concern) and warning Remus that Neville is a bad choice to demonstrate a spell; and McGonagall by suggesting in front of the class that Neville is likely to let them down during the ceremony to welcome Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. Yes, Snape is being quite nasty to Neville but there seems to be no teacher-training in the wizarding world: he learned his teaching skills, such as they are, from his own teachers, including McGonagall, who is punitive and insensitive, and Dumbledore who is at times outright emotionally abusive. It is McGonagall, not Snape, who seizes a student (Draco) by the ear, and who seems to approve of somebody being tortured with Crucio and thrown through a sheet of glass just for being rude to her.

Snape nags Neville for things which he believes (rightly or wrongly) that Neville could help if he tried, such as carelessness and bringing a badly-controlled pet into a room full of flames and cauldrons. As Neville's head of house McGonagall ought to know that the boy has some kind of problem with memory and that constantly changing the password would put him under a lot of strain. Neville couldn't have predicted that a friend's cat would steal his list of passwords, which he was keeping inside the password-protected area where no-one who didn't already know the password ought to have been able to get at it. Of course, McGonagall doesn't know about that part - but she doesn't ask. Instead, she punishes Neville severely and for weeks in a deliberatly humiliating - and potentially life-threatening - way. It's stated in the book that she does lock Neville out as punishment, not as a security measure.

There's a slight anomaly in canon. During the only detention which we see Snape give to Neville, he sets him to disembowel horned toads for potion ingredients. It seems likely that JKR intended Snape to be being as nasty as McGonagall here (who orders Hermione to Vanish kittens, which from what we're told elsewhere effectively emans killing them), and to have spitefully forced a boy who loves toads to dissect toads - even if they were already-dead toads. However, where there's a conflict between what's on the page and authorial intent what's on the page is generally considered to be canon, unless the author outright says "This was a printing error which will be corrected in the next edition". And what's on the page says that Snape had Neville dissecting horned toads, which are a type of lizard which resemble toads only in having a wide flat head and body. There's no way anybody who was familiar with toads could remotely mistake a horned toad for one - they have a long tail, and claws, and are covered in spiky scales - so this detention should be no more upsetting for Neville than any other dissection.

[That Neville, whose parents were tortured into madness by Death Eaters, should have as his Boggart a teacher who apparently gives him one detention in six years and never that we know of does anything worse to him than nag and snarl, is an anomaly - especially when you see how McGonagall treats him. The simplest explanation is that Neville, with his family connections to the Aurors, knows that Snape is a former Death Eater.]

As for Snape's repeated threats to have Harry expelled, they seem to be just his way of letting off steam. When he really has something serious on Harry he doesn't use it. McGonagall says Harry should have been expelled after cutting Draco, but Snape only gives him detentions. When the Trio throw Snape into a wall and knock him out (accidentally, but he isn't awake to know that) he thinks they have been Confunded by Sirius. Whatever their reasons for believing Sirius innocent they still attacked a teacher, but he doesn't even complain about it or take any points.

As Headmaster, Snape presided over the regime of the Carrows, who are said to have punished students very cruelly. We know Snape was sent to take that post by Dumbledore, in order to protect the students, so he presumably toned things down as much as he could without breaking his cover. But note that according to Filch, in the past students at Hogwarts were punished with lengthy sessions of extreme physical torture. In the first book he says that "It's just a pity they let the old punishments die out ... hang you by your wrists from the ceiling for a few days, I've got the chains still in my office, keep 'em well oiled in case they're ever needed ..." and in HBP he extols the use of thumbscrews. Hanging by the wrists is an extreme torture which tears the shoulders out of their sockets. We don't know how long ago this was, assuming Filch is telling the truth, but it was recent enough for the equipment to still be in good order.

As recently as the 1960s, in the early days of Dumbledore's Headmastership, the then caretaker, Apollyon Pringle, caught Arthur and Molly canoodling out of hours and Arthur was punished in some way which left him physically scarred for life ["'Your father and I had been for a night-time stroll,' she said. 'He got caught by Apollyon Pringle – he was the caretaker in those days – your father's still got the marks.'"]. In Harry's fifth year Umbridge doesn't seem to have any concerns that she will get into trouble for using a Blood Quill on Harry and forcing him to spend hours at a time having his skin cut open, and she is able, apparently quite legally, to authorize Filch to whip students. Whatever the Carrows do, punishing students with outright torture is a Hogwarts tradition.

The only punishment that we know Snape himself gave out during his Headmastership was more of a surreptitious pat on the back. When McGonagall sent Harry, Hermione, Neville and Draco on a midnight detention with Hagrid in first year they were children, and she knew that Hagrid would collaborate in punishing them by giving them scary and difficult tasks. When Snape sends Ginny, Luna and Neville on detention with Hagrid they are young adults, and he must know that Hagrid will probably throw a party for them - but he puts it about that they have been cruelly punished, as a sop to the Carrows.

Incidentally, much has been made of Rowling having called Snape "cruel" - but she also calls the Twins cruel, specifying that Fred was the more cruel of the two.

Harry's very first Potions lesson is often seen as evidence of how punitive and unfair Snape is, because of a fanon idea that the questions he asked Harry were unreasonably difficult. Snape certainly makes a rather uncalled-for snide remark about Harry being a celebrity, but it is very likely that Draco - a whiny, sneaky kid who is away from home for what may well be the first time in his life, and who knows his new Head of House as a family friend and quite possibly as his godfather - has already told Uncle Severus that Famous Harry Potter was nasty to him on the train, and has presented it as Harry being rude and self-satisfied. And Snape has already looked up at the Sorting Feast and seen Harry apparently glaring at him - in fact wincing with pain from his scar, but the two expressions are almost identical - so he will think Petunia has raised Harry to hate him; and like Harry he probably associates that meeting of his gaze with Harry's with a sense of the presence of evil which is in fact coming from Quirrell.

The sequence of events is that Snape makes his keynote speech, to which Harry listens fairly attentively (although the idea that he makes notes belongs to the films). Harry and Ron then turn to look at each other instead of the teacher. Snape will want to know whether they are genuinely confident and knowledgeable enough to feel they don't need to pay attention, or are just slapdash. He must be very wary of Ron, since his most recent experience of the Weasley family is the Twins, who are often outright criminal: indeed we later see George launch an unprovoked physical assault on Snape which could have killed him (he tries to knock Snape off his broom in mid-air by aiming a Bludger at him). Snape will be wary of Harry too for a wide range of reasons, and will want to know if Harry will be the Potions star his mother and many of his father's ancestors were; but having an awkward and difficult personality he tries to find out in a clumsy way.

So he asks Harry a series of three increasingly easy questions. Questions two and three could at a pinch be answered by an informed Muggle (bezoars, for example, were described on The Antiques Roadshow on 4^th September 2016), but Harry can't answer any of them. He isn't apologetic about it, either, but stiffly resentful (because he associates critical, overbearing adult men with Vernon - but Snape doesn't know that), and just as he told Vernon to give a job to Dudley so he tells Snape to ask Hermione - whose insistent hand-waving is intrusive, since Snape had asked questions specifically of Harry, not of the whole class.

Because the first question related to the Draught of Living Death, which is a NEWT-level potion, there's a fanon assumption that Snape was asking Harry impossible questions; but in fact there are several clues that Snape is asking Harry about items from a first-year textbook which Harry has actually read. Snape's comment on Harry's failure to answer is "'Thought you wouldn't open a book before coming, eh, Potter?'",

drawing of upright plant bearing a tower of dark-blue hood-shaped flowers

Monkshood/wolfsbane/aconite, from Phytographie médicale, ornée de figures coloriées de grandeur naturelle. Tome I- II, (Paris, 1821-25), by Joseph Roques (1771-1850), art by Edouard Hocquart, taken from Wunderkammer with the hue and saturation tweaked a bit because the original appears to be faded. Monkshood flowers can be cream with violet highlights, indigo, bright blue, deep blue or violent purple.

and Harry's answering thought is "He had looked through his books at the Dursleys', but did Snape expect him to remember everything in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi?" It seems clear that Harry believes the questions relate to his first-year Herbology textbook.

The fact that Hermione knows the answer - even though at this point she has probably been to Diagon Alley only once, a few weeks ago, and won't have had time to do much extra reading - tends to bear this out. Indeed, Hermione says on the train that she has learned all their set books by heart, and that she has "got a few extra books for background reading", and then mentions three books on recent wizarding history - not in-depth Potions texts. And you have to wonder why Rowling would choose to write Harry as thinking that the questions related to a textbook he had already read, if she didn't mean this to be so. She has already established that during the previous month at the Dursleys Harry had found that "His school books were very interesting. He lay on his bed reading late into the night ... "

The fact that Snape asks Harry about asphodel, aconite and a bezoar even suggests that he may have deliberately chosen questions relating to entries near the beginning of the alphabet and therefore of the book, to increase the likelihood that Harry would have read them.

There may have been a secret message buried under the question, because in the Victorian Language of Flowers the combination of asphodel and wormwood means something like "my regrets follow you to the grave", with bitter sorrow linked to a lily, and if so it would be unreasonable to expect Harry to understand the message. But he didn't need to understand it in order to answer the questions - just to remember what he had read within the previous four weeks. If he had just said "I'm sorry sir, I did read the book but I'm afraid I don't remember that bit" Snape would just have harrumphed a bit and moved on, but instead Harry's coldly cheeky response (which is really aimed at Vernon) escalates the back-and-forth hostility which began with Snape's remark about celebrities.

Snape selectively and unfairly targets all Gryffindors, and constantly criticises Gryffindor.

On the train on his very first day at Hogwarts, Snape says to Lily that he hopes to be in Slytherin, James butts in and makes a rude remark about Slytherin and Snape counters with a suggestion that Gryffindors value brawn over brain. When Snape referees a Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Quidditch match in the first book Wood fears that he may be eager to take penalty points from Gryffindor to ensure a Hufflepuff win (which will probably make a Slytherin victory in the end of term House Cup more likely). Snape does indeed award one fair and one unfair penalty to Hufflepuff, after the Gryffindor team have put his back up by physically assaulting him; but we later learn from Quirrellmort that he was really there to protect Harry, and that he had pretended that his aim was to rig the match in order to disguise his true motives. Here endeth all the canon evidence that Snape is biased against Gryffindor.

Ron does say in PS that he's heard, presumably from his brothers, that Snape favours his Slytherins - but not that he specifically dislikes any one of the other houses. Percy tells Harry that Snape wants the DADA post, but doesn't mention any house bias.

This fanon came about because we constantly hear Snape take points from Gryffindor, but in fact aside from one incident where he takes 10 collective points from Harry, Ron and Neville for fighting, we never see him take points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio. Prior to the Sectumsempra incident, we see him give one detention to Neville, four to the Trio and three to assorted Slytherins over the course of six years. We're told during the first Potions lesson that he criticises almost everybody in the class, including the Slytherins, except Draco (who seems to have genuine Potions ability); and at no point are we told that he targets Gryffindors in general, as opposed to the Trio and Neville, for any punishment or criticism. Twice we are shown Slytherins waiting until Snape's back is literally turned before misbehaving, showing that they expect he'll be angry with them if he catches them at it.

If he has a bias in canon it's against the Trio and perhaps Neville (although Neville is genuinely a bad and dangerous Potions student), not against Gryffindor - but McGonagall also is seen to punish the Trio and Neville more than she does anyone else, which suggests that mainly the Trio are just worse-behaved than anyone else (or, when compared with e.g. Draco, not as sneaky about it).

Incidentally, although there's no canon evidence that Snape is biased against Gryffindor, it's Pottermore canon that McGonagall is biased against Slytherin, because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was about eighteen.

Snape deliberately broke Harry's vial of potion after the Pensieve incident.

We do not know whether or not James and Sirius really did strip young Severus and display his genitals at the end of the "Snape's Worst Memory" bullying scene, or only threatened to, but assuming that they did, Snape almost certainly believes that Harry has witnessed this and is laughing at him because of it. From his point of view Harry has been complicit in a minor sexual assault against him, and he behaves in an odd and traumatized way, initially blanking Harry out. This is consistent with a known psychological phenomenon whereby people who have suffered a sexual assault in the past and have coped with the aftermath, but then suffer a second assault, are often catapulted right back to their starting point and lose all the progress which they had made in recovering from the first assault. It is quite on the cards that Snape would, at least for a week or two, regress to thinking and acting as if he was a humiliated sixteen-year-old again.

Then Harry takes a completed potion up to Snape's desk, and turns to walk away. Behind him, his vial falls to the floor and breaks, and Snape gloats over his misfortune.

It's usually assumed that it's canon that Snape himself deliberately knocked Harry's vial off the desk, and that's certainly possible - but in fact it's only implied, not stated. It could have been knocked over accidentally, either by Snape, by the swirl of Harry's robes, or by another student... as wynnleaf has pointed out, we aren't even told that Harry himself thinks that Snape knocked the vial over deliberately.

Even if he did, it's just nuisance-value. All the evidence suggests that Hogwarts uses the exam system which was normal in British schools when Rowling and I were girls. The only results which have any effect on your future are the state exams at the end of fifth and seventh year: marks given for course-work and for other years' exams exist only to tell students whether they are doing as well as they will need to do to pass their state exams.

Note also that Harry seems sure that if Snape actually marks his well-made potion, he will mark it highly, whatever else is going on between them. Harry does not expect that Snape will ever allow personal bias to affect his assessment of a student's performance (at least in regard to something as objective as a finished potion), even when he is in great emotional turmoil.

[Snape does seem very unfair in sixth year when he asks the class how to tell the difference between a ghost and an Inferius, and then criticises Harry for saying that a ghost is transparent and an Inferius isn't - but it seems from his reaction that he mistakenly believes himself to have said "What is the difference...?" rather than "How can you tell the difference...?"]

This is derived from something JKR said in an interview. However, we see in the books that Snape sprints through the castle in his nightshirt because he thought he heard someone scream; runs ashen-faced through a closed door without checking what's on the other side because a girl's voice screamed "Murder!"; risks being sacked by Umbridge to prevent Neville from being throttled and is controlled by Dumbledore with the reminder that if he takes risks and gets himself killed he won't be able to protect the students, which Dumbledore evidently expects Snape will consider to be a more important issue than his own survival. We see him clutch at a chair-back when he hears that Ginny has been taken into the Chamber of Secrets, and turn white and shaky when he sees Cedric's dead body in Harry's memory.

Clearly, therefore, Snape cares about all the students, at least as regards their physical safety. Presumably, then, what Rowling means is not that Snape wouldn't care about Harry at all, if he weren't Lily's son, but that he would care about him no more than he cares about any other student. Which is actually a fair amount.

In the first book, Dumbledore suggests that Snape dislikes Harry because of his contorted feelings about James - but this forms part of a conversation in which Dumbledore is, at the very least, being "economical with the truth". Dislike of James may well be a factor for Snape, but we've no firm evidence that it's a major factor.

He has plenty of other reasons to dislike Harry - a lazy, cheeky student who cheats, lies, steals, copies other people's work and deliberately causes a potentially life-threatening explosion in class, and who begins their relationship by communicating with Ron in class just after Snape has finished making his keynote speech, and then is arrogant and chippy about his own inability to answer three increasingly easy questions. Plus, there are rumours flying around that Harry will be the next Dark Lord and Snape the Legilimens can probably sense the taint of Voldemort which surrounds Harry's scar, without knowing that it's not coming from Harry himself, and even before that first disastrous lesson Draco may well have whined to Uncle Severus, his parents' friend, that Famous Harry Potter and his new friend Ron were nasty to him on the train. This will of course make Snape think of the way James and Sirius picked on him on the train on his first day - especially as Ron is the brother of the Twins, who are like a more overtly criminal version of the Marauders, and enjoy picking on Slytherin first years.

As a Legilimens Snape will also be able to sense Harry's hatred of him and sense that Harry constantly lies to him, but probably without knowing that Harry often has virtuous reasons for lying.

So, the fact that Snape dislikes Harry is not evidence that his understandable dislike of James is anything more than an additional irritant. When Snape feels that Harry has done a good job during an Occlumency lesson he praises him, in a dour sort of way, and unlike Sirius he isn't at all angry with Harry when Harry behaves sensibly and impartially and breaks up the building fight between Snape and Sirius. This strongly suggests that Snape's primary problem with Harry is that Harry is a bad student: when he thinks Harry has done a good job, he no longer has a problem with him.

This is evidently quite deliberate on Rowling's part, not just my interpretation of a throwaway line. Rowling has allowed the fen to see a chart she used to plan part of OotP: it has a column for the Occlumency lessons and one square is labelled "Snape grudgingly approves ish".

Insofar as Snape's bad history with James makes him more sensitive to bad behaviour by Harry, and more likely to react strongly to it than he might with another student, it's going to be a lot more complex than the "I don't like your dad so I'm going to take it out on you" that powers Hagrid's unprovoked attack on Dudley. As the fanwriter duj puts it, "Harry embodies all Snape's regrets, mistakes and miseries rolled into one." In no particular order:

¤	Harry has Lily's eyes in James's face, constantly reminding him that the bully who made his life a misery also got the girl.
¤	Harry looks at him with hatred in Lily's eyes - the same hatred he saw in her eyes when she rejected him.
¤	Harry hates Potions which Lily loved, and that seems like an insult to her memory.
¤	Harry hates Potions even though (according to Pottermore) the Potter family have a long history of Potions excellence, and Harry's failure at the subject seems both perverse and a disappointment.
¤	Harry reminds him of his confused and guilty feelings about James, who tormented him, saved him, tormented him again and then died through his fault, and if the bullying by James happened on a very regular basis (as the phrase "relentless bullying" used on Pottermore suggests) then he probably feels a twitch of fear and nausea and humiliation every time he sees Harry. In modern psych-speak, seeing James's face on Harry is probably "triggering" for Snape, it will activate his fight-or-flight reflex, and flight isn't an option when he's teaching.
¤	When Harry looks in the Pensieve he appears to Snape to be continuing the bullying by James and carrying it forward into the present day, as if it had never stopped. If James did indeed go on to strip him and display his genitals he will expect that Harry has watched this, and will feel therefore as if Harry has taken part in a minor sexual assault against himself.
¤	The fact that Harry is an orphan is a constant reminder of Snape's fault in relaying the prophecy to the Dark Lord, and his failure to put it right by saving the Potters.
¤	Harry is the thing Lily died for and because of.
¤	Harry's fame as The Boy Who Lived is stolen, it was Lily who was the heroine.
¤	Snape has dedicated his life to protecting Lily's child, it's partly for Harry's sweet sake that Snape is stuck in a teaching job he appears not to enjoy instead of pursuing a glittering career in Potions research, but Harry seems Hell-bent on getting himself killed - and the fact that Harry continues to despise Snape even after knowing that Snape is trying to protect him is a slap in the face, a rejection of his efforts to put his error right.
¤	Harry was raised by Petunia, and Snape expects Petunia to have taught Harry to hate him.
¤	Harry is a Parselmouth who smells of the Dark Lord.
¤	Harry is supposedly the best hope for a free world, and for Snape's own survival, but he really doesn't look like he'll be up to the job and has little interest in learning the skills he'll need.
¤	Snape's experiences with Lily must leave him fearing rejection, and now he thinks Harry is supplanting him in Dumbledore's affection. Which is true up to a point, except that it's partly guilt because Dumbledore is taking a bigger risk with Harry's life than with Snape's (even though it didn't pan out that way in the end) and not even giving Harry much choice about it, whereas Snape does at least have the option of walking away.

Harry is very annoying in his own right - any teacher would be annoyed by a student who behaved towards them the way Harry behaves towards Snape - and Snape is a twitchy, excitable person at the best of times. Given the combination of Harry's poor behaviour with the whole extra layer of misery and guilt which he represents to Snape, it's really not surprising that Snape finds him very hard to take.

On one level, Snape seems especially harsh and cruel, or especially, irrationally jealous of a James-lookalike dating a redhead, when he gives Harry a long series of detentions after the Sectumsempra incident and so prevents him from spending the summer days at the end of sixth year with Ginny. This is especially noteworthy since we know from The Prince's Tale that by this point Snape believes that Dumbledore has raised Harry as a kamikaze sacrifice and that the boy may not have much longer to live. But there are several layers to this.

To start with, neither Harry nor Draco tells Snape that when Harry cut Draco he was acting in panicked self-defence as Draco tried to Cruciate him. Harry does not allow Snape to see how shocked he was by Draco's injuries but instead behaves in an arrogant self-righteous way, as if Snape is committing an offence by being angry with him for half-killing another student. Harry's apparent lack of remorse after nearly killing a classmate must remind Snape all too horribly of Sirius and James (who also showed no remorse for what they had nearly done, since even though James drew the line at actual murder he continued to bully and humiliate Snape even after having saved his life). Snape must feel that the horror and grief he had felt when he learned of Harry's likely fate had been wasted on an unworthy object, and he may also hope to drive a wedge between Harry and Ginny - red-haired Ginny for whose sake he had clutched at a chair-back when he heard that she had been taken to the Chamber of Secrets - because she is still only fifteen and he is afraid that Harry's private war with Voldemort will get her killed, as it did Lily.

Nevertheless Pottermore stresses Snape's continuing unwillingness to hurt Harry physically, even when Harry is trying to hurt him. Referring to the aftermath of Dumbledore's death, it says: "... we completely understood Harry's blind rage when he chased after Snape and the Death Eaters. // What was really interesting was Snape's reaction to Harry in the aftermath. Initially he deflected every spell and didn't return fire, rather than jinxing Harry or putting him out of action, which would be a lot easier. Snape only returned fire when Harry persisted in chasing him while taunting him, and even then he used spells to keep Harry down rather than actually injuring him significantly. It must have taken a surprising amount of skill and control to keep Harry at arm's length and out of harm's way."

It is often assumed in fanfics that Snape has some kind of personal agenda against Neville. This despite the fact that although he is rude to and about Neville, that we see he only takes 3⅓ points from him and gives him two detentions (one of which is more of a covert pat on the back) in seven years, and we see him risk being sacked by Umbridge in order to protect Neville from being half-throttled. Although he's a nag to Neville, because nagging is in his nature, he is substantially less punitive towards the boy than McGonagall is, and only slightly ruder. His anger towards Neville is centred around keeping him safe, stopping him from blowing himself and his classmates up, whereas McGonagall sends the boy into a midnight wood full of giant man-eating spiders when he is only eleven, and forces him to stand outside in the corridor for weeks waiting to be let into the common-room at a time when a man she believes to be a mass-murderer has been hanging around the entrance to the common room with a big knife - yet nobody ever asks "Why does McGonagall hate Neville?"

It's certainly possible that Snape has some unpleasant associations connected to Neville, since Neville's parents were Aurors during Vold War One, and that means they were either torturers themselves, or the colleagues of torturers. Whether or not Snape or anyone he loved was ever tortured by the Longbottoms, the general fact that the Vold War One Aurors tortured suspects and threw them to the Dementors for life without a trial would have made spying!Snape's task of betraying fellow Death Eaters who trusted him even more distressing than it would otherwise have been. It's even been suggested that Snape hates Neville because if Voldemort had picked Neville as the prophecy-boy instead of Harry, Lily would not have died.

However, every negative comment we see Snape make to or about Neville is connected to his poor classroom and magical performance, so canon gives us no evidence that his nagging of Neville is anything more than a misguided effort to improve his performance, combined with irritation over Neville's continued failure to improve and perhaps coupled, latterly, with resentment over the Boggart incident. Of course, snarling and berating him is quite the wrong way to handle Neville, who needs gentle encouragement - but Snape is a very combative person himself and probably expects that Neville will work harder to prove him wrong, because that's what he'd do.

Even threatening to poison Trevor the toad isn't as unreasonable as it seems at first (quite apart from the fact that Flitwick, and Harry himself, also use Trevor to practise magic on). We know Trevor is prone to running off, and he isn't being contained, since Snape simply picks him up - he doesn't have to rummage in Neville's pockets for the toad, or demand that Neville produce him. So Neville has brought a badly-controlled, loose pet into a room full of open flames and hot and in some cases explosive chemicals - a very irresponsible thing to do, and one which Snape probably hopes to scare him out of repeating. And "poison" need not mean "deadly" or even "dangerous": any substance which does more harm than good when ingested is a poison, and it's unlikely that a third-year potion which is intended to be drunk would be terribly toxic even if it went wrong.

Nevertheless it was a cruel threat to make, since Neville himself would have feared that his own failure would cause somebody he loved to suffer or even die - something Snape ought to have empathized with. But then Snape doesn't have good rôle models. His father was angry and depressed; Slughorn is kind enough but not interested in anybody he doesn't think has great potential; Voldemort controls people by threatening their loved ones; McGonagall encourages her class to stick pins into semi-transformed hedgehogs who are still conscious and suffering; Flitwick uses Trevor to practise charms on; Dumbledore demands that Snape should pay him with a lifetime's service in return for saving the Potters. Even Hagrid is only kind to animals, including humans, if he happens to like them. Brutal insensitivity is a cultural norm.

photo of horned toad, a flat-bodied lizard fringed with spikes around body, tail, jaw and the back of the head, the colour yellowish-grey with wavy stripes of charcoal and white crossing the body

Blainville's horned lizard a.k.a. horned toad or horny toad, Phrynosoma coronatum, from California Herps, photo' by Gary Nafis. There are several species of "horned toad" which vary slightly in coat pattern, spike formation, tail-shape and degree of flatness

photo of common toad, brown and a bit lumpy

Russian example of common toad, Bufo bufo, from the NIC.FUNET.FI Tree of Life section

There's an odd bit of business where Rowling may well have intended Snape to be being spiteful to Neville, but if so it hasn't turned out that way. That we see, Snape only sets Neville two detentions in seven years, one of which is the one in seventh year where he sends Ginny, Luna and Neville to Hagrid to protect them from the Carrows, and then puts it about that they've been cruelly punished - although clearly this is not so much a punishment as a covert pat on the back. The other occasion is in fourth year, after Neville has melted his sixth cauldron, when Snape sets him to disembowel a barrelful of horned toads - a spiky, flattish kind of lizard with only the most cursory resemblance to a real toad. It seems likely that Rowling intended Snape to have set a boy who loves toads to dissecting toads -

side-view photo of horned frog, patterned with loops of dark and light tan, with brown lengthways stripes and tiny finger-like nodules on the skin, and with a huge, bizarre head like an upside-down bucket topped with protruding eyes with long spikes on the brow

Surinam horned frog, Ceratophrys cornuta, sometimes miscalled a horned toad, from Wikipedia: Surinam horned frog, photo' by Maarten Sepp

especially as Harry thinks that Neville has "frog guts" on his hands - but whatever the intention it says right there in the text that Snape made Neville dissect lizards, so Rowling's putative intention clashes with canon.

There does exist a creature called a Surinam horned frog which is occasionally miscalled a horned toad, and given Harry's reference to frog guts you could say that that was what Snape had Neville dissect. But even though they're both anurans, the horned frog doesn't look much more like Trevor than the horned lizard does. It's a weird thing with a head like an upturned bucket, and resembles a common toad only about as closely as an orang utan resembles a human.

You could say that making a sensitive boy like Neville dissect any animal is cruel - but not more so than forcing him to Transfigure living animals into pincushions and then stick pins in them to see if they still flinch, or ordering Hermione, who loves cats, to Vanish kittens "into non-being", both of which we see McGonagall do without adverse comment. Extreme callousness towards non-human animals is a Hogwarts norm, and at least Snape did not, so far as we know (and unlike McGonagall), require Neville to hurt or kill the animals he was going to cut up.

We know Neville has some sort of disability of memory. He forgets passwords, his family sends him a Remembrall - he could have Attention Deficit, or perhaps he is dyslexic and cannot follow the written instructions on the board. His poor memory may be the direct result of the fact that his uncle used to put him into repeated danger of death in an attempt to squeeze more magic out of him, as severe prolonged childhood stress due to abuse is known to damage the hippocampus, causing memory problems.

The wizarding world, however, seems to have no awareness of learning difficulties, and McGonagall too is very hard on Neville as a result. On top of this, Snape must be frightened all the time Neville is brewing, which isn't a good state from which to be lovingly patient, especially if you're Snape and weren't very patient to begin with. Snape, after all, is shut in a small room with somebody who is prone to causing accidents involving fire and potential explosives, and who may at any moment kill or severely injure him, themselves and/or one or more classmates.

Snape is probably baffled and frustrated by Neville's poor performance, when he is known to be a star Herbology student and as such must be quite bright, and when Herbology and Potions are so closely allied. We never see Snape criticise Neville's written work. He seems to cope better with Crabbe and Goyle, who are genuinely thick - he snaps at them, gives Crabbe lines to write and tries to get them to pull their metaphorical socks up, but he doesn't get as excited about them as he does about Neville.

It is conceivable that he is right to be baffled and that on some level, whether consciously or unconsciously, Neville is failing deliberately. It seems likely that his grandmother will try to pressurise him into becoming an Auror like his parents, whether he wants to or not, and failing at Potions would be a surefire way to render that impossible. It is even conceivable, although a bit of a stretch, that Snape deliberately mismanages Neville in an attempt to make him do poorly in Potions, because he's reasoned that if Neville gets into NEWT Potions, and passes, his gran will force him to become an Auror and the boy will end up dead. It would be a rather cruel way to protect Neville, but Snape has an established pattern of caring very deeply about his students' physical safety, and very little about their happiness.

It has also been pointed out that Neville's performance seems to improve after his father's wand is broken at the end of fifth year, and he finally gets a fresh one of his own.

Even though in canon Snape is less punitive towards Neville than McGonagall is, the fact that it is Snape who is Neville's Boggart, rather than the Death Eaters who tortured Neville's parents into madness, leads fanon to assume that Snape must be horribly cruel to Neville, even though all that we are shown is a rude overbearing ill-tempered nag who nevertheless almost never actually punishes the boy, and criticises his performance rather than his person; and even though Neville only interacts with Snape for three hours a week of which Snape spends perhaps ten minutes a week nagging him, and Neville does not otherwise come across as an especially timid or fragile person. But there are several possible reasons why Snape might be Neville's Boggart, without having done anything very dreadful to him.

The first and most obvious one is that Neville, with his family connections to the Aurory, knows that Snape is a former Death Eater, and this would make sense in terms of the structure of the story. In PoA nearly everybody (including Harry, right up until the Shrieking Shack scene in mid June) believes that an ally, Sirius, is a murderous Death Eater who has come to Hogwarts to kill Harry. In GoF nearly everybody (including Harry, right up until the graveyard scene in mid June) believes that a murderous Death Eater who has come to Hogwarts to kill Harry is an ally, so that the two books in some sense form a mirror-image pair. It would make sense thematically if Neville's fear of Snape is intended to foreshadow the revelation of his Dark Mark in GoF.

Then, Neville's family put him in danger of death to try to squeeze more magic out of him, and Snape constantly reminds Neville that he is bad at magic, so Snape may make him think about danger and rejection by his family. Duj suggests that even though as at the date of the Boggart lesson Snape has never, that we have been shown, actually punished Neville, just nagged and criticized him, Neville has been brought up with people who subjected him to life-threatening violence when he was bad at magic, so he may expect Snape physically to attack him, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It may be significant that the Snape-Boggart "... was bearing down upon him, reaching inside his robes", as if to draw a wand, supporting the idea that Neville expects Snape to attack him, either because he expects to be physically punished for beibng bad at magic, or because he expects the ex Death Eater ro carry out an attack.

Nightfall Rising has pointed out that there is evidently some physical resemblance between Snape and Neville's grandmother, and the Longbottoms are supposedly a Yorkshire family - they certainly have a Yorkshire name - and Snape, although Pottermore places him in the Midlands, comes from a place which looks like it's probably as far north as the Midlands can get, so there may be some similarity of accent too. So Snape may trigger fears which in fact revolve around Augusta.

Then there's Snape's generally sinister, Goth appearance, which may have caused Neville to develop a phobia about him out of proportion to his actual behaviour, and the fact that the session with the Boggart took place only a couple of hours after Snape had threatened to poison Trevor, and immediately after Neville had seen Snape again in the staff common room and Snape had been rude about him to Remus, so Snape was on his mind that day.

Finally, Neville may be scared of the subject itself - of the fires and the explosions, but also of the fact that Potions is one of the subjects his gran wants him to succeed at so he can be an Auror like his dad.

You also have to wonder why Neville would be so nervous of Snape, who snarls at and verbally bullies him but also physically protects him, and not apparently scared of McGonagall, who puts him in serious danger. But given what we've been told about Neville's family, he may regard being put into severe danger by somebody who is supposed to be caring for and teaching him as normal. He may even see it as a proof of caring, as women in some rough areas often used to think that if their man didn't beat them up he must not be passionate enough about them: the fact that Snape tries to keep him safe may be part of what makes Neville uneasy about the man, because it feels unnatural and disturbing to him.

Interestingly, when Snape warns Lockhart not to use Neville to demonstrate duelling techniques because "Longbottom causes devastation with the simplest spells, we'll be sending what's left of Finch-Fletchley up to the hospital wing in a matchbox", he's suggesting that Neville - who believes himself to be almost a Squib - has a great deal of magical force, even if he can't control it. If this is accurate - if he isn't just saying this off the top of his head - it suggests Snape has taken an interest in Neville outwith Potions class, since Neville's spell-work doesn't come up in Potions, so far as we know.

Snape certainly seems to dislike Hermione a fair bit, and many elaborate suggestions have been made about this, to do with Lily and Muggle-borns and so on. But I don't think one should invent complex solutions when there are obvious, simple ones.

Hermione is able, but she's annoying. She's constantly waving her hand, wanting to answer questions, without understanding that when a teacher questions the class they want to know who knows what and get the less able students to engage with the lesson: they don't just want to confirm that a student who they already know knows the answer, knows the answer. When Snape does ask her, she parrots the textbook instead of showing original thought. [I've been told that that would be acceptable at a US school - but British students are expected to say what they thought, and why.] When he calls her a know-it-all he's being extremely childish, but we're told he's only calling her what her friends all call her, and his irritation is justified. She also writes essays much longer than she has been asked for, creating extra work for the teachers and showing that she doesn't know how to summarise what she knows, or identify the core of the matter.

The "I see no difference" scene is ambiguous - it's not clear whether Snape means "I see no difference between Granger's teeth now and Granger's teeth this morning" or "I see no difference between what Malfoy has done to Granger and what Potter has done to Goyle". But even if he does mean it as a personal insult, you have to think about how she appears to him.

We know, because we see things from Harry's point of view, that Harry's gang generally have virtuous, even Quixotic reasons for the stunts they pull. But Snape doesn't know that. What he knows is that Hermione set his robes on fire in first year. He knows she was involved in stealing expensive ingredients for Polyjuice from his private store (because she ended up furry), and therefore that she was probably in some way involved in sabotaging Goyle's cauldron with a firework, causing his Slytherins to be sprayed with Swelling Solution, leaving Malfoy with a huge nose and Goyle with 11"-wide eyes which he had to hold in with his hands to prevent himself from being blinded, and which must have been agonisingly painful. Snape may have worked out that it was the Trio who drugged Crabbe and Goyle and stuffed them in a cupboard - from his point of view, what he is seeing is two Slytherins who have borderline learning disabilities being picked on by the Brain of Gryffindor.

Later Hermione was one of the group who threw him into a wall, knocked him out and then left him lying head-injured and unconscious for nearly an hour without seeking medical treatment for him, even though any period of unconsciousness due to blunt trauma and lasting more than ten minutes is considered potentially life-threatening, and Hermione at least should know that. We are shown, twice, that Draco's gang wait until Snape's back is literally turned before picking on the Trio, so Snape will probably see Draco's gang as innocent and the Trio as the Marauders redux, a swaggering Gryffindor gang picking on Slytherins for fun. The fact that they are friends and realtives of the Twins, who are a swaggering Gryffindor gang picking on Slytherins for fun, isn't going to help. He has no reason, therefore, to find Hermione anything other than annoying and unlikable.

This is aside from the fact that in some ways she probably reminds him, not of Lily, but of his boyhood self - a plain, brilliant, studious nerd - but unlike him she has loyal friends, parents who love her, and plenty of money.

This is perfectly canon-compatible, since Snape is repeatedly described as having greasy skin or hair, but it's still pure fanon. The word "git" - an extremely mild expression which is probably a corruption of "get", i.e. "offspring", and translates roughly as "annoying person" - is used of Snape but also of many other people. Filch, Quirrellmort, Dudley, Ron, Pigwidgeon the owl, Hagrid, Percy, Viktor Krum, Marvolo Gaunt and Griphook are each called a git once during the course of the books. Gilderoy Lockhart, Ludo Bagman, the Weasley Twins and Harry are each called a git twice. Snape is called a git three times, and Draco four times. Nobody in canon, either in the books or the films, ever calls Snape a greasy git. They might do so off-stage, it seems perfectly feasible, but nobody ever does it where we can see it.

You're on firmer ground with that other fanon insult for Snape, "overgrown bat" or "great bat of the dungeons". The only person who ever actually calls Snape "an overgrown bat" out loud in canon is Quirrellmort, but Harry thinks of Snape silently as an overgrown bat, a large, malevolent bat and (in DH) a bat-like flying shape, and once suggests to Ron that Snape might be able to turn into a bat. It's a curious point that it was Quirrellmort who put the idea, and even the phrase "overgrown bat", into Harry's head - and that this suggests that Voldemort himself thinks of Snape as a bat.

This one has been so well and truly canon-shafted that it has ceased to be fanon, but there are still a lot of older fanfics out there which talk about Lord Snape and Snape Manor etc., and the idea is still not quite dead. There's an otherwise good WIP called Proximity, started as recently as 2014, which still describes the Snape house at Spinner's End as large and old with huge doors and a massive cellar, and ditto a good Snarry called Promises to Keep, written in 2008 (when the events in The Prince's Tale must have been fresh in the writer's mind),

small terraced houses with tiny front gardens

2up2downs in Lancashire

which has Snape's house at Spinner's End surrounded by woods, even though it's clear from the canon description that it's intended to be a terraced (U.S. "row house") Victorian mill-worker's "two-up-two-down". That is, it would have a smallish kitchen and living room downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs with a tiny landing about 30" wide by 3ft long and originally no bathroom, just an outdoor lavatory in a shed in the (probably paved and about 16ft-square) back yard, although it might have had a loft conversion and an extension at the back added since. Sans any later extension, the "footprint" of the house would probably be about 16ft wide by 20-25ft deep. It would either front directly onto the street or have a tiny front garden, the width of the house and probably around 4-6ft deep, and separated from the street by a low wall or metal railing.

[The Snapes might however have had an allotment - a sizeable garden plot, usually used to grow vegetables and situated not next to the house but a small distance away and forming part of a field of similar plots, all let to neighbouring families for a token annual rent. If you want Snape growing herbs, or young Sev and Lily playing in and out of flowers and beanstalks and garden sheds, a neighbourhood field of allotments is the way to go. Note however that if a family doesn't already have an allotment, the waiting-list to sign up for one can be years-long.]

Sometimes the problem seems to be that the author just has no idea how small a small working-man's house in the UK would be. The otherwise generally good fanfic Snape's Boon by amr seems to be trying to portray Snape's house as small and scruffy but gives it four floors, multiple rooms and passages on each floor and at least two bathrooms, all of which would be more at home here in a successful stockbroker's house, or a very large farmhouse.

Even though we now know that Snape's father was a Muggle and that he grew up in a dirt-poor industrial suburb, it is still possible that his mother's family, the Princes, were pure-bloods, and if you need to write Snape in a grand setting you can write him staying with his grandparents, or inheriting a house from them. However, there is a certain amount of evidence that his mother wasn't a pure-blood either.

When Bellatrix and Narcissa Apparate to the riverbank near Spinner's End, Bellatrix speculates that they are the first of "our kind" ever to visit the area. She probably doesn't mean the first witches or wizards, because she knows Snape and Pettigrew are already there ahead of her - although it's just about possible that the "we" she's speaking of includes the two wizards who are some hundreds of yards away. She may mean "posh people like us", but there's a good chance she means pure-bloods. If she knows that this is Snape's childhood home - which we don't know - then the implication is that Snape's mother Eileen wasn't "our kind" and wasn't a pure-blood, or if she was she wasn't from a posh family.

Young Snape's calling himself The Half-Blood Prince carries a suggestion that the Princes are hot on being pure-blooded and he is sticking two fingers up at them, which would suggest they are an old, posh family. If so, and if Bellatrix knows this and knows that Spinner's End is where Eileen lived, then when Bellatrix says that she and Cissy are the first of "our kind" to visit the area, she doesn't mean members of the old, grand families - so she may mean they are the first pure-bloods. So if the Princes are posh, Eileen is probably a half-blood, the daughter of a Prince wizard and either a Muggle woman or a Muggle-born witch.

Another possibility which has been pointed out to me is that Bellatrix could mean "pure-bloods who are not blood-traitors", in which case Eileen could be a pure-blood whom Bellatrix has blanked because she married a Muggle. However, the Princes do not appear on Pottermore's list of the top twenty-eight pure-blood families, which was compiled in the 1930s, round about the time Eileen must have been born. It may be that they were excluded from the list because Eileen was born, and wasn't pure-blood.

It should have been obvious from the first that Snape wasn't an aristocrat, because he tries far too hard. Real aristocrats do as they please, because they are sure that whatever they feel like doing must be the right thing to do because it's them that's doing it. The name was also possibly a clue. There has been speculation on the Lexicon and elsewhere that Rowling called Snape Snape because it resonates with the words snap, snappish and with snipe in the sense of taking verbal pot-shots at people, but there is also the expression "guttersnipe", which means a child from a very poor and low-class family.

To begin with, there's a lot of confusion about what a manor actually is, and fanwriters tend to assume it's a big house. A manor is a large estate which includes tenant farms and, usually, a comparatively grand house, called the manor house and used by the owners of the manor. The actual name of the manor house will sometimes be Something Manor House, but is more commonly just Something House, or e.g. Compton Hall or The Laurels. Most manor houses wouldn't be very big (and the internal evidence suggests that the Malfoy manor house is quite small): maybe two or three times the size of the Dursleys' place. A very big, very grand house with dozens of bedrooms would be called a "stately home": most, probably all stately homes have or used to have a manor attached, but only a small fraction of manor houses are stately homes.

It is common in fanfics to portray pure-blood society as glittering and wealthy, with each family having its own luxurious manor house. However, according to Pottermore a Cantankerus Nott in the 1930s produced a Pure-Blood Directory which listed the "Sacred Twenty-Eight" British families whose blood was still completely "pure" as at the 1930s. These are: Abbott; Avery; Black; Bulstrode; Burke; Carrow; Crouch; Fawley; Flint; Gaunt; Greengrass; Lestrange; Longbottom; Macmillan; Malfoy; Nott; Ollivander; Parkinson; Prewett; Rosier; Rowle; Selwyn; Shacklebolt; Shafiq; Slughorn; Travers; Weasley and Yaxley.

Rowling has said the Potters were Pureblood but were excluded from the list because their name was a common Muggle one - which is ridiculous since the list includes Black, Macmillan and Parkinson. Perhaps it's because Potter is a name for Muggles of the artisan class. Also, Garrick Ollivander, the proprietor of Ollivander's, is half-blood and was born in or prior to 1919, so the Ollivanders aren't "pure".

Of this group of pure-blood families, the Weasleys are poor and the Gaunts almost starving. The Ollivanders work for a living, and the Blacks' once grand house has fallen into disrepair. Hannah Abbott and Neville Longbottom will run a pub, not an estate. Shacklebolt has class and the Crouches seem well-off, but the Carrows are clearly at the bottom of the heap, and Yaxley regards the Malfoys as show-offs, what with their peacocks. Clearly, being a pure-blood doesn't even mean you'll starve with style. There may be other wealthy wizarding families apart from the Malfoys and the Blacks, but there's no evidence those wealthy families are especially likely to be pure-bloods. Nor do we see much of a social scene, although there must be some to justify all those dress robes.

The idea that Snape is highly cultured, and in many fanfics is able to play a range of musical instruments, is not impossible - but it would require some explanation, given his poor background.

It's canon that he has at least enough books to line the walls of a smallish room at Spinner's End, although we don't know if they cover a wide range of subjects, or even if they're his or inherited from his parents. For all we know they could be a complete Britannica and his dad's old Zane Greys. We know that he is (or was as a teenager) a brilliantly innovative and intuitive potioneer, is able to invent his own spells, is a passable but probably not brilliant duellist, has a fine dramatic turn of phrase, and is able to devise a complex logic problem (the puzzle concerning the bottles of potions towards the end of the first book) and set the result to quite competant verse - which does suggest that either his Muggle primary school was quite good, or that he reads more than just textbooks, since nothing in wizard education seems designed to encourage the development of any sort of literary style.

Whether he has much more education than that, or can play an instrument etc., depends on unknown factors. I have him in one of my own fanfics able to play guitar because Lily's parents bought her lessons when she was fourteen and then she taught her pal Sev on the side, and many Muggle schools taught students to play the recorder, but it seems unlikely Snape's own parents would have paid for any extra lessons for him, or that he could have learned how to play anything expensive unless it was provided at school. We don't know how good his Muggle primary school was, or whether there might be extracurricular music or literature clubs at Hogwarts. [It's been suggested that since his mother's name was Eileen he might be part Irish and have gone to a Catholic primary school, which would explain why he evidently wasn't at the same school as Lily.] We don't know whether he was proud of his working-class roots or whether he tried to disguise them by polishing his accent and manners - or whether Slughorn or Lucius helped and encouraged him to do so.

It certainly isn't necessary to be posh in order to be a Death Eater, since we have the horrible examples of Amycus, Alecto and Greyback. It could be argued that the fact that prior to HBP so many fen assumed that Snape was an aristocrat is evidence that he has tried to raise his apparent class and has done a good job, meaning that he might well have studied deportment, learned to play the cello etc. etc.. I suspect, however, that this belief in Snape's high social status is mainly the result of his being played by Alan Rickman, with his smoothly educated and up-market voice.

The fact that Snape spits on the ground after refereeing a Quidditch match in the first book could be evidence that he still has very rough, urban-underclass manners. On the other hand there's some evidence he's a bad flyer - in his memories Harry hears a girl laughing as young Snape struggles with a broom, and the fact that he learns to fly without a broom may mean he feels he needs to - and during the match George Weasley aimed a Bludger at him while he was in mid air, and Harry nearly accidentally knocked him off his broom while diving after the Snitch. It may well be that Snape is spitting because he has nearly been sick from fright and shock, and has a mouthful of stomach acid.

It is a curious fact that the fanon version of Snape often ends up as John Nettleship (handsome, romantic, fastidiously clean, his greasy hair due to insomnia and potion fumes etc.). John actually was something of a polymath - an award-winning folk-singer and an accomplished jazz musician who could both play and teach a wide variety of instruments, as well as being a prominent local politician, a scientist and historian (he had had research papers published in both fields, and ran the local history group), an astronomer, an excellent photographer, a highly amusing humorous writer, a not half bad cartoonist, a lifelong campaigner for the rights of the downtrodden and the closest thing Caerwent had to a resident Druid priest. But all in a raffish, bouncy and often mildly risqué way, and he was still quite working class - he really didn't do the sort of suave sophistication often attributed to Snape.

Snape's height is never actually specified. John Nettleship, the main model for Snape, was 5'8". What we are told in the books is that Narcissa Malfoy is tall for a woman, and Sirius is tall for a man, but Sirius's height isn't heavily stressed so he's probably not as outrageously tall as Dumbledore. When Narcissa collapses against Snape in the Spinner's End scene he looks down into her upturned face (although she may have her knees bent), and when Harry sees Snape and Sirius face to face he sees that Snape is visibly the shorter but he appears not to have been aware of this before, so the difference isn't huge. So Snape is significantly taller than a tall woman and an inch or two shorter than a tall man - say between 5'10" and 6'1". Because Rowling has admitted that Snape is based on John Nettleship, who was 5'8", a 5'10" Snape is arguably more canonical than a 6'1" one, but a tallish 6'1" Snape is just about canon compatible if you assume Sirius was 6'2" or 6'3" (and Dumbledore is about 6'8" ).

Snape's title "Potions master" means that he is an acknowledged master of the art of potion-making.

A [Subject] master, a.k.a. a schoolmaster, is a male teacher at a British secondary school - which is why the Headmaster is called the Head-master. The female equivalent is a mistress, as in Headmistress.

It may well be that Snape has some high professional qualification - it's certainly canon that he has a real flair and creativity in his subject - but if it involves the word "master" he will be called a Master of Potions (or possibly of Magic or of Philosophy) or a Master Potioneer, and this will be in addition to his being Potions master, which is simply the name of his job at Hogwarts. He will certainly not, as occasionally seen in fan fiction, be addressed as "Master Snape" since in British English that is an old-fashioned, formal way of addressing a very small male child who is too young to be called "Mister Snape".

Since the only teachers we hear referred to as masters at Hogwarts are Dumbledore, Snape, Slughorn and Flitwick, the Headmaster and three current or former Heads of House, it may be that in the wizarding world the term is reserved for teachers with a certain degree of seniority, but it's still going to be a job title, not a professional qualification. The fact that Snape calls himself "master of this school" confirms that. It clearly doesn't mean "I am the lord of this school", which would be ridiculous since he clearly isn't: it means "I am a male teacher employed at this school", in the same way that Irma Pince might style herself "librarian of this school".

Note that in real-world Britain "Professor" is the title of a senior university lecturer, not a school-teacher, so the nomenclature of Hogwarts positions does diverge to some extent from Muggle custom. However, the puppeteer who operates the Punch and Judy show is traditionally dubbed "Professor" and so are some stage magicians, so JKR may be implying that some stage magicians are real wizards.

This occurred only once in the entire series, it happened shortly after he had come round after being knocked unconscious for nearly an hour, and it's a known symptom of concussion - as is the ranting near-hysteria which accompanied the spitting.

In PS we see him spit on the ground, in a deliberate way, after Harry's Quidditch victory (which should have been a big clue that he was lower working class). But he'd just been nearly knocked off his broom, and may have been spitting up bile from fright. [Or maybe he chews tobacco - it would explain the yellowish teeth.]

In the PoA film, Snape regains consciousness just before or during Remus's transformation to a werewolf, and interposes himself between the children and the were. This is such an iconic scene that it is widely regarded as being canon, but in the book it is Sirius who protects both the children and the still-unconscious Snape from were-Remus (transforming into Padfoot first, which means he wasn't in as much danger as a man would have been, but it was still a brave act).

We can say that Snape was very likely present in the Shack in the first place to protect the children. We know that he took Wolfsbane to Remus's office, saw the Marauder's map which showed Remus moving fast down the tunnel under the Willow, and sprinted after him, leaving the Wolfsbane behind. He did not see Sirius, who was out of range. However we know that Snape believed Sirius to be trying to kill Harry, and that Remus was in league with him, and we know that protecting Harry was his main raison d'etre. I would say, therefore, that it's virtually certain that he would check the map to see if Harry was safely in Gryffindor Tower, see that he was not, and suspect at once that Harry, like himself, had been lured into danger in the Shrieking Shack, by the same pair who had once nearly killed him, Snape. So his sprint across the lawn, and into danger in a place which had to have terrifying associations for him, was almost certainly done at least partly to save the children from a werewolf and what he believed to be a mass murderer.

After all he probably knows - because it seems to be general knowledge - that the Shrieking Shack is sealed at the Hogsmeade end. If he just wanted to catch Remus conspiring with Sirius they're already in a cul-de-sac, a sort of bag, and he has plenty of time to stroll across the grounds to the Willow, carrying the Wolfsbane, before Remus could get as far as the Shack and then come back. He's unlikely to think Remus himself is in danger, because he believes him to be in cahoots with Sirius. The only element of the situation which is time-critical is the possibility that Sirius may have capturted the Trio.

Also, although Snape didn't regain consciousness until after were-Remus had run off, he didn't then seek safety or even reinforcements, but loaded the by now unconscious Ron onto a stretcher and set off into the dark (or at least, as dark as it gets in northern Scotland in June), probably severely concussed (the fact that he was raving and spitting an hour later strongly suggests concussion), to find the rest of the party, although he must have known there was a strong likelihood that Remus had transformed and was somewhere out there in the darkness, looking for prey. In HBP, we see him charge through a closed door, ashen in the face, because a girl's voice had shouted "Murder!" - without bothering to check what was on the other side first. So although canon Snape didn't interpose himself physically between Harry and a werewolf, we can say that it's just the sort of thing he probably would have done, had he been conscious.

As to why he didn't bring the last dose of Wolfsbane with him, there's a hint that it only works when fresh from the cauldron (when he brings it to Remus in his office he encourages Remus to drink it as soon as possible), and he may have felt the situation was so time-critical that he didn't have time to conjure a sealed container. Running with an open goblet would just have spilled it.

Also, Alex Forbes on Quora has pointed out that at that point Snape is pretty sure in his mind that Remuis is conspiring with Sirius to endanger Harry. As such, he may prefer to have to deal with an insanely violent and therefore stupid, uncooperative werewolf than with one who retains his human intelligence and cunning, and can still carry out whatever he is planning to do to Harry.

There are question-marks, however, concerning Snape's decision to cast off the Invisibility Cloak and reveal himself before holding Remus hostage for Sirius's good behaviour. To begin with, he could not possibly be 100% certain that pointing his wand at Remus would control Sirius, even if Remus and Sirius were genuinely allies, since the crimes Snape believed Sirius to be guilty of were ones which, if true, would mean there was a strong possibility that he was a full-bore psychopath who had betrayed his friend James without compunction.

Werewolves must be resistant to magic, otherwise young Severus, with his wand, would not have been in major danger from were-Remus, without his wand - especially given that he already suspected that he would be encountering a werewolf, even if he wasn't expecting a direct confrontation - and it may be that even in human form Remus is hard to take down. But you would think that Expelliarmus would still work on him, since it's a spell applied to his wand. Sirius was already sitting down and in poor shape, so if he came over woozy and faint the others probably wouldn't even realise he was under attack. Snape's best, most reliable course of action would probably have been to Confund Sirius silently, from under the cloak, wait until Remus was distracted by seeing if Sirius was all right, and then cast Expelliarmus on Remus from under the cloak - or to reveal just the tip of his wand while the others were looking towards Sirius, and use it to bind Remus with ropes (a spell which probably can't be cast from under the cloak, since it involves the wand physically firing out physical ropes). Instead, he gave away the advantage of invisibility and went for shock instead by materialising out of thin air like the Demon King in a pantomime, which raises the possibility that he cared so much about getting to stage a coup de theatre and gloat over his enemies that he was willing to put aside the huge advantage of invisibility and risk reducing his chances of saving the children.

Although in the films the cloak is shown as interfering with the wearer's sight and hearing, this is not the case in the books. In canon there's no mention of any loss of hearing, and it is possible to read through the cloak (confirmed by this passage in GoF: "Harry opened his eyes. He was still in the library; the Invisibility Cloak had slipped off his head as he'd slept, and the side of his face was stuck to the pages of Where There's a Wand, There's a Way."), so any visual interference it creates must be like wearing dark glasses - something which has little or no effect on visual acuity. So we cannot say Snape took it off because he couldn't see or hear well enough to strike from underneath it, and in fact Harry fights successfully from underneath the Cloak during the final battle, in the dark or at least semi-dark (it was about twenty minutes before dawn).

Even though the fabric is lightweight it's quite cumbersome - long and full and shaped more like a small tent worn over the head (Harry is able to eat and drink under it) or a front-opening burqa than a regular cloak. It has enough sideways slack for three people to fit under it, but isn't all that long. At the start of HBP, at which point Harry is the same height as Narcissa (although Ron is probably taller), the Trio are having trouble getting the cloak to cover their ankles. Snape as an adult is taller than Harry was at the start of HBP, because he is enough taller than Narcissa to be able to look down into her face. He is one person not three so there will be more slack and droop in the Cloak for him than for the Trio, but it will still not be hugely long on him.

We are not told exactly how large or small the bedroom they are all in in the Shrieking Shack is, or who is standing where, so it is possible that Snape felt that he couldn't get into a position from which he could take out both Sirius and Remus, fast enough to avoid a fire-fight in which the children might be injured, without brushing so close to somebody that they would be alerted to his presence before he could strike. He ought to be able to raise his wand high, as he did when duelling Lockhart, and aim over the heads of the children, but since he isn't familiar with this cloak and has only seen it briefly and in a poor light, he may not realise how much extra cloth is in it, and may expect that if he raises his wand high the cloak will ride up and reveal his legs anyway, so that his best course of action is to relieve himself of the cumbersome fabric and startle Remus and Sirius into momentary confusion by suddenly revealing himself.

There's also some ambiguity as to what spells can or can't be cast through Harry's cloak. In the railway carriage scene near the start of HBP, Harry seizes his wand underneath the cloak, but we don't know whether he will be able to fire through it without poking the tip of his wand out of the fabric, or not. In the Astronomy Tower scene in HBP Harry thinks "if he could only move, he could aim a curse from under the Cloak --" although it's not absolutely clear that he isn't planning to poke his wand out of cover to do so. Then Dumbledore is killed, the Death Eaters flee down the stairs and Harry is able to move again. He sees the last Death Eater disappearing through the door to the stairs, and he then spends time removing the cloak before casting Petrificus totalis on his almost-out-of-sight enemy, which suggests that he thinks he won't be able to cast it through the cloak.

In DH the Trio practise Apparating and Disapparating while under the cloak, so we know that works. In the courtroom scene at the Ministry we find that Harry "raised his wand, not even troubling to keep it concealed beneath the Invisibility Cloak, and said, 'Stupefy!'". That implies that he could have cast from beneath his cloak, but at the same time he didn't, he got his wand outside the cloak in order to cast, and it remains possible that he would have had to poke at least the tip of the wand out anyway.

Then, Harry several times cast Imperius from under the cloak at Gringott's, and it seems pretty clear that his wand was covered as he did so, and then during the final battle Harry twice casts a Shield Charm from under the cloak to protect comrades from Voldemort, and we hear that "Harry was shooting jinxes and curses at any Death Eater he could see, and they crumpled, not knowing what or who had hit them", and there's no mention of him having to poke his wand out to do so (although we don't definitely know he didn't).

The only spell we can be fairly sure Harry casts through the fabric of his cloak, then, is Imperius but it's hinted that he can also cast Protego and a variety of jinxes and curses through it. The cloak somehow redirects light - visual energy - to make the wearer invisible, so if we assume that Harry would have had to poke his wand-tip out to cast Stupefy, then it is possible that the cloak tends unpredictably to reflect some of the wearer's magic back at them if they try to cast underneath it. That would explain why the only spell we know fot certain that any of the Trio casts under it is Imperius, which would be unlikely to do any harm if reflected back onto the caster (Imperiusing yourself would surely either do nothing or sharpen your focus), and Apparition/Disapparition which are supposed to be applied to oneself.

It is also possible that even if spells can be cast through Harry's special Hallow cloak, they can't be cast through a normal Invisibility Cloak, and Snape takes the cloak off because he believes it to be an ordinary one and that he cannot fight until he has removed it.

In reality, of course, Snape probably takes the Cloak off because JK didn't think through what it would mean to be invisible in a fight until she got to DH, since similar problems apply to why Harry would cast the Cloak off and drop it by the Willow. Even if he feared the folds of cloth would hamper him in a confined space, he didn't know how confined it was going to be until he got down there, he didn't know what dangers he might be facing and there was nothing to stop him from taking the Cloak off and tucking it under his arm, other than authorial fiat.

The same applies to Harry's decision to cast off the Cloak before fighting his final duel with Voldemort, instead of simply shooting him from under cover. Perhaps he felt that to do so would be dishonourable, but I'm dubious about the morality of setting his own sense of moral probity higher than improving his chances of saving the world from a ruthless dictator.

This is another one which is so deeply established in fanfic that it tends to be believed even by people who like Snape, although they view his supposed obsession with sympathy. It came about in part because initially many people took Dumbledore at face value, and didn't realise that some of what he said might be intentionally misleading.

In the first book, Dumbledore suggests that Snape is still strongly motivated by his grudge against James, and that this is the reason for his hostility to Harry - but this forms part of a conversation in which Dumbledore is, at the very least, being "economical with the truth". Whilst Dumbledore probably won't tell an outright lie there's no doubt that he lies by omission and distortion, and no doubt that JK Rowling intends this to be the case - because she quotes Dumbledore's little speech about the truth being "a beautiful and terrible thing" which should be "treated with great caution" in Beedle the Bard, with reference to an essay written by a Dumbledore who is using misdirection to give the impression that he isn't one of the people who believes that the Deathly Hallows are real - written while he had one of them in his possession, could lay his hands on the second one at any time and was hot on the trail of the third.

So, dislike of James is probably a factor in Snape's dislike of Harry, but we've no firm evidence that it's a major factor. There are plenty of other reasons for Harry to not be his favourite student.

The fact that Snape is wary of Remus from the moment he is appointed could be a sign that he bears an old grudge against him; but it's not unreasonable, since he knows that at school Remus did little or nothing to stop his friends' rule-breaking, even though he was a prefect. This is bound to lead Snape to think that Remus can't be trusted to put his duty to the school ahead of his own interests - and Snape is right, he can't. Remus deliberately withholds information which could have been vital for Harry's survival, just to save face. Even Sirius, one of his best friends, distrusted Remus so much that he thought he might be Voldemort's spy in the Order - or to put it another way, at twenty-one Sirius trusted Remus less than he trusted Peter Pettigrew, so it's hardly remarkable if Snape doesn't trust him either. And the fact that when Snape brings Remus his Wolfsbane he backs out of the room, not taking his eyes of him, strongly indicates that Snape is still very afraid of Remus, which isn't going to help matters.

At school, as far as Snape knows Remus did absolutely nothing to prevent his friends from bullying Snape (in fact he did occasionally make some effort to make them feel bad about it, but it's unlikely Snape knows that), even when he was a prefect and it was his job to keep order. Now, as an adult, Remus lies to Snape about The Marauder's Map - and Snape, the Legilimens, probably knows he's lying. Worse, Remus is lying to him in the context of whether or not Harry has been wandering around Hogsmeade unsupervised, at a time when they all believe that a mass-murderer is stalking him - which must make Snape wonder whether Remus is setting Harry up to be killed. Snape probably does suspect Harry has an Invisibility Cloak, since Draco saw Harry's head apparently floating in mid air, but he doesn't know it's a special one so good that Harry is in little danger while he wears it.

Whether or not Remus is conspiring with Sirius to murder Harry, Snape can see Remus repeating the pattern where he sides with rule-breaking students even when it's his job to uphold the school rules, so he can see that as far as working with him goes, Remus is not on his side. In his campaign to maintain order and keep the students from taking stupid risks, he will see Remus as an obstacle, not a colleague.

[Actually, to do him credit Remus does make some attempt to head Harry off from taking stupid risks, and is more successful at this than either Snape or McGonagall because he knows how to use emotional blackmail - but Snape doesn't know this.]

Remus compounds this impression by encouraging Neville to transform the Snape-Boggart into Snape in ridiculous women's clothes, making him a laughing-stock and bringing up memories of when he was a child so poor and neglected that he was jeered at for wearing his mother's old blouse. Remus could have encouraged Neville to defuse the Boggart in a less damaging way, by making it e.g. Snape picking his nose, but instead he held what was meant to be his colleague, his working partner, up to ridicule in the most extreme way. Again, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation this is a clear indication to Snape that Remus is not a trustworthy colleague, and not on his side, and doesn't have any respect for him, so Snape has every present-day reason to distrust him.

Then, Snape sees Remus talking to Harry in the DADA classroom, and the same night Sirius comes into the school and slashes the Fat Lady. Obviously Snape is going to suspect that Remus is in cahoots with Sirius and is setting Harry up to be killed. But he doesn't know for sure, so he doesn't out Remus - he just makes sure that Harry's class are forewarned on how to spot a werewolf, in case his suspicions are correct and Remus attacks Harry. He doesn't out Remus as a werewolf until after he learns that Remus has suppressed information which as far as he knew at the time could have meant the difference between life and death for Harry, and he knows Remus has failed to take his Wolfsbane, and has then walked out under a full moon along with three children (one of them lame), a bound prisoner and an unconscious colleague, endangering the whole party, despite having been reminded that he hadn't taken his Wolfsbane and shouldn't go outside unless he was bound first. By this point Snape has every reason to think that Remus is a significant danger to the students - and he's right.

Against this, Rowling herself has said that Snape outed Remus because of "resentment". As with her flatly untrue statement that Harry never refuses to help somebody who is in pain, this is probably a case where she has forgotten what she wrote, and secondary canon has to be ignored because it clashes with primary canon. We can see, right there, that Remus has proved himself to be a danger to the students, so it would have been a dereliction of duty for Snape not to out him.

The only way this comment about resentment makes sense is if Snape knew that Remus was leaving at the end of the year anyway, so that outing him wasn't necessary to student safety because he wasn't going to be spending another full moon at the school. Remus resigns after realising that he had come close to biting students, so as far as he knows his leaving is very sudden - but if Dumbledore has any care for him at all, he must have planned to get rid of him anyway, at least from the DADA post, so as not to activate the curse. If Snape acted out of resentnent, knowing Remus was leaving anyway, presumably that means Dumbledore discussed getting rid of Remus with him, and Snape knew Remus would be leaving before Remus did.

In the Shack, Snape has just heard Remus telling Harry that the cause of the enmity between Snape and James was that Snape was jealous of James's popularity and sporting prowess, which we know is a lie because Rowling has said the cause was James's jealousy of Snape's friendship with Lily, and because we see James give Snape every reason to dislike him from the outset, by launching an unprovoked verbal attack on him on the train. Even if he was wrong about Remus being in league with a mass murderer, Snape knows for a certain fact that Remus is a liar who takes the easiest course, shirks his duty and takes extreme risks with student safety, and who seems to have zero respect for him, Snape.

We don't know whether Snape ever finds out exactly what happened in the Shrieking Shack after he was knocked out, but if he does then he knows that Remus left him lying unconscious on the floor, bleeding from a scalp wound and so still and pale that Harry wondered if he was dead. Remus probably knew he wasn't dead, if only because he was still bleeding, but medically any period of unconsciousness caused by head-trauma and lasting longer than ten minutes is considered to be life-threatening and to require hospital treatment, and yet Remus didn't put him into the recovery position and didn't even bother to check his pulse for fifteen or twenty minutes. He then handed him over to the care of Sirius, who hates Snape, has just boasted that he deserved to be fed to a werewolf, and is twelve years out of practice at using a wand, with the result that Sirius allows Snape's head to bang against the ceiling several more times. This was immensely dangerous, as a second blow following soon after being knocked unconscious is very often instantly fatal (called Second Impact Syndrome). If Snape does know this he knows neither man has any care for his safety, yet he will later have to work with them in a situation (the Order) where his life is constantly on the line.

As for Sirius, Snape initially believes - just like everybody else including Sirius's dear friends Remus and Hagrid - that Sirius is a fanatical Death Eater who betrayed the Potters to their deaths, murdered his friend Peter and twelve Muggles in a single terrorist attack, and has come to Hogwarts to finish the job by killing Harry. There is no reason to think that he knew that it was really Peter who was the Death Eater spy until Dumbledore told him. He does not hear the details which show that Peter was the guilty party - he arrives in the Shack too late to hear the bit of conversation about Peter being a rat Animagus and being Scabbers, and is knocked out before Peter transforms and confesses. Nothing he has heard, therefore, provides him with any reason why Sirius would have broken into Harry's dormitory with a big knife, other than to kill Harry, so of course he remains convinced of Sirius's guilt.

What he does hear is Sirius, whom he hasn't seen for at least twelve years, still boasting about his attempt on his, Snape's life and saying that he had deserved it. This is before there has been any present-day interaction between them, at all. It is Sirius, not Snape, who is carrying a deranged and pointless grudge left over from their schooldays: Snape's grudge against Sirius at this point is the true fact that Sirius is still gloating over an ancient historic grudge against him, and the mistaken belief that Sirius is a mass murderer who betrayed Lily and is planning to kill Harry.

His lack of sympathy for Sirius's starved and traumatized condition, his eagerness to send him and Remus back to the Dementors, seems horrible to us because we know Sirius was innocent. But Snape is only expressing the same hatred Harry himself had felt half an hour earlier, before he heard the full story Snape has not heard. As far as Snape knows, Sirius and Remus are there to kill Harry, and the fact that Sirius has broken Ron's leg only reinforces his belief. As far as he knows, the fact that Sirius has chosen to starve in the Forbidden Forest instead of making a new, comfortable life somewhere else is proof of his fanatical desire to get at Harry in order to serve the Dark Lord.

Nor is this unrealistic: he's just wrong about who Voldemort's agent is. The following year Barty Crouch Jnr comes to Hogwarts precisely to do what Snape fears Sirius is doing. Snape's wanting to bind Remus with ropes and then "drag the werewolf" was also perfectly sensible, and if Remus had been thinking straight and behaving responsibly he would have asked to be bound: unbound, he was a danger to everyone else in the party, including a child with a broken leg, who couldn't run. And Snape has every reason at this point to think Remus doesn't have the children's best interests at heart, because he has heard enough of the conversation to know that Sirius is an Animagus, and he knows Remus knew this but didn't warn the school, potentially endangering Harry. Of course he will assume Remus is in cahoots with Sirius to harm Harry.

I've seen somebody argue that Snape should have known Sirius wasn't there to kill Harry, because if he was, why hadn't he already done so? But the Shack must be warded against Apparition, otherwise it could be used as a back door into Hogwarts, and we see from the fact that false!Moody wasn't able to whisk Harry away except by corrupting the destination of the Tri-Wizard Cup (which was evidently always meant to be a Portkey, since it eventually transported Harry to a point in front of the judges' table) that unauthorized Portkeys are blocked at Hogwarts as well. So if Sirius was there to take Harry to Voldemort - as false!Moody would be less than three months later - he would have to win Harry over and get him to return to the Hogwarts grounds with him, and then walk past the Dementors and out of the gate with the big doggie to a point from which Sirius could Apparate or Portkey him away.

A couple of hours later Snape - who by this point is severely concussed (ranting and spitting) - refuses to believe in Sirius's innocence and reminds Dumbledore of Sirius's attack on himself. He is mistaken, but his belief is perfectly reasonable - he's saying "This man was imprisoned for mass murder, and now you think he might be innocent but is that likely, given that he already had one atttempted murder under his belt at sixteen?" It's also reasonable for him to think Sirius has deceived and maybe Confunded the Trio with malign intent, and to want to gag him so he can't do it again: after all, Sirius once did something of the sort to him, in order to lure him into a potentially fatal encounter with a werewolf, and he still hasn't heard a rational explanation of what Sirius was doing waving a knife around in Harry's dorm, if he wasn't there to kill or kidnap Harry.

Of course, Snape continues to dislike Sirius after he knows Sirius is innocent. But again, he has plenty of current reasons to dislike Sirius, without invoking the past. Sirius is constantly rude to and about Snape, and Snape is risking his life as a spy whilst knowing that one of his fellow Order members is still bragging about how he tried to kill him - a mentally unstable man with a drink problem, whose brother Regulus and cousin Bellatrix were/are Death Eaters, even if there are already some suspicions that Reggie was a defector. Snape is going to have to wonder all the time whether Sirius will betray him to Voldemort out of spite.

Nevertheless he doesn't take an obvious opportunity to rid himself of Sirius, but slips Umbridge fake Veritaserum so she won't be able to make Harry betray Sirius's location. And like Harry, who saves his bully Dudley from the Dementors, Snape tries to warn and protect Sirius when he realises Voldemort is trying to lure Harry to the Ministry. The difference is that Dudley isn't a gung-ho idiot who would stand up in clear sight and deliberately provoke a trigger-happy psychotic into taking a shot at him, so he's a lot easier to protect.

Snape has absolute proof that Remus still sides with rule-breaking students against his colleagues when it is his job to uphold the school rules, just as he did when he was a prefect, and that he still takes reckless risks with children's lives for selfish and venal reasons; and if he is aware of what happened in the Shack after he was knocked out then he knows that Remus literally doesn't care very much whether he, Snape, lives or dies and couldn't even be bothered to check his pulse for about twenty minutes after he'd been potentially fatally injured and was lying on the floor unconscious and bleeding from a head-wound. He has reason to think that Sirius has an active preference for his death, or claims to have. Of course he doesn't like them.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't still feel bitter and angry about their childhood treatment of him as well. Again, he has every reason to be bitter, since Sirius and Remus not only never apologize to him, that we see, but openly jeer at him in the Shack for still being upset about it, even though he has just heard Sirius bragging about the murder attempt and saying that he had deserved it. Sirius then actively continues his campaign of baiting Snape, so from Snape's point of view he's not being bitter about events in his childhood, but about a campaign of petty persecution which is still ongoing.

This must be reinforced by the way the other houses isolate Slytherin, supporting whichever other house is playing against them - although that might have something to do with the fact that they won the House Cup seven years in a row, making the other houses feel that whoever was playing Slytherin was automatically the underdog. Despite Slytherin's considerable run of success with the House Cup, Snape probably feels that he is still part of an isolated, beleaguered group, being picked on by bullies from the other houses - and to some extent that's actually true.

Sirius is shown to be a lesser man than Dudley, who at seventeen is beginning to appreciate the fact that Harry saved him from the Dementors: just imagine if Dudley, in his mid thirties, was still relentlessly needling Harry and gloating about the way he used to bully him, the way Sirius does to Snape. Snape is better able to defend himself as an adult, since it's now one on one instead of four on one, but for him, the bullying isn't finally over until Sirius dies. Yet he still tries to save him. The key to Snape's relationship with the Marauders, in my opinion - and with anybody with whom he has a rivalry - is that he's very competitive, but he doesn't actually want to hurt anybody (except when he believes that Sirius and Remus are there to kill Harry). He just wants to prove that he's won.

And to the extent to which he may still be bearing boyhood grudges, there's a lot of it about. According to Pottermore, McGonagall at sixty is still bearing a grudge against Slytherin because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was a schoolgirl. He didn't bully and abuse her for years, he didn't strip and humiliate her in public, he didn't try to murder her, he just cheated her out of victory in a ball-game - but she's still steaming about it and resenting his whole house for it nearly half a century later. Sirius in his thirties is still bragging about how he tried to kill Snape when they were sixteen, and the Dumbledore brothers are still locked in rivalry and resentment nearly a century after they first fell out.

Many fanwriters portray the ongoing war at school between Snape and the Marauders as fairly even-handed. However, since it seems to be true that the Marauders generally went after Snape many on one, this could only be the case if Snape was a brilliant duellist or the Marauders were hopeless, neither of which seems to be the case.

Snape's claim at the end of HBP that James never attacked him unless it was four to one seems to be a bit of an over-simplification. We see James and Sirius first start to pick on Severus and Lily two on two, although completely unprovoked (in fact, gratuitously picking on Sev and Lily seems to be how James and Sirius bonded). During the werewolf "prank" Sirius was in a sense attacking Severus, Peter may or may not have been involved, Remus was a potential attacker but he was a weapon in Sirius's hand, not an aggressor of his own free will, and James was actually backing Severus, at least as far as being unwilling to kill him went. During the underpants incident Remus was an abstainer, and James and Sirius attacked Severus two on one with cheerleading and potential backup from Peter - and the fact that Severus seemed not to be on the alert for an attack suggests that they'd probably left him alone for a while prior to that point. Remus and Sirius claim that during seventh year Severus and Head Boy James repeatedly duelled one on one and that it was mainly Severus who was trying to hex James at that point, although the fact that they were able to conceal this both from the staff and from Lily suggests that it was actually James who picked the time and place, using The Marauder's Map to choose spots where there were no staff around.

This could be taken as support for the idea that the feud was more even-handed than Snape would later claim, or at least that it was generally two to one rather than four to one. However, we do have evidence that the bullying was ongoing, and that prior to Remus becoming a prefect it probably really was generally four on one.

For example, James and Sirius give Snape the insulting nickname "Snivellus" on their first day at Hogwarts and are still using it at the end of fifth year, implying continuity. It seems unlikely that young Snape would want to get them expelled (assuming he really did) if they weren't a threat to him, and the way in which James launches a totally unprovoked attack on Severus after OWLs because he expects that this will alleviate Sirius's boredom suggests that this is a very well-worn groove. Sirius appears to be obsessed with Snape's physical appearance - so much so that he is still obsessing about him and gloating about his attacks on him nearly twenty years later. The voices of all four of the gang - starting with Remus, who must therefore at some point have taken an active part in the bullying - appear on The Marauder's Map, sneering at Snape's physical appearance in vicious terms.

[I'm not sure incidentally whether that makes Snape's "I see no difference" remark about Hermione - which may mean either "I see no difference between her teeth now and her teeth before" or "I see no difference in severity between what Malfoy has done to Granger and what Potter has done to Goyle" - better or worse, even if he does intend it as a snide reference to her buck teeth. You could say that having been subjected to verbal abuse about his own appearance he should know better than to do it to someone else, or you could say he grew up in a milieu in which making rude personal comments was the norm, so that even if he means it rudely he won't expect Hermione to be very upset.]

Sirius admits that Peter habitually attaches himself to the biggest bully in the playground, showing that he knows what James's gang were. Lily accuses them of "hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can", and the fact that James offers to leave Snape alone in the future if Lily will go out with him is a strong indication that attacking Snape is a fairly regular occurrence. Remus also says that James hexed people for fun, and that he himself should have done more to tell James and Sirius to "lay off" Snape and that their treatment of him was out of order, and Sirius says that Remus did sometimes make them feel ashamed. And the assault on Snape after the OWL was of an extreme kind - James and Sirius launched an unprovoked attack on him, then punished him for daring to complain, told him that he deserved to be hurt for the crime of existing, and finished by carrying out a minor sexual assault on him (or at least threatening to). Unless they were actively insane, this doesn't seem like something they would do to somebody they weren't already so accustomed to bullying that any ill-treatment of him seemed normal to them. All of this, combined with the fact that it evidently still burns Snape miserably more than twenty years after the event, strongly suggests that although there may have been a period of respite between the werewolf and underpants incidents, many-on-one attacks on Snape by the Marauders were a fairly frequent occurrence, at least through years one to five, even if they weren't all four on one.

Indeed, if you accept Pottermore as canon, an article about Remus (published prior to the point where Pottermore merged the books with the films) refers to "relentless bullying" of Severus by James and Sirius, and Remus disapproving of this. The definition of "relentless" according to the Oxford Dictionary is "oppressively constant; incessant" and according to Merriam-Webster "showing or promising no abatement of severity, intensity, strength, or pace". There is no doubt, therefore, that Rowling does see the gang's treatment of Severus as bullying, not just duelling, and as bullying which evidently occurred frequently over an extended period of time, whether or not it occurred throughout their schooldays.

As to how loaded the odds were, Snape seems to be a reasonably good duellist, but not brilliant. He easily defeats Lockhart - but Lockhart is an idiot. He fends off a three-pronged attack by McGonagall, Flitwick and Sprout fairly efficiently but is able to be knocked out by three third years. When he tries to cut the Death Eater who is aiming at Remus during the Polyjuice chase, he misses and hits George instead. As a boy we see he makes a valiant attempt to fight back against James and Sirius but is clearly heavily outgunned - more outgunned than Harry was against Dudley's gang, since Harry at least had wandless magic to help him escape and his persecutors did not.

Meanwhile, James is a big Quidditch star (so must have superb agility and reflexes), and the prequel-ette shows James and Sirius already successfully fighting adult Death Eaters when they are seventeen. And Peter may seem like just a cheerleader, but in fact he was probably the most dangerous person there - five years later he would stage his own disappearance, condemn Sirius to Azkaban and murder twelve Muggles, all at a stroke, and fourteen years after that he would single-handedly resurrect the Dark Lord. Even though Snape probably fought back with everything he had and scored some convincing hits, he was still heavily outnumbered in most of their interactions, and for much of his schooldays he must have been constantly stressed, always wondering where the next attack was coming from. His tendency to stay in the dungeons may have come about because as a boy leaving Slytherin territory meant danger.

Some people claim that Snape is an unreliable source because he says that the Marauders attacked him four on one, and in the scene we are shown Remus and Peter did not actively attack him. But Peter was probably the most dangerous individual in the group, by a wide margin, and the fact that a prefect allowed the attack to continue and did nothing to help is not neutral, any more than it would be neutral if someone was being mugged and a policeman just stood by and did nothing.

Maidofkent has also pointed out the scene in HBP where Snape is talking to Draco about Draco's covert activities, and says "You were certainly alone tonight, which was foolish in the extreme, wandering the corridors without lookouts or back-up. These are elementary mistakes –" which does sound as if he's speaking from experience about precautions he himself had taken as a boy. But no amount of backup from his Slytherin friends would have been all that much use against a gang he didn't know had Death's own Cloak, and a flawless surveillance device which enabled them to see where everyone in the castle was at any time.

That may well have been the cruellest thing the Marauders did to young Snape - that they destroyed his credibility. The staff probably thought that young Sev was melodramatic and spiteful and kept making false accusations against the Marauders out of jealousy, because none of the staff knew that the Marauders possessed both a literally-supernaturally effective Invisibility Cloak the likes of which had never been seen before or since, and a covert surveillance device which enabled them to always get Sev on his own when he had no friends or staff members nearby. They would have to suspect the boy of making it up, because he couldn't explain how come his bullies kept catching him where there were no witnesses. This may be why even Lily doubted his word about James's behaviour, in the courtyard scene. And being pursued by people who could go invisible at will, who always knew where you were and where you'd been however hard you tried to hide, would be very like being cyberstalked - and we know that that can damage people's nerves for life.

The name "The Marauders" is semi-fanon. JK Rowling has confirmed that they did call themselves that, but late in the day and online, not in the books, and only after the idea had been spread by fanon.

All we have on this in the books is that the Gryffindor foursome call their covert-surveillance device (don't tell me that four hormonal teenagers don't use it for spying on other people's sex-lives) "The Marauder's Map". Note the placement of the apostrophe - they call it a map to be used by a marauder, singular, not a map belonging to the marauders, plural. Now that Rowling has confirmed that they did call themselves The Marauders, we have to conclude that either the four boys, Rowling herself or her editor just don't know how to use the apostrophe, or that Rowling decided only retroactively and in response to fanon to have them call themselves that.

However, I used the name in this essay, even before Rowling confirmed that it was legitimate, for the same reason everybody else does - because it's easier to type than "James, Sirius, Remus and Peter".

It is possible that the name is another one of Rowling's deliberate spot-the-references. in 1965 Mimi and Richard Fariña brought out a fairly well-known, much-covered and extremely creepy song called The Bold Marauder. If we are meant to understand that James and co. took their gang name from this well-known song, written only six years before they formed their little gang, it casts a sinister light on how they thought of themselves:

It's hi, ho, hey
I am the bold marauder
And hi, ho, hey
I am the white destroyer

For I will bring you silver and gold
And I will bring you treasure
And I will bring a widowing flag
And I will be your lover

I will show you grotto and cave
And sacrificial altar
And I will show you blood on the stone
And I will be your mentor
And night will be our darling
And fear will be our name

It's hi, ho, hey
I am the bold marauder
And hi, ho, hey
I am the white destroyer

For I will take you out by the hand
And lead you to the hunter
And I will show you thunder and steel
And I will be your teacher

We will dress in helmet and sword
And dip our tongues in slaughter
And we will sing a warrior's song
And lift the praise of murder
And Christ will be our darling
And fear will be our name

It's hi, ho, hey
I am the bold marauder
And hi, ho, hey
I am the white destroyer

For I will sour the winds on high
And I will soil the river
And I will burn the grain in the field
And I will be your mother
I will go to ravage and kill
And I will go to plunder
And I will take a Fury to wife
I will be your father
And death will be our darling
And fear will be our name

It is almost universally assumed in fanfic that the werewolf "prank" - in which Sirius tried to trick Severus into coming into dangerously close contact with Remus in his were form, at full moon in the Shrieking Shack or in the tunnel leading to it, and James had to intervene to save him - happened in the middle of the night, with the participants sneaking about out of bed after hours. The very common fanon idea that Severus was punished after the incident and Sirius wasn't is based on the assumption that Severus was wandering around the grounds after bedtime. However, all we actually know is that since James is said to have rescued Severus from danger, it probably happened after moonrise, with Remus transformed or about to transform, and it certainly happened after Remus was sent down the tunnel to the Shack to await moonrise.

We do not know for sure when the werewolf incident happened, except that it happened after Sirius turned sixteen (on 3^rd November 1975, according to one of Rowling's Tweets, which fits with her website statement that he was "about twenty-two" when he was sent to Azkaban early in November 1981), and before the underpants incident in mid to late June 1976. When Harry complains about James's bad behaviour in the underpants incident, Remus says that James was only fifteen. This is untrue - he was sixteen by that point - but it could be taken to mean that the werewolf incident naturally preys on Remus's mind and that James had been fifteen at that time, making it prior to his birthday on 27^th March.

Also, Severus ambled out from his DADA OWL and sat down near the Marauders without any wariness. He could have been so wrapped up in re-hashing his exam questions that he didn't notice the danger he was in, but I would have thought that the fact that he had just been answering an exam question about werewolves would have brought the Marauders to mind. That he was nevertheless not looking out for them in any wary way suggests to me that they had left him alone for a substantial period, and therefore that the werewolf "prank" had happened a considerable time ago and they had been punished sufficiently to make them behave themselves for a while.

That pushes the werewolf incident back to early spring or winter (and gives Sirius the partial excuse that the "prank" happened around the time he split from his family, when he was probably under a great deal of stress). The full moon is full because it is directly opposite the sun, meaning that moonrise of the full moon happens around sunset - and sunset in a Scottish winter happens pretty early. If the "prank" occurred in the middle of winter, moonrise on the horizon would have been around 4.30pm, although if it was rising behind the mountains its appearance would have been slightly delayed. The werewolf incident could have happened as early as about 5.15pm, if the moon has to clear the mountains and become visible for Remus to transform, or 4.30pm if it only has to clear the unseen horizon. It could have happened after lights out, but there's no reason to assume it did.

It is however a fairly safe bet that when the three Animagi ran with were-Remus, they did so after curfew and probably after bedtime. We're not given any reason to think they ever left Remus to roam unsupervised, and once he was released I doubt that they would be able to get that particular genie back into the bottle until moonset when he had transformed back into a boy. Once they had released him, they would have to stay with him all night. It would surely be a great deal less likely to attract suspicion if they went into their common-room and then up to bed, and then snuck out again under the Invisibility Cloak, than if they failed to show up to go into the common-room in the first place.

Dumbledore favoured the Marauders and treated Snape's life as worthless, as a boy or as an adult.

The fact that James's intervention in the werewolf "prank" is said by Dumbledore to have saved Snape's life, and that this seems to be regarded as heroic, is a strong indication that Sirius set Snape up so that he would actually come into biting range of were-Remus, not just glimpse him behind a safety barrier. What Sirius did was equivalent to a real-life schoolboy trying to set a class-mate up to have a close encounter with a grizzly, or to contract Aids. Nevertheless Sirius was clearly not expelled. Snape was forbidden to tell anyone that Remus was a werewolf. The Marauders, including James who had saved Snape, continued to persecute him, and despite this James and Sirius appear to have been Order members by the start of seventh year, and James was then made Head Boy. This is widely taken to mean that Sirius's attack on Snape wasn't treated seriously.

However, there are indications, to do with the number of holidays Sirius spent with the Potters in between leaving home and buying his own flat, that Sirius's attempted murder (or possibly just criminally reckless endangerment) of Snape coincided closely with Sirius's parting of the ways from his family. Hence the staff may have felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was having some kind of nervous breakdown, especially as there seems to be a history of mental illness in his family, and that it would be cruel to deprive him of his place at boarding school at the same time that he had just lost his home, or was in the process of doing so. Also it seems unlikely that Remus would have connived at putting Snape in extreme danger from himself so he was, at least in this instance, an innocent party, and it would probably have been hard to explain Sirius's expulsion to the Board of Governors without getting Remus into trouble. That some concern was shown for a student with mental health and family problems, and for one with quasi-medical problems who didn't deserve to be punished for his friend's madness, doesn't amount to unreasonable favour.

Also, we do not even know that the staff knew at the time that Sirius had lured Severus into the tunnel. We know that they knew that Severus had glimpsed the werewolf, since he was told not to talk about that, and we know that the fact that James had rescued him was common knowledge because Lily mentions it a few days later. We know that Dumbledore knows that Sirius had set Severus up by Harry's third year, but we don't know when he found that out. There is a strong bias in British schools against telling tales to the staff even about people who are attacking you, and the only evidence we have that Severus was a tale-bearer is Sirius's opinion that he was trying to get the Marauders expelled - and Sirius, though basically honest, is very biased where Snape is concerned. It could be that Snape didn't tell Dumbledore that Sirius had tried to kill him (or had, at the very least, recklessly endangered him) until after Sirius was arrested - and if neither Snape nor the Marauders told them it's difficult to see how the staff could have found out, unless a portrait overheard something.

There is nothing in the books to say - as so often portrayed in fanfics - that Snape himself was punished for having gone down the tunnel. There's nothing to say that he wasn't, either, but this detail is pure fanon, usually introduced to make young Sev seem even more hard-done-by than we know he was in the books. It probably came about because of the mistaken fanon that the so-called "prank" must have happened at dead of night and that Severus was therefore necessarily out of his dormitory after curfew. In fact, if it happened in winter Remus could have transformed, and his encounter with Severus could potentially have occurred, as early as 4.30pm if it is sufficient for the moon to have cleared the unseen horizon, or around 5.15pm if it has to have cleared the mountains around Hogwarts.

Snape was told not to tell other students about Remus, but since the staff had just spent five years trying to keep Remus's condition a secret, it's not surprising that they told Snape to keep his mouth shut. We have no evidence as to whether he was ordered, threatened, persuaded, bribed or put under some kind of magical compulsion. It must have been very unpleasant for him not to be able to discuss his traumatic experience with other students, and frightening and frustrating not to be able to warn Lily that James's circle included a werewolf and a near-murderer (although ironically it turned out not to be them she needed to worry about), but it wasn't a punishment as such - it wasn't done to hurt him.

We do not know whether or how Sirius was punished, short of expulsion - assuming that the staff even knew he had done anything to be punished for on that occasion. He seems to feel free to persecute Snape again in the underpants incident, but all we know for sure about the date of the werewolf "prank" is that it happened after Sirius's sixteenth birthday (which other evidence shows is early in the autumn term) and before the underpants incident. When Harry confronts Sirius and Remus about their bullying of Snape in the underpants scene, Remus says that James was "only fifteen", which is untrue - he was sixteen - but this may mean that Remus's mind tends to dwell on the Shrieking Shack incident in which he himself was nearly an unwitting murderer, and that at that time, James was fifteen. That would put the Shack incident prior to 27^th March of their fifth year.

The two attacks on Severus, the one in the Shrieking Shack and the one by the lake, could be separated by as much as nine months - long enough for Sirius to have forgotten even quite a severe punishment - and the fact that Snape settles down on the grass close to the Marauders, without looking around to check where they are or making any effort to avoid them, in fact suggests that they've probably left him alone since the werewolf incident and he no longer feels very threatened by them. This is especially noteworthy since he has just been confronted by an exam question about werewolves, and you would think that the werewolf "prank" would be on his mind.

In any case the fact that Sirius tried to kill a classmate may mean he is mildly psychopathic and lacks an automatic social conscience (he's not a full-bore psychopath, since he seems to love his friends in an emotional way), and one of the definitions of a psychopath is that punishment does not modify their behaviour. Therefore, the fact that his behaviour was unmodified does not prove he wasn't punished.

It appears that the Marauders were able to get away with continuing to persecute Snape - but then, they were in possession both of a superior sort of Invisibility Cloak and of a surveillance device which meant they could pick moments when there were no teachers around. We are told that even when James was Head Boy and was dating Lily he was able to continue his war with Snape and conceal that fact from Lily - and if he was able to hide what he was doing from a girlfriend with whom he shared a common room, he could surely hide it from the staff.

We can say that the Marauders were not watched closely and competently after the werewolf incident, since they were able to come and go from the dorm and from the tunnel. But the staff may have asked the wrong questions. If they asked the Fat Lady to watch out for those four boys trying to sneak out of the common room at night, or set a house elf to watch for students entering or leaving the tunnel under the Willow, they might not be told about invisible presences leaving the common room, or a large dog entering or leaving the tunnel. Nor do we know whether the staff had any reason to think the Marauders even might be going out in the middle of the night: if it happened in winter the werewolf incident could have occurreed as early as 5pm, because in winter the full-moonrise in the Highlands can happen as early as 4:30pm.

If we accept the prequel which Rowling wrote for charity as canon (which personally I do), then as at the summer between their sixth and seventh years James and Sirius were wearing phoenix T-shirts and so were probably already members of the Order of the Phoenix. As at a year after the underpants incident, then, a special, extra-curricular relationship did exist between James and Sirius and Dumbledore. This doesn't necessarily mean that Dumbledore liked them any better than he liked Mundungus Fletcher or Aberforth, though, just that he found them useful (rich, brave, athletic), and/or that considering that Sirius came from a very doubtful family and was Bellatrix's cousin, he preferred to have him inside the tent pissing out.

That James was made Head Boy could be evidence that his bullying of Snape and others was condoned. But it could equally mean that Snape's life was valued so highly that the fact that James had saved him (or, in general, that he saved an enemy) was enough to raise James's standing and outweigh all his misbehaviour. We're told in PoA that Percy was elected as Head Boy so probably James too was elected, but we don't know who the electorate are - it could be all students, or just all prefects, or it could be the staff. If it's the staff James could have been selected, unofficially, because he was an Order member - Dumbledore and Hagrid are certainly Order members, and Flitwick and Sprout might be, while Slughorn is Dumbledore's friend and would have been impressed by the fact that James saved one of his Slytherins.

Dumbledore twice refers to Snape's defection as his rejoining the anti-Voldemort side, which suggests that he had had Snape pegged as one of the good guys from the outset. The fanon idea that Dumbledore treated the boys as if the Marauders could do no wrong and Snape's life was worthless came about in part because it seemed a likely explanation for why Snape joined the Death Eaters. But of course, just like the staff, Snape doesn't know that the Marauders have an Invisibility Cloak and a special map which enables them to know where their prospective victims and their teachers are at all times. He would probably suspect that the staff were letting them get away with their bad behaviour (rather than that they had managed to conceal it so successfully), and he would see James, Head Boy and already (according to the little prequel which Rowling wrote for charity) an Order member, casually breaking the rules and continuing to persecute him, and getting away with it. He might well think (probably wrongly) that the staff didn't care that he was being persecuted, and if he understood why James and Sirius were wearing phoenix T-shirts he would certainly think that the Order was recruiting swaggering, rule-breaking thugs who had no respect for school rules even when it was their job to uphold them.

Dumbledore doesn't give adult Snape an easy time and is occasionally outright emotionally abusive towards him, but he speaks of him with what sounds like a certain amount of genuine affection, defends him to Harry and is touched to the point of tears by his loyalty to Lily. On the other hand the evidence that he even liked the Marauders, let alone favoured them, is thin. It appears from the prequel that he did recruit them to the Order while they were still at school - but that just tells us he had a use for them. If Snape fen can conceive that Dumbledore might possibly have recruited Snape without feeling any fondness for him, they can surely see that the same applies to James and Sirius - except that Dumbledore does show some signs of having a real affection for Snape, even if that doesn't stop him from exploiting him.

When Snape defected and told Dumbledore that the Potters were in danger, Dumbledore asked Snape what he would give him in return for protecting them - as if it wasn't a thing he would do just for their sake. At a time when the Potters are in hiding and in danger, he then borrows James's Invisibility Cloak, which he knows or suspects is the one which is meant to hide the wearer from death, and then hangs on to it. In the King's Cross scene Dumbledore tells Harry that he only borrowed the Cloak a few days before the Potters died, but Lily's letter shows that he had already had it for a significant length of time prior to Harry's first birthday party, and there's a wealth of internal evidence that that party was indeed held around the time of Harry's actual birthday, not in October. In the event possession of the Cloak probably wouldn't have made any difference to the Potters' survival, but Dumbledore didn't know that when he borrowed it. To some extent, it could be said that he cheated Snape, because Snape did pay him to save the Potters, and he didn't really give it his best shot - but he let Snape down by not caring about James enough, rather than by caring about him too much.

An impression is created that James and Sirius were well-liked by almost everybody because McGonagall, Madame Rosmerta and Hagrid seem to have liked them, but that doesn't mean Dumbledore did. In the scene at the start of PS, McGonagall seems to be genuinely upset that James and Lily are dead, but Dumbledore doesn't seem all that concerned, and is more interested in sucking sweeties - even though Snape has just accused him of failing to save them. He tells Harry that James was to Snape as Draco is to Harry, which somewhat suggests that he saw James as a spoilt, arrogant pure-blood brat who was not totally evil or beyond redemption, rather than as a beloved favourite. He later tells Harry that, like Harry himself, James would not have executed in cold blood an unarmed prisoner who was begging for mercy at his feet, and I guess that makes James one better than Sirius and Remus who were planning to execute Peter in cold blood, but it's pretty tepid praise.

Dumbledore gives Remus the DADA job which Snape wants, but since he knows that the post is cursed and that anybody who takes it on will be forcibly and potentially fatally prevented from working a second year, far from suggesting that he favours Remus over Snape, this suggests that he sees Remus as more expendable than Snape. This may well be the origin of this particular fanon, however, since we weren't told at this point that the DADA post was cursed, and so it looked as though Dumbledore had cruelly trampled over Snape's aspirations in order to give the job he craved to one of his old rivals.

As for Sirius, Dumbledore presumably knew he was Harry's godfather, but he nevertheless decided to hand Harry over to the Dursleys without consulting Sirius - although it's possible he assumed without asking that Sirius had been the Secret Keeper and so might be a traitor. He was willing to believe without investigation that Sirius was not just a traitor but a mass murderer, and to abandon him to Azkaban without a trial.

Once he knows Sirius is probably innocent, he helps to save him, but later when Sirius is living at Grimmauld Place, Dumbledore cuts him out of decisions again and treats him like an annoying extra feature he has to put up with to get the house. Knowing that Sirius and Snape don't get on, and that Sirius is kicking his heels without a job to do, he nevertheless excludes Sirius from discussions and just springs it on him that his enemy Snape will be having a meeting with his godson in his house. And when Sirius dies, Dumbledore praises him in a rather tepid way, but can't resist criticizing his behaviour to Kreacher and effectively blaming Sirius for his own death.

As for the common fanon idea that Dumbledore treats Snape's life as worthless when he is a spy, and knowingly and perhaps even deliberately sends him to his death, we do not know how much Dumbledore valued Snape's life during Vold War One. The extreme emotional cruelty we see him display to Snape at that time could mean that he genuinely saw him as worthless, but it could also be that, like Snape himself, he is verbally vicious to someone of whom he is nevertheless fiercely protective. Or he could be extra angry because Snape had been his friend Horace's star student, a boy with so much potential of whom so much had been hoped for, a Slytherin in love with a Muggle-born, and he'd gone to the bad like Horace's other star student Tom Riddle. We just don't know.

In Vold War Two, however, and irrespective of how much emotional affection and care Dumbledore may or may not have for Snape, his plans require Snape to place himself in great danger but they absolutely require him to survive, at least until a couple of hours before the final battle, because he needs Snape to explain the final stage of the plan to Harry and Harry isn't going to believe it if it's just a letter. Harry shooting Snape on sight would be a disaster: Snape has to contact Harry just before the final battle, and survive long enough to give him the message. And there's no benefit to Dumbledore in Snape then dying in the last few hours of the war. He did die in the last few hours of the war but that was just bad luck, and nearly a disaster for Dumbledore's plans. Things would have gone more smoothly if Snape had still been alive and fighting for the Order - and why should Dumbledore wish the death of his agent, through whom he is still able to influence events?

In fact, aside from Harry himself Snape is probably the only Order member in Vold War Two who isn't expendable.

The common idea that Dumbledore knowingly left Snape to be accused of his murder, with no means of proving that he was acting under orders, is just about canon-compatible but not supported by canon. To begin with, there seems to be no reason why Dumbledore would have ended up on top of the Astronomy Tower, dying in front of Harry, had Draco not succeeded in bringing Death Eaters into the school and setting off the Dark Mark - and Draco's success appears to be a totally unexpected event. Without that, Dumbledore would presumably have entered the castle through the main doors, dying of the poison which Harry had fed him, and would have gone to Snape's office where Snape would have finished him off (to make sure that the mastery of the Elder Wand didn't go to Voldemort). As far as the Order knew, Snape would simply have been "unable to save him" and the blame, if any, would have landed on Harry.

Even aside from that, it's not necessarily true that no evidence was left to show that Snape had been acting on Dumbledore's orders. They would both have to be very, very careful about what that evidence might be, because if things went pear-shaped and Voldemort won, any evidence that Snape had been on the Order side all along could be the death of him. But there are a couple of avenues which could be explored, but which Voldemort probably wouldn't think of because he wasn't actually looking for evidence that the apparently loyal Snape had betrayed him.

We don't know if portraits are allowed to testify, but if they are, Dumbledore's portrait can exonerate Snape. In addition, Hagrid heard part of the argument where Snape was trying to get out of killing Dumbledore, and it would probably be possible to retrieve the whole conversation from his memory using a Pensieve. We see in the Snape's Worst Memory scene that the Pensieve seems to include things which the subject probably did not consciously hear, although they might have been able to if they'd been listening hard. Snape doesn't give any sign that he has heard the Marauders discussing the fact that Remus is a werewolf, although Harry hears this conversation in Snape's Pensieve memory, and when they are under the tree Harry hears James and Sirius winding themselves up to attack Snape, while Snape stands on the grass nearby, apparently oblivious because he is concentrating on something else. So although Hagrid only consciously overheard the tail-end of that conversation, he must have been drawing near to Dumbledore and Snape during the earlier part, and the whole conversation is probably accessible in his memory where it could be used to clear Snape - if anybody thinks of it, and assuming that the memory-extraction process works on a half-giant. We know it works on house-elves.

It's true we don't see a Pensieve used in court - but acording to Pottermore they are very rare and fiddly to use, so even if they are admissible one probably wouldn't expect them to be seen in court in cases where the use of one wouldn't add much to the evidence. A Pensieve memory would have been useful when Harry was examined over his casting a Patronus to protect Dudley and himself from Dementors, since there was no witness in court except the plaintiff until Mrs Figg faked it, but in that case the Ministry wasn't that keen on knowing the truth, plus it would have had to take the time to teach Harry how to extract memories to start with - whereas Snape already knows how, and one hopes that in the event of an Order victory they might genuinely want to know what his true allegiances were.

It is widely assumed in the fandom that Snape spied on Voldemort because he wanted to bring down Lily's killer, and that he saw Harry just as a means to an end. But this is what Snape himself says about it, at a point in the story where Rowling is writing explanation rather than obfuscation: "I have spied for you, and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter's son safe." This is a strong indication that he wanted to bring Voldemort down in order to protect Harry, rather than vice versa.

We can see in canon that as a small child Snape was poor and ragged, from a markedly dysfunctional family and possibly abused. His great eagerness to make friends with Lily may mean he has no other friends, or it may just mean that he has no other friend who is a magic-user, with whom he can share that important aspect of his life.

The fanon idea that Snape was friendless at Hogwarts is one which seemed to be indicated by canon when it was first proposed, and which is weakly supported by Rowling's interview comment that Snape joined the Death Eaters in part because he was insecure and needed a group to belong to. As a dirt-poor, working-class half-blood in Slytherin his position must have been precarious - but the idea that he had no friends at all has really been canon-shafted, especially by DH. It came about because Snape says that the Marauders always attacked him four on one, suggesting that he had no friends to stand by him, and because we're told that Harry thinks he seems to be unpopular with the crowd who watch James and Sirius bullying him; also because he seems to be naturally on his own after his DADA OWL, rather than hanging around in a crowd.

Sirius did say that Snape was part of a Slytherin gang which included Rosier, Wilkes, Avery and a couple called Lestrange who at some point married. However, if the Lestrange couple referred to were Bellatrix and Rudolphus (as opposed to Rabastan and some unknown partner), Bellatrix is a minimum of five years older than Snape, and nine years older if you acept JK Rowling's diagram of the Black family tree as canon, so it was felt that this list might refer to people Snape became friends with after he left school.

Against this, in HBP Snape talks to Draco about Draco's covert activities, and says "You were certainly alone tonight, which was foolish in the extreme, wandering the corridors without lookouts or back-up. These are elementary mistakes –" which does sound as if he's speaking from experience about precautions he himself had taken as a boy, and would suggest that he was part of a group who tried to guard each other's backs - although it's also possible that the experience he had was of being the person who did not have backup. Either way, and even if he had several friends who were in the same house and year and doing all the same elective classes, he would still have to go to the lavatory or the library on his own some time, and possession of The Marauder's Map means that the Marauders would always be able to wait until he was on his own. Therefore, the fact that the Marauders always attack him when he has no-one to stand by him isn't hugely significant.

The fact that he's on his own after the DADA OWL (a compulsory subject which everyone in his year must have sat, or at least it was in Harry's day) could mean that his friends had gone on to an exam for an elective subject he wasn't taking, or that they were in a different year. Or he might just have been a bit of a loner when he was preoccupied with his studies, even though he did have friends. We now know that he was friends with Lily until after that OWL, and yet he didn't seek her out to sit with her after the exam: perhaps because he wants to concentrate on picking over the exam paper and he knows Lily won't want to (although she does produce a book after she's dipped her feet in the lake). And we know that Lily complained about his friendship with Avery and Mulciber. So he wasn't totally isolated, and we know Avery was his friend while still at school so probably Rosier and Wilkes were as well, if not the Lestranges.

Then, he was certainly friends or close colleagues of some sort with Lucius at some point in later life. We don't know whether this friendship began at school, but Sirius needles Snape about being "Lucius's lapdog" and Snape reacts badly. This could mean that there was a sexual relationship between them - widely expected at boarding school, although if it happened at school it would have to have been at least technically abusive, since Lucius must have left school when Snape was thirteen - or that Sirius has a history of annoying Snape by implying a sexual relationship with Lucius even though there wasn't one. Or he could have been Lucius's "fag" - a junior boy at some boarding schools who acts as secretary and valet to an older boy, something like an officer's batman, in return for protection and patronage. Either way, Snape may have been under Lucius's protection for his first two years at Hogwarts.

Then, we know that the Half-Blood Prince was using his sixth-year-standard Potions textbook by some time early in fifth year, because he worked Levicorpus out in the margin, and that spell became fashionable in fifth year. The fact that Slughorn uses him as a yardstick of sixth-year Potions excellence, praising Harry's (borrowed) performance with "never had a student produce finer on a first attempt, I don't think even you, Severus – ", suggests that Snape may have worked out at least some of his improvements to the Draught of Living Death prior to the first time he brewed it in class - or, if he modified it on the fly, he already had a good knowledge of what sort of modifications might work, and then he ran it again later to produce the even better version Harry found in his book.

Yet, Spinner's End doesn't seem at all the sort of place which could hold a Potions laboratory, at least while there were still three people living there, and young Snape's discoveries as detailed in his book sound as though they would have taken more work than could be done just by experimenting in class. The implication is that Slughorn allowed young Severus, and probably Lily, to have the use of a laboratory in which to do some out-of-hours research. Even if they used the Room of Requirement, the ingredients would probably have to be brought in and most likely obtained from Slughorn, so it's very likely that Slughorn favoured Severus and facilitated his research. That they have a good relationship is borne out by the fact that Snape comes to Slughorn's Christmas party, mingles with actual students and allows drunk!Slughorn to fling his arm round him, without trying to gnaw it off at the elbow.

Slughorn likes to add promising students to his collection, people who are likely to do well. Sometimes it's because they come from wealthy families but he also seems to have been very keen on Muggle-born Lily, so he doesn't care about blood-status or family position if a student has obvious talent and potential.

Also, even if Lucius was a conscientious prefect who took an avuncular interest in Slytherin first years, you have to wonder why he would forge a connection with a much younger, half-Muggle, working-class boy when in later life he would claim to be strongly opposed to magic-to-Muggle marriages. This comes up in Beedle: Lucius wrote to Dumbledore demanding that all books which showed marriage between wizards and Muggles should be removed from Hogwarts in case they encouraged Draco to "sully the purity of his bloodline". Even if Lucius's interest was predatory, young Severus would be a peculiar choice of victim.

Everything falls into place if we assume that young Snape (and probably Lily too) was a member of the Slug Club, and entered Lucius's orbit there as one of Slughorn's rising stars: one to whom Slughorn granted special laboratory privileges. His unpopularity with the crowd in the underpants scene would then be due not to his being scorned and friendless, but to his being perceived, and resented, as a Teacher's Pet - a male Hermione who hadn't had the luck to make friends with a popular Quidditch star whose reflected glory might have given him protection.

This is an unusual one in that it is fairly strongly supported by canon - just not as strongly as is assumed in fanon.

It's canon that Snape's mother was sour-looking even before her marriage. What seems to be Snape's father is seen shouting at what seems to be his mother in front of a very upset infant-or-early-primary-school-age Severus. He is sent out scruffy and unkempt in ridiculous-seeming, mismatched hand-me-down clothes. He tells Lily that his father doesn't like magic, or anything much, and he is tense and stressed about the situation at home. At King's Cross, when he is preparing to leave for Hogwarts for the first time and ought to have been quite bouncy and keen, he stands next to his mother with his shoulders hunched, suggesting he is either in pain or he expects her to hit him or shout at him.

As an adult he seems to have a tense, watchful manner which could mean he grew up being randomly attacked, although it could just be the result of being bullied, or of his precarious position as spy. I'm inclined to think he really is an abuse survivor, because he isn't put off by Lily's frequent coldness or by Dumbledore's occasional outbreaks of outright emotional abuse, he doesn't seem to understand why Lily is upset that Petunia is angry with her, and the fact that he seems to care a lot about his students, or at least about their physical safety, doesn't cause him to be pleasant to them. This all suggests that he comes from the sort of family where people are randomly unpleasant to their nearest and dearest, without it terminating their relationships.

If there was that sort of random aggression in his family, we don't know whether it was physical or just shouting.

If he was a beaten child, though, then as with Vernon it would go some way to explain his verbally aggressive manner to his students. It would mean that he had a kind of broken thermostat for aggression, and felt that so long as he wasn't actively hitting anybody (and the only time we ever see him lay hands on a student in anger is to pull Harry out of his Pensieve) he was being pleasant.

This is supported by an article on Pottermore entitled The etymology of Defence Against the Dark Arts professor names. The canon status of this article is intermediate, as it's one of the "lists of facts" essays which was probably not written by Rowling herself, but at the same time it's a thorough, detailed piece, not just filler as some of these lists are. It describes Snape as having had a "desperately lonely and unhappy childhood ... with a harsh father who didn’t hold back when it came to the whip".

There's also the fact that he seems to be looking for a father figure, and isn't a great picker. As a student he becomes a Potions star, the same subject taught by his head of house Professor Slughorn. It may be that he already knew he was fascinated by potions as a boy, and wanted to be in Slytherin in order that the then Potions master would be his house father. The fact that he doesn't seem to know that it's unlikely that Muggle-born Lily will be Sorted to Slytherin suggests that it is not his mother's house and he doesn't know much about it, and wanting to have the Potions master for a house father would explain why he was nevertheless so keen to get in. Slughorn was probably fairly satisfactory as a father substitute, but after Severus leaves school he attaches himself first to Voldemort and then to Dumbledore - both at least potentially abusive towards him, but that doesn't seem to put him off, suggesting that he's used to it.

It's also been suggested that the fact that young Sev seems to wear long-sleeved, often heavy clothes even in hot weather may be meant as a hint that he is concealing bruises on his arms.

Nevertheless, if you ignore Pottermore, it's perfectly possible to give Snape a canon-compatible family background in which his mother is tired and irritable and his father depressed, but no worse than that. The ridiculous clothes he wears as a child could just mean that he, or his mother, is trying to approximate wizard robes using Muggle clothes.

Some Potterverse characters do use their father's first name as a middle name - Harry James Potter, William Arthur Weasley - but Remus John Lupin's father's name was Lyall, according to Pottermore, and there's no canon evidence that Snape even has a middle name.

It's even possible that he has a middle name, and it's Severus. He might have a regular Muggle-type first name for use in the Muggle world (possibly even an embarrassingly old-fashioned one, such as Clarence) and Severus might have been a name which, as a child, only the few people who were in the know about magic would use - hence his smile when Lily called him by that name.

It's canon that Snape has some kind of friendship or close working relationship with the Malfoys which probably began at school. There is nothing in the books to say that he is Draco's godfather: it's certainly possible, but his concern for the boy could just be because he is a family friend and a conscientious Head of House.

Somebody I know, who comes from a "showbiz" family and claims to have known Tom Felton well as a teenager (and I've no reason to doubt that this is true), once told me that Tom told her that JK Rowling had told him, as part of the background to his character, that Snape was indeed Draco's godfather. This is far too tenuous a chain of evidence to be considered canon, but it's suggestive.

The casting of Alan Rickman - who was a superb and very emotionally affecting actor and by all accounts a thoroughly nice person, but more than twenty years older than Snape and a couple of stone heavier - has created the impression of Snape as this masterful middle-aged figure. But canon Snape is only thirty-one when Harry first meets him, skinny and intense. We know he's meant to be quite skinny because he's described as having a thin face, and Rowling's own drawings show that by this she means he has a bony, hollow-cheeked face, rather than a narrow one.

Sadly this is all down to Rickman, although there's nothing in canon to say Snape doesn't have a sexy voice. We aren't told. He is typically described as snapping, snarling, hissing, whispering, shouting, even howling - but his voice is also at times described as icy or silky, so it could be Rickmanesque, at least some of the time.

The idea that Snape's voice is curlingly sarcastic may be both true and misleading. It's Pottermore canon that Snape comes from the Midlands, and many people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic to outsiders even when it isn't meant to be. Snape may have become genuinely sarcastic in part because everybody just assumed he was being sarcastic anyway, and he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.

Fwiw John Nettleship, Rowling's Chemistry teacher on whom Snape is mainly based, was a superb, award-winning baritone singer in the slightly operatic Welsh manner, but he came originally from Nottingham and had a soft and strangely furry speaking voice, described by an American friend as sounding like Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films.

Snape is described in canon as having a thin face and a hooked nose. This is usually taken (including by me, initially) to mean that his face is narrow and hatchet-like and that he has a Roman nose - that is, one with a pronounced bend at the bridge.

ink sketch of Snape striding across in front of three students with cauldrons and pointed hats

However, a "thin" face can mean two different things. Rowling's own drawings suggest that she means Snape to have a squarish but very bony, hollow-cheeked face, rather than a narrow face.

As for his nose, a hooked nose can be a Roman or "aquiline" nose but it can also mean a straight nose which is turned down at the tip, and the latter meaning is probably the commoner one here in the UK. Rowling has drawn Snape at least four times, slightly different each time. One drawing - the least accomplished and sketchiest - shows him with a classic Roman nose (as well as a grotesquely massive, almost "chibi" head and tiny T. rex arms), as does a rather more accomplished drawing showing Snape, complete with bristling stubble, striding up and down in front of the Potions class.

ink sketch of Snape clasping a high-collared cloak across his chest

One, quite polished artistically but clearly intended to be cartoonish rather than realistic, shows him with an immensely long, needle-pointed nose with a slight bend at the bridge.

pencil sketch of Snape, arms folded, standing behind Ron and giving Harry a sour look

The fourth drawing, which is much more realistic and detailed (including more stubble), shows him with a longish, mostly straight nose with a bent tip. In this drawing she has essentially shown Snape as John Nettleship, except that John's nose ended in a humorous blob like an opossum's, and was only slightly hooked (in the sense of being deflected down at the tip).

Viktor Krum is described as looking like a bird of prey so he probably has an aquiline nose (= bent at the bridge). His nose is described as prominent once, hooked once and curved three times. This suggests that while JK does sometimes use "hooked" to describe an aquiline nose it's not her term of choice for this sort of shape, so when she calls Snape's nose hooked she probably (although not definitely) means hooked down at the tip, as is normal here.

Snape is described in fanfiction as having onyx eyes so often that it's arguably moved from cliché to fanon. It's canon that Snape's eyes are very black (one of the few points in which he differs physically from John Nettleship, whose eyes were grey) - the problem lies in whether "onyx" is an appropriate way to describe a black object.

You often see cheap jewellery described as "onyx" and containing a plain black shiny stone, which is presumably where the first fanwriter to use the term "onyx eyes" got the idea, but in fact the stone used in this jewellery is nearly always agate which has been artificially dyed black. Agate and onyx are both banded forms of chalcedony but onyx has tight parallel bands, whereas the banding in agate is more random (and it's cheaper).

photograph of a stone egg made of smudgily-banded green and cream onyx

Genuine black onyx does exist, although it is nearly always striped with noticeable white veins. But onyx comes in a wide variety of colours. Onyx whose main colour is red or a deep tan is often referred to as sardonyx, and the situation is confused by the fact that banded calcite is often wrongly described as onyx, but generally speaking "onyx" is used to refer to all chalcedony with tight parallel bands, and it's more likely to be either green or tan with off-white stripes, rather than black. Horace Slughorn has onyx eyes. Snape's eyes can properly be likened to jet (always black) or obsidian (usually black), but not to onyx (usually streaky grey-green and off-white).

Luna Lovegood seems to be almost invariably described in fanfiction as having definitely blue eyes, perhaps because the actress who plays her in the films does. In the books, however, her eyes are described as protruberent and as being pale, misty and silvery. It's possible they are a very light, muted blue or green or even violet, but "silvery" sounds more as if they are grey, or a blue so pale as to be almost white.

The idea that Remus Lupin has wolf-like, yellow or amber eyes is pure fanon. If you go by the original editions of the books alone then it's an idea which is arguably canon-compatible, since his eye-colour is not specified in the books. Yellow-eyed humans do exist - but they are however very rare. That I'm aware of I've seen two in my life, both male, both redheads, both - weirdly - working in the same shop at different times, although they were not related. You could say that the assumption must be that Remus does not have yellow eyes, since if he did they would be unusual enough to be noted, as they are for Rolanda Hooch.

The later, special illustrated Limited Edition of the books includes a picture of a Ministry file about Remus, which states that his eyes are in fact green. It's a matter of taste whether you consider an illustration to be canon or not. The illustrations in the initial US editions, giving Snape a goatee beard, are not considered canon but an illustration which contains text is a little different, and could be compared to the lists of borrowers and readers' hand-written notes in the Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them booklets, which are considered canon. I don't know whether it's known whether Jo Rowling provided the information shown on Remus's Ministry ID sheet or not.

It's usually assumed that Snape's hair is markedly long whenever he appears, but the evidence for this in the books isn't clearcut. JK Rowling has done at least four drawings of Snape [see: Snape has a narrow face and a Roman nose], all showing him wearing a high-collared "Dracula" cloak which is modelled on a real coat belonging to John Nettleship, Rowling's real-life Chemistry master. In one of these drawings his hair seems to be very long and trailing down his back (although if it is it seems to be emerging through the back of his collar - this is the least well-thought-out of the drawings). In one it is crammed inside his collar in a way which suggests that if it were hanging straight it would be just past his shoulders. In two it is bobbed at a point midway between his jawline and his shoulders. Rowling has admitted that Snape is mainly based on John Nettleship, whose hair when she knew him was worn in smooth wings and ranged from about half an inch above the jaw to about an inch above the shoulder.

As a young child, before Hogwarts, Snape's hair is said to be overlong and poorly cut. As a teenager his hair is said to be "jumping" as he walks, which suggests it's longish but above the shoulder, otherwise weight and friction would hold it still. When he defects to Dumbledore in 1980 his hair is "straggling".

In the first book, when Harry first meets Snape, his hair is never described in any way which suggests that it is long, which moderately suggests that it isn't. By the start of Harry's second year he has shoulder-length hair, so if it wasn't already long when Harry first met him, he must have been growing it since partway through the first book (unless he grew it magically). His hair is also described as long early in third year. It seems unlikely he would chop it short just to grow it again almost immediately, so it's reasonable to assume that it remained long throughout second year and into the start of third year.

In books four and five, however, his hair is merely described as forming curtains, which frame and sometimes cover his face. His hair must be at least around chin-length and very mobile but we don't know if it's any longer, and as with the "jumping" hair, it's probably no longer than just above the shoulder, otherwise it wouldn't swing freely across his face.

He has long curtains of hair in the Spinner's End scene at the start of HBP - so his hair must be just above the shoulder - and long hair when Harry sees him at the start of the autumn term. His hair length isn't mentioned again until just before the final battle, when it again forms curtains of unspecified length.

So, it's perfectly canon-compatible to assume that Snape's hair is just above the shoulder throughout his adult life, but the idea that it must be so is to some extent fanon. It's equally canon-compatible to say that his hair was a bit below the jaw when he was young, but at some point after his defection he cut his hair short and it was still short when Harry met him. He stopped cutting his hair partway through Harry's first year and grew it out to shoulder-length, where it remained for a year, or possibly grew a bit longer. Some time after the start of PoA he trimmed it back to a little below the jaw and it stayed there until partway through OotP when he let it grow down to just above the shoulder again, where it was during the summer of 1996, and then further down right onto his shoulders where it was in early autumn. Some time between early autumn 1996 and spring 1998 he cut it back up to just below the jaw.

No explanation is given as to why Snape's hair always seems greasy - personally I've tended to assume that it was a magical manifestation of his own low self-esteem, just as Harry's resolutely untidy hair is a manifestation of his defiance. Other possibilities are that he avoids any kind of soap which might get into his mouth, because it reminds him of when James forced soap into his mouth on the day he lost Lily (so we are to understand that the bullying has scarred his entire life), or that he simply never got into the habit of washing his hair every day because he grew up in a house that had no bathroom and just a cold tap.

There are some common ideas in Snape fandom which turn up often enough to qualify as semi-fanon, and which attempt to explain away the greasy hair as not greasy, or at least not due to poor hygeine. In some ways this is irritating, because part of the point about Snape in the books is that an awkward, ugly child, a scruffy, ill-favoured man can nevertheless be a great romantic hero. However, all these ideas do have some actual support.

Rowling has admitted that Snape is inspired by her own Chemistry master and Head of Science, John Nettleship, and John fitted Snape's description closely, except that his long nose ended in an amusing blob rather than a hook, and his eyes were grey. Other than that, he was thin and intense with long straight black hair which fell in wings either side of his face, a fierce manner, fishbelly-white skin and snaggly teeth. Although it's not mentioned in the books, Rowling even draws Snape as wearing a cloak with a distinctive high "Dracula" collar which is actually the collar of a coat which John wore when she knew him, and which probably prompted the comparison between Snape and a giant bat. But John was actually strikingly handsome, in a hungry, Gothy sort of way, especially at the age that Rowling knew him, and fastidiously clean. His bad-tempered manner and scruffy appearance at that time were mainly due to a combination of acute insomnia and being so insanely busy at work that he barely had time to pee, let alone to tidy his hair and scrape off his five o'clock shadow.

Also, irritatingly, the fact that Snape's hair is described as "jumping" when he is a teenager and as swinging in curtains across his face as an adult kind-of supports the common fanon idea that his hair isn't greasy at all, but very clean and fine and so shiny that it can be mistaken for oily. The cleaner and finer the hair, the more mobile it is. His hair is presumably intended really to be greasy, since so much emphasis is placed on this in the books, but if it really is as greasy as Harry thinks it is then the fact that it also seems to be very mobile is problematic. Possibly Snape is, like John, fastidiously clean and washes his hair every day, but like Harry's roadkill haircut the greasiness always comes back in a few hours. When Harry looks at him and sees his hair as jumping, or as moving in curtains across his face, it's just been washed, and when he looks at him and sees "greasy" it's later in the day. At the very least he must wash it or spell it clean often enough to explain the many incidents where Harry sees it as freely-moving curtains.

The idea which one occasionally sees in fanart, b.t.w., in which Snape is portrayed with heavy features and a little beard, isn't even derived from the films. It belongs solely to the illustrations included in some American editions, and is completely unsupported in canon.

This derives purely from the films: in the books we're just told that Lucius's hair is sleek and blonde. His hair probably isn't long in the books, or certainly not as spectacularly long as it is in the films, because if it was it would have been remarked on, and it certainly doesn't have the slightly fluffy texture it has in the films.

Note incidentally that in DH Lucius and Draco are described as looking "extraordinarily alike", so anything which is said about Draco's appearance, other than his height, clothes and haircut, also applies to Lucius.

Thanks to Viola Forkman of Quora for pointing this one out. Fanart and fanfiction nearly always portrays Teddy as having turquoise hair, but all we're told in the books is that he briefly turns his hair turquoise as a baby, as he feels his way into being a Metamorphmagus, and it's only one of several colours he experiments with.

A recent spate of online comments have proposed that Snape has sallow, greasy skin, long black hair, black robes and a large, hooked nose because he is a thinly-veiled anti-Semitic caricature. A well-known essay entitled Taming the Prince also famously claimed that Snape had long hair and wore a nightshirt because Rowling wanted to "feminise" him in order to get control over him (although why being feminine should make him more controllable is anybody's guess).

photo of John Nettleship wearing hig-collared coat

John Nettleship in December 1978, around the time he was teaching Jo Rowling

Snape has an unhealthy skin-tone, long black hair, a big nose, snaggly teeth and black robes because he is lifted almost neat from John Nettleship, Rowling's Chemistry teacher, who had pale and sometimes sallowish skin, long black hair,

bare head and shoulders photo of John Nettleship in a deckchair, grinning

John Nettleship sunbathing circa 1980, grinning at one of his sons

a big nose, snaggly teeth and black robes. Rowling even draws Snape as wearing a cloak with a high "Dracula" collar which is the collar of a hippy coat John wore when she knew him. According to himself he did also have greasy skin and hair when Rowling knew him, even though he was fastidiously clean, because he was very run down due to chronic insomnia. The only things she's changed in Snape are eye-colour and the end of his nose: John's eyes were grey and his nose ended in a humorous blob, although it was slightly hooked in the British sense of being deflected down at the tip.

It's quite true that JKR has exaggerated Snape's nose and makes great play of him being ugly, even though John himself was very handsome in a bony, Goth sort of way (although he probably didn't look his best when Rowling knew him, owing to the afore-mentioned chronic insomnia). However, if JKR wanted Snape to be ugly then exaggerating how hooked his nose is is an obvious way to go, because it conforms to the traditional idea of a witch or wizard. Snape seems to be the only character credited with greasy skin but all his other stereotypically witch-like features occur in other characters as well, although not necessarily all at once.

Dumbledore's nose is repeatedly described as very long, and is also very crooked. Viktor Krum is described in terms very similar to Snape. McGonagall has jet-black hair and a long pointed nose and beady eyes (colour not specified). Madame Maxime has "a handsome, olive-skinned face, large, black, liquid-looking eyes and a rather beaky nose." Ron is another one with a markedly long nose, and Hagrid has black-beetle eyes. Sirius has long black hair, "waxy" skin and yellow teeth, although his eyes are grey. Madame Pince is a thin woman with sunken cheeks, parchment-like (so presumably yellowish) skin, a long, hooked nose and a shrivelled face, who "looked like an underfed vulture". Augusta Longbottom has a "rather bony" nose, although we're not given much detail on her appearance.

cartoon of a witch on a broomstick, accompanied by a pet albatross, being greeted by a committe of a female teacher and several schoolgirls holding a banner which reads 'Welcome to our new Science Mistress'

Also, we know that Rowling reads the St Trinian's books and/or watched the films, because Umbrage and Tonks are the names of teachers at St Trinian's. One of the St Trinian's cartoons shows the school welcomong a new Science Mistress who is a Snape-like witch on a broomstick, with a very large, curved nose.

As to why Rowling felt obliged to make Snape ugly when John was so handsome, you could base all kinds of psychological speculation on this, but it may just be a necessary plot point (or a cunning allusion to Cyrano de Bergerac, that famously huge-honkered romantic). Hogwarts began life as a series of stories which JK told to her classmates at Wydean, lampooning their own teachers - which is why most of the staff at Hogwarts are identifiably based on real people at Wyedean. So Snape began as a lampoon of handsome, Gothy John.

Harry, however, was probably a late addition, and the Marauders must have come later still. Then she needed the Marauders to have bullied young Severus in a vicious, spiteful way - and if he had been obviously handsome, as John was, it would alter the dynamic and make it clear that the Marauders were acting out of jealousy. That is, she's said at interview that James was indeed motivated partly by his jealousy of Severus's friendship with Lily, but if Severus had been handsome James's jealousy would have been too obvious, and Snape would probably have ended up less bitter and damaged than the plot requires him to be. And whatever the reason JK chose to uglify Snape, the basics of his appearance belong to a lapsed Anglican choirboy with leanings towards goddess-worship, not to some anti-Semitic caricature.

The goblins we see in the films, however, really are a grotesque anti-Semitic caricature - although that's the fault of Warner Bros, not of Rowling, whose canonical goblins are very different.

While we're at it, here in the U.K. the nightshirt is, like the kilt, generally regarded as a very masculine garment, since it leaves the genitals so readily available - and we know Rowling does think like that because there was that gag in GoF about the old boy who liked a healthy breeze round his privates. Evidently Snape likes one too. And even if you think Snape has a slightly feminine vibe that too comes from life: John was as straight as it is humanly posible to be, and quite fit and muscular when not dying of cancer, but he had a very slight, almost girly bone-structure and generally preferred female company to male.

Hogwarts students wear regular Muggle-type school uniforms with academic gowns over the top.

The grey uniforms with trousers or gymslips and school ties belong to the films. In the books the students wear black robes, plus pointed hats (even in the classroom, according to Rowling's own drawings). When they put these robes on on the train, we're told they simply take their jackets off and then put the robes on over whatever they are wearing, which in Harry's case means Muggle attire. We don't know whether they continue to wear other clothes under their robes while at school - it probably depends on how cold it is. Sixteen-year-old Snape, on a bright June day, seemed to be wearing nothing under his robes except underpants. Rowling's own drawings suggest that she thinks of the robes as floor-length, dress-like and pulled on over the head, so not showing much if anything of whatever the student may be wearing underneath.

There is a mystery in the books in that students seem able to tell at a glance what house someone is in, but we're never told how (except in the case of prefects, who wear pin-on badges), and their first-year robes are bought before they know what house they're going to be in. Perhaps house-elves sew appropriately-coloured piping or embroidered patches onto their robes once they've been Sorted, but if so we aren't told about it, and there's no mention of the uniforms and ties seen in the films which, if they existed, would be on Harry's summer shopping list for Diagon Alley.

There is, however, a strange anomaly in OotP, where Draco says "Weasley, your shirt’s untucked", and takes points because of it. This is a school day - they've just come from Herbology - but Ron is clearly visibly wearing a shirt, and something to tuck it into. It was just before Easter (it was the day after the betrayal of the DA, which happened on the day of their last session before Easter)so the weather may have been cold, but that doesn't explain why Draco could see Ron's shirt.

Perhaps school robes can be of any design so long as they are plain and black. Percy in Rowling's drawings is wearing a pull-on one, but Ron's robe in fifth year opens at the front, so that if he chooses to wear anything underneath, it will be visible. Or maybe he just took his robe off for Herbology. Either way, whatever is worn under the robe isn't uniform, since it isn't specified on the shopping list.

This one is fairly weakly represented and as such I'm not sure if it really qualifies as fanon or not, but it does quite often turn up in fanfics by American authors, maybe because they have an idea of Britain derived from old films. This issue is discussed in more detail in my essay on British cultural references, but basically all the canon evidence indicates that Hogwarts is a state-run school which admits all students who are able to do magic (although there's a suggestion you can get thrown out of you're really bad at it), and which is not only free at point of use but actively subsidises poorer students and gives them grants for books and clothes. If you accept interview canon, Rowling actually stated in July 2015 that at Hogwarts "There's no tuition fees! The Ministry of Magic covers the cost of all magical education." It is conceivable that very well-off parents such as the Malfoys contribute towards their offspring's upkeep - food, blankets, laundry etc. - but if so we never see any evidence of it. We do see Lucius donating equipment to the school, and since nobody complains that this gives Slytherin an unfair advantage, it may be a regular thing that the Ministry provides the basic minimum of equipment, and the extras such as good brooms and luxurious couches are paid for by grateful (and successful) former students.

We are never told how the school is financed, other than this brief comment by JK - which isn't a whole lot of help because we're never told how the Ministry or St Mungo's are funded either, and we don't know whether the Ministry pays for the entire running of the school or just for the tuition aspect (= teachers' salaries and class materials). One possibility is that the school is funded out of a combination of bequests from former students and the revenue from lands and patents which it owns. Another is that the Ministry pays for the lot, and raises the money from a combination of taxation and using magic to cheat on the Muggle Stock Market.

There is quite a common assumption in fanon that because Harry gets his Hogwarts letter directly from Hagrid on his eleventh birthday, all Muggle-born students get their Hogwarts letter on their eleventh birthday - even if their birthday is on 31^st August. If you count back from Harry's birthday to the day the first copy of his Hogwarts letter landed on the mat, however, he got, or should have got, his letter on 24^th July, a week before his birthday. Hermione on the train says that she has "tried a few simple spells just for practice" and has "got a few extra books for background reading", and that she has been "asking around and I hope I’m in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best", all of which strongly suggests that she found out about the wizarding world only recently - not on her eleventh birthday which was nearly a year ago. So we can be confident that the first years' Hogwarts letters normally go out in mid to late July, regardless of when the student's birthday is - although one would hope that they would be sent out earlier to the sort of family where the parents would otherwise already have booked their children in for a fee-paying school, and started paying in advance.

If, however, you accept Pottermore as canon, a Pottermore essay on Minerva McGonagall's back story says that she received her Hogwarts letter on her 11^th birthday. From the dates Rowling has given on her website and on Pottermore, Minerva was borh on 4^th October 1935, so her birthday definitely wasn't in the summer holidays. So if you accept this as canon, in the past the letters did go out on people's birthdays.

I've heard somebody argue, as a reason why it was unfair of Snape to ask Harry about the contents of one of his set books, that Harry had only been to Diagon Alley and bought his textbooks two days before the first Potions lesson. This idea comes from the films, in which it appears that Harry goes straight from Diagon Alley to King's Cross. It's true that in GoF Molly Weasley indeed collected the children's set books for them from Diagon Alley only a few days before the start of term, probably due to the disruption caused by the World Cup. But in the books, in PS Hagrid takes Harry to shop for his new course books, uniform etc on his birthday, 31^st July, so that he has a whole month between buying his books and starting at Hogwarts, and we're told he spends that month taking a great interest in his new books and "[lying] on his bed reading late into the night". In CoS they get their letters detailing the books they will need for the coming year a week after Harry arrives at the Burrow, which is about ten days after his birthday, and they buy the books the following week - so in mid August. In PoA Harry leaves the Dursleys' place and goes to Diagon Alley a week after his birthday, then spends "several days" settling in, then buys his books for the next year - so again, in mid August.

In OotP their booklists do indeed arrive on the very last morning before the start of term, and Molly has to dash to Diagon Alley to get them while the children are packing - but Ron says "Booklists have arrived. About time, I thought they'd forgotten, they usually come much earlier than this ...' In HBP they do their shopping only a few days after Harry's birthday. So we can safely say that by Harry's time first year Hogwarts letters, at least for those who hadn't known before that they were going to Hogwarts, come in mid to late July but the booklists for later years may come two or three weeks later. Shopping for the next year's course books and equipment is generally done in or around the first half of August.

Many foreign fen mistakenly believe Hogwarts to be in England, generally because they don't understand how the British Isles are laid out and which bit is which, and get England confused with Great Britain or the United Kingdom. It is, admittedly, a very complicated subject.

The British Isles are an archipelago of over six thousand islands off the northern edge of continental Europe. Some of them aren't much bigger than a front garden, but the two biggest are Great Britain (so-called to distinguish it from Little Britain, Brittany or Bretagne, a district of France settled by British refugess during the Dark Ages), which at nearly 600 miles long is the eighth-largest island in the world and functions as a mainland for the rest of the archipelago, and Ireland, which is about a third the size of Great Britain. No other islands in the group are anything like as big as these two.

Venn diagram showing how the British Isles, the UK, Eire etc. interrelate

Great Britain is split into three countries. The island has been described as looking like an old witch riding a pig. If so the witch's head, from the chin up, is Scotland, the pig's head is Wales and the rest is England. Cornwall - the western half of the pig's "foreleg" - is historically, culturally and linguistically distinct, with strong ties to Brittany, and even though it is administratively part of England it could be considered a separate country for some purposes.

The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland and Wales, the three countries of mainland Britain, plus about a fifth of the island of Ireland, at its north-east tip. The rest of the island, known variously as Southern Ireland (even though it includes the north-west of the island), the Republic of Ireland, Éire or just Ireland, is a wholly separate country with a separate government - even though it has an open border with the UK, and strong historical ties. The north-eastern bit which is part of the UK is usually called Northern Ireland, but is sometimes also called, confusingly, Ulster, even though it occupies only two-thirds of the historical province of Ulster and the rest is in the Republic of Ireland/Éire.

The terms "Britain" and "British" properly relate to Great Britain but they are often used, even by the British, to refer to the whole of the UK including Northern Ireland.

In addition, Great Britain and Ireland are surrounded by several secondary archipelagos and largeish islands with significant populations. The Orkney and Shetland Islands, tiny, isolated Fair Isle and the Hebrides are part of Scotland. The Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles are part of England.

The Isle of Man, in between Great Britain and Ireland, and the Channel Islands between England and France, however, have a peculiar status. They are known as Crown Dependencies and are not technically part of the UK, or even of the Commonwealth or the European Union, and function as tax havens; but their defence and foreign policy are run by the UK. The Channel Islands are further divided into two wholly separate mini governments called bailiwicks - the Bailiwick of Jersey, which contains Jersey alone, and the Bailiwick of Guernsey which includes Guernsey itself, Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jehou, Lithou and various smaller islands.

Strictly speaking, the British Islands are all the islands which come under the UK, plus the Crown Dependencies, and the British Isles are the British Islands minus the Channel Islands but plus Southern Ireland. Because of the association of the term "British" with Great Britain and hence with the UK, however, some Irish people object to being told that Ireland is part of the British Isles - even though geographically it clearly is. This is a bit like the argument about whether Canadians are Americans or not - Canada is part of the continent of North America but the term "American" has become associated with the US.

So, Hogwarts is in Scotland, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Islands and the British Isles but it is not in England. We know that Hogwarts is in Scotland, incidentally, not only because iirc Rowling has said so, but from the books. In CoS the flying car follows the Hogwarts Express north from London and passes Peebles, which is quite far into Scotland, so for Hogwarts to be on the British mainland and be anywhere other than Scotland, the train would have to do a U-turn. Also, the scribbled notes in the first edition of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them booklet refer to the centaurs as living in a forest in Scotland.

The very common fanon idea that the lake/loch in the Hogwarts grounds is called the Black Lake or the Dark Lake comes from the GoF film, only. The scriptwriters probably came up with this because its waters are repeatedly described as black or dark in the books. If you pay attention, however, it is always night when the surface of the lake is so described, or in one case the bare beginning of sunrise, with the sun just peeping above the horizon.

The waters in the depths of the lake are described as dark in daytime during the Tri-Wizard contest, but that's because the lake is "fathoms deep". When the daytime appearance of the surface of the lake is described, depending on the season and the weather it's variously said to be "chilled steel", iron-grey, periwinkle blue, "smoothly sparkling" and reflecting back dazzling sunlight. And it's in Scotland, so if it were called Black-anything it would be Black Loch, not Black Lake.

Incidentally, as from May 2016 I live in Slamannan, a village outside Falkirk. Although Slamannan has a population of only about 1,400 it has its own mini satellite, Limerigg, population a bit over 200, and Limerigg really does have an authentic Black Loch. Some feature of its position means that when the sky is overcast, the surface of the loch looks like polished coal.

We're told in the first book that "There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump." It's conceivable that the stairs which go somewhere different on Fridays do so by swinging through space, and in OotP there is a reference to students having to take a detour via "the swivelling staircase", so there is at least one. The height (in terms of number of storeys) to which the marble staircase from the Entrance Hall extends also varies unpredictably from book to book.

However, the idea that there are multiple giant wooden stairs which start in the Entrance Hall and turn randomly through space belongs only to the films. The only swivelling staircase which is mentioned in the books is somewhere near Umbridge's office. The stairs to the Entrance Hall are three- or possibly fourfold: steps from the lawn outside up to the main doors; stairs down to the dungeons; possibly also stairs to the kitchens and cellars; and a grand marble staircase to the upper floors. None of them so far as we know ever swivels.

In addition, the spiral stair which leads from the guardian gargoyle up to the Head’s office moves and carries the climber up the stairs, like a slow escalator. This is mentioned in GoF, OotP, HBP and DH, always with reference to somebody ascending rather than descending the stair. Possibly it was installed out of respect for Dumbledore’s great age.

There is a widespread assumption that the dungeons at Hogwarts must be frigid because they're underground. It's true that unless they are close to the cliff face, they will not be warmed by the sun as the castle above them potentially is. However, being warmed by the sun is seldom an issue in Scotland, except sometimes in the period from mid July to mid September, for most of which the students are not in residence to see it. In 2012 - admittedly an unusually overcast summer, even by Scottish standards - the Edinburgh area enjoyed just over one and a half hours of sunshine during the whole of the first ten days of July.

Rowling herself says in the lead-up to Harry's first Potions lesson that the dungeons are colder than the main castle, which must be where fandom got the idea - but this is right at the start of September, so the weather is probably still sunny and warm.

In reality, and if you factor out the warmth of direct sunlight, the deeper you go into the ground the warmer it gets, because of geothermal energy. Snape's office is probably quite cold because it's immediately below the castle floor (Harry and Snape can hear the argument over Trelawney's sacking, which is taking place in the Entrance Hall, through the ceiling of Snape's office) and so gets the worst of both worlds. But the deeper levels of the dungeons should never go below 4°C even if they never see a fire or a warming charm, whereas the rooms in the castle above them will be capable of dropping below freezing point if not actively heated.

In the books, the Yule Ball is a special occasion put on just for the Triwizard Tournament. However, if you want to include some equivalent of an American prom in your story, we are told that every year, a day or two before the end of the summer term, there is a Leaving Feast, and we are never told what happens there. This is the slot where you can place formal dances, presentation ceremonies and so on if you need them.

This is another thing which exists only in the films. In the books Chocolate Frogs are just frog-shaped chocolate bars, although there is a sweet called a Peppermint Toad which creates a hopping sensation in the stomach after it is eaten.

In the films, all the Beauxbatons students who come to Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament are girls, and all the Durmstrang students we see are boys. This appears superficially to be canon (and I got caught by this one myself), since every named Beauxatons student in the books, and every Beauxbatons student Harry speaks to, is a girl, and the same with Durmstrang and boys.

In fact, however, there are several passing mentions of Beauxbatons boys at Hogwarts during GoF, and at least one reference to a Durmstrang girl. It's just that we never see Harry talk to one of them, or hear their names.

In PoA Remus says that Hermione is "the cleverest witch of your age I've ever met". In fanon this is often taken to mean that she is the brightest witch of her era - but in context it seems fairly clear that Remus means she is the brightest fourteen-year-old witch he's ever met. Otherwise, he would probably have said "... of our age". He's saying that she's very advanced for her age, but not necessarily that she's some over-arching genius.

On the other hand, Rowling would later say that Hermione's Chocolate Frog Card would indeed describe her as "the brightest witch of her age", but whether this is accurate, or the result of somebody in the Wizarding World also misinterpreting Remus's comment (which they might have learned about by interviewing Harry or Ron) is moot.

Canon Hermione genuinely seems to have a great gift for Charms and is able to adapt existing concepts in original and ingenious ways, although we do not know whether she can invent new spells from scratch. In Potions, however, she is far from the genius she is often portrayed as. She's very precise and produces good results by following the text-book, but she shows no innovation and is reluctant even to try out the mysterious Half-Blood Prince's suggestions. Snape complains that she parrots the text-book, rather than demonstrating her own understanding of the subject. If she is the brightest witch of her age it doesn't bode all that well for the IQ of the wizarding population, as it means there are no witches alive in the late 20^thC who have true genius and who would be capable of being a high-ranking research scientist or mathematician or artist.

[Plus it's a bit weird, given that JK ultimately wrote this claim and she says Hermione is herself.]

Hermione genuinely is described as biting her lip noticeably more often than anybody else is, but still only eight times in the whole series, and never more than twice in a year. So in canon it's something she does more often than other people, but still only occasionally - she doesn't constantly worry at her lip during almost every conversation, as so often portrayed in fanfiction. Harry and Ron are each described as biting their lips twice during the series, and Hagrid, Ernie Macmillan and Tom Riddle once.

During the making of the second Deathly Hallows film, Helena Bonham Carter, who was accustomed to playing Bellatrix, had to switch to playing Hermione pretending to be Bellatrix. Emma Watson said that she told Helena that the key to playing Hermione is that Hermione is very prim - which is one of the reasons why I say that the books and the films have to be treated as quite separate stories with separate characters.

Canon Hermione, book Hermione, is quite a robust girl. She was snogging an eighteen-year-old international sports star when she was fifteen, was highly amused by the old man at the World Cup who liked a healthy breeze round his privates (= genitalia), and roared with laughter at the Twins' story about Uncle Bilius who used to pull bunches of flowers out of his arse - although she did prevent Fred from completing that one too explicitly. During the scuffle in the Shrieking Shack she kicks Sirius in a place which is carefully not specified, but which causes him to let go of Harry at once. She's quite nannyish about always doing your schoolwork and not cheating at it, but she sometimes gives in and gives the boys the answers, and she cheats in other ways - e.g. Confunding Cormac so Ron will get his place on the team - and is willing to lie and steal and kidnap and even to damage library books to further what she considers to be good ends.

JK Rowling has said that Hermione is a self-insert - so she's modelled on the person who actually thought up the story about Uncle Bilius who pulled bunches of flowers out of his arse....

Hermione's birthday is on 19^th September, less than three weeks into the school year. Some fen initially applied what is presumably an American idea of where the cutoff point is for who goes into which academic year, and assumed that Hermione started at Hogwarts when she was ten. But Rowling has confirmed that the cutoff is 31^st August/1^st September and that Hermione started at Hogwarts when she was eleven, and turned twelve a few weeks later. She is almost a year older than Harry.

Hermione's use of the Time-Turner left her significantly older than her calendrical age.

There's a widespread belief that Hermione's use of the Time-Turner meant that afterwards she was months, even a year older than her calendar birthdate would suggest. She says she used it to attend several classes at once, and for the first two terms of the year she's taking all twelve subjects when normal students take nine. Around Easter she drops out of Divination, and at the end of the year she drops Muggle Studies. In subsequent years she does ten subjects and manages to fit them in without the use of a Time-Turner.

Hermione says she was given the Time-Turner right at the start of the year. Out of fifty-two weeks in the year, the whole of July and August are holidays, and according to the Lexicon's calculations term ended on the 18^th of June that year. In any case exams finished on the 9^th, according to the Lexicon, and once the exams were over Hermione had no need to use the Time-Turner (except to rescue Sirius later that day). There are also two-week holidays at Christmas and Easter. So that's sixteen weeks, less a couple of days, when Hermione was not using the Time-Turner, and thirty-six weeks when she was. For twenty-eight of those weeks she was doing three extra subjects, and for the remaining eight weeks, two.

For each extra subject, she needs to fit in three hours per week in the classroom, plus time for study and homework. Most students take nine subjects and I doubt if they are expected to work more than nine hours a day on average, so that's not more than an average of seven hours per week spent on each subject, three in the classroom and four on study and homework, so Hermione needs to gain around seven hours for each extra subject she is taking. She probably doesn't need to do all that on the Time-Turner - in subsequent years she manages to do one extra subject without one - but if we take the most extreme position and assume that she does use the Time-Turner for seven hours a week for each subject, and let's say nine hours for extra sleep to make up for all the extra study, that's thirty hours a week for twenty-eight weeks, and twenty-three hours for eight weeks. That works out at forty-three days, or six weeks - and that's the maximum it could be.

In fact, given that in later years she does one extra subject without needing a Time-Turner, and her tendency to work herself too hard, she may be sleeping less and adding fewer study-hours. She's more likely to have added four or five weeks to her life than six.

Also, Hermione spent five or six weeks in second year Petrified by the Basilisk. No date is given for the Easter holidays that year but in the real world Easter Sunday was on the 11^th of April, so school should have resumed on the 17^th. The Gryffindor-Hufflepuff match, after which Hermione was Petrified, seems to be on the following Saturday, so the 24^th, and the Petrified students were revived three days before the start of exams, so in very late May or early June. During that time Hermione certainly appeared to be in some sort of stasis during which she probably didn't age - we don't see any attempts being made to feed her, for example, which suggests her metabolism is on hold. Those five or six weeks counter the four to six weeks of extra ageing caused by the Time-Turner, so overall the Time-Turner balanced by the Petrification only leaves her at most a week older than she would otherwise have been.

Since we see dittany being used to treat a bite from Nagini, it is often said that Hermione left Snape to die when she could have saved him, if only she had used her supply of dittany on him.

There are several points to consider here. The first is that vipers - which, from her description, is what Nagini is - can choose whether to bite with venom or not. It seems likely, from the way Harry reacted when Nagini bit him, that she withheld her venom in order to bring him alive to Voldemort, and therefore all Hermione did with dittany when she healed Harry was to seal a simple bite-wound, such as one might get from a dog or a crocodile. We do not know, therefore, whether dittany would help in cases of actual snake venom - it isn't mentioned as being used on Arthur Weasley when he received a venomous bite.

Given that Voldemort wanted to kill Snape, and do so rapidly so he could (as he thought) gain the Mastery of the Elder Wand, it seems very likely that Nagini would have bitten Snape with venom, as well as tearing a hole in his neck. Now, there are three unrelated plants which are all called dittany, all of which are believed to have healing properties. We know that Hermione started out with a small bottle of dittany essence, and that she used it to heal Ron's Splinch injury, Harry's bite, and widespread burning and scorching on three people. We do not know whether the type of dittany Hermione was carrying could have helped treat snake venom, but if it could, it was presumably Dittany of Crete, since that is the form of dittany associated with power over serpents. Dittany of Crete is both foreign and rare, so if that was what Hermione had it's unlikely she would have been able to replenish her bottle of the stuff, so treating their post-Gringotts scorches had probably used up all she had had left. If on the other hand the dittany she had was one of the more common ones, she might well have replenished her bottle and it might have sealed Snape's wound and prevented further blood-loss, but it wouldn't have helped with the venom.

If they could have got him to St Mungo's he might have been saved, since St Mungo's know what saved Arthur. But St Mungo's was in enemy hands. Also, they presumably wouldn't have been able to Apparate from the Shack, because if Apparition to the Shack were possible it could be used as a back door into Hogwarts, and Hogwarts' anti-Apparition wards seem to work both ways. In any case the Shack is just on the edge of Hogsmeade and they had established a few hours previously that the Death Eaters had set wards to prevent anyone from Apparating out of Hogsmeade, and they had no definite information that those wards had been lifted. We don't know whether the students who were evacuated via Hogsmeade were Apparated or Flooed out, but I don't think the Trio knew either.

So, to take Snape to St Mungo's they would have had to carry him away from the Shack first, quite possibly a couple of miles away from the Shack depending on how far into the area around Hogsmeade the Death Eaters' anti-Apparition wards extended, at a time when time was of the essence and he appeared to be already dead, to reach a point whence they could Apparate him to a hospital currently held by Death Eaters. Much the same applies to carrying him back through the tunnel to Madam Pomfrey - it would have taken a long time, and if he wasn't dead when they started he almost certainly would have been by the time they got to the hospital wing, so they would just have traded a quick death from bloodloss for a slow, painful one from venom.

They could perhaps have Transfigured him into some small portable object and than carried him to Poppy that way, assuming that that would have put the process of dying on hold, but we don't really know whether Transfiguring a living person into an inanimate object is survivable or not (was Slughorn actually self-Transfigured into an armchair, or was it just some sort of Glamour?) and in any case there wasn't really time to think of it. As soon as they drew near to the injured Snape he gave them instructions, which they obeyed, and between their completing his instructions by collecting the memory cloud and Snape's dying (or at least losing consciousness) there were only a few seconds: not really time for three teenagers with no medical training to do anything useful. To save him they would probably have had to disobey him, and he was a soldier - he had a right to choose to spend his last few minutes doing his duty instead of being saved. And choice it probably was, because he could if he had so wished have used his last remaining breaths to instruct the children on how best to save him, if he thought they had a chance of succeeding, and if he cared enough about his own survival to set it before his duty to the Cause.

Hermione cares, usually, about people who she feels are downtrodden, although sometimes in a rather patronising way. She assumes that she must know what is best for the house elves better than they do, perhaps because their small size and fractured way of speaking makes her see them as child-like, without regard to the fact that they are from a different culture and even a different species from herself, and may have quite different needs. It seems to me that the house elf bond is a kind of marriage between a house elf family and a wizard family: it's reasonable to campaign for elves to have the right to divorce their wizard counterparts if the relationship has gone irretrievably sour, and to be given some pocket money, but by attempting to trick the Hogwarts elves into receiving clothes without their consent Hermione is in effect trying to force divorce onto partners who are happily married; and they regard being formally paid for their contribution to the "marriage" roughly the way most human women would react to the idea that their husband ought to pay them for sex. You might possibly get them to accept a little money by saying "You are a member of this family so you are entitled to a share in its income", but to pay them is to say "You are not a member of this family, but just a servant".

Hermione thinks about ethics more than the boys do - not that that's hard - and wants to help Montague, when he is seriously injured by the Twins, by telling Madame Pomfrey and his parents exactly how he was hurt so that they will be better able to treat him. But she lets the boys talk her into leaving Montague in medical danger, rather than risk getting the Twins into trouble for their near-fatal cruelty and recklessness. I'm not sure whether she's better than the boys, because she at least knows that she should help Montague, or worse than them, because she knows what the right thing to do is, but doesn't do it.

Her intrinsic nature is quite aggressive. When Draco is nasty about Hagrid, her response is to hit him. In the Shack, she kicks Sirius hard enough to make him let go of Harry even though he's fighting for his life, and she bombards Ron with little birds for seeing other girls.

She is capable of being quite cold: when Peter is grovelling for mercy at her feet she tugs her robe out of his hands and steps back from him, and doesn't protest at the idea of Sirius and Remus executing him in cold blood - although she does make some effort to establish his guilt first, and turns her back so as not to see him die. When she and Harry and Ron accidentally knock Snape out her immediate concern is whether they will get into trouble rather than whether Snape is seriously hurt. She does later at least ask "in a small voice" what they are going to do with him, which is more interest than anybody else shows in his fate, but this is after he's been unconscious for about twenty minutes (unconsciousness due to head trauma and lasting more than ten minutes is considered to be potentially life-threatening).

Although she appears initially to be more concerned about school rules than the boys are, her attitude to the rules becomes more lax as soon as she becomes friends with Harry and Ron, and by second year she is conspiring with Harry to steal from Snape while Harry creates a distraction by causing a Potions accident which could quite easily have killed or permanently maimed one of his classmates (swelling somebody's head without the rest of them, for example, could easily have broken their neck). By fourth year she's become actively criminal, kidnapping a journalist and holding her prisoner for weeks until she agrees to stop writing for a year - with no apparent provision for how Skeeter is meant to feed herself for a year if she can't work. If she had shopped Skeeter to the Ministry for being an unregistered Animagus you could call it a citizen's arrest - but as it is she's a blackmailer who is complicit in covering up Skeeter's crime.

She sets up a spell which will scar for life (JKR has implied at interview that it's permanent) the face of any student who betrays Dumbledore's Army, and she doesn't warn them in advance - so it seems intended to be a malicious punishment, not a deterrant. And facial scars are especially psychologically damaging and traumatising. It's not even a good way of identifying anybody who may be spying on the group long-term, since anybody who finds they have "Sneak" branded into their face will know at once that they've been rumbled, and will cut their losses and shop the group at once. Had she really wanted to identify traitors in their midst she would have been better to curse them to develop e.g. a small crescent-shaped pimple on their left earlobe - something which she would recognize, but they wouldn't even notice.

As it is, she afflicts Marrietta Edgecombe with major facial scarring which will require her to use makeup or a glamour every day for the rest of her life, to punish her for being more loyal to her own mother and her mother's employer than to a friend of a friend whom she barely knows and has no reason to trust. There's no suggestion that Hermione ever feels a moment's guilt about this. Rowling was asked about this scene and seemed to be gloating about the idea of a "traitor" being punished so probably Hermione, who is Rowling's self-insert, also thinks that she did a good thing by ruining a girl's face for life for being loyal to her mother. Translated into the real world I suppose the equivalent would be an acid-attack - the sort of thing which would earn the girl that did it a couple of years in prison - or primitive punishments involving branding letters on people's cheeks.

Of course, the wizarding world is primitive. Although Hermione's behaviour here is barbaric, it's taking place in a world where interpersonal violence and duelling are accepted in the way they were in the 18^thC, and people are doing well if all their body parts are still human and nothing is sprouting tentacles.

Wiping her parents' memories shows a disturbing ruthlessness, although it's arguably justified. If they love her, her parents might well be willing to lose even their memory of her, at least temporarily, in order to be sure that they can't be forced to betray her.

She's also not very good with animals. She loves Crookshanks but doesn't seem concerned at the idea that he might have killed her friend's pet; she states that she doesn't like horses; and when false!Moody is showing them the Unforgiveables, she is concerned about the fact that the spider's agony under Cruciatus is upsetting Neville, but doesn't seem to have any pity for the spider itself.

Also, to dismiss Firenze, a fully sentient person, with a casual remark about horses is rather speciesist - even if she's making a joke about the common enthusiasm of teenage girls for all things equine.

This is not to say that Hermione is a bad person - just that she's a long way from the wholly good angel of mercy she's often portrayed as in fanon. One of her best characteristics is that when she does decide to care about somebody downtrodden, her caring does not depend in any way on whether they are grateful to her, or even reasonably pleasant. We see this in her unfailing tolerance and kindness towards Kreacher, even when he is racially abusing her and calling her "Mudblood". It is possible that Rowling intends this to contrast with Lily's rejection of Severus and show that the present-day students are better than their predecessors, just as Harry's care for oddball Luna, his sorrow over the way people pick on her, contrasts with Sirius and James's persecution of oddball Severus. Hermione is also nice to Molly Weasley and very concerned about her when she may be in danger, even though Molly has not always been nice to her.

Remus has a polite, mild manner and so he is usually portrayed in fanon as being a thoroughly sweet and gentle person. Canon Remus is far more complex.

Firstly, the fact that he seems to find the idea of the suffering of the prisoners in Azkaban disturbing and unpleasant, even when they are genuinely guilty, and questions Harry's callous attitude to them, suggests that he genuinely is fairly kind, or at least not cruel, and that he does to some extent think about ethics. He says that he didn't have the guts at school to tell his friends to leave Snape alone and that their behaviour was out of order, and Sirius replies "you made us feel ashamed of ourselves sometimes ... that was something ..." which suggests that Remus did truly think that the persecution of Snape was wrong at the time, and occasionally had the courage to say so, and that he still thinks it was wrong - it's not just something he's saying to appease Harry.

At the same time, he encourages his class to practise repeatedly breaking the fingers of a captive Grindylow, which presumably causes it at least some pain. His is the first voice on The Marauder's Map to insult Snape as an adult, so presumably he had at one stage joined in quite enthusiastically with the bullying - and he was still going along with it at least to some extent when they made the Map, even though we know this was in fifth year when he was a prefect. It has to have been in fifth year, and very likely after he had nearly killed Snape, because the Marauders are already going by their Animagus names when they leave that insulting message built into the Map, and Remus says that they became Animagi in fifth year, and it was after that that they made the Map.

And although he sticks up for Snape to Harry - at least when Sirius isn't there - he seems unable to resist the temptation to needle him, just a little bit, if only by being offensively bland when he is lying about the Map. He doesn't see anything wrong with encouraging Neville to make Snape (his colleague, after all) a laughing stock by changing his Boggart into Snape in ridiculous women's clothes as opposed to, say, making it be Snape tripping over a mat, or picking his nose, which would have been equally defusing without exposing Snape to the same level of humiliation.

That whole business of the Boggart lesson is peculiar and was taking a huge risk with the welfare of the students. It was only by good fortune that somebody's Boggart wasn't "my uncle with an erection" or "the Aurors finding our illegal artefacts" or something else which would have brought extreme humiliation or family disaster or both. Nightfall Rising has pointed out that this scene was also not very long after the encounter with the Dementors on the train, which had forced everybody to relive terrible memories and ensured that those memories would be at the forefront of their minds; they believed that a mass-murderer was stalking the grounds; and the previous year they had been at the mercy of an unseen monster for months. There must have been a real risk of that class dissolving into mass hysteria: and of course, the whole class now knows that they can scare Ron with spiders.

It's canon that being a werewolf can cause behavioural changes even when in human form - Bill Weasley isn't even a true werewolf, he just has scars inflicted by one, but it changes his appetite so that he develops a taste for bloody steaks. So it may be that even in human form Remus has enough canine in him that he doesn't really understand humiliation, and doesn't understand the emotional damage that being forced to expose your deepest fear might cause his students, or the stress that having his image ridiculed in ridiculous women's clothes would cause Snape.

To be fair, it's very unlikely Remus knows that as a child Snape was jeered at for being so poor he had to wear his mother's old blouse, and given Neville's history it seems to me unlikely that Remus would have expected Snape to be Neville's Boggart. He probably expected Bellatrix or (if he knows about how Neville's family treat him) the life-threateningly abusive great-uncle Algie. It's possible that he had conceived the idea of dressing them in Augusta's clothes in advance, then couldn't think of anything else on the spur of the moment when it turned out to be Snape.

drawing of golden goblet containing blue liquid which is smoking

I don't see that Remus's reluctance to drink his Wolfsbane in Snape's presence is an indication of hostility towards Snape, as some people do - just hostility towards being nagged. We see that the Wolfsbane is very nasty and that Remus has to nerve himself up to drink it by taking a series of small sips before he knocks the rest back, and it seems to me natural that he would feel uncomfortable about doing so while Snape hovered at him as only Snape can.

Remus is not wholly mild or harmless or fair-minded. He verbally attacks Snape and calls him a fool for minding having just heard Sirius bragging about his attempted murder of Snape in fifth year and saying that he had deserved it (although of course Remus will probably use any weapon at that point to deflect Snape from feeding himself and Sirius to a Dementor). He is enthusiastically willing to collaborate with Sirius in executing Peter in cold blood as he begs for mercy and indeed seems to be the instigator, before even hearing any firm proof that it is Sirius who is telling the truth, and not Peter. He even rolls his sleeves up, as if he expects the execution to be a bloody one - in front of three children.

Of course, the full moon is up outside in the Shrieking Shack scene, and he hasn't taken his last dose of Wolfsbane, so it may be that he is feeling much more aggressive than usual - but in DH when Harry calls him a coward for running out on Tonks, he throws Harry bodily into a wall. This contrasts with Snape, who seems much more deeply upset and overwrought when Harry calls him a coward, but who restricts himself to giving Harry the magical equivalent of a slap. When Snape is accidentally thrown into a wall and knocked unconscious, Remus leaves him lying on the floor, bleeding from a head injury, and doesn't even bother to check his pulse for about twenty minutes. He then hands him, unconscious and helpless, into the care of Sirius who hates him, and who then causes or allows him to be injured further by repeatedly bumping his head against the ceiling. Remus at this point quite literally doesn't care much whether Snape lives or dies, although they are meant to be colleagues and Snape was injured while (however misguidedly) trying to protect students.

The key to canon Remus seems to be that he is genuinely fairly benevolent in intention, or at least not actively malevolent, but he is shifty, inclined to go along with anything done by people he loves, and morally lazy - as, indeed, you might expect a canine to be. As a boy, he apparently knew that what the others were doing to Snape was wrong but did very little to stop it, even when he was a prefect and it was his job to stop it. He also apparently did not tell the staff about The Marauder's Map, since it seems to be new to them in PoA, even though he was a prefect and the Map was being used to break school rules, and he condoned his friends' activites as illegal Animagi, and joined them in excursions which put innocent bystanders at risk of being bitten and infected, or even killed.

As a teacher he sides with Harry against Snape over the matter of the Map, even though at this point it's part of his job - the job for which he's accepting payment - to uphold the school rules and the dignity of the staff, and even though what he is helping to conceal is the fact that Harry has been wandering around the countryside unsupervised at a time when he and everybody else thinks that Harry is being stalked by a mass-murderer. [Actually Harry has the Cloak, so he isn't in much danger so long as he uses it, but Remus probably doesn't know that.] He at least does, to his credit, employ emotional blackmail to try to dissuade Harry from taking stupid risks.

It's not really surprising that Remus became an enthusiastic member of the Marauders' gang and a willing collaborator. Like working-class, half-blood Severus in Slytherin, half-blood werewolf Remus in Gryffindor was to some extent at the mercy of the arrogant pure-bloods he had to share a dormitory with, and he must have been both thrilled and relieved to find that they liked him and didn't want to chase him away with pitchforks. It's not surprising that, like Severus with Avery and Mulciber, he would go along with their misbehaviour and make excuses for it, so that they wouldn't stop liking him. But Remus is more fluid, and allows childhood conspiracy to segue into adult dishonesty.

We see in the Shrieking Shack that he lies about Snape in order to pacify Harry and Sirius, saying that the cause of the animosity between Snape and James was that Snape was jealous of James's success on the Quidditch pitch. We know that was a lie because Rowling has described James's treatment of Snape at school as "relentless bullying" and has said that the cause was at least partly James's sexual jealousy of Snape's friendship with Lily, and we see that James picked on Snape almost from the very moment he set eyes on him on the train, before they even arrived at Hogwarts. But it seems Remus will say whatever causes him the least trouble, at least when Sirius is around. This makes it all the more remarkable, and admirable, that he sticks up for Snape to Harry in HBP, even though it's clear that's not what Harry wants to hear; but when Sirius was around he was willing to treat Snape's very life as worthless, because Sirius did.

Worst of all, he has a nasty habit of putting other people into extreme danger for selfish reasons, and/or because he is an emotional coward, and then just telling himself that it will be OK. As it happens, it always is OK - but that doesn't absolve him of having gambled with other people's lives, unless he's a Seer who really does know in advance that it will be OK. And if he was a Seer, he wouldn't have believed Sirius to be guilty.

As a boy, he willingly ran around with his friends when he was in unmodified were form, and had many near misses where he came close to biting and infecting some innocent bystander, or even killing them. He could have told his friends he wouldn't do it because it was too risky; he could have told them he would only do it if they took him straight into the heart of the Forbidden Forest, well away from humans. But evidently he did neither of these things.

As an adult, by his own account he concealed the information that Sirius was an Animagus rather than confess his childhood rule-breaking to Dumbledore, despite the fact that he believed Sirius to be a mass-murderer who had come to Hogwarts to kill Harry, and even after Sirius had twice entered the school with a big knife.

silhouette of a young red stag, a reclining Newfoundland, a rat and a wolf with a blunt snout and a tufted tail

He told himself that Sirius wouldn't be able to get in again because the tunnels had been sealed; but even if that had been true, he knew that Sirius could get into the school grounds, and there was nothing to stop Padfoot from sauntering up to Harry on the lawn and ripping his throat out. As far as we know, at no point did he say to Harry, "If you see a large black dog in the grounds that isn't Fang, don't let it get close to you."

Yes, Remus has convinced himself that his near-misses as a boy will never become actual hits, that he will never actually infect or kill anybody and that Sirius (whom he still at that point believes to be a mass-murderer) won't break into the school again and won't get to Harry. He's not an outright villain - he's not deliberately endangering lives. But we have seen in real life where this kind of self-deluding laziness can lead.

Here in Scotland in summer 2015 the courts are examining the case of Harry Clarke, the driver of the Glasgow bin-lorry which mowed down and killed six people just before Christmas 2014, after the driver fainted at the wheel. Clarke, it has turned out, had a 40-year history of fainting fits, including at least one prior case of passing out at the wheel, but since this had never in the past led to any severe consequences he assured himself that it never would, and lied by both omission and commission in order to get the job driving the bin-lorry in which he then ploughed through a crowd of Christmas shoppers, when his - and their - luck finally ran out. It was only the fact that he was wrong about Sirius being a Death Eater which saved Remus from doing the same: had Sirius been what Remus thought him, the Trio might well have been already dead or, in Harry's case, parcelled up and on his way to meet Voldemort before Remus caught up with them in the Shack.

When he saw on the Map that his silence had backfired and that Padfoot had kidnapped Ron, he ran to save him, and so it was understandable that he left without drinking his last dose of Wolfsbane. But once they were all in the Shack and the situation had stabilized, he knew that the Scottish weather is very changeable and that just because it had been cloudy when he went down the tunnel, that didn't mean it was still cloudy. He knew that the full moon was up. He knew he hadn't taken his Wolfsbane. He knew he had the option of staying inside out of the moonlight while one of the others went back to the castle and fetched his Wolfsbane. He had even been bound by Snape and instead of accepting this for the sensible precaution it was, he had himself unbound. Then he walked out into the moonlight, unbound, and transformed in the presence of three children (one of them lame), an unconscious colleague, a handcuffed prisoner and a half-starved friend in no condition to fight, putting them all in extreme danger.

There may be mitigating circumstances in that case, including for his criminal callousness to Snape when he was dangerously injured. And yes, Snape was pretty callous to Remus in that scene, and wanted to feed him to a Dementor - but Snape sincerely believed that Remus was in league with a mass-murderer and was there to kill Harry, whereas Remus knew that Snape was there to protect students - in however confused and wrong-headed a fashion.

Then again, since Snape had been trying to get Sirius and Remus Kissed, while labouring under the delusion that they were what Barty Crouch would be the following year, it's perhaps understandable if Remus had mixed feelings about whether he actually wanted Snape to survive, and certainly preferred him to stay unconscious for the moment. He couldn't be completely sure that Snape wouldn't succeed, if he were conscious - and he had a right to protect his own life and that of his suddenly re-discovered friend, even if that friend was acting like a prick.

The fact that the moon was up and he hadn't taken his Wolfsbane may also have messed with his mind, even though he hadn't transformed yet. And/or, the fact that a werewolf and two people bearing the Dark Mark were crowded together with Harry in a confined space and a very fraught atmosphere may have activated the Horcrux in Harry's scar, and caused it to make everybody madder or more selfish than they would otherwise have been.

The influence of the moon might also have contributed to Remus's willingness to run with the other three in were form as a boy, although he admits having discussed and planned these expeditions in advance while in human form. But no influence of the moon explains why he concealed the information that Sirius was an Animagus for nine months, even though if he were honest with himself he would have to believe that by doing so he was putting Harry in grave danger. He thought that Sirius was a mass-murderer who was out to kill Harry and he knew he was getting into the school grounds and into the school itself, and that he was able to do so in a form in which the other staff wouldn't recognize him, but he warned no-one.

It remains true, then, that while Remus generally doesn't actively mean any harm, and left to his own devices he would probably never have bullied Snape, he has little sense of duty or responsibility and has a tendency to take the course which is least stressful for himself, even if that puts other people - even people he loves, if you think that he actively loves Harry - in extreme danger. Seen in that light, even his pleasant manner is probably mainly just a way of smoothing his own path, rather than something he does for the sake of the people he's being pleasant to. It's not really surprising that Sirius initially suspected him of being the Order's security leak.

Having said that, the theory of "ego depletion" (which is widely accepted in psychology circles, although currently in dispute) says that any given individual only has a finite amount of willpower to go around, which is why people often appear passive in other areas of their life if they are dealing with poverty or illness. It may be that Remus was issued with a standard amount of willpower and backbone, but just coping with being a werewolf and official second-class citizen uses up so much of it that he has very little left for anything else. Also, according to Pottermore Greyback bit and infected the child Remus to punish his father for having outed him, Greyback, as a werewolf, and/or for having said within Greyback's hearing that werewolves were all irredeemably evil monsters who should all be put down, and it was years before the father could bring himself to admit this - so Remus has grown up in a family where concealing shameful or uncomfortable information because you feared to lose someone's affection was normal.

Also, Nightfall Rising has raised the possibility that the Dementors which (who?) were stationed around the school during that year might have influenced the characters' behaviour. They were stationed at the gates, hundreds of yards from the school - but going by the number who turn up at the end of PoA, there were rather a lot of them. If Remus was sensitive to them they would certainly make it harder for him to work up the nerve to tell the Headmaster about his boyhood indiscretions, by making him feel grey and guilty and hopeless and sure he'd be rejected.

He does try to minimise the danger to Harry by getting hold of the Map and watching out for Sirius, but he can't watch it 24/7 (unless it has an alarm function, or he enlists a team of house elves to help him). He does demonstrate protective physical courage when he sprints across the lawn and down the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack after seeing that Sirius, Peter and the Trio have gone down there. It's not clear who he thinks he'll be protecting from whom but he has to realise that either Sirius or Peter is a mass murderer, and he doesn't hesitate to follow. Curiosity, the desire to find out what was going on, may have been a factor, but as with Snape the fact that he sprinted to the Willow, and hastened down the tunnel instead of waiting to pick off whoever emerged from it, suggests anxiety and urgent protectiveness. And he resigns once he realises that he has transformed in front of students and put them at risk - even though he ought to have thought of that in advance.

[Incidentally, when Snape suggests that Tonks's Remus-shaped Patronus is "weak", it's not clear whether he's suggesting that Remus is weak, or that Tonks's confidence in Remus's love isn't strong enough to generate a sound Patronus. If the latter, he's probably right, given that Remus tries to leave Tonks in DH.]

Hagrid in the books is a strange mix of kindness and spite - a spite which, unlike Snape's, sometimes descends into actual physical attack. This could be the result of his dual nature as a half-giant, or of his periodic bouts of depression - but the simplest explanation is that for quite a lot of the time he's either drunk or hungover.

He's a bit of a bigot who uses "Muggle" in the pejorative way that other people might say "loser" or "mouth-breather", and says that Harry needs to be with "his own kind". He uses "Squib" as an insult when arguing with Filch, and calls the Centaurs "ruddy mules": admittedly they call each other mules as an insult, but it's a bit weird for a half-giant to call a half-horse a horse/donkey hybrid as if that was a bad thing. He tells Harry that there's never been a wizard who went bad who wasn't a Slytherin, even though he knows for a fact that this is a lie, and that one of the Gryffindor Marauders was a Death Eater and mass-murderer who betrayed his friends to their death (even if he's initially confused about which one of them it was).

Right at the outset we see him carry out a vicious attack on a cowering, terrified eleven-year-old child, just because he doesn't like the kid's father, and/or because he regards Muggles as a lesser species. Yes, we know that Dudley is a nasty little bully, but Hagrid at this point does not know this, and the scene where Dudley tries to steal Harry's cake exists only in the film. All book-Hagrid knows against Dudley is that he is fat - for which he verbally abuses and humiliates him - and that his father is a blustering loud-mouth. For this, he tries to turn Dudley into a pig. The book makes it absolutely explicit that Hagrid attacks Dudley and inflicts severe pain and humiliation on him to punish Vernon:

       'I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!' yelled Uncle Vernon.
       But he had finally gone too far. Hagrid seized his umbrella and whirled it over his head, 'NEVER,' he thundered, '– INSULT – ALBUS – DUMBLEDORE – IN – FRONT – OF – ME!'
       He brought the umbrella swishing down through the air to point at Dudley – there was a flash of violet light, a sound like a firecracker, a sharp squeal, and the next second, Dudley was dancing on the spot with his hands clasped over his fat bottom, howling in pain. When he turned his back on them, Harry saw a curly pig's tail poking through a hole in his trousers.
       Uncle Vernon roared. Pulling Aunt Petunia and Dudley into the other room, he cast one last terrified look at Hagrid and slammed the door behind them.
       Hagrid looked down at his umbrella and stroked his beard.
       'Shouldn'ta lost me temper,' he said ruefully, 'but it didn't work anyway. Meant ter turn him into a pig, but I suppose he was so much like a pig anyway there wasn't much left ter do.'

This wholly unprovoked attacked on a child could, if successful, very easily have resulted in pig-Dudley running away - because we're told in Beedle that people Transfigured into non-human animals become the animal mentally and can no longer think like a human - being mistaken for a real pig and ending up being killed and eaten. As it is, Hagrid inflicts on Dudley a painful and humiliating pig's tail which has to be surgically removed (by a private surgeon iirc, and therefore at great expense), because Hagrid can't or won't reverse the spell and would rather leave a child to suffer than own up to Dumbledore, and he jokes about what he's done and thinks it's funny because his victim is overweight. This despite the fact that Rowling draws Hagrid himself as apple-shaped with a huge belly.

Hagrid loves Harry, but his love is conditional - he turns very cold and rejects him when Harry doesn't elect to continue with Care of Magical Creatures. He seems to have loved James and Sirius, but was easily able to believe Sirius was guilty, without a trial.

He has quite a cavalier attitude to student safety. He sends Draco and Neville, two more frightened eleven-year-olds, unsupervised, into a wood which he knows contains giant man-eating spiders and a unicorn-killer, and is flippant about and dismissive of Draco's fear. A year later he sends Harry and Ron to meet the spiders without any warning, trusting that they won't be killed - this may be the result of too much trust in the spiders, rather than too little care for the boys, but it's still reckless.

When Draco is injured by Buckbeak he does show proper care and sprints with him to the hospital wing, but he himself bore some of the blame - he ought to have known that many teenagers are idiots, and have had the students approach the Hippogriffs a few at a time, so that he could keep a close eye on them.

Like Snape with Harry after the Pensieve incident, he then allows his personal dislike of Draco to influence his classroom behaviour. In OotP he tells the class they have to do extra-curricular work with the Skrewts in the evenings, and when Draco objects Hagrid humiliates him by bringing up the ferret incident, and allows the class to jeer at Draco.

Draco I suppose began the war between himself and Hagrid by spying on baby Norbert, but he was eleven, and Hagrid mocked him for (or at least teased him about) being frightened of going into a midnight wood full of dangerous predators with just another child and a dog for company. This is at least as unhelpful as anything Snape does to Neville, with the added twist that Hagrid is sending Draco into serious danger, whereas Snape is trying to keep Neville out of it. It's not surprising Draco doesn't like Hagrid.

Hagrid is not even as kind to animals as he's usually assumed to be, since he gloats over the idea of setting his giant boarhound Fang on the cat Mrs Norris. In the first book he advises Harry against getting a cat because he, Hagrid, doesn't like cats because he's allergic to them - a very shallow and self-centred reason actively to dislike an animal, as opposed to just wanting to avoid it.

The fact that he supposedly feeds Buckbeak on dead ferrets is peculiar. It is not, as I first thought, some sort of symbolic revenge on Draco, since Draco wasn't turned into a ferret until the following year. Nevertheless, if these really are ferrets then they are little trusting, loving, playful domestic pets, piled up like dead wood. It seems most unlikely that Hippogriffs actually need to eat ferrets as opposed to, say, venison, so there isn't a ferret-breeding industry designed to produce Hippogriff chow. They're not animals who might have needed to be killed anyway as pest-control, as might happen with rats or rabbits, or of which there is a surplus needing to be culled, ditto, or which are reared for meat and sold ready-killed. Hagrid would have to be going round the pet-shops and buying up ferrets intended as pets or cable-guides or rabbit-controllers, and then killing them himself. He might as well be feeding Buckbeak on dead puppies.

As with the horned toads, and the winking python (snakes have no eyelids!), and the fact that James's stag and Lily's doe are different species, there's a possibility that this is a case where authorial intent has been sabotaged by Rowling's poor knowledge of biology. It may be that Rowling intends Hagrid to be feeding Buckbeak on polecats, the wild cousins of ferrets - an animal which a gamekeeper might well need to cull. That still doesn't work very well, though, because it's unlikely he would need to cull polecats in such large numbers in a short-enough time frame to generate a stack of bodies. We see Buckbeak eating in a single meal the number of polecats Hagrid might expect to kill over several months.

One possibility which could make sense is that Harry doesn't know one mustelid from another, and Hagrid is feeding Buckbeak the skinned carcases of mink discarded by a fur farm. On the one hand, that would be a sensible use of by-product meat which would otherwise have gone to waste, removing the necessity of killing more animals to feed to Buckbeak: on the other hand it would mean Hagrid was collaborating with a cruel industry. Or he could be culling feral mink, which have become a damaging invasive species in many areas of Britain - but as with polecats you wouldn't really expect him to catch that many all at the same time, although it's possible he's been storing them in a fridge for some reason.

No major human characters in the Potter books are wholly pleasant, except Arthur Weasley, Cedric, Neville and Luna and maybe Tonks - and even Arthur is mildly corrupt, since he doesn't himself keep the rules about Muggle artefacts which he enforces on others (and Cedric has been sabotaged by The Cursed Child, if you accept that as canon, which personally I don't). Hagrid has many good points and is on average probably a good man (or giant or whatever), but like many of the Potter characters he's nothing like as nice as fanon (or the films) paints him.

There may be a good reason for this, of course. Hagrid was born in 1928 but he still seems slow and rather childlike. Grawp must be several years old at least (his and Hagrid's mother "Died years ago"), but acts like a barely verbal toddler. I suspect that the reason that Hagrid behaves like a teenager and Grawp like a toddler is that giants mature very slowly, and in giant terms they are a toddler and a teenager.

JK Rowling has said in interview that Harry would never fail to help someone in pain, and that his encounter with the fragment of Voldemort's soul at King's Cross was the first time he had felt revulsion for suffering rather than wanting to help. This is one of those cases where an interview cannot be accepted as canon because it clearly clashes with what's in the books.

It's true Harry is quite often kind when he remembers to be - but he often forgets. In the first book canon Harry is amused by Dudley's pain and fear when Hagrid attacks him, and eats in front of the Dursleys when they must be ravenously hungry, although they had shared their meagre rations of the night before equally with him (not that this last is really Harry's fault, since Vernon instructs Dudley and Petunia not to eat Hagrid's food - probably a wise move when it comes to the sausages). He has to be dragged away from a book on nasty magical things you can do to your enemies. In CoS he chooses to kill the basilisk in a very cruel way without even trying to talk to her and persuade her to change sides, although they share a language. In PoA he gloats over the idea of sending Sirius back to the Dementors when he believes he is guilty; he looks at Snape lying unconscious and bleeding after Snape has rushed into danger to protect him, and wonders if he is dead, but doesn't care; and he is either neutral towards or actively amused by Sirius's rough treatment of the still unconscious Snape.

In GoF he is amused to see ferret!Draco being repeatedly battered against a stone floor as he screams in pain; is unconcerned by the agony of the Crucioed spider; and has no problem with Hermione kidnapping a woman and holding her prisoner for weeks, apparently without even telling her family that she's all right. In OotP he deliberately supresses information which could have helped in the treatment of Montague, although Montague is so badly injured that weeks later he is still being spoon-fed in the hospital wing; is unconcerned by the fact that adult Snape is clearly traumatised by the Pensieve incident (even though he does care about teen-Snape); and has no problem with badly scarring a young girl's face for life to punish her for being more loyal to her mother than to a friend of a friend she barely knows. In HBP he practises hexes on a Squib, and in DH he tortures somebody and throws him through a glass door just for being rude, and is revolted by Aberforth's ancient misery. Twice he leaves Draco, Crabbe and Goyle to spend an eight-hour train journey contorted beyond recognition by what are probably very painful hex injuries, without (so far as we know) even a drink of water or a lavatory break, and has no problem with seeing the Twins deliberately tread on them as they lie injured and helpless.

[SPOILER for The Cuckoo's Calling: Harry's cold revulsion at Aberforth's unhappiness is probably some characteristic of JK herself, as she has her detective Cormoran Strike behave the same way. He is repelled by the tears of a mother who has just learned that one of her children has killed the other two, and is coldly impatient with her grief.]

We see Harry at his best, perhaps, when he feels acute sorrow for the way Luna is isolated and persecuted (even though it seems to bother him more than it does her), and when he is deeply upset to see that his father and Sirius really were bullies who persecuted schoolboy Snape; when he kneels quietly by the dying Snape and accepts his memories, even though he still believes him to be an enemy; when he saves Draco and Goyle from the consequences of Crabbe's stupidity; when he is tolerant of Kreacher even though he knows Kreacher betrayed Sirius to his death. His behaviour towards oddball Luna stands in sharp contrast with his father's behaviour to oddball Snape, and he even wants to help the unpopular Mrs Norris when she is frozen by the Basilisk, although he seems to be about to let Ron talk him out of it.

We see him at his worst when he sees Snape lying unconscious and bleeding in the Shrieking Shack in PoA, wonders if he is dead but does nothing about it; when he seems quite amused to see Sirius brutalising the unconscious Snape and banging his head against the ceiling; when he initially approves of prisoners in Azkaban being tormented by Dementors (in contrast with Remus's dislike of the idea) and likes the idea of sending Sirius - who at that point he believes to be guilty - to suffer; when he practises hexes on a Squib; when he leaves the magically-distorted Draco, Crabbe and Goyle to suffer for a whole eight-hour train journey, twice, without water or a lavatory break; when he talks Hermione out of doing anything to help Montague after the Twins have seriously injured him; when he is quite unconcerned about false!Moody torturing an experimental animal with Cruciatus; when he himself tortures an enemy just for being rude. The situation is complicated, of course, by the fact that some of Harry's worst behaviour may be being caused by proximity to the chunk of Voldemort which is stuck to his forehead.

Harry is in some ways rather cold, without that much inner life. Really, this is because he is the viewpoint character and Rowling doesn't always fill in what he is thinking and feeling, as opposed to what he is witnessing, but it leaves his emotional life seeming a bit flat. That he actually is a bit cold is shown in the scene in DH just after they have escaped from the raid on the Weasley wedding, and Arthur's Patronus comes to them at Grimmauld Place to tell them that the family have survived. Ron and Hermione are both almost hysterical with relief on learning that the Weasleys are OK, even though Molly hasn't always treated Hermione well. Harry has to consciously think about Ginny before he can share their relief. Molly and Arthur love him, they treat him in some ways better than their own sons, but their fate does not engage him. In fact he explicitly says that he would have been equally as relieved as Ron and Hermione if the Weasleys had been his own family (i.e., because they aren't, he isn't) - "'It's your family, 'course you're worried. I'd feel the same way.' He thought of Ginny. 'I do feel the same way.'" The lack of a blood connection had not stopped Hermione from being as relieved as Ron, but Harry only has strong emotion about Ginny.

Harry's background and character have been very carefully constructed. Had the Dursleys been his actual parents, and treated him as they do, he would probably have grown up with very low self-esteem, feeling that he must be a horrible person if the people who were meant to love him in fact barely tolerated him. But he knows they're not his parents, that his parents probably did love him, and the Dursleys have made it plain that he was imposed on them against their will, so he doesn't have to feel that they ought to love him and that there's something wrong with him if they don't.

If the Dursleys had been physically or sexually abusive Harry might have grown up nervous and meek, trying to placate them so they wouldn't hurt him, or have ended up as jumpy and snarly as a stray cat, the way Snape is. If they had sometimes shown him love then he would have become needy and anxious in the hopes of getting more. But since they were always cold but never especially threatening they were just an unpleasant background noise which would be upsetting if he allowed himself to notice and care about it, but which he could quite easily tune out. Hence he grew up extremely self-contained and with no desire to win adult approval, and with not much awareness of adults as thinking, feeling people like himself. And because they punished him for magical accidents which he couldn't help and didn't even know if he'd done, but don't seem to punish him for things which he can help (such as being cheeky), he treats punishment as a random irritant, like bad weather, which has nothing to do with his own behaviour. He loves McGonagall, as much as he does any adult aside from Sirius and Hagrid, but the idea that if she's giving him yet another detention she must be displeased with him and that maybe, just maybe, he might consider changing his behaviour, or that his ignoring her wishes might cause her pain, never seems to occur to him.

This probably contributes to his poor relationship with Snape. Snape has a very exaggerated idea of how much Harry desires fame (which isn't zero, because he likes being praised for doing well at sports), but that aside, the things he nags Harry about are things he really thinks Harry could and should do better in class - beginning with putting Harry on the spot in their first lesson and trying to get him to think about potions, after catching Harry communicating with Ron instead of paying attention to the teacher, just after he has made his big keynote speech. But Harry really doesn't associate adult anger with his own behaviour. If he never thinks "If McGonagall is giving me detention for doing X, maybe I should stop doing it", he's certainly never going to think "If Snape is snarling at me for doing Y, maybe I should stop doing it." Snape doesn't know about Uncle Vernon and doesn't know that Harry screens out adult anger as so much white noise, and needs to be cajoled - and even if he did understand it he may not know how to do it.

Prior to the final battle Harry hates Snape, at times understandably because Snape has done something offensive, but at times in a deranged, obsessive way where everything about Snape, his voice, his manner, his appearance strikes Harry as some sort of crime and he fantasizes about torturing him, even when he knows Snape has made sacrifices to protect him. He also fantasized about sending Sirius back to the Dementors and wanted him to suffer, before he found out that he was innocent, and then later he blames Snape for Sirus's death to an irrational degree. This exaggerated hatred of Snape may in part be because he, or the Horcrux, senses the presence of the Dark Mark but it's also possible that it's a safety valve.

The key, I think, is that Harry thinks he wants Sirius to suffer and die for betraying his parents, but when he is confronted with the terrified, grovelling reality of Peter Pettigrew, the man who really did betray his parents and who is right there in his power, waiting for execution, he spares him. When he has Kreacher in his power, Kreacher who has to do absolutely anything Harry tells him to, Kreacher who really did betray Sirius to his death, Harry is no worse than a bit abrupt with him (much like Snape, who does nothing worse to Pettigrew, his childhood bully who betrayed Lily to her death, than boss him about and make him do a little house-work). When he is personally responsible for dealing with a helpless, dying Snape he is suddenly polite and obliging, even though as far as he knows at that point, Snape is an enemy.

It looks as though he hates Snape, prior to the death scene, in part because Snape is a safe person to hate. If he lets his justified rage against the Dursleys or against Kreacher rise up, he could really hurt them, either through subconscious, wandless magic or deliberately; but he can project all his rage at Vernon onto Snape and Snape will brush it off with a sneer, because he's a strong adult wizard and it's unlikely Harry can do him much damage. In fact, then, most of the time Harry doesn't really want to hurt anybody. He thinks he does, but when he has the chance to take real revenge on someone who really has performed a great crime against Harry or his nearest and dearest, and who can't defend themselves, he does them a good turn.

He is, of course, very cold and callous towards the injured, unconscious Snape in the Shrieking Shack - he sees the man lying there bleeding and wonders if he is dead, but does nothing about it. He watches Sirius letting Snape's head bang against the ceiling, and either approves or doesn't dissapprove enough to say anything. But at this point he has suffered so many emotional reverses in such a short period of time that he may be suffering from psychological shock, and he is not himself responsible for Sirius's brutality. Like Remus with James and Sirius, Severus with Mulciber, Harry is willing to go along with violence committed by Sirius, Hagrid and the Twins because they are friends of his, even when he wouldn't be violent in that way himself.

This relative gentleness begins to change, though, from HBP onwards, perhaps because Harry is warping with age or with exposure to wizard culture, or perhaps because of increasing pressure on his mind from Voldemort. During HBP he enjoys practising the Half-Blood Prince's hexes on Filch, a Squib. OK, aside from Sectumsempra the Prince's spells seem to be fairly harmless, and Filch is a creepy old perv who wants to torture the students (or says he does) - but practising spells on somebody who can't fight back is dishonourable and shows Harry beginning to turn into a bully.

In DH he uses Imperius freely - and he has sound military reasons to do so, but one would like to see him at least hesitate. Much worse, although he has been Cruciated himself and knows how horrible it is, he Cruciates Amycus just for spitting at McGonagall, and throws him into a sheet of glass which may well have seriously injured him. All just for being rude, and it wasn't even a good move militarily - it would have been far safer and more reliable just to Stupefy Amycus from behind - under cover of the Cloak, if it's possible to cast spells from under it, or if not then by sticking his hand out at the last moment.

Of course, in some ways this scene just demonstrates one of the problems with magic - it makes escalation too easy; it enables the thought to become the deed. In a real-world, non-magical situation, an excitable teenager who saw an enemy spit in the face of somebody he loved might feel an intense urge to do something dreadful, but all he would be able to do on the spur of the moment (assuming he wasn't carrying a knife or a gun, and that he wasn't the sort of lunatic who kicks people to death) would be to sock them on the jaw, which would be reasonably proportionate to the offence. Even if he thought, at the time, that he would like to punish them by torturing them in extreme ways, this would take a lot of time and effort to set up, during which he would probably cool down and realize he was being ridiculous. But Harry, with his wand, is able to translate that momentary surge of cruelty into instant action.

When she was asked about this scene, Rowling likened Harry to Snape, two flawed men, and it's fair enough that young men are often idiots and may do things they will regret in later life. Nevertheless it demonstrates pretty clearly that Harry is capable of being violent and vicious, and makes an interesting contrast with the scene where Harry calls Snape "Coward" and Snape, in what seems to be an agony of rage and despair, gives way to his violent impulse - and gives Harry the magical equivalent of a slap in the face, which is no worse than what he might have done if he hadn't had magic.

Harry certainly seems Snape-like, i.e. brave and protective but not very kind, when he saves Dudley from the Dementors, but then doesn't bother to tell Vernon and Petunia that feeding Dudley chocolate will make him feel better. Dudley is his enemy, but he saves his life; he saves his life, but he doesn't care about his emotional state.

Although canon Harry is flawed and occasionally nasty, the fanfiction theme known as Dark Harry, where Harry turns out to be truly cruel and evil, doesn't really work unless you're going to assume that he has been taken over and mentally corrupted by Voldemort. Canon Harry is unselfish and devoid of self-interest to an unusual degree, so he would have little motivation for becoming an Evil Overlord. Film Harry may haver between saving Cedric from the Acromantula and winning the Tri-Wizard Cup, but book Harry doesn't hesitate for a moment.

Indeed, given that Harry has managed to be as reasonably-good as he is in the books with a Horcrux sharing his body, he may at base be as virtuous as fanon makes him, in order not to have been corrupted any more than he is; and it may well be that having been de-Horcruxed he would grow into a thoroughly good man (although this isn't really the case in The Cursed Child, if you accept that as canon, which personally I don't).

Yes, I thought so too, and yes it seems a perfectly reasonable assumption - but there isn't actually any canon evidence for it, other than the fact that it is the part that hurts when Harry is tuned in to Voldemort. Somebody told me recently that Rowling had said, either at interview or on Pottermore, that the Horcrux is not located in the scar, although I can't find the reference. Rowling's pronouncements outwith the books are only tertiary canon, so it's up to the reader whether you think that the fact that in the books the scar is the part of Harry which resonates with Voldemort's presence and actions is or is not evidence that that's where the Horcrux is, strong enough to overrule Rowling's later statements.

Fanon tends to paint the Weasley Twins as lovely, jolly boys. In canon, however, when they were little they beat Ron's pet Puffskein to death for fun (it's mentioned in the marginal notes in the original Fantastic Beasts booklet), tried to get Ron to take an Unbreakable Vow which could easily have killed him, burned a hole right through his tongue and traumatized him by turning his teddy-bear into a giant spider while he was holding it. It could be said that they treated Ron rather worse than Dudley treated Harry, with added magic, and they continue to be nasty to him even as adults - they don't even give him a family discount in their shop, or credit, but are rather unpleasant about him having to pay on the spot, and make an obvious and ostentatious show of how much more they value and like Harry than they do their brother. [Could jealousy be a factor here? Do they resent the fact that Ron has captured the loyalty of Famous Harry Potter to a greater extent than they have?]

At Hogwarts they commit criminal blackmail against Ludo Bagman, carry out unethical and unauthorized magical experiments on children and Muggles, jeer at eleven-year-olds just for having been Sorted into Slytherin, and threaten to rape Zacharias Smith with an implement. ["'Would you like us to clean out your ears for you?' enquired George, pulling a long and lethal-looking metal instrument from inside one of the Zonko's bags. // 'Or any part of your body, really, we're not fussy where we stick this,' said Fred." And yes, this sort of thing is sometimes said as a joke but the jokes have a standard pattern, and this seems at least half serious.] George uses a Bludger to launch an unprovoked attack on Snape when he is refereeing a Quidditch match, even though if he had succeeded in knocking Snape off his broom in mid air the man could well have been killed.

Their attack on Montague is particularly vile. They stuff him into a broken magical box too small to lie down in, without food or water or lavatory facilities, and then send him off into wizard space without any idea of how long he'll be gone or whether he'll have any air beyond what's already in the Vanishing Cabinet, or whether he'll still be able to at least use his wand to summon water. It was only good luck that Montague was only missing for around 32 hours and wasn't returned weeks later, dead of thirst, and as it was he was so badly damaged that weeks after his return he was still in the hospital wing being spoon-fed (although he did recover by the end of the year). And all this just for taking a few points, and for being a Slytherin.

Worst of all, according to Ginny the Twins were seriously planning to let off Garrotting Gas - which judging from its name and Ginny's comments is probably lethal - in a school full of children. If the gas really is as fatal as Ginny implies, then what they were planning was a major terrorist attack, in a high school - and not even a terrorist attack done to express some serious political grievance, but just because it amused them, which takes them into the same sort of territory as the Columbine killers. Ginny does not seem to find this surprising.

Indeed, the Twins are so obviously criminal that I wonder if Rowling was inspired in part by the famous 1980s case of the Gibbons twins. Isolated by the bullying which they suffered at school because they were the only black children in a rural Welsh village, and perhaps also a little autistic, the Gibbons girls developed a private language which excluded outside contact, fell into a folie a deux and ended up spending fourteen years in the state hospital for the criminally insane at Broadmoor, after embarking on a campaign of arson.

JK might even - whisper it - have been thinking of our most famous pair of criminal twins, the Kray brothers; murderous gangsters who, like Al Capone, acquired a sort of spurious glamour. She is certainly aware of the Twins' cruelty: in an interview with Today in 2007 she said "Fred is normally the funnier but also the crueler of the two."

The Weasley Twins' attack on Draco and his cohorts on the train at the end of GoF was justified, since they were defending Harry from an unprovoked assault - but having got Draco, Crabbe and Goyle down and helpess the Twins deliberately tread on them. If they were soldiers, they would be the kind of soldiers who ignore the Geneva Convention and beat prisoners. But they get given a free pass for their potentially-murderous cruelty because they have a wholesome appearance and a nice line in humorous patter.

As with most of Rowling's characters, however, there are mitigating circumstances. The Twins were born at the height of Vold War One, and they were three when their mother's brothers Gideon and Fabian were killed. Molly was either about to have or had just had Ginny when her brothers died, with Bill about to start at Hogwarts and five other boys under the age of ten staying at home, and now she had just suffered a traumatic double bereavement. It seems likely that she would have been satisfied so long as her children were healthy and fed and would have had no time or attention to spend on the Twins' moral guidance, just at the age when their worldview was being formed and they were forming a tight, exclusive and somewhat toxic little Gang of Two.

McGonagall is pleasant to Harry, and clearly fond of him, although she punishes him far more often than Snape does. [That may just be because she's his head of house.] She doesn't seem to provide any sort of pastoral care, though, or to intervene when Harry is ostracized by his housemates, and her record on student safety is dubious. It's also Pottermore canon that she is nursing a lifelong grudge against Slytherin - at least as far as wanting to see them thrashed on the sports pitch goes - just because a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was about eighteen.

She began working at Hogwarts in 1956 - initially as a teaching assistant under Dumbledore, according to Pottermore. We don't know when she became head of house for Gryffindor. It may have been when Dumbledore became Headmaster, circa 1963. If she is responsible, as head of house, for most punishment of her students then it may have been her doing that when teenage Arthur Weasley was caught canoodling with Molly after hours, circa 1966, he was (according to Molly) punished in some way so severe that it physically scarred him for life. It's quite possible the then caretaker, Apollyon Pringle, who caught Arthur at it, may have punished him without McGonagall's authorisation; but it certainly seems that severe corporal punishment at Hogwarts continued well into Dumbledore's time as headmaster, and so possibly into McGonagall's time as head of house.

According to Pottermore, during her tragically brief marriage to her former Ministry boss Elphinstone Urquart [thus spelled on Pottermore, although the name is usually Urquhart; either way it's pronounced Ercott], 1982-1985, McGonagall lived in a cottage in Hogsmeade and commuted to work. If she was already Head of House this suggests some carelessness, since although she could be summoned by Floo in an emergency, she wouldn't be on the spot if her students misbehaved in ways they didn't want her to know about. It could be taken as evidence that she didn't become Head of House until after her husband's death, and was therefore probably not involved in Arthur's severe punishment.

By her own account, she was hard on Peter Pettigrew because he wasn't as good a student as his friends. Believing him to have died a martyr, she feels bad about this - but her guilt doesn't stop her from being hard on Neville, or from reminding him of his inadequacies in front of the whole class: "Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can't even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!"

If she is paying any attention to her house students, McGonagall ought to be aware that Neville has some sort of mild learning difficulty involving poor memory, and that having to remember a different, elaborate password every day would be difficult for him. She doesn't know, of course, that Neville wasn't really being careless by writing the passwords down, since they were on a sheet of paper which was inside the password-protected area, where nobody should have been able to get at it who didn't already have the current password. He couldn't really have predicted that a housemate's pet would turn out to be in league with Sirius. She doesn't know this, but she doesn't try to find out either: instead she gave him detention, barred him from Hogsmeade for the rest of the year, and forced him to stand outside in the corridor until a housemate let him in, for weeks, at a time when she believed that a mass-murderer with a big knife was hanging around trying to get into Gryffindor Tower. It's true there were security trolls around but it was still a risk, and must have been terrifying. And we're told that this was done as a punishment, not as a security measure.

In PS, she sends four first-years, including Neville, on a midnight detention in the Forbidden Forest at a time when she probably knows that Voldemort is hanging around looking for one of them. As Deputy Head she really ought to know that Hagrid takes silly risks with student safety, and that there are Acromantulas in the woods. But student safety doesn't seem to be her priority. When she sees false!Moody slamming ferret!Draco repeatedly against a stone floor as he screams with pain, she protests against the Transfiguration but not the beating, and allows Draco to be dragged away by his abuser, without even checking him for broken bones or internal injuries first.

[If you wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt you could postulate that any injuries sustained by the ferret will be healed when he is turned back into a boy, and McGonagall knows this. Even so, she has no evidence "Moody" won't continue to batter Draco in human form, and she still lets him drag the boy away.]

She's not great with animals - although that seems to be normal at Hogwarts. She does tell Lee Thomas off for doing something unspecified to a mouse, but she teaches her class to Transfigure live animals into inanimate objects.

drawing of white ferret sitting up and looking back over its shoulder

We're not told whether the animals are ever brought back or whether they've all been casually killed. She encourages the students to turn hedgehogs into pincushions and then stick pins into them, even though some of them are still alive and aware and suffering, and must be terrified and confused. When she sees false!Moody slamming a screaming ferret repeatedly against a stone floor, she is concerned that it might be a Transfigured student but apparently not worried about cruelty to what might be a genuine pet. According to what Dumbledore says about Transfiguration in Beedle, even though the ferret is Draco he will still think he is a ferret and not know he is a boy, so however you look at it it's a little pet which is being tortured here, but McGonagall doesn't seem concerned about the cruelty, only the misuse of Transfiguration.

The scene towards the end of DH, where Harry Cruciates Amycus, is rather creepy. OK, McGonagall no doubt has every reason to loathe Amycus, but her student, who is forty-five years younger than her and for whose moral development she should be responsible, has just tortured a man and thrown him through a sheet of glass just because he spat at her - and instead of telling him off for disproportionate thuggery, she calls him "gallant" and appears to be in some sense flirting with him over the unconscious body of his victim.

To be fair to her, however, she was very shocked by Harry's sudden re-appearance and it's not entirely clear whether she really means it when she calls Harry's action "gallant" or whether she's just waffling while she tries to get a grip on the situation. And although the viciousness with which she attacks Snape (her former student) in DH seems upsetting in light of what we now know about Snape's enduring loyalty to the Order and his refusal to fire on her, it was understandable from her point of view. As far as she knew, the colleague she had worked with and perhaps even been fond of for fifteen years had never existed - had been nothing but a false mask being worn by a deadly enemy who'd been plotting to betray her trust from the outset. Indeed, the depth of her spite against him could be an indication that she really had been very fond of him and had seen him as a friend, and now felt not only betrayed but made a fool of. The revelation two years previously that her vague unease about false!Moody's behaviour had been wholly justified, and that he had been a Death Eater plant, would also predispose her to believe that she had again been misled and betrayed.

One also has to allow for the fact that like Snape she works about an 85-hour week just teaching and marking, plus she has her duties as Head of House, Deputy Head and Order member, so she is probably exhausted and irritable most of the time. Indeed, since she appears to teach a single-house Transfiguration class rather than doubling up two houses, her teaching hours may be even longer and crazier than Snape's, although her lessons probably require less preparation than his.

This one is unusual in that it's a fanon which the author herself buys into - one where authorial intent is incompatible with what's on the page. When JK Rowling chose a surname for the tartan-loving Minerva McGonagall, she was obviously inspired by the famous, and famously bad, Victorian Scottish poet William Topaz MacGonagall, and like many people she saw him as a sort of icon of comic Scottishness.

On Pottermore, it is stated that McGonagall's father was a Protestant minister in the north of Scotland. I take it from this that Rowling isn't aware that McGonagall is an Irish Catholic surname from Donegal (which is why there is no McGonagall tartan). William Topaz McGonagall's parents were refugees from the Irish Potato Famine who had emigrated to Scotland, and we must assume that somewhere in Minerva's paternal ancestry an Irish Catholic man married a Scottish Protestant wife, and their son chose to follow his mother's religion.

As Deputy Headmistress, McGonagall is Dumbledore's Second in Command when it comes to running the school. It's clear she is a member of the Order of the Phoenix in OotP, and judging by the fact that she met up with Dumbledore and Hagrid to deposit baby Harry on the Dursleys' doorstep, she probably was one during Vold War One as well. The fact that she isn't (or isn't mentioned as being) in the VWI Order photograph isn't necessarily suspicious: Moody says that the meeting where the photo' was taken was the only time he ever met Aberforth, and we know Arabella Figg and Mundungus Fletcher were part of what Dumbledore calls the "old crowd" whom he sent Sirius to alert to Voldemort's return at the end of GoF and yet they aren't mentioned as being in the Order photo' either, so clearly not every member went to every meeting.

photo of tabby cat with narrow vertical stripes, reclining on a cushion

Mackerel tabby, from Savvy Pet Care: The Glorious Tabby Cat

If you accept Pottermore as canon, however, Pottermore says that McGonagall was not a member of the Order during VWI but that she used her Animagus form to spy on the Death Eaters for the Ministry, who regarded the Order as dangerous mavericks - phrased in a way which implies that she didn't join the Order because the Ministry regarded them as dangerous mavericks. This is one of those things on Pottermore which seems not to have been very well-thought-out. That sort-of explains what she was doing at Privet Drive at the start of the first book - she was making some kind of liaison with the Order - but it raises big questions about how much she actually trusted Dumbledore. She'd been his deputy, first in the Transfiguration Department and then as Deputy Headmistress, for twenty-five years and according to Pottermore they were so close that Dumbledore actually revealed some of his past to her, yet it also implies that she chose not to work with him in the Order because the Ministry didn't trust him. This despite the fact that Pottermore also says that she left the Ministry in part because she didn't like the anti-Muggle-born prejudice there.

It also means she worked for the Ministry at the very time that it was torturing and killing suspects and imprisoning them for life without a trial and that it was she, not Dumbledore, who was probably in a position to ensure that Sirius at least had a trial, and she did not do so. And what had changed - what happened between 1981 and 1995 - to convince her to trust Dumbledore and the Order, when nothing which had happened between 1956 (when she started working for Dumbledore) and 1981 had done so? Maybe it was just Fudge's incompetence which caused her to throw in her lot with the Order, but it puts a new spin on her willingness to believe Snape was a traitor at the end of HBP. The fact that he was an Order member of long-standing wouldn't necessarily cut any ice with her because she was already dubious about both the Order and Dumbledore's judgement.

Against this, Kelly Chambliss of Loose Canon has suggested that the Ministry may have approached McGonagall even before the Order was formed, because she was an Animagus who had worked for Magical Law Enforcement years beforehand, and she may have shared information on both the Death Eaters and the Ministry with Dumbledore without actually joining the Order - making her not exactly a double agent like Snape but a sort of forked one, who genuinely served her official masters and unofficially served another who had the same enemies as the first lot, if not quite the same friends.

In VWII, the fact that Dumbledore clearly hasn't told McGonagall that Snape might have to kill him, or that Snape was still acting for the Order in DH, doesn't prove he doesn't trust her on an inter-personal level: just that he knows she's not an Occlumens so he has to be careful about what Tom might see in her mind if he chose to examine her. Nevertheless, the fact that she isn't an Occlumens means she's kept somewhat "out of the loop", so it's unlikely that Dumbledore treats her as his 2inC even though many people - me included - have tended to see her that way.

In the doorstep scene in PS, for example, she doesn't seem to know about the Blood Protection or much about what's going on, and when she tries to find out Dumbledore wants to talk about confectionary instead. There are some hints that Aberforth and Hagrid both know Snape's true loyalties: Aberforth talks about how Dumbledore (mis)uses his agents, and in my opinion Snape's strategy of sending Neville, Ginny and Luna to Hagrid for a detention which must have been more like a Potter Appreciation Party and then putting it about that they'd thereby been cruelly punished probably wouldn't work unless Hagrid was in on the joke. Indeed, an in-depth Pottermore essay entitled The chapter which made us love... Severus Snape says that "we learn that he had to kill Dumbledore for noble reasons that barely anyone knew about" which suggests that more people than just Snape himself and Dumbledore knew (although I suppose it's possible this refers to the headmasters' portraits). Yet McGonagall apparently isn't in on it - there's no suggestion that she's acting when she turns on Snape, so she is less "in the loop" than Hagrid.

Again this need not mean that Dumbledore doesn't trust her, just that as a half giant Hagrid is resistant to magic, possibly including Legilimency, and she isn't. But it does mean that Dumbledore cannot freely discuss his plans with her. He doesn't even tell all of them to Snape, the Occlumens, because Snape has to spend time close to the Dark Lord. It's not clear btw whether that's because Dumbledore fears that Tom might doubt Snape's loyalty some day and rip into his mind, even overriding Snape's Occlumency skills, or whether it's because he wants Snape to be able to show Tom, truthfully, the memory of a conversation which indicates that he, Dumbledore, hasn't entrusted him with his secret plans, so that Tom won't expect Snape to tell him those plans and doubt his loyalty when he doesn't.

It's not really surprising that Dumbledore appears to make most of his important Order decisions without consulting anybody - the fact that Tom is a powerful Legilimens is really a game-changer - but it does mean he can't really have a 2inC except Snape, the Occlumens; and even Snape is only allowed to know part of what's going on.

Incidentally, in my own Mood Music/Sons of Prophecy fanfics, which are AU from the end of HBP, I have Flitwick and Poppy Pomfrey having joined the Order, but in the books we have no evidence that Flitwick is a member, and Poppy certainly isn't as at the end of GoF, where Padfoot has to wait for her to leave the ward before he morphs back into Sirius.

[Or lemon drops, in the U.S. editions. I gather that in the U.S. sherbet is a fruit sorbet containing cream, but here it's a white fizzy powder which crackles on your tongue, and a sherbet lemon is a hard, boiled, translucent yellow lemon-flavoured sweet shaped like a rugby-ball and with a hollow in the middle containing fizzy sherbet powder. They are similar to a sweet called a Zotz which is sold in the US, except that a Zotz is a sweet hard candy containing a sour powder, and a lemon sherbet is a sour hard candy containing a sweet powder.]

photo of oval yellow boiled sweets wrapped in twists of clear plastic

Sherbet lemons, from Amazon advert

In the very first scene in the very first book Dumbledore - who we now know had just come from verbally lacerating Snape while he was in an agony of grief, almost certainly because Snape had accidentally reminded him of his own guilt over his sister Ariana's death - deflects McGonagall's questions about the death of the Potters by childishly concentrating on sucking on sherbet lemons, says that he is fond of them and offers one to her. In CoS "sherbet lemon" is the password to the stairs to Dumbledore's office. The sweet is mentioned again in GoF when Harry twice tries it out as a password although it no longer works. And that's all.

This idea is so firmly rooted in fanon that it is accepted almost universally as being established canon - yet all we find in the books is that Dumbledore says that when one wizard saves another, it creates "a certain bond" between them, and that Snape feels himself under an obligation to James because James saved his life. There's nothing in canon to say that this is any more than the sense of gratitude or of moral obligation which a Muggle would feel towards someone who had saved them.

I'm dubious as to whether the idea of a formal Life Debt is even conon-compatible, since you would expect that if such a thing existed, it would have been mentioned. Even if Dumbledore's "certain bond" is more than just the sense of moral obligation a Muggle would feel, it still doesn't sound strong enough to be the powerful imperative assumed in fanon.

Perhaps the problem is in the use of the word "certain". I'm as sure as one can be from the phrasing that when Dumbledore says "a certain bond" he means "something in the nature of a bond", not "a bond which is certain and sure", but it's a phrase which is open to misunderstanding.

This one isn't so much a fanon as a misunderstanding. In HBP Tonks uses a spell called Episkey to heal Harry's broken nose, and it's common to see this spell appear in fanfics as a general healing spell. However, epistaxis is the medical term for a nose-bleed, and dropping a large, cold metal key down the back of the patient's neck is a traditional folk-remedy for a nose-bleed, so it seems virtually certain that Episkey is intended to be a specific broken-noses-and-nose-bleeds spell.

On the other hand, it's possible that it doesn't only do noses, but the general nose-and-upper-jaw area, because later in HBP Ron accidentally punches Demelza Robins in the mouth during Quidditch practice and causes her to have a fat lip and to be "dripping blood everywhere", and Harry fixes it with Episkey. It's not clear whether the blood is coming from her mouth or her nose, or whether or not what Harry fixes includes her lip. It may be that Episkey is, generally, a maxillo-facial healing spell.

In OotP we are told that a portrait of a "rather vicious-looking" wizard labelled Urquhart Rackharrow, 1612 – 1697, Inventor of the Entrail-expelling Curse hangs on a wall in St Mungo's. Most people, me included, just assumed that this was what it sounded like - a spell for disembowelling people. However, the fact that this invention and its inventor are commemorated in a hospital suggests that the Entrail-expelling Curse has significant medicinal uses, worthy of commemoration - so it has occurred to me that it may be not a disembowelling spell but a very powerful laxative. As such it could be used not just to clear constipation and blockages but to get rid of poisons before they could be absorbed. It might even expel anything in the entrails that shouldn't be there, such as tapeworms, pathogens or tumours, and/or have other medically useful features such as shifting the content of the gut directly into a bucket without going through the usual channels.

Alternatively, it might be used to remove specific bits of the entrails that were causing trouble, such as tumours, necrosed sections of bowel or an infected appendix. [I can't remember what the proper plural of "appendix" is and I can't be arsed to look it up.]

I cover this in more detail in the essay Sectumsempra and the nature of curses, but basically fanon generally assumes that Sectumsempra is a very strong and deadly curse, and that may possibly be what Rowling intended, but the text doesn't support this.

We do not know whether Snape invented Sectumsempra or merely learned it. It's in the Half-Blood Prince's book but with none of the workings-out we see with spells we know Snape invented, so Harry thinks the Prince didn't invent this one. Snape later rages about Harry using "my own spells", apparently meaning Levicorpus and Sectumsempra, but he is in a wild state and may be speaking loosely. Remus knows Sectumsempra as a spell Snape uses but makes no mention of his having invented it. It literally means something like "cuts every time", which could be a reference to legends of swords which must draw blood every time they leave the scabbard, or could be a pun on a brand of Muggle kitchen knife called StaySharp. However, in the spell Rictusempra Rowling seems to be using the sempra bit to mean "all the time" or "perpetually", so you could loosely interpret Sectumsempra as "Sever[us] Forever", although that doesn't tell us whether Snape invented it and called it that, or whether he learned it because the name appealed to him.

An article on Pottermore refers to Sectumsempra as something Snape invented, but it's a very shallow article, just a list rather than an essay, almost certainly not written by Rowling herself (the style is wrong) and published after Pottermore merged the book and film universes to create something internally inconsistent, so its canon significance is doubtful.

It is not unreasonable for young Snape to want a spell "for enemies" which causes physical damage, since his enemies have tried to feed him to a werewolf. We must assume that werewolves are resistant to direct spell-action such as Stupefy or Imperius, otherwise young Severus with a wand would not have needed to be rescued from were!Remus without a wand; and indeed we later see adult Snape hoping to bind Remus with physical (albeit magically generated) ropes before he transforms.

We see Sectumsempra used successfully four times. Snape inflicts a small cut with what is probably Sectumsempra on James's face during the underpants incident. Harry swings at Draco with it without knowing what it does, and gashes him badly, but he doesn't disembowel Draco, open his lungs up or cut him in half, as you'd expect if he'd used a physical sword. Harry hacks at the Inferi in the cave with it as hard as he can and he slashes their wet clothes and inflicts flesh wounds, but no amputations. Snape accidentally cuits George's ear off with it during the Polyjuice chase. It looks as though it's rigged either to cut shallowly or not to cut bone (ears are made of cartilege).

Since we are told that George's ear cannot be regrown, a lot of people have assumed that the name Sectumsempra means that when this spell amputates a body part that part can't be regrown - it remains "severed forever" - and/or that it creates unhealing wounds. That doesn't make sense, however, as we're told that all curses, if they cause an amputation at all, cause permanent amputation, or that all Dark curses do so (the information given is ambiguous about this). The same seems to be true of parts physically torn off by Dark creatures.

To invent a curse to cause permanent amputation, therefore, and then name it for this, would be like inventing a new pen which did no more than existing pens already do, and then calling it "makes marks on paper". It would only make sense if Sectumsempra is a very, very old spell and was one of the first to have these characteristics. More likely, "Sectumsempra" means something else. It may well be that it really is a play on StaySharp and that it means "the knife which cuts every time", which would suggest that it started as a kitchen-knife spell, or something for chopping dangerous potion ingredients without touching them.

Because we see Snape sing Draco's wounds closed, in a very shamanic way, there's an assumption that wounds caused by Sectumsempra require a special counter-curse before they can be healed. Against this, Molly is able to heal George's ear, though not to make it regrow, and in the cave scene in HBP Rowling points up the similarity between the way Snape heals Draco's injuries and the way Dumbledore heals a cut which he has inflicted on himself with a purely physical blade.

Note also that Remus says that Sectumsempra is Snape's signature spell, but it's not clear how he knows this. During Vold War One Sirius didn't know Snape was a Death Eater, so presumably Remus didn't know either. Since we're told Snape rescues people from the Death Eaters whenever he can, Remus might have seen him use it on Order missions - but if he saw him use it at school it was probably only in a very controlled, limited way, since there's no suggestion of Snape getting into serious trouble for using it.

All-in-all, the fanon interpretation of Sectumsempra is not impossible, but neither is it strongly supported by canon. Therefore, it cannot reasonably be used as evidence that Snape is a terrible person because he only might have created a spell which only might be anything more than a remote-controlled fruit-knife.

I actually have a full essay about this called Sectumsempra and the nature of curses, which looks at what we are told about the different classes of spell including the Dark Arts and Dark magic, and concludes that these terms refer to any magic which is alternative or unauthorized or dangerous in some way. This can mean anything from monstrous evil which warps the very fabric of space and time, all the way down to Goth lifestyle accessories.

For example, we are told that everything which is on offer in Knockturn Alley is Dark Arts-related - and then we are shown, more than once, that Hagrid shops in Knockturn Alley. Whatever the Dark Arts are, therefore, Hagrid does some of them. We're told in Beedle the Bard that Beedle - and Dumbledore - merely "mistrusted" Dark magic: not that they recoiled from it in revulsion.

In the Spinner's End scene, Snape tells Bellatrix that when Harry arrived at Hogwarts there were rumours going around that Harry "was a great Dark wizard, which was how he had survived the Dark Lord's attack", and he's telling the truth, because Ernie Macmillan says in CoS that "Only a really powerful Dark Wizard" could have survived the Killing Curse. We know that Harry survived because of Lily's sacrifice, but nevertheless the wizarding world in general clearly considers it possible for a fifteen-month-old baby to already be "a great Dark wizard", able to use his powers to defend himself. Whatever a Dark wizard is, therefore, it clearly isn't, or isn't necessarily, a person who consciously performs acts of evil magic.

The power of the Obscurus, the manifestation of a child's pain and bottled magic, is also described as dark. At least some of the things classed as Dark seem to be things you do with your will rather than a spell. Snape comes across as more like a genuine magic-user than most of the characters, especially in the way he sings Draco well - so perhaps the reason he wants to be a Dark wizard (if he really does) is because he's a real magic-worker, not just a spell-caster, and he wants to work with the real raw stuff and shape it with his mind. Which would either be wonderfully liberating or a good way of getting fried, depending on exactly how good his control is.

This one is weakly supported by canon, but isn't nearly as firmly established as is assumed in fanon.

To begin with, Sirius says that young Severus arrived at Hogwarts knowing more curses than half the seventh years, which must mean he knew fewer curses than the other half, or the same number. Harry, the great DADA expert, so good at the subject that he is able to teach it proficiently when he is fifteen, enters what would have been his seventh year knowing, so far as we know, eight curses - Fernunculus, Reductor, Petrificus totalus, Locomotor mortis, Sectumsempra, Cruciatus, Imperius and Avada Kedavra - two of which he hasn't even tried to cast, and all but one of which he was either taught in class or found in a school library book. On this evidence, "knows more curses than half the seventh years" probably means "knows six curses", and it doesn't matter whether Sirius was being precisely accurate or not - he certainly thought that young Sev knew more curses than some of the seventh years, but not all.

Snape's mother might have had good reason to teach him curses, incidentally. According to Pottermore he grew up in the industrial Midlands and the description of Cokeworth/Spinnner's End makes it sound quite northern. If he was at the northern end of the Midlands, near Manchester, then he (and the Evans girls) was a child growing up in the hunting grounds of the paedophile serial killers called the Moors Murderers, who killed five children in 1963-1965. From 1974-1976 three teenage girls were killed by Trevor Hardy, the "Beast of Manchester", and from 1976-1981, when Snape was aged sixteen to twenty-one (covering the period when he both joined and left the Death Eaters) the north of England, including the northern Midlands, was terrorised by the Yorkshire Ripper, a prolific serial killer of young women, who must have made Snape fear for Lily's safety. This was also the era of nuclear panic when many Muggles themselves believed that Muggles were about to destroy the whole planet and all life on it except rats and cockroaches. It's not really surprising Snape joined a group who thought Muggles were dangerous and needed a wizard overseer.

Harry too was very keen on curses at eleven, although being wholly Muggle-raised he hadn't had the chance to learn any. "Even Dudley, who never read anything, would have been wild to get his hands on some of these. Hagrid almost had to drag Harry away from Curses and Countercurses (Bewitch Your Friends and Befuddle Your Enemies with the Latest Revenges: Hair Loss, Jelly-Legs, Tongue-Tying and much, much more) by Professor Vindictus Viridian."

So, the fact that young Snape knew more curses than half the seventh years probably does not amount to knowing very many curses, and does not suggest that he was any "darker" than Harry at the same age, although it does suggest that he was both precocious and combative.

Then, Sirius attempts to explain his and James's treatment of Snape to Harry by saying "James and Snape hated each other from the moment they set eyes on each other, it was just one of those things, you can understand that, can't you? I think James was everything Snape wanted to be – he was popular, he was good at Quidditch – good at pretty much everything. And Snape was just this little oddball who was up to his eyes in the Dark Arts, and James – whatever else he may have appeared to you, Harry – always hated the Dark Arts."

But this statement is highly questionable, among other things because JK Rowling has described James's treatment of Snape at school as "relentless bullying" and has said at interview that the cause of their enmity was at least partly James's sexual jealousy of Snape. The evidence suggests that Snape was, yes, probably mediocre on a broom but that he was good at pretty-much everything else, so Sirius's explanation is clearly very slanted. Slughorn makes it clear in HBP that Snape was a star student in Potions; and the fact that he was a Potions star and also able to invent his own spells suggests that he was probably a high flyer in Herbology and Charms as well; and the fact that it seemed credible to Voldemort that it would seem credible to Dumbledore that Snape should apply for the DADA post less than two years after leaving school suggests he had scored very highly on DADA as well. There's a fair degree of evidence that far from being a scorned outsider, Snape was in the Slug Club.

We see that James starts picking on Snape on the train when he knows nothing about him except that he's poor, has a rather scratchy manner, wants to be in Slytherin and is friends with a girl - and probably that both he and the girl have thick Midlands accents. James certainly began to pick on Snape for reasons which had nothing to do with the Dark Arts, unless he just assumes without question that all Slytherins must be into the Dark Arts - and if he does, that means that his assumption that Snape must be heavily into the Dark Arts may have been mostly imagination, and based on little more than blind house-prejudice. Either Sirius's assertion that James disliked Snape to any major extent because he was into the Dark Arts is a lie, because James started picking on Snape before he knew whether he was into the Dark Arts or not, or if true it's misleading, because James evidently assumed from the outset, without evidence, that Snape was into the Dark Arts. Either way, it's only very weak evidence that Snape actually was into the Dark Arts at school.

No explanation is offered as to why James should have hated the Dark Arts so much, when Hagrid performs some of them (he regularly shops in Knockturn Alley, and we're told that everything on sale in Knockturn Alley is Dark Arts-related), and when we're told in Beedle that Dumbledore himself only "mistrusts" Dark magic. And it's highly hypocritical when James himself routinely exposes innocent bystanders to the risk of being bitten and infected by a werewolf (an official Dark creature), or even killed, and when Snape is almost certainly right when he says that the Marauder's Map is full of Dark magic - bearing in mind that "Dark" seems to mean unauthorized or transgressive, rather than necessarily evil. It's exactly the sort of thing Arthur Weasley warned his children against - something which speaks as if it has a mind, but you can't see where it keeps its brain.

In the courtyard scene, which takes place some time in fifth year a few days after the werewolf "prank", Lily accuses Snape of being friends with somebody who tried to cast a Dark spell on somebody called Mary Macdonald, and Snape says it was "a laugh, that's all". It's not clear whether he means "It was Dark magic, but it was funny" or "He was only kidding that he was going to cast a Dark spell". We also don't know the circumstances, whether it was a duel, an attack, self-defence or what. The culprit was called Mulciber and a Death Eater called Mulciber would later be famous for his use of Imperius: if this is the same guy he may well have tried to Imperius Mary, in which case it was creepy but how sinister it was would depend in part on what he was trying to make her do. It could be anything from having sex with him to clucking like a chicken but the fact that young Snape says it was a joke suggests it was towards the chicken end of the spectrum, or he believes that it was. All we can be fairly certain of is that, like Remus with the Marauders and Harry with the Twins, young Snape had a tendency to make allowances for bad behaviour by his friends.

At any rate, Lily doesn't accuse him of performing Dark magic himself, and if she thought he had done so, she would surely have said so. So Snape apparently did not have a reputation for performing Dark magic, as at some point early in fifth year, or at least not one that Lily believed - despite the fact that as a dirt-poor, working-class half-blood Slytherin he must have needed anything he could get which would improve his street-cred.. He had some dodgy associates, yes - but at a time when Voldemort was on the rise and actively recruiting Slytherins, almost everybody in Slytherin would have had some dodgy associates. He doesn't seem to have had a reputation for Dark Arts at the end of fifth year, either - otherwise James would surely have given Lily a better reason for his persecution of her friend than "he exists".

So, Sirius is being economical with the truth when he suggests that James disliked Snape because Snape was into the Dark Arts. If that was ever a factor, it was a factor after fifth year, and long after Sirius had tried to feed Snape to a Dark creature to conceal the fact that he and his friends were practising to be illegal Animagi. Indeed, it may well be that Sirius asserts that Snape was heavily into the Dark Arts and arrived at school knowing a lot of curses in an attempt to conceal from himself, as well as from Harry, that he had joined in enthusiastically in what Pottermore calls their "relentless bullying" of Snape, and instead convince himself that Snape had been so powerful and deadly that four on one was fair odds.

Also, any reputation for Darkness which Snape may genuinely have garnered at school may have been at least partly a pose intended to scare off enemies. Rowling definitely thinks of some Slytherins as putting on an act in re. the Dark Arts, because on Pottermore there's a "welcome to Slytherin" letter, supposedly penned by a Slytherin prefect some time after Vold War Two, which includes the following: "It can be fun, having a reputation for walking on the wild side. Chuck out a few hints that you've got access to a whole library of curses, and see whether anyone feels like nicking your pencil case."

What's left? Snape must genuinely have had some reputation of being involved in the Dark Arts, at least as an adult, because he tells Bellatrix that the reason Dumbledore didn't give him the DADA post was because he, Dumbledore was afraid that he, Snape would relapse back into his old ways. Almost certainly it was because Snape was too valuable to risk him in a cursed post, but this explanation needs to sound convincing to Bellatrix, so he must have a reputation as a Dark wizard by this point, and he does seem fascinated by Dark magic when he describes it to the class in HBP. Always bearing in mind that "Dark wizard" cannot equate to "intentionally evil wizard", since the wizarding world believes that it is possible for a fifteen-month-old baby to be a functioning Dark wizard.

Rowling has said at interview that Snape drifted away from Lily because he was "drawn to loathesome people and acts", but on the page we see that Lily is clearly already drifting away from Snape in the courtyard scene, at which point she is accusing him of having friends who are into Dark magic, but not of performing it himself. She must be already drifting away, because she knows that he had a terrifying, life-threatening experience a few days beforehand, this is the first time she has spoken to him since the event, and yet she doesn't even ask him how he is, but launches straight into criticising him - and then prefers to believe James's word over his as regards the werewolf incident, even though it is Snape who is telling the truth.

Whether the acts Snape was drawn to were more loathesome than routinely putting innocent bystanders in danger of being bitten by a werewolf (the Marauders); plotting to let off a deadly gas inside a school, beating a small child's pet to death for fun or imprisoning a classmate in a small box and leaving them potentially to die of thirst (the Twins); violently attacking a terrified child and trying to turn him into a livestock-animal because you don't like his father (Hagrid); badly scarring a girl's face for life to punish her for being loyal to her mother (Hermione); or torturing somebody with agonizing pain and then throwing them through a sheet of plate glass just for being rude (Harry) we aren't told.

In another interview Rowling said that Snape joined the Death Eaters in part because he felt isolated and needed to belong to something stronger than himself, and in part because he hoped it would impress Lily - no mention of being drawn to the Dark Arts, so she evidently doesn't see it as his major motivation. Hoping that joining a paramilitary organization might impress Lily isn't nearly as stupid as it sounds, btw. The Death Eaters in Vold War One weren't as violently opposed to Muggle-borns as they would be in Vold War Two, since Rowling says that they tried to recruit Lily (Pottercast #130, 17^th December 2007: "... James and Lily turned him down, that was established in Philosopher's Stone. He wanted them, and they wouldn't come over ..." - although she did say later that it was very unusual for the Death Eaters to try to recruit a Muggle-born). Snape sees his own mother stay with a sour, angry man, he may by that point have known that Petunia was engaged to a blustering loudmouth, he sees Lily date a bully who had threatened her with violence ("Don't make me hex you") - it's quite natural that he would suspect Lily of being turned on by thugs, and he could be right.

This one is almost canon. Percy says in the first book that it's common knowledge that Snape wants Quirrell's job; Umbridge says (and Snape agrees) that Snape originally applied for the DADA post and that he has applied for it "regularly" ever since (which may or may not amount to every year); and Snape tells Bellatrix that Dumbledore won't give him the DADA job in case he relapses back into his "old ways". When Snape is finally given the DADA job in HBP, Harry thinks he can detect a look of triumph on Snape's face (although it sounds like it's pretty well hidden, if it exists at all and isn't just Harry's imagination).

The big question is, why does he apply for it? It isn't very credible that Snape should have watched a succession of DADA teachers leaving after only a year, for fifteen years, and that he should be knowledgeable enough about the Dark Arts to be able to teach defence against them, and yet not at least suspect that the post is cursed, even if Dumbledore hasn't told him it is. Is he so arrogant that he is sure he will be able to overcome the curse?

If Snape knows that the post is cursed, and specifically that it's cursed by Voldemort, that raises a whole new set of problems. He and Dumbledore must surely at least suspect that the curse won't attack a loyal Voldemort supporter, or at least suspect that Voldemort will expect them to suspect it. It's true that both Quirrell and Crouch Jnr. ended up dead, but Quirrell's was a special case and in any case he probably didn't bear the Dark Mark, and Crouch had Polyjuiced himself into the form of somebody who wasn't Marked.

The mere fact that Voldemeort originally sent Snape to apply for the DADA post suggests that the curse would not affect somebody who was Marked: otherwise, why go to all the trouble of inserting a spy into the staffroom at Hogwarts and then tell them to apply for a post which would ensure they would only be there for a year? Or if the deaths of Quirrell and Crouch were just due to the risks they were running, and not to the DADA curse, it could be that the curse doesn't affect those who are truly loyal to Voldemort and that Voldemort told Snape to apply for the DADA post because he was already a bit suspicious of him, and thought that if Snape was not loyal the curse would reveal it.

If Voldie thinks that Snape would think that the curse won't attack a loyal, Marked Death Eater, and he knows that Snape originally applied for the DADA post and has the reputation of still wanting it, then for Snape not to apply for the DADA post periodically would be tantamount to admitting to Voldie that he isn't a loyal Death Eater, and therefore expects the curse to apply to himself - assuming, that is, that Voldie would expect Snape to know or suspect that the post had been cursed by Voldie.

Similarly, if Dumbledore gives Snape the DADA post and then he loses it at the end of the year in a way which suggests that the curse has been activated, that would prove to Voldie that he isn't a loyal Death Eater - or at least they would have to fear that it would, since they don't know the exact terms of the curse. So Dumbledore and Snape are locked in an endless cycle where Snape has to apply for the DADA post and Dumbledore has to refuse him, until they get to the point where they know Snape will have an unimpeachable reason for leaving just before the end of term and hence before the curse gets him, without rousing Tom's suspicions.

Of course, it would probably have been possible for Dumbledore to give Snape the DADA post for one year only and then remove him from the post before the curse could hurt him, as effectively happened with Remus. But then he would have had to take on an alternative Potions master/mistress for just one year, if Snape was to have his old job back. He wouldn't want to have to make the existence of the curse more obvious to other applicants by having Snape leave the job without explanation or by telling the new Potions professor in advance that he was hiring them only for a year, nor would he want to make it look like Snape couldn't handle the post and had been demoted. So for these reasons also Snape could only have the job at a point when they both knew he'd be leaving at the end of the year anyway, and in a way which wouldn't attract suspicion to the job itself.

The Death Eaters are a highly organized group who wear special, elaborate masks and uniforms.

In the films the Death Eaters are portrayed as militarized and disciplined, wearing black uniforms and elaborate, sinister white or silver ceramic masks as they trample in silent unison across the World Cup campsite, hammering it flat with their iron tread. In the book the Death Eater wannabees at the World Cup are a baying, undisciplined rabble emitting "Loud jeering, roars of laughter and drunken yells", who set fire to a few tents more or less by accident as they blast them out of the way.

During the scene in the graveyard at Little Hangleton in GoF, Harry sees a gathering of Death Eaters, including Lucius, and sees that "their eyes dart[ed] sideways at each other through their masks" and "the glittering eyes in their masks [were] fixed upon Voldemort". Lucius's voice is variously described as coming both from "beneath the hood" and from "under the mask". When Harry next encounters Lucius, in the Department of Mysteries at the end of OotP, he thinks that "He had last seen those cold grey eyes through slits in a Death Eater's hood".

photo montage showing a man in a camouflage jacket and black Balaclava helmet, holding an assault rifle, with a dim image of a man's head wearing a gas mask behind him and above him two Irosh flags vertically banded in gold, white and green, with a drawing of a hand holding a rifle superimposed over the flags

Pro-IRA photo' montage, found on Google images - the link is to a Pinterest page but the image has been removed. The flag is that of the Republic of Eire.

It seems clear that mask and hood are one thing, and that the mask is some sort of cloth flap on the front of the hood. The result probably resembles, and is intended to resemble, the black Balaclava helmets worn by real-life British paramilitary organisations such as the IRA, INLA and UDA. Pointed KKK-style hoods are possible but unlikely, as that look is so distinctive - and to British eyes so ridiculous - that you'd expect it to be mentioned. Indeed, in British tradition a pointed, cone-shaped hat like that is called a "Dunce's cap", and symbolises stupidity.

This seems to fit almost every occasion when Death Eater masks are described. The only exception is during the final battle when Thicknesse's mask is pulled down to bare his forehead, showing that it isn't of a piece with his hood: but Thicknesse isn't a real Death Eater, just some poor sap of a politican who was Imperiused, so his outfit may be ad hoc.

There are references to recognisable "Death Eater robes", which indicate that they do have some sort of uniform, or at least a look: but we are never told what that look is. Possibly it's the built-in mask which distinguishes them. Even the idea that the Death Eaters habitually dress in black is only moderately supported in canon. We are never told that the Death Eaters always wear black, nor told that they are wearing black every time they appear. All we can say is that on the few occasions when we see a Death Eater and are told what colour their clothes are, they're wearing black - but black is a very common colour for wizard robes.

American readers tend to assume that the Death Eaters are based on Islamist terrorists and are therefore wholesale slaughterers of civilians - but the Harry Potter books were planned at a time when hardly anybody had heard of Islamist terrorists and Britain was, and had been for decades, in the grip of its own long-running terrorist war between the different factions in Northern Ireland. This is why Vernon makes a joke about Harry "checking for letter-bombs" in the first book - if the family had had any strong police, political or military connections then a letter-bomb would have been a real possibility in 1991 - and also probably why Vernon and Petunia assume that the Potters were killed by the explosion which destroyed part of their house. They (and presumably the villagers of Godric's Hollow) assume that they were the victims of a bombing. The Death Eaters wear cloth hoods which are probably similar to the black Balaclava helmets worn by Irish terrorists, and the timing of various events to do with the Death Eaters matches similar events to do with Irish terrorism in Ireland and on the mainland, with the same debates about the behaviour of the security services, with starving, Dementor-damaged prisoners in Azkaban as against hunger-strikers in The Maze etc., so it's far more likely that the Death Eaters are modelled on the IRA, UDA etc. than on Islamists.

With some exceptions, Irish terrorists rarely deliberately murdered civilians. They were perfectly willing to kill civilians as collateral damage but their style was usually to attack political and military targets, or to cause huge damage to civilian buildings but to give the police just enough warning to evacuate them first. The bombs which took out a large slice of central Manchester in 1996 could potentially have killed or maimed eighty thousand people: but in reality there were no serious injuries at all, because the IRA warned the police in advance.

Sometimes they warned the police there was going to be a bomb when there wasn't, and got to cause mass evacuations and massive disruption for the price of a 'phone-call.

So, we cannot automatically assume that the Death Eaters target civilians or carry out acts of gratuitous cruelty, just because they are terrorists. We need to look at what we actually know about them.

In GoF Arthur Weasley refers to "Muggle killings" during Vold War One, half of which he believes to have been done for fun, but gives no figures - we don't know if he's talking about two gratuitous murders or two hundred. In DH Harry tells the Dursleys that Voldemort (he personally, not the Death Eaters) kills Muggles for fun, and there are references to Muggle casualties and the need to defend Muggle neighbours during Vold War Two, although it's not said whether these casualties are due to Death Eaters or to Dementors. Although Arthur mentions the existence of some gratuitous killings, all the Muggle killings that we actually know about before DH seem to have been carried out for practical, tactical reasons, mainly to put pressure on the Ministry. These killings are callous, but not gratuitous, so they do not amount to evidence that the Death Eaters kill for sport on a regular basis - that idea seems to rest only on Arthur's opinion.

We are told that some of the Death Eaters in Vold War One indulged in Muggle torture - Voldemort himself refers to it - but then he calls the baiting of the Roberts family at the World Cup "Muggle torture", and that was only slightly worse than what the Marauders did to Snape. So we don't know whether Muggle torture refers to gory atrocities or aggravated bullying. It could be the kind of horrors assumed in fanon, but we don't know.

Sirius says that in Vold War One "Every week, news comes of more deaths, more disappearances, more torturing ..." but again, we don't know if this was the gratuitous cruelty assumed in fanon, or practical military action. The torture of the Longbottoms, for example, was done in order to obtain information, not out of sadism. If you list the names of people we know have been killed by Death Eaters up to the start of DH, there are one or two where we don't know where they worked or why they were targetted, but the vast majority were either Ministry staff or Order members or their families, and there's nobody that we know of that was killed by Death Eaters prior to DH and that we know not to have been a Ministry official or an Order member or one of their relatives. We do know that whole families of Order members were wiped out, but we don't know whether they were deliberately targetted, or were collateral damage.

The way Voldemort seems to be holding court at Malfoy manor slightly supports the idea of Death Eater social gatherings, at least in Vold War Two, and he does have a tormented prisoner in the dungeon - or at least in the cellar - and kills Charity Burbage in front of his council. The classic fanon idea of the Death Eaters is just about canon-compatible, especially in Vold War Two: but it's not the only possible interpretation. Therefore, one cannot state that the Death Eaters as a group definitely do murder or torture for fun and then use that as evidence of anything else: it's a point which is unclear.

It may well be that Rowling had the Nazis vaguely in mind when she wrote about the race laws which Umbridge introduces, but the Nazis would kill anyone who was even a quarter Jew or gypsy, whereas the Death Eaters, and even Umbridge, will spare anyone who is even a quarter wizwitch.

There are superficial similarities between the Death Eaters and White Supremacists, but the dynamics are different. White Supremacists, at least where they occur in predominately white countries, are members of a majority who have been in power for centuries and don't like the idea that they may now have to share their toys with others. Pureblood supremacists are a minority within an already tiny minority, possessed of certain advantages but hiding in fear from the very Muggles whom they affect to despise but who outnumber wizwitches six thousand to one, and who in the past have done their best to hunt wizards into extinction.

If the Death Eaters equate to any American racist group, it's not the Ku Klux Klan but the Nation of Islam; a militant wing of an oppressed minority, who have become as bigoted as their erstwhile oppressors.

The dynamic is similar to the setup of the made-for-tv 1991 film called Blood Ties, which was shown at least three times on British TV and might well have been seen by Rowling....

It's about vampires, but these vampires aren't supernatural beings but a surviving remnant of another and more predatory human species, who refer to themselves as Carpathians. They are physically superior to Homo sapiens, much stronger, more agile and longer-lived, but their numbers are tiny and because of their wolf-like behavioural peculiarities they have been ostracised and hunted to the verge of extinction. The moral core of the film is about what happens when a persecuted minority turn inward and start to see themselves as not only different from but superior to their persecutors, and start to treat them as beasts, as prey, which is effectively what's happening with the Death Eaters (especially after Umbridge gets involved).

The distinction between the Ministry and the Death Eaters is obviously one of good versus evil.

One of the things to bear in mind about the Death Eaters is that they were formed at a time when many Muggles themselves believed that Muggles (who outnumber wizards by around six thousand to one) were soon going to destroy the world in a total nuclear war, when there was widespread concern about air-pollution and when Britain was being shaken by terrorism originating in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and disrupted by power-cuts and refuse-collection strikes, and when many British businesses were being restricted to opening only three days a week in order to conserve failing electricity supplies. Snape, in particular, very likely grew up close to the areas haunted by the paedophile serial killers known as the Moors Murderers, by Trevor Hardy, aka the Beast of Manchester, and by Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, a prolific killer of young women. It was not surprising that some wizards felt that wizards should intervene and take control.

Another is that prejudice against Muggles is widespread in the wizarding world. Hagrid, for example, uses "Muggle" as a term of abuse. When he says to Harry "An' it's your bad luck you grew up in a family o' the biggest Muggles I ever laid eyes on." it's pretty clear he isn't referring to the Dursleys' weight - he's using "Muggle" in much the same way people say "mouth-breather" or "Neanderthal".

We see not only Hagrid and the Twins but Dumbledore too amusing themselves by tormenting the Dursleys, and especially their child, with magical tricks which terrify them (the pig's tail, the extended tongue, the floating glasses of mead); and when JK Rowling was asked to provide a little prequel for charity, she chose to show James and Sirius in the summer between their sixth and seventh years, already Order members, amusing themselves by making fools of two Muggle policemen. In the Victorian era, there was actually an attempt to legalize Muggle-hunting as a sport, and the wizarding world as a whole cheerfully accepts the idea of messing with Muggles' minds and memories, sometimes to the point of leaving them dazed and confused, without any apparent moral qualms. So the Death Eaters' prejudice against Muggles isn't something unique to them - they are just carrying a normal wizard attitude to extremes.

Kreacher says that Regulus thought that the Death Eaters intended the pure-blood wizards "to rule the Muggles and the Muggle-borns", but their prejudice against Muggle-borns evidently was nothing like as bad in Vold War One as it was to become after Umbridge got involved. Hagrid, an Order member, is surprised to think that Voldemort didn't try to recruit Muggle-born Lily and her husband, and in fact Rowling has said at interview that he did try to recruit them. So the Death Eaters' social model in Vold War One was at the same sort of level as South African apartheid, with the Muggle-borns reduced to second-class status but still able to do fairly well if they were especially talented, rather than the Nazi-style total social exclusion and murder we see in Vold War Two.

Then, Rowling makes it plain that not everybody who joined the Death Eaters was evil, or an unmitigated pure-blood supremacist. The house elves go into battle against Voldemort shouting the name not of Sirius, the Gryffindor Order member, but of "Brave Regulus", the Slytherin Death Eater who betrayed the Dark Lord because he loved a house elf more than his own life. The flaw in Voldemort's plan was Severus, the Slytherin Death Eater who betrayed the Dark Lord because he loved a Muggle-born girl more than his own life. When they were recruiting, the Death Eaters must have presented themselves in some way which made them seem palatable to a nice boy who loved his house elf.

The Death Eaters were not a tiny disaffected rump of fanatics and loners, as most paramilitary groups are. The wizarding population of Britain probably numbers around ten thousand [Rowling actually said at one point that there were three thousand wizards in Britain, but that doesn't fit with the amount of infrastructure we see, unless we assume that she literally means three thousand adult male magic users.] Remus says that during Vold War One the Death Eaters outnumbered the Order twenty to one.

At the time the Order photograph was taken, almost certainly mid to late July 1981, that we know of the Order had over twenty members: Sirius Black; Edgar Bones; Dedalus Diggle; Elphias Doge; Aberforth Dumbledore; Albus Dumbledore; Benjy Fenwick; Arabella Figg; Mundungus Fletcher; Rubeus Hagrid; Alice Longbottom; Frank Longbottom; Remus Lupin; Marlene McKinnon; Dorcas Meadowes; Alistair Moody; Sturgis Podmore; James Potter; Lily Potter; Gideon Prewett and Emmeline Vance, plus Peter Pettigrew and Severus Snape who for separate reasons may not be on Remus's mental list, and possibly but not definitely plus Minerva McGonagall and Fabian Prewett. So if this is the period Remus was thinking of when he said the Death Eaters outnumbered the Order twenty to one, and assuming he's correct, there must have been at least four hundred active Death Eaters, out of a population of around ten thousand. Scaled up, that's equivalent to a British Muggle paramilitary group having nearly two and a half million active, combatant members - or twelve million in the U.S.. Even if Remus was thinking of the last days of the war after several of the members in the photograph had been lost, it's clear that if Remus's figures are anything like accurate, the Death Eaters were a mass movement which represented a startlingly high percentage of the wizarding population, and Vold War One was a true civil war, not just a government putting down a small number of unrepresentative rebels.

Following an incident in which Donald Trump was widely compared to Voldemort on Twitter, JKR tweeted "How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad." Of course there's a degree of hyperbole here - nobody has ever suggested that Trump is an actual murderer who machine-guns his followers when he's in a bad mood - but it does suggest that JK sees Riddle as a charismatic demagogue whose followers were often foolish rather than evil.

The wizarding world is not a benign democracy - indeed there's little evidence that it's a democracy at all. We're told that Fudge had been elected five years prior to OotP, but we're not told who the electorate is. We see no sign of political parties so the Minister ought to be directly elected, like the officers of a Students' Union, and if s/he steps down they won't just be replaced by whoever is the new leader of their party, because there isn't one. There ought to be an immediate election to choose a replacement. Yet when Scrimgeour takes over from Fudge we see no sign of voting, which may mean that the electorate is confined to the Ministry itself.

The Death Eaters do seem to have begun to use extreme violence first. If Sirius's account is accurate (bearing in mind that much of this happened while he was a child spending most of the year in a boarding school, so a lot of what he thinks he knows about Vold War One must be what he recalls of what he read in the Prophet at the time) Barty Crouch became "as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark side" and authorized the use of Unforgiveables as a reaction to a violent situation which was already escalating. And it may be that the practice of sending prisoners to Azkaban for life without trial also came about as a reaction to that escalation.

Even before that, though, the wizarding world was one in which prisoners were sent to a sort of concentration camp where they were psychologically tortured by the Dementors until they went mad and starved to death. We don't know if the Kiss was already being used but if so it was worse than straightforward execution, because it killed the person but left their family to deal with an empty body - a kind of horrible state terrorism, equivalent to the brutal forms of execution used to terrify the populace into compliance in the Muggle Middle Ages. It was a society where at some point in the not very distant past schoolchildren had been disciplined with days-long sessions of brutal torture (according to Filch, anyway); a society in which fully sentient non-humans were second-class citizens. It was a society which didn't kill as readily as the Death Eaters did, but which did things to its prisoners which were arguably worse than killing them; a society in which, not that long ago, a public figure had actually campaigned to have Muggle-hunting legalized as a sport.

And although Muggle-hunting was voted out, the way regular, "good" wizarding society treats non-human sentients isn't much better than the way the Death Eaters treat Muggles. The giants seem to have suffered something close to genocide, house elves can be abused with impunity, werewolves are third-class citizens and the way the gnomes are treated is despicable. Although we're told they aren't as intelligent as humans they are clearly sentient persons who talk and wear clothes, are probably around as bright as a human child and who were probably in Devon well before the Weasleys built their Burrow. OK, wizards don't seem actually to kill them, but in other respects they are treated as garden pests and Luna's idea that they might have a culture and something to teach humans is mocked, even by her author. Ron takes a gnome man prisoner, humiliates him by hanging him up on the Christmas tree and, that we know of, gives him no food or water or opportunity for a lavatory break for several days, and as far as we are told nobody, not even Arthur, thinks this is wrong, or does anything to help the man. Now take away "gnome" and think "native tribesman" - at least the unfortunate African bloke who was locked in a cage in an American zoo was only on display during office hours, and got to eat and probably to sneak off for a private pee when he needed it.

The Death Eaters probably still were even worse than the Ministry, but the difference wasn't all that great, and it must have been clear to any thoughtful person that the Ministry was deeply flawed. If they glossed over the sordid reality in their recruitment presentation, the Death Eaters may well have been able to convince naive teenagers like Regulus and Severus that they were the lesser evil.

Once the Department of Magical Law Enforcement began to use Unforgiveables on prisoners and to commit them to life imprisonment without trial, the situation becomes even murkier. Since Sirius calls Crouch "cruel", presumably the Unforgiveables which the Aurors were using included Cruciatus. We are not given any reason to think that Crouch tortured or killed or sent to the Dementors without trial anybody whom he did not at least believe to be guilty. Sirius says that Crouch was "as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark side" and that necessarily means that many on the Dark side were not more ruthless and cruel than Crouch - that is, many, if not most, of the Death Eaters tortured and killed, if they did so at all, only when they felt it was strongly justified - not recreationally.

The Death-Eaters-as-monsters fanon is just about canon-compatible if you assume some sort of especially violent inner circle or clique - the Carrows and Greyback certainly seem to be recreational thugs - and by Vold War Two many of them have been addled by exposure to the Dementors. Bellatrix in Vold War Two does seem to be a deranged racist and sadist, but that may be the result of damage done by fourteen years being psychologically tortured and stripped of all good feelings by Dementors, probably in solitary confinement. Before she was condemned to Azkaban, she may not have been as straightforwardly evil as is usually assumed, even though she was one of the group who tortured the Longbottoms until they suffered permanent brain damage.

Unless they had taken a stand against what the Aurors were becoming, the Longbottoms themselves were not wholly innocent. As Aurors at that time, they were either torturers or the colleagues of torturers - loosely equivalent to officers of the Stasi. [N.B. we're told in one place that both of them were Aurors, and in another just that Frank was, so it may be that Alice was on maternity leave and so not involved in the use of Unforgiveables.] Bellatrix was in love with Tom Riddle, and she believed that he had been captured - by a Ministry which was very likely to torture him and then hand him over to the Dementors to have his very soul sucked out of his body and eaten. Leaving aside the fact that she shouldn't have pinned her great love to a frothing psychopathic bigot in the first place, from her point of view she tortured torturers to save her love from being tortured - not good behaviour, but not necessarily worse than what the Ministry was doing at that point.

The knee-jerk violence which made Bellatrix kill the unfortunate fox she mistook for an Auror is understandable when you think how petrified she must be of being recaptured and taken back to Azkaban: the Ministry's cruelty breeds cruelty in return. In real life we saw this with the notorious Bonny and Clyde: Clyde was reportedly a fairly harmless petty thief until he was sent to a particularly brutal prison in Texas, where he was raped by a fellow prisoner and brutalized by the guards. Having killed his rapist in self-defence, he became consumed with hatred of the regime which had facilitated the abuse, and desperate not to be recaptured and taken back into that hell-hole, and so became a hair-trigger killer.

Even the Order of the Phoenix isn't a bastion of freedom and fairness - just the best of a very bad bunch. Hagrid uses "Muggle" to mean "knuckle-dragger", and thinks it is acceptable to attack a Muggle child with great violence just because his father wasn't sufficiently respectful towards Dumbledore. James and Sirius enjoy a spot of light Muggle-baiting, and even Arthur talks about Muggles as if they were clever circus animals. Just about every Order member the Dursleys meet is either rude to them, bullies them with magic or patronises them, and whilst some of that is because they are obnoxious, I'm very doubtful that the Order would have treated a wizard family in the same disrespectful way. Aberforth thinks that holding children hostage would be a good idea. And the fact that false!Moody's behaviour didn't lead to his imposture being discovered suggests that the real Moody is the sort of person who might torture experimental animals, or punish a child by repeatedly slamming them against a stone floor as they screamed in pain.

This fanon splits in two directions. There are fen who believe that all Slytherins are evil, and there are fen who believe that JK Rowling portrays all Slytherins as evil but that this is an act of bigotry on her part. Neither is fully canon-compatible, although there is certainly some wiggle room as to what proportion of Slytherins you think are wrong 'uns.

To begin with, I find it helps to remember that although Rowling puts Harry in Gryffindor and talks about how much she admires bravery, she herself dresses in green and silver and little snakes. She said in an interview that when she took the house test on Pottermore she got Gryffindor, apparently because she had deliberately answered the questions that way, but then she went on to say that the reason so many Gryffindors stayed to fight in the final battle was because that house was full of reckless, foolhardy show-offs.

Rowling says that all her characters contain elements of herself but admits to having based Snape on John Nettleship, her own Chemistry master, and in most respects you can see the resemblance. John was brilliant, loyal, loving, limitlessly brave but also socially awkward, hot-tempered, sometimes catty and in some ways immature, and at the time Rowling knew him he was also half out of his mind with chronic insomnia, which explains a lot about Snape. But the more unpleasant aspects of Snape's character, his spitefulness and grudge-bearing, don't belong to John at all, whereas Rowling has made it very clear that she herself is still carrying childhood grudges. It seems likely, therefore, that her ambiguous attitude to Snape - and by extension to all Slytherins - is at least in part because she has put into Snape aspects of herself which she doesn't like about herself, and she can't understand why many fen still love him.

In canon, Hagrid tells Harry that there was never a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't a Slytherin. Quite apart from the fact that we know that many foreign wizwitches went bad and followed Grindelwald, Hagrid is lying even as regards British wizwitches, since we know he knows that one of the Gryffindor Marauders went to the bad, became a senior Death Eater and betrayed his friends, even if he's confused about which one. Possibly he regards Sirius as an honorary Slytherin because he was a Black. Characters whom Harry likes, especially the Twins, are seen to jeer at and denigrate Slytherin at every turn. James first began to pick on Severus because Severus wanted to be in Slytherin, and all the other houses will cheer for whatever team is playing against Slytherin.

We do not know whether it's true that nearly all Death Eaters were in Slytherin, or not. It's certainly true that, with the exception of Peter Pettigrew, a Gryffindor, and Quirrell, supposedly a Ravenclaw, every Death Eater whose house affiliation we know of was a Slytherin, and so was Umbridge (probably by default, since she was disloyal, thick and a coward). We do not know how large a part house-loyalty may have played in this and whether, had Tom Riddle been a Ravenclaw, it would have been mainly Ravenclaws who followed him.

We see some Slytherin players employing dirty tricks at Quidditch, both in Harry's day and in McGonagall's schooldays - but then if you read Quidditch Through the Ages it seems as if cheating is the norm. Indeed, it could be argued that cheating at Quidditch is so universal that to some extent cheating is the game. [This may have something to do with the popularity of a card-game called Cheat when Rowling and I were teenagers.] We can say that at Hogwarts the Slytherins do seem to cheat more than the other teams, perhaps because they are more ambitious - although ambition can be aimed at artistic or scientific skill as easily as at worldly success.

When it comes to the staff we are told that Snape and McGonagall are exactly as partisan as each other when it comes to Quidditch, although both of them "attempted to disguise it under a decent pretence of sportmanship": but we can say that Snape's partisanship involves multiple-booking the pitch for practice sessions and turning a blind eye when some of his house students hex the Gryffindor team, while McGonagall's consists in not giving her students homework in order to free up more time to practise. On the other hand she cheated right at the outset to get Harry onto her team, because we're told that it was actually against school rules for a first year to be on the team, and she had to ask Dumbledore to bend the rule for her. It's Pottermore canon that McGonagall is biased against Slytherin after a Slytherin player fouled her during a Quidditch match when she was about eighteen. At least, she's determined to see them lose at Quidditch - and that kind of lifelong resentment is pretty-well bound to spill over into other areas.

Just as an impression is created that Snape is constantly taking points from Gryffindor, when in fact he is constantly taking points from the Trio, specifically, so an impression is created that Harry has constant problems with Slytherins, when in fact he has constant problems with Draco and his cronies, specifically. When it was announced that Hagrid would be the new Care of Magical Creatures teacher, the applause was "tumultuous at the Gryffindor table in particular", which strongly implies that all the other tables including Slytherin applauded, although Gryffindor applauded loudest. When Harry rode on Buckbeak in front of the mixed Gryffindor/Slytherin class, "everyone except Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle cheered". Pansy Parkinson and her friends jeer at Hermione from behind Snape's back during the teeth incident, and it is Pansy who suggests handing Harry over to the Dark Lord to protect the school - but she too is one of Draco's immediate circle. Umbridge's gang of thugs do seem to all be Slytherins, but again they are mainly Draco's gang, and she is a Slytherin herself. That is, it may be house-bias rather than intrinsic evil which leads a Slytherin teacher to look for, and find, Slytherin recruits.

Then, there's a very odd bit of business which you may say is an official canon-compatible fanon. On 1^st February 2008 Rowling said at interview "A part of the final battle that made me smile was Slughorn galloping back with Slytherins, [cut] they'd gone off to get reinforcements first, you know what I'm saying? But yes, they came back, they came back to fight, so I mean - but I'm sure that many people would say 'Well, that's common sense, isn't it? Isn't that smart, to get out, get more people and come back with them?' It's the old saying, 'There is no truth, there are only points of view.'" This scene does not exist in the book.

What we do find, however, is this: "And now there were more, even more people storming up the front steps, and Harry saw Charlie Weasley overtaking Horace Slughorn, who was still wearing his emerald pyjamas. They seemed to have returned at the head of what looked like the families and friends of every Hogwarts student who had remained to fight, along with the shopkeepers and homeowners of Hogsmeade." This reads superficially as if "every Hogwarts student who had remained to fight" is referring to the non-Slytherin students who are already up at the castle, but it seems pretty clear from JK's comments that what she had in mind was that this group included many Slytherin students who had remained in Hogsmeade while they summoned reinforcements, or who had been Flooed to their families only to come back with those families in tow. Even though it doesn't say so on the page.

Against this we have Voldemort in the Shrieking Shack, saying to Lucius "If your son is dead, Lucius, it is not my fault. He did not come and join me, like the rest of the Slytherins." which suggests that many of the Slytherins had joined the Death Eaters. This contradicts Rowling's statement to some extent, but is feasible time-wise.

In the scene in the Great Hall, McGonagall told all the students they would have to be evacuated, and Ernie Macmillan asked if they could stay to fight if they wanted to, and McGonagall said they could if they were of-age. Pansy Parkinson (only) wanted to hand Harry over. The other three houses rose and faced Slytherin, then drew their wands on Pansy (only). The rest of Slytherin remained seated and uninvolved, but this incident must have left them feeling isolated. McGonagall then said "Thank you, Miss Parkinson. You will leave the Hall first with Mr Filch. If the rest of your house could follow." and all the Slytherins rose and left; followed in turn by Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. No Slytherins stayed behind to fight but there were "a number" of Ravenclaws, a larger number of Hufflepuffs and about half of Gryffindor who did, including some who were underage and had to be ordered to go.

On the face of it this makes it seem that the Slytherins didn't want to defend the school, and as if the Gryffindors are bravest and best. However, this is Rowling commenting on that scene: "There comes a point in the final book where each House has the choice whether or not to rise to a certain challenge – and that's everyone in the House. // The Slytherins, for reasons that are understandable, decide they'd rather not play. The Ravenclaws: some decide they will, some decide they won't. The Hufflepuffs, virtually to a person, stay – as do the Gryffindors. Now, the Gryffindors comprise a lot of fool-hardy and show-offy people. That's just the way it is. I'm a Gryffindor, I'm allowed to say it. There's bravery and there's also showboating, and sometimes the two go together. The Hufflepuffs stayed for a different reason. They weren't trying to show off. They weren't being reckless."

She's misremembering it slightly - less than half of the Hufflepuffs stayed - but it seems clear that this statement refers specifically to the scene in the Great Hall and it does suggest that she is seeing the Slytherins' departure as in part a reluctance to join in with a game of one-upmanship, especially as she sees many of the Gryffindors as staying in part to show off. It has no bearing on what they did later.

There are other factors here to bear in mind. The fact that the numbers staying increased with each house suggests that there was an element of being given confidence by seeing people ahead of them opt to stay, and that part of the reason none of the Slytherins stayed was simply because they were the house who sat closest to the door and were therefore the first to leave.

Also, one of the Gryffindors who wanted to stay, and who was ordered to go because he was underage, was Colin Creevey, who from what we were told in CoS is probably Muggle-born (Draco certainly thinks he is, and he hadn't known about magic till he got his Howgarts letter), and therefore wouldn't have been at school that year. Just before the muster in the Great Hall, Harry was sent to collect people who had come in via the wizardspace tunnel from The Hogshead to the Room of Requirement. Colin Creevey's presence at the muster shows that some, perhaps many of the people from the RoR had come downstairs to sit at their house tables. These were, by definition, people who wanted to fight, because that was why they'd come there in the first place, and this group was heavily weighted towards Gryffindor and away from Slytherin. Neville had alerted some of the former Dumbledore's Army members, who in turn had alerted the rest of the DA (which included no Slytherins because none had been invited to join), the Order (which included at least two Slytherins but for differing reasons neither was present) and several former members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team (all Gryffs by definition).

So, a lot of the people who stayed behind to fight did so because they had just come to the castle for that very reason, part of the reason why there were so many Gryffindors was because more Gryffindors than other houses had been given the alert, and part of the reason why there were no Slytherin fighters at that point was because Slytherins had been excluded from the chain of communication which brought the fighters in. If Rowling's interview comment is to be believed, they gathered fighters later, once they had had a chance to speak to their families.

Just after the fourth student house left, McGonagall stated that the time was half an hour before midnight. Having left the Great Hall between about 11:15 and 11:25pm, the students all tramped upstairs to the seventh floor, shepherded by their Prefects, entered the Room of Requirement and filed out through the wizardspace passage which led to the upstairs room at The Hogshead. The route through this passage appears to be shorter and faster than the real distance outside, but it would still take a while to feed nearly six hundred students down it. Having emerged in The Hogshead, any students wishing to join Voldemort would have had to walk back to Hogwarts and then deep into the Forbidden Forest, since Voldemort's army was based at Aragog's old nest. They could have done this by about 1am.

Just after Snape's death, Voldemort made an announcement giving Harry an hour to come to him. Half an hour later, Harry looks at his watch and sees that it is nearly 4am, so Snape died around 3:20am. Working back through the sequence of events prior to Snape's death, Voldemort's comment to Lucius was made around 2.35am, so there was time for Voldemort to have witnessed Slytherin recruits coming in, if he was telling the truth to Lucius.

Against this, however, we have not only Rowling's comment about many Slytherins returning with reinforcements to defend the castle, but also the fact that we aren't shown any young people fighting on Voldemort's side other than Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle, and that Aberforth speaks of seeing Slytherins in general and the children of Death Eaters in particular being evacuated to safety. It's clear, therefore, that Slytherin house didn't join Voldemort en masse, even though some of them may have done. Perhaps Voldemort was already at the Shrieking Shack, saw Slughorn leading Slytherins towards the school, and just assumed they were for him. Or he saw that Draco's gang - who make up around half of their year - were joining him, and assumed that all the Slytherins would do so.

>[Depending on whether ther are eight or ten Gryffindors in Harry's year, there are twelve or ten Slytherins, since the two houses together add up to twenty students. Draco's gang comprises Draco Malfoy himself, Vincent Crabbe, Gregory Goyle, Blaise Zabini, Pansy Parkinson and possibly, but not definitely, one or more of Theodore Nott, Daphne Greengrass and Millicent Bulstrode.]

We still don't have hard evidence within the book that many of the students whose families came to fight with them were Slytherins, despite what JK said at interview. It is however reasonable to surmise that many of them were the families of students who had been evacuated to Hogsmeade and then chose to fight. Of those students who had stayed at the castle not many could send a speaking Patronus, and if they were able to Floo-call their families from the castle then their families could have stepped through the Floo to join them, not had to walk from Hogsmeade. We are not shown any evidence that any sort of broadcast about the attack was able to go out in time to summon support, only that Neville was in touch with Luna and Ginny through the old DA coins, and they then spread the word. Unless somebody at the castle had a working mobile phone, it seems likely that the families who came to join students in Hogsmeade had been summoned using a Floo in Hogsmeade.

Although the books certainly do create the impression that Slytherins are all pariahs, or that Rowling thinks they are, this was clearly not her original intention, but the accidental result of an editorial decision. She has stated that she had originally intended the books to include a major character called Mafalda Weasley, Ron's red-headed Slytherin cousin, who would be opposed to Voldemort, who would help the Trio by reporting on the activities of the DE wannabees in her house, and who was just as brilliant and as bossy as Hermione, causing Hermione to have mixed feelings as to whether Mafalda was an ally or a rival. But Mafalda, sadly, was edited out, along with Dean Thomas's back story, for reasons of compactness.

The following is a letter posted on Pottermore and supposedly given out or read to newly Sorted Slytherins. We know that the timing is at the start of Harry's first or second year, because it's part of a set of welcome letters, one for each house, and the welcoming Gryffindor prefect is Percy Weasley. At a pinch it could be the start of PoA if Percy write his letter before becoming Head Boy.

Congratulations! I'm Prefect Gemma Farley, and I'm delighted to welcome you to SLYTHERIN HOUSE. Our emblem is the serpent, the wisest of creatures; our house colours are emerald green and silver, and our common room lies behind a concealed entrance down in the dungeons. As you'll see, its windows look out into the depths of the Hogwarts lake. We often see the giant squid swooshing by – and sometimes more interesting creatures. We like to feel that our hangout has the aura of a mysterious, underwater shipwreck.

Now, there are a few things you should know about Slytherin – and a few you should forget.

Firstly, let's dispel a few myths. You might have heard rumours about Slytherin house – that we're all into the Dark Arts, and will only talk to you if your great-grandfather was a famous wizard, and rubbish like that. Well, you don't want to believe everything you hear from competing houses. I'm not denying that we've produced our share of Dark wizards, but so have the other three houses – they just don't like admitting it. And yes, we have traditionally tended to take students who come from long lines of witches and wizards, but nowadays you'll find plenty of people in Slytherin house who have at least one Muggle parent.

Here's a little-known fact that the other three houses don't bring up much: Merlin was a Slytherin. Yes, Merlin himself, the most famous wizard in history! He learned all he knew in this very house! Do you want to follow in the footsteps of Merlin? Or would you rather sit at the old desk of that illustrious ex-Hufflepuff, Eglantine Puffett, inventor of the Self-Soaping Dishcloth?

I didn't think so.

But that's enough about what we're not. Let's talk about what we are, which is the coolest and edgiest house in this school. We play to win, because we care about the honour and traditions of Slytherin.

We also get respect from our fellow students. Yes, some of that respect might be tinged with fear, because of our Dark reputation, but you know what? It can be fun, having a reputation for walking on the wild side. Chuck out a few hints that you've got access to a whole library of curses, and see whether anyone feels like nicking your pencil case.

But we're not bad people. We're like our emblem, the snake: sleek, powerful, and frequently misunderstood.

For instance, we Slytherins look after our own – which is more than you can say for Ravenclaw. Apart from being the biggest bunch of swots you ever met, Ravenclaws are famous for clambering over each other to get good marks, whereas we Slytherins are brothers. The corridors of Hogwarts can throw up surprises for the unwary, and you'll be glad you've got the Serpents on your side as you move around the school. As far as we're concerned, once you've become a snake, you're one of ours – one of the elite.

Because you know what Salazar Slytherin looked for in his chosen students? The seeds of greatness. You've been chosen by this house because you've got the potential to be great, in the true sense of the word. All right, you might see a couple of people hanging around the common room whom you might not think are destined for anything special. Well, keep that to yourself. If the Sorting Hat put them in here, there's something great about them, and don't you forget it.

The idea that Merlin might have been in Slytherin is of course a colossal continuity error. Whilst it's true Merlin is a title not a name (it's usually translated as "from Carmarthen" but for reasons explained in this essay I personally think it means "from Caermelyn") and there may have been several of them, the Merlin, if he existed at all, was five or six hundred years too early to have ever been a student at Hogwarts, unless he went back in time. Perhaps History of Magic is still being very badly taught, and perhaps what Gemma should have said was that Merlin survived to great age and was one of the early Heads of House in Slytherin....

simple poster-style painting of a wizard in purple and gold robes and a young, blond boy beside a lily pond - the boy's reflection shows him as a crowned king

Cover art for The Once and Future King by TH White, painting by Rachel Nicole Saffold, part of a series of colourful poster-style illustrations

Or perhaps, of course, it's all quite deliberate and is another obscure literary reference. In TH White's young adults' series of Arthurian novels called The Once and Future King, which was popular when Rowling and I were schoolgirls, Merlin ages backwards and so remembers the future, so Rowling might really mean us to understand that Merlin was a schoolboy in the 11^thC and an old man in the 5^thC. Or she may be playing with the idea that the world of the Harry Potter books really is the world of The Once and Future King or of Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Seeing Stone series, with Arthur and Merlin living in a fantasy version of Norman England. There is some internal evidence to support the idea that this isn't our modern Britain. The Muggle prime minister in HBP would have to be John Major in our world, but he thinks of his predecessor as "he" and Major's predecessor was a "she". Pottermore claims that the Hogwarts Express is a Hall Class locomotive and was made ninety-seven years before the Hall Class was designed in our world, and two years before the successful first public test of Stephenson's Rocket, when real-life steam trains had barely begun. Rowling has witch-persecutions happening in the 10^th/11^th C, at a time when in the real world the church officially didn't believe that witches existed, and the ordinary people consulted them for medical help; and in the 15^th C when in our world they came a century later - although this last is almost certainly because Rowling doesn't know the difference between "the fifteenth century" and "the fifteen-hundreds".

Of course, this letter is intended to be Slytherins talking about themselves, so we can expect a certain degree of bias relative to whatever JKR herself thinks of Slytherin, but it shows, I think, that while she has admitted that she sees Gryffindor as full of reckless show-offs, she sees Slytherin as full not of villains but of Goths and poseurs. Which, I suppose, would include young Severus, and certainly includes Draco. In the same interview in which she spoke about the Great Hall scene, she said "Yeah, I am a Gryffindor, but that's not all good. I know Harry's a Gryffindor, but Harry's a Gryffindor for the same reason I'm a Gryffindor. I've got a short temper. Harry's got his issues. I'm just saying. Also Gryffindor hasn't, despite the way it thinks of itself, it's turned out the odd dark wizard. Hufflepuff's got pretty much a clean record. As, indeed, Slytherin has turned out more than one hero."

Given what she said at interview, it seems likely that JK showed the Slytherins all leaving, and supposedly being for Voldemort, because she was setting up a magnificent coup de theatre, echoing the big reveal about Snape, with the massed ranks of Slytherin house swarming to join the fight - but she forgot to mention the house of the people who followed Slughorn's charge across the grounds. And with or without a mass influx of Slytherin students' families, the final victory over Voldemort is quite Slytherin-heavy. Phineas Nigellus is the Trio's agent and guide, more than they know. Horace Slughorn duels the Dark Lord in his pyjamas. Narcissa Malfoy saves Harry's life in order to bring Voldemort down and save her son. The house elves swarm into battle behind Kreacher crying "Brave Regulus!", the name of the Slytherin Death Eater who gave his life in struggle against the Dark Lord because he'd learned that the Dark Lord didn't value the lives of house elves. And it is Snape who brings Harry the sword of Gryffindor; whose Patronus represents all that is good and beautiful to Harry; who dies for the cause whilst using his last breath to give Harry vital information; who is "the bravest man" and whose capacity for love and loyalty is the "flaw in the plan" which plays a major part in bringing the Dark Lord down. Interestingly, Dumbledore thought that the power the Dark Lord knew not would turn out to be love, and that it would be Harry's love; but in the event it was Snape's capacity to love and Harry's near-total lack of self-interest - another virtue which the Dark Lord knew not - which saved the day.

It was because of Snape that Lily had a free choice whether to save herself or to die defending Harry, thus giving Harry the magical protection which kept him safe and disembodied the Dark Lord for ten years; and without Narcissa and Snape at the Battle of Hogwarts there would have been no final victory.

McGonagall ordered all the Slytherins to leave, or sent them to the dungeons.

With reference to the final battle in DH, the Harry Potter wiki says that "it should be noted that the acting head at the time ordered the entire house to leave due to a single Slytherin student suggesting the student body hand Harry Potter to Voldemort". It is easy to form this widely-believed impression, which in fact is only very weakly supported in canon. I've even seen people say that the Slytherins were locked into the dungeons (which apparently happens in the films, but certainly not in the books), or locked out and the secret passages closed against them - although in fact the passages were closed against everyone, with curses at the proximal, castle end and Death Eaters at the distal end.

The actual sequence of events was as follows. Snape flew away from the castle just as Horace Slughorn arrived, and McGonagall made a rather hostile speech to Slughorn suggesting she thought the Slytherins might be enemies; but she did not say so to the students themselves, or say it anywhere where they might overhear her that we know of. The students then gathered in the Great Hall, by house. They were told that they would be evacuated but (in response to a question from Ernie Macmillan) that any who were of-age and wished to stay and fight could do so.

Voldemort was then heard demanding that Harry be handed over. Pansy Parkinson (only) wanted to do so. The other three houses rose and faced Slytherin, then drew their wands on Pansy (only). The rest of Slytherin remained seated and uninvolved, but this incident must have left them feeling separate from the other houses. McGonagall then said, in what's described as a clipped voice, "Thank you, Miss Parkinson. You will leave the Hall first with Mr Filch. If the rest of your house could follow." - that is, she addressed the Slytherins through Pansy rather than directly, which they may have felt was cold, but she did not do anything which directly denied them the right to stay and fight.

All of the Slytherins then filed out, leaving no-one behind. They may possibly have interpreted what she said as meaning that none of them should stay, especially as her tone was cold and they were the house nearest the door, first to leave and so not having the example of how the other houses interpreted McGonagall's orders; but what she said to them was not in itself much different from what she then said to the next table - "Ravenclaws, follow on!"

The Ravenclaws then trooped out as well, but "a number" of the older ones stayed. Then the Hufflepuffs rose to go but a higher proportion of them chose to stay, then Gryffindor and half wanted to stay, including some who were underage and had to be ordered to go. As discussed above, this was not a simple matter of Gryffindors being so much braver than Slytherins. Each house, successively, had more fighters staying behind than the one before it, suggesting that there was an element of each house being emboldened by the example of the one before it. The other three houses, especially Gryffindor, had been bolstered by fighters from groups from which Slytherin was excluded - the Order, the DA and the Gryffindor Quidditch Team. And Rowling has said that the reason so many Gryffindors stayed was in part because the house was full of foolhardy show-offs.

This one is just about canon-compatible, but it's a stretch. The evidence for it is just the fact that he belonged - probably fairly briefly - to a terrorist organisation which certainly carried out a substantial number of killings and torturings of political targets (although the extent to which they may or may not have killed or tortured just for the sake of it is moot), the fact that Amycus, Alecto and Greyback seem very respectful of him in the Tower scene, and Rowling's statement that he had been "drawn to loathesome people and acts". On the other hand, there's quite a lot of evidence against it.

Firstly, there is the fact that even Sirius, who was an Order member and who hated Snape, said that in Vold War One there had been no rumour that Snape was a Death Eater. We know that he was - but this suggests that he didn't do anything which attracted attention. Then there's the fact that later, in HBP, Bellatrix accuses him of being, as a Death Eater, all talk and no action.

Then there's the argument he has with Dumbledore about Harry's fate. Dumbledore is on the back foot, being defensive and looking for a weapon with which to defend himself, yet he does not ask Snape how many people he has killed - only how many he has seen die (and Snape says latterly, only those he could not save). And Snape expresses concern as to the possible damage to his soul if he kills Dumbledore, with no suggestion from either of them that he has killed before.

Talking to the young Tom about Horcruxes, Slughorn says that the soul can be split "By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart." This is slightly ambiguous, but there seems to be no suggestion that Molly's soul will be split by having killed Bellatrix, although she certainly will not feel any remorse, so that tends to confirm that it is murder specifically which splits the soul. Dumbledore says that only Snape himself can tell whether carrying out a mercy killing will damage his soul, and does not seem to be saying "It will be damaged but your remorse will heal you", which again hints that Dumbledore does not think that any kind of killing necessarily splits the soul, only murder (and whether Snape's mercy-killing of Dumbledore will count as murder or not will depend on what's in his heart when he does it). So if your fanfic requires it you can have Snape having killed in battle or as an act of mercy while he was a Death Eater, without raising canon issues about his soul.

When Rowling was asked at interview - presumably before HBP came out - whether Snape could see Thestrals, she replied that he could, because as a Death Eater he would have witnessed "things". There was no suggestion that he had killed anyone himself, or taken an active part in the "things", and she went on to soften it further by saying that most of the other staff could see Thestrals too. She has also said that he joined the Death Eaters because he felt isolated and wanted the security of belonging to a group, and because he hoped it would impress Lily - no mention of political fanaticism or wanting an opportunity for violence.

And whilst we know that he did relay the first half of the prophecy, there was nothing in the half he heard to indicate that "the one" was a still-to-be-born baby, or that it was male - or even that it was a person rather than a weapon of some kind, and that the word was "born" rather than "borne". It could have meant that a powerful weapon was being conveyed ("borne") to some people who had thrice defied Voldemort. All he could say was that if it referred to a person, and the word was "born", then it must be somebody young enough to have parents who were still alive at some point after Voldemort's rise.

Then there's his own nature, which seems to be verbally aggressive, but physically gentle. As a boy he dropped a branch on Tuney, probably subconsciously (just like Harry inflating Aunt Marge), but as an adult he is remarkably non-violent. When he believes that Sirius is a mass-murderer who has come to Hogwarts to kill Harry, he wants to destroy him, to feed him to the Dementors: but still when he has to carry Sirius unconscious, he uses a stretcher. The idea of seizing the opportunity to knock his unconscious enemy around, as Sirius had done to him, evidently doesn't occur to him.

When he has the chance to hurt Peter Pettigrew, the man who bullied him at school and then betrayed Lily to her death, slaughtered twelve Muggles and condemned Sirius to Azkaban for a crime he hadn't committed, so far as we see Snape just sneers at him a bit and makes him do a bit of fetching and carrying about the house, and stings him with a minor hex to stop him eavesdropping (possibly a reference to the fact that John Nettleship's nickname was "Stinger" - the stinging nettle being one of our commonest British plants). When Harry calls Snape a coward, and he is in emotional agony, he gives him a magical slap - in contrast with Remus, who threw Harry into a wall when Harry called him a coward. He allows Buckbeak to tear at him, and does not try to defend himself. He uses only defensive spells when McGonagall, Flitwick and Sprout are doing their best to harm him.

We are told that latterly Snape saves people from the Death Eaters whenever possible, even though that doesn't really serve either Lily's or the Order's interests. OK, it's Snape who says so, but we have other evidence that his urge to save people is powerful - we see him risk blowing his cover during the Polyjuice chase in order to protect Remus, despite Dumbledore having told him to keep his head down. He risks antagonising Umbridge to prevent Neville being half-throttled, and does his best to warn Sirius not to go to the Ministry. He clutches the back of a chair when he hears that Ginny has been taken into the Chamber, and turns white-faced and angry when he sees the memory of Cedric's death. He sprints through the school in his nightshirt because he heard somebody scream, and runs through a bathroom door, ashen-faced and without checking what's on the other side first, because a girl's voice cried "Murder".

Even Sectumsempra, which he either invented or learned especially, seems to have strict limits. Harry strikes at Draco with Sectumsempra and cuts him quite badly, but he doesn't carve him open or chop him in half, as would happen if he'd hit him with a real sword. He hacks at the Inferi with all his might, and he cuts through their wet clothes which shows how sharp the magical blade is, but he still only inflicts shallow wounds. It looks as though the spell is rigged not to cut too deeply, or not to cut bone (although it does cut ear-cartilege).

The only time we see adult Snape be physically violent, outside of the Duelling Club, is when he hauls Harry away from the Pensieve and throws a jar at him - and he misses, probably deliberately.

Altogether, despite his in some ways aggressive nature, Snape seems to have a strong urge not to hurt people physically, at least when he's not in a combat situation. Physical violence just seems to go against the grain, for him, so it seems unlikely he would have been very violent even as a Death Eater, if he could get out of it.

A prominent fan-writer has suggested that young Sev must have been required to carry out atrocities as part of his induction into the Death Eaters - but there's no canon evidence for this, and I've never heard of our home-grown British terrorist organizations doing anything of the sort.

The extent to which young Snape bought into the Death Eaters' ethnic theories at the time is uncertain - quite apart from the fact that Rowling says that Voldemort tried to recruit Muggle-born Lily, showing that the Death Eaters were not as racist (or magicist or whatever you want to call it) in Vold War One as they would be once Umbridge got involved. He says that he doesn't want to speak to Petunia because she's a Muggle - but that's reasonable, because the reason he wants to speak to Lily is because he wants someone to share magic with, so this is like one musically-gifted child seeking out another, and not wanting to talk to their sibling who is tone-deaf. Later on the train he says that Tuney is "Only a..." and the next word might have been going to be "Muggle" or it could have been "snidey little cow", we don't know. But even if it was going to be "Muggle", nobody seems worried by the fact that Hagrid uses "Muggle" to mean "knuckle-dragger".

Severus apparently uses "Mudblood" freely in fifth year, but Lily has evidently tolerated this up until the underpants incident, and since he's a half-blood in Slytherin himself his use may have been ironic or self-protective. He calls Lily a "filthy little Mudblood" when he is angry and desperate, but there are several questions here which bear on the extent to which he might have been truly bigoted and might truly have bought into an anti-Muggle or anti-Muggle-born agenda.

We don't know whether he's saying Lily is filthy because she's a Muggle-born, whether he's implying that her blood is literally dirty - but he probably isn't. We occasionally see it used that way by other characters, but in most cases where characters in the Potter books - or Rowling herself - use "filthy" as a form of profanity, it's a general emphatic like "bloody" or "blasted". That's probably how Snape himself uses it, since he also applies it to pure-blooded James ("Your filthy father"), so you have to think of it as if he had said "bloody little Mudblood".

Lily and Severus have been drifting apart for some time. We see in the courtyard scene, a few days after the werewolf incident, that Lily knows Severus has had a life-threatening experience from which he had to be rescued, and this is the first time she's spoken to him since, but she isn't interested in how Severus is or whether he was frightened, just in criticizing him and his choice in male friends. And although he's meant to be her friend she arrives already believing James's version of events and won't give any credence to Severus - even though it's Severus who is telling the truth. So he already has good reason to be unsure of her.

Now Lily has just suppressed a smile on seeing Severus's bare legs exposed. She probably means it affectionately but he is very raw and stressed and if he sees it he probably thinks she's jeering at him - especially as she later does just that, calling him "Snivellus" and sneering at his poor clothes, so it's not an unreasonable thing for him to expect. We've heard what was probably her laughing at him as he struggled with his broom, after all. And Rowling has said that in the underpants scene, Lily was actually flirting with James, or at least already fancied him, and a future spy and Legilimens would probably be very good at reading body-language, so Severus would be aware of Unresolved Sexual Tension between James and Lily, and be jealous and upset that his misery was being made part of their courtship. Also, as a dirt-poor, working-class half-blood in Slytherin, allowing himself to be seen to be rescued by a Muggle-born Gryffindor girl could probably have got him into serious trouble with people who could get at him while he was sleeping.

Then, he knows, although he isn't allowed to say so, that Remus is a werewolf. He may be raging at Lily because she is putting herself in danger by going near the Marauders, in the way that parents rage at a child who has run out into traffic, and want to drive her away from James who has just threatened to hex her. He may also want Lily to be (temporarily) angry with him, because he's just heard James offer to stop persecuting him, Severus if Lily will go out with him, James, and Sev would rather be persecuted than see Lily dating James, so he doesn't want her to feel like sacrificing herself by dating James to save him.

Also, the spell which James uses to suspend Severus in the air, Levicorpus, is one of Sev's own devising. We're told that it enjoyed a vogue during fifth year, and presumably that was before this scene which took place within two or three weeks of the end of the academic year. When Harry talks to Remus about it it doesn't really sound as if Remus already knew this was one of Snape's own spells, so it's unlikely young Severus had openly revealed this spell as one of his, and it's non-verbal so it wouldn't have got about through people hearing him use it. Wolfwillow has suggested that young Severus didn't know how this spell had got into other people's hands, but that he had (almost inevitably, especially if what he was initially trying to do was to imitate her flying from the swing) shared it with Lily, and then suspected her of sharing it with fellow Gryffindors without permission.

In fact, James could and probably would have got it by spying on Sev and Lily from under his Cloak, while trying to decide how best to ask her out, but at that time Sev didn't know James had a perfect Invisibility Cloak, so when James turned his own spell on him that would make him furious with Lily for having (as he thought) been the one to put that spell in James's hands. That would then feed adult Snape's anger at the end of HBP when James's son tried to use the same spell against him, since by that point he knew about the Cloak and the Map and knew that because of James's sneaking about he had falsely accused Lily, and it was partly because of that that he had lost her friendship.

So there are many complex reasons why he might in that moment have wanted to offend Lily by using an offensive word, without neccessarily genuinely buying into the racist theories that underpinned it. The fact that he called himself the Half-Blood Prince rather sounds as if far from being a pure-blood supremacist, he gloried in his own mixed-blood status and wanted to rub his snooty Prince relatives' noses in it.

It's unpleasant of him to use a racially-offensive term, of course it is, but he's half-Muggle himself so to some extent he has rights over offensive terms used of people with Muggle blood, just as black people have rights over offensive terms used about black people. And in this group, at least, even if probably not in the Slug Club, Snape is an isolated outsider while Lily is popular and surrounded by allies and admirers, and he is very poor while she is, if perhaps not quite middle class, of a social level that looks down on people from Spinner's End as if they were dirt. Some people argue seriously that it is impossible for the disadvantaged to be racist towards the advantaged, that racism by definition is something the strong do to the weak. Personally I think that's a ridiculous argument, it's just re-defining words to suit your own agenda, but to anyone who actually believes that argument, Snape cannot be being racist here, because he is in a weak social position and Lily is, despite being Muggleborn, in a strong one.

I see some of the Snape-haters on the net have been screaming that I am an awful person because I have suggested that young Snape could be anything less than totally evil even though he used a racist word. This just goes to support my thesis that most Snape-haters are very young, because they clearly have no idea what the 1970s were like or what was socially acceptable then. And, as always, they never seem to worry about the almost universally patronising attitude of wizards towards Muggles or the fact that Hagrid clearly uses "Muggle" as a term of racial abuse - perhaps because they themselves don't regard a half-giant as a fully sentient person with responsibilities, or because they think it's OK to discriminate against ordinary human beings for being ordinary.

If Snape - or indeed Lily or Petunia - was racist it would not be very surprising, however. Pottermore canon says that Cokeworth, their home town or suburb, is in the Midlands and the Midlands in the 1960s were a hotbed of racism in the Muggle sense. They would have heard adults around them, perhaps including their own parents, casually employing racist language throughout their childhoods, and it's to Petunia's credit that she admires Kingsley rather than being prejudiced against him.

Note that we do not know when Snape joined the Death Eaters, except that it was probably after the underpants incident in June 1976 (at least, if he was already a Death Eater at that point James didn't know it, since the greatest crime he accused Snape of was existing), and presumably before Trelawney made her big prophecy, which happened at the very end of 1979 or start of 1980. Draco apparently was Marked as a Death Eater within a month or two of turning sixteen (his birthday is on 5^th June and he was showing his Mark in Borgin and Burkes a few days into August), so it is certainly possible that Snape joined as early as 1976. He defected to the Order side late in 1980 or early in 1981. The longest period for which he could have been a genuine Death Eater, then, is just over four and a half years and the shortest just under a year.

There is, however, one very small suggestion that he became a Death Eater around the middle of 1979, meaning that he was a true Death Eater for around eighteen months. In the Skinner's End scene, he tells Bellatrix that when Voldemort returned to life and summoned him - that is, in June 1995 - he had sixteen years' worth of information about Dumbledore to offer him. This doesn't make much sense however you cut it, since Voldemort had only been trapped in half-life for fourteen years, and at the point when he was disembodied he had presumably been up to date on whatever information Snape was willing to give him. Either Snape is as bad at maths as his author - which is unlikely in somebody who has to work out precise combinations of ingredients without a computer, and hasn't yet blown himself up - or his mind is dwelling on the date on which he first began to collect information for Voldemort, sixteen years prior to summer 1995.

There is also the point that in late 1979 or very early 1980 Dumbledore allows young Snape to leave The Hog's Head after overhearing Trelawney's prophecy, without Obliviating him. This seems a huge oversight and plot hole, unless Dumbledore actively wants Voldemort to hear the prophecy, or he does not know Snape is a Death Eater. If he does not know that Snape is a Death Eater, either his intelligence-gathering is poor, or Snape hasn't been one for very long - or perhaps isn't one yet. You could make a case for Snape overhearing the prophecy in late 1979, taking the warning to Voldemort and only joining the Death Eaters at that point, having been undecided up to then. It would explain his emphasis on his usefulness to Voldemort being the information he had about Dumbledore, even in 1979.

There's a common fanon idea that Snape is a Big Name Death Eater, part of Voldemort's inner circle. This has a certain amount of canon support in that Harry thinks, in DH, that "The werewolf might be allowed to wear Death Eater robes when they wanted to use him, but only Voldemort’s inner circle were branded with the Dark Mark: Greyback had not been granted this highest honour." And yes, Snape had the Dark Mark (although we don't know whether he was Marked before or after he defected, and Dumbledore started feeding him tidbits of information to give to Voldemort). But so did bottom-feeders like the Carrows, and sixteen-year-old Draco, so as inner circles go the circle of the Marked wasn't exactly an exclusive club.

As far as Snape belonging to some more significant inner group goes, by Vold War Two there were only a few Death Eaters, and Snape was picked to become Headmaster, so it's reasonable to assume that at that point he is one of the top players. But during Vold War One there were around four hundred Death Eaters (Remus says they outnumbered the Order twenty to one)and Snape, when he asked for Lily's life, was only twenty. We also know that he had no reputation as a Death Eater at that time, since Sirius, an Order member, had not heard any rumour that he was one. It seems unlikely that he could have been in any sort of serious inner circle at that age.

So why did Voldemort try to spare Lily to please him? When Voldemort kills Snape, he tells him that he regrets it, which suggests that he is as near to being fond of Snape as he is capable of being. Perhaps he always had some fellow-feeling for a dirt-poor half-blood, having been one himself. We also have Rowling's statement that Voldemort had previously tried to recruit Lily, so he must have valued her, and perhaps hoped to try again.

It tends to be taken as a given (especially by fan-writers who have noticed that the evidence suggests that Snape wasn't very visible as a Death Eater) that the main service Snape rendered to Voldemort before he became a teacher was to brew new and deadly potions. On one level this would make perfect sense.

However, we have to remember that Snape originally applied to Dumbledore for the DADA post, and whatever Voldemort expected the outcome to be, Snape would have to seem like a reasonable candidate if his application was not to rouse Dumbledore's suspicions. This quite strongly suggests that he had spent the intervening eighteen months since leaving school (he finished school in summer 1978 and internal evidence, below, suggests that he made his initial job application for the DADA post very early in 1980) working at something which would fit him to teach Defence. The most probable option seems to me to be that he was a curse-breaker or some sort of magical bodyguard, but it's not inconceivable that he started Auror training and then quit to join the Death Eaters after seeing how cruel the Aurors had become (and not initially realising that the Death Eaters were even worse).

We know Snape started teaching in autumn 1981 (in autumn 1995 he tells Umbridge he has been teaching at Hogwarts for fourteen years). It's unclear what he did between early 1980 and autumn 1981 when he was given the Potions post. It could be that he was given some other job at Hogwarts, perhaps as a teacher's assistant, which would explain why he tells Bellatrix that at the time of Voldemort's reconstitution, in summer 1995, he had sixteen years' worth of information about Dumbledore to give him.

But then, we see him defect in winter and he cannot very well have defected before Harry was born - before the Dark Lord could know that Harry would be born as the seventh month dies. So his defection must have been in winter 1980/81. If he had been working at Hogwarts, why would he defect on a bare hillside instead of in an office? And it's clear Dumbledore knew he was a Death Eater at that point, and it doesn't seem likely he would already have employed him on those terms. So Snape applied for the DADA post and heard the prophecy early in 1980, defected in winter 1980/81 and started teaching at Hogwarts after his defection and probably in autumn 1981, so if you need him to be Voldie's potioneer full time there's an eighteen month gap where it could fit, between early 1980 and autumn 1981. And of course, he could have been a curse-breaker and yet also made potions for Voldemort in his spare time.

This one is the result of confused and conflicting information in the books, and is just about possible, but unlikely. Whenever you think he defected, there's some piece of confusing information which needs to be explained, because however you cut it there's a socking-great continuity error involved.

We are told that the Potters went into deep hiding under the Fidelius charm about a week before their death - i.e. around 24^th October 1981. This quite naturally leads people to suppose that Snape only defected, and warned them that Voldemort was targetting them, round about 20^th October. However, there are a number of problems with this idea.

The first issue is that Lily wrote a letter which appears to have been written quite soon after Harry's first birthday party, and very soon after the deaths of the Mackinnons (which she refers to as if it was recent, shocking news), and in it she says that "James is getting a bit frustrated shut up here", especially as Dumbledore "still" has his Invisibility Cloak, without which he is apparently unable to go out. Clearly, they are already in hiding. The fact that the Dumbledore Harry meets at the astral King's Cross says that he borrowed the Invisibility Cloak only a few days before Lily and James died supports the idea that Lily's letter was written three months after Harry's first birthday and a day or two before she died, despite sounding as if his birthday party was a recent event.

However, the first problem with this is that Lily says that "Bathilda [Bagshot] drops in most days", so if this really was written just before the Potters died they must have allowed Bathilda inside the Fidelius, which doesn't sound as if they are maintaining a panicky high security which has only been in place for a few days. And it seems unlikely that even James would be all that frustrated if he had only been in hiding for six days - or that either Lily or James would be complaining that Dumbledore "still" had the Cloak if he had borrowed it only two days beforehand.

Also, Lily speaks as if Sirius already knows about Dumbledore having borrowed the Cloak, yet this seems to be the first time she has written to Sirius since Harry's birthday party. So if Dumbledore really did borrrow the Cloak only a few days before the Potters' deaths, Lily would have to have written to Sirius (letting him know that Dumbledore had borrowed the Cloak), then held the birthday party, then written to Sirius again (letting him know that Dumbledore still had the Cloak), all in those last few days. Just on that basis, without regard to the evidence concerning Snape, we can probably discount the idea that Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak only days before the Potters died.

Then, the letter seems to have been written only a week or two after the Mackinnons died, since Lily refers to some bad news about the Mackinnons as a recent shock, and not just a shock to the Potters - who might be behind with the news because they are in hiding - but to Peter as well. We know the Mackinnons were killed two weeks after the Order group photograph was taken, so Lily's letter was probably written three or four weeks after the photograph was shot.

It's just about conceivable that the deaths of the Mackinnons didn't become known to the Order until months after the event, but if Lily's letter really was written just before she died, and shortly after the Mackinnons died, then the Order photograph was taken in early October. Yet, Moody lists an enormous number of things which happened between the photograph being taken and the end of the war. I go into this in more detail in a separate essay, but it's really extremely unlikely that the photograph could have been taken that late in the war. The list of events which happened between the photograph and the end of the war makes far more sense if we say that Lily's letter was written just after Harry's birthday, and the photograph was taken in early to mid July.

But that means that the Potters were already in hiding by early to mid August, and had been for long enough for James to get frustrated - and Dumbledore had in fact borrowed the Cloak some time prior to this, despite what he says at King's Cross. However you look at it, there's a continuity error. If Lily's letter was indeed written soon after Harry's birthday, then astral!Dumbledore's claim that he only borrowed the Cloak in the last week of October doesn't work, and if the letter was written at the end of October then the sequence of events which were meant to have happened between the Order photograph and the end of the war doesn't work - unless the Mckinnons' deaths, or something to do with them, were discovered long after their actual deaths - and Harry's birthday party was apparently held months after his birthday. But the idea that the letter was written in early to mid August creates fewer problems, and it fits with the fact that Rowling said at interview that Harry's christening was "very hurried", which suggests that it wasn't too many months after his birth, and that at that point the Potters were already aware that they might have to go into hiding.

It looks as though the Potters went into hiding in two stages. The initial stage happened at least some weeks prior to Harry's first birthday, and involved only a medium level of security, with friends coming and going freely. Round about the third week in October they were warned that Voldemort was about to strike, and went under the Fidelius. Despite what Dumbledore says in the King's Cross scene, he must have borrowed the Cloak no later than July 1981, and possibly earlier.

We still don't know whether Snape's defection preceded their first hiding or their second, so it still remains possible that he defected only in October 1981. But then we have to look at the evidence involving Snape himself.

Firstly, we're told that as at early autumn 1995, Trelawney has been teaching at Hogwarts for "Nearly sixteen years", and she describes herself as having been there for sixteen years both late in the autumn term of OotP and early in the spring term, suggesting that she began teaching very late in 1979 or early in 1980 As at June 1996 we're twice told that the prophecy was made sixteen years previously, so presumably in 1980. Combining these, we have Trelawney being interviewed, and making the prophecy, very early in 1980 and Trelawney starting work at the beginning of the second term a week or two later.

We're told in autumn 1995 that Snape has been teaching at Hogwarts for fourteen years, so he started round about autumn 1981. We know that Snape initially applied for a teaching job at the same time as Trelawney and that that was when he overheard the prophecy, so he must have heard it very early in 1980, while Harry was in the womb. If he didn't then defect until mid to late October 1981 that means it took nearly two years for him to realise that Voldemort associated the prophecy with Lily, and either Dumbledore hired him before he defected - in which case you have to wonder what he was doing defecting on a bare hillside instead of in an office at the school, and why Dumbledore had hired somebody he seems to have already known was a Death Eater - or he didn't start teaching until the middle of the autumn term, in which case you have to wonder what became of whoever taught Potions for the first couple of months. If he defected earlier, there's no problem.

view from a high place along a small river flanked by trees in autumnal colours, with wooded hills in the distance

Killiekrankie in North Perthshire on 25^th October 2015: photograph by Hannah Kettles from BBC webpage Your pictures of Scotland: 23-30 October 2015

view of a high, dark, conical mountain, with in the foreground a stream tumbling among rocks and a few half-bare, scrubby trees

Glencoe in mid November 2016, showing half-stripped trees in an exposed area (although other photographs from the same week but taken in more sheltered spots show much thicker leaf cover): photograph by Sally Anderson from BBC webpage Your pictures of Scotland: 11-18 November 2016

view looking up at tall trees, one of which is deciduous and still covered in shrivelled brown leaves

Craigvinean Forest near Dunkeld, at the southern edge of the Grampian Highlands (and therefore about as far north as Glencoe, but more to the east), on 3^rd December 2016: photograph by Margaret Easton from BBC webpage Your pictures of Scotland: 2-9 December 2016

Most strikingly, he defects on a bleak hillside on which the trees are bare and fallen leaves are blowing about. I've seen somebody say that the leaves in Virginia start falling in late August and "keep falling until November", and the otherwise generally good fanfic Snape's Boon by amr contains this to British eyes extraordinary statement: "the tree [cut] had only a smattering of yellowish leaves still fluttering in the breeze. This reassured her a little. She hadn’t lost too much time, since leaves wouldn’t hang on into November, no matter how far south she was."

This explains why American fen might think Snape defected in October, but leaf-fall in the UK happens about six weeks later (which I'm told is also true of US trees in the Deep South). A BBC nature blog on 4^th October 2011 stated that "Many trees are starting to take on their beautiful autumn colour. Where just a few weeks ago there were many shades of green, we're now starting to see vibrant shades of red, gold and orange as the season shifts" but it tends to be a little later in Scotland. In fact, I've seen advertisements for people to come and look at the pretty red and orange leaves on trees in the Highlands in late October and early November - and roses blooming in Edinburgh during the first half of December.

It varies from year to year, of course, but for example a tourist page headed The Best Time to Visit Scotland for Autumn Leave says that "the leaves on some broad-leaved trees start to change color in early autumn, but the best time to see the fiery glories of fall foliage in Scotland starts at the end of September. [cut] Depending on the weather in any particular year, and the location and tree species that dominate, the specific period with the best colors can vary a lot. If you plan your trip for the middle to second half of October, though, you're bound to catch some of the best displays." The novel Death of an Avid Reader, by Frances Brady, includes the following passage set in the north of England in the first week of November: "The trees in Batswing Wood were not yet bare. Among the gold, yellow and brown, a few green leaves refused to die."

Leaf-fall has apparently got later over time. Oak trees are now recorded as shedding at the end of October, and would have done so about a week earlier in the 1970s, according to the Woodland Trust. However, the event which the Trust is recording appears to be the first significant leaf-fall when there are "some bare twigs or branches" - not the point at which the trees are bare, which would be three or four weeks later. Even in the 1970s, therefore, you wouldn't get a whole wood of bare trees in the third week of October unless there had been a very severe drought.

However you cut it, the second half of October is not a good time to find hillsides covered with naked trees and wind-blown dead leaves. Generally speaking most trees in Scotland shed during November, with a few leaves hanging on into December or even January. I caught the bus across Slamannan Moor on 12/12/2016 and I'd say about 80%, maybe 85% of the deciduous trees were bare but still there were many that still had a few leaves clinging on, and a significant minority still covered with a thick coat of brown leaves, in mid December. The rest of the UK isn't much different. This explains incidentally why Britons don't call the period from September to November "fall" - leaf-fall here does overlap with that period, but it doesn't correspond with it the way it does in the US.

[On the 31^st of January 2017 on Slamannan Moor, after what was, admittedly, a mild winter, there were still hundreds of deciduous trees and bushes lining the roadside which were quite thickly covered with leaves, albeit they were brown and shrivelled. Meanwhile, this year's gorse is already flowering. Stand still for too long anywhere in the British Isles and the countryside will start growing up your leg.]

There are a few species of tree used as street ornaments in towns and which do begin to shed quite early in October - rowans and I think also hazels - but there's no reason to assume the wood is a monoculture, and assuming that that bare hill is in Britain then this strongly suggests that Snape in fact defected some time between late November 1980 and early spring 1981 (i.e. before the trees would have started to have new buds on them). The Potters then went into medium-level hiding - explaining why James was pretty fed-up by early August - until October when Snape warned Dumbledore that Voldemort was about to strike, and the Potters then went under the Fidelius.

A defection in mid to late November is to be preferred (meaning that Snape spied on Voldemort during VWI for just shy of a whole year) if you accept interview statements as at least semi-canon, because that allows for Harry to have been christened at less than four months old - just about early enough by British standards to count as "very hurried", or at least fairly hurried - and for the Potters to have already been warned at that point that they might need to go into hiding.

It is possible, if your fanfic requires it, to have Snape defect in mid October 1981 if you assume that the hillside where he defected bore only those few specific types of tree which shed early - or that it was in the US. But this assumption generates a wide range of problems which have to be explained, especially if you also assume that that was the point at which the Potters first went into hiding (the usual assumption in fanon), and that Dumbledore was telling the truth about having borrowed the Cloak a few days before the Potters died - meaning that Lily's letter, in which she says that Dumbledore "still" has the Cloak, was written at the end of October.

If Snape defected in October 1981, you have to explain away the bare trees. You have to say that either he didn't become Potions master until halfway through term, or Dumbledore hired him to teach while he was still a Death Eater. If the latter, why did he defect on a barren hillside, instead of in a nice warm office? And it would make Dumbledore's evidence in court about Snape spying at great risk to himself a bit odd, since he would only have been a spy for about ten days before Voldemort fell.

Then you have to assume either that the Potters already went into hiding long before Snape gave his warning, or that they went into hiding for the first time when they set up the Fidelius. It's possible that Dumbledore just hid any family which Voldemort might possibly think fitted the prophecy: but there's a big difference between the whole prophecy which Dumbledore heard and the fragment which Snape heard and relayed to Voldemort. Snape probably hadn't heard far enough into the prophecy (that is, not as far as "mark him") to know that "the one" was male, or even human - if he didn't get as far as "mark him" then it could just as well have referred to a weapon which was being borne, i.e. carried, to people who had defied Voldemort, and since we know for certain that he didn't hear as far as the word "equal" he certainly didn't hear the part which said that the one's birth was still in the future. It's never explained why Voldemort, based on what he had heard, ever decided that the prophecy referred to an unborn baby, let alone why Dumbledore should be able to predict that Voldemort would think it would refer to an unborn baby.

If you want to have the Potters go into hiding only after Snape gave his warning, and Snape defecting only in October, then you have to wonder why Harry's birthday party was apparently held in October, why Lily who is supposedly living under top-secret Fidelius speaks so casually of Bathilda coming round most days, why James was complaining that Dumbledore "still" had a Cloak he had borrowed only a couple of days beforehand and why Lily had apparently already told Sirius about this and was now writing to him again, referencing that past conversation, only a few days later. You have to assume that James was so immature he became frustrated about being in hiding after less than a week of it.

Internal evidence suggests that the Order photograph was taken three or four weeks before Lily's letter was written, meaning that if the letter was written at the end of October the photo' has to have been taken in early October. Given that, you have to ask how so many events could have happened between then and the end of the war, and why it would be especially noteworthy that the Mackinnons died two weeks after the photo' was taken, if most of the incidents being described happened within four weeks of it. And you have either to dismiss JKR's comment that the Potters already knew they were going to have to go into hiding at the time of Harry's christening, or assume that he wasn't christened till he was well over a year old.

On the other hand if you assume that Snape defected in late 1980 or early 1981, issuing a warning which caused the Potters to go into medium-level hiding, and their going under Fidelius in October 1981 was a separate act in response to an increased threat-level, all the rest makes sense. Snape was hired in autumn 1981, well after his defection and when he was already Dumbledore's man. He spied for around ten months, so it is reasonable for Dumbledore to speak of him being in great danger. Harry was christened when he was four or five months old. Harry's first birthday party was held on or soon after his first birthday, and Lily's letter was written in early to mid August, at which point the Potters had been in medium-level hiding for around eight months, and James had good reason to be getting impatient. The Order photograph was taken in July, leaving three or four months for all the events which occurred between then and the end of the war.

The only thing you have to work around is that King's Cross Dumbledore's statement about when he borrowed the Cloak cannot be accurate, since Lily refers to it as having happened a significant perior prior to her letter written in August. Perhaps he borrowed it twice, giving it back in between, and his old man's memory has run the two together. Or perhaps he borrowed it soon after the Potters went into medium-level hiding, and he has mis-remembered himself as having borrowed it just after they went under the Fidelius.

Snape knowingly endangered a baby when he relayed the prophecy, and other prophecy-related issues.

The full prophecy given by Sybil Trelawney about "the one" who would vanquish the Dark Lord strongly implies that "the one" is not yet born. "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not ... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives ... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies ..." Tenses in poetic speech are often a bit scrambled so it's not totally impossible that this could have turned out to have meant "will have been born" rather than "will be born at some point in the future", but it certainly creates a strong impression that it's talking about a future birth.

However, in chapter 37 of OotP Dumbledore says: "My – our – one stroke of good fortune was that the eavesdropper was detected only a short way into the prophecy and thrown from the building. [cut] // He heard only the beginning, the part foretelling the birth of a boy in July to parents who had thrice defied Voldemort. Consequently, he could not warn his master that to attack you would be to risk transferring power to you, and marking you [US version says 'again marking you'] as his equal."

This means that the very farthest Snape could have heard into the prophecy was "mark him as his..." We know Voldemort, and therefore Snape, did hear about the "seventh month dies" clause, but Dumbledore says Snape was interrupted "only a short way" into the prophecy, and "mark him" falls about 40% of the way through it, so we can probably assume Snape did not get as far as "mark him". It is likely that all he heard was "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ..."

Although Dumbledore says that the part of the prophecy which Snape heard was the one which foretold the birth of a boy in July to parents who had thrice defied Voldemort, because that's what it did in fact foretell, you couldn't really tell that that was what it was about if that was all you had heard.

There is no indication in what Snape heard that "the one" is male, and the only indication that they have not yet been born is that it says "as the seventh month dies" rather than "as the seventh month died". That is a minor tense-shift which might pass unnoticed or be assumed to have been misheard (by somebody who had been listening through the keyhole and was probably in the very act of being dragged away by Aberforth at that point), and it would be outweighed by the statement that the one "approaches", which sounds as if it refers to an adult champion physically travelling. Voldemort was well into his fifties by this point, he had been recruiting Death Eaters since the mid 1950s and the war had been going on for ten years, so there was plenty of scope for an adult to have parents who were young enough to be still alive and active in the war, and old enough to have already defied Voldemort three times.

It would be extremely unusual to say that an unborn baby "approaches" - indeed I think this is probably the only example of this usage that I've ever heard. Normally, you say that the birth approaches, not the baby, so to say that "the one" approaches strongly suggests an adult, or certainly somebody already born, and now travelling through distance, not time.

Snape could not even be entirely sure that "the one"'s birth was being referred to, since "born" = "given birth to" and "borne" = "carried" or "conveyed" sound exactly the same. It could refer to a champion whose parents had thrice defied the Dark Lord, or to somebody on a ship travelling to join a group of people who had defied him. It might not even refer to a person: for all Snape knows "the one" could be some powerful weapon (such as the Elder Wand) which is being borne towards them.

Or let's suppose that Snape did hear a litte further - that he heard: "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his-". Now, OK, he knows that "the one" is human and male - but it sounds as if they're a Death Eater (therefore at least sixteen) whom Voldemort will put the Dark Mark on. Only the final "will be born" clause indicates a newborn baby and we know for certain that Snape didn't hear that.

Even Voldemort seems not to have decided that a baby was being referred to for some time after Harry's birth - or if he did he didn't tell Snape about it - since Snape defected some time during winter 1980/81, at least three and a half months after Harry was born. That fits with Rowling's original statement that the Potters went into hiding around the time of Harry's christening, since British babies are usually christened when they're a few months old. Apparently she's now saying they started hiding before Harry was born but if so it can't have been prophecy-related, since there was no way anyone (except perhaps a Seer), could know in advance that Harry would be born in late July, not early August.

Other than this latest suggestion by Rowling, which if true can't have been related to the prophecy, there's no indication Dumbledore thought the Potters or Longbottoms were in any particular danger (more than they were in for being Order members or Aurors) until Snape defected and told him Voldemort thought the prophecy referred to the Potters. Evidently Dumbledore himself didn't see it as referring to one of the babies born at the end of July until Snape gave him the idea, even though he, unlike Snape, had heard the whole prophecy and knew it referred to a birth, and one which had not yet occurred at the time of the prophecy. Or if he did see it as referring to a baby, he evidently didn't expect Voldemort to see it that way, based on the fragment Snape had relayed.

Dumbledore's rant at Snape in the defection scene adds an element of confusion, especially in readers who haven't thought about the fact that Dumbledore is still so emotionally contorted about his sister's death, and anything which reminds him of it, that nearly sixteen years later he will be fatally injured after putting on a cursed ring he hopes will enable him to talk with her. In the defection scene he accuses Snape of having been willing to sacrifice James and Harry in exchange for Lily, and fanon generally accepts that statement as true - but in fact, so far as we know this is nonsense, as it was not within Snape's gift to place Harry and James in any more danger than they were already in.

The evidence indicates that the Potters were already in some sort of medium-level concealment by August 1981 and then went under Fidelius in late October, and that Snape defected in winter - which has to be winter 1980/81, since winter 1979/80 was before Harry was born and therefore before Voldemort could know that he would be born at the end of July, and winter 1981/82 was after the Potters were already dead. We've no reason to think the Potters went into hiding very soon after Harry's birth - that is to say, their decision to go into hiding almost certainly follows and is a consequence of Snape's defection, and his initial warning that Voldemort was taking an unhealthy interest in them.

Therefore, Voldemort would not need to get the Potters' address from Snape - the only way in which Snape could really have betrayed James and Harry to the Dark Lord prior to his defection - because prior to his defection they were not in hiding and their address must have been common knowledge. In fact given that Godric's Hollow is a mixed Muggle/magical community and Lily was Muggle-born and would probably want to keep in touch with her Muggle family, their address may well have been in the telephone directory.

What Dumbledore might more fairly have accused Snape of was trying to save Lily but not trying to save her husband and son. It's quite natural that a not very mature young man barely out of his teens would care more about the fate of his childhood best friend than about a bully who had tormented him for years and a baby he didn't know, but in any case he was able to come up with a good excuse for asking the Dark Lord to spare Lily - he could claim he wanted her as some sort of sexual prize - whereas it would be difficult to think up a good excuse for asking Voldemort to spare James (not one that wouldn't require Snape to follow through by killing James himself, anyway), and impossible to think of a reason why he should ask the Dark Lord to show mercy to baby Harry, the very person who had been prophecied to bring about the Dark Lord's downfall. For Snape to ask Voldemort to spare Harry would be to admit that he didn't care very much whether the Dark Lord was going to be vanquished or not, so all it would do is bring about Snape's own death and lose whatever tiny hope he had of saving Lily.

In fact, the only thing Snape could do to save James and Harry was either to convince Voldemort that the prophecy referred to someone else - sacrificing another set of innocents to spare the Potters, which really wouldn't be an improvement - or to do what he did do: to warn the Potters that they were being targeted. It's true that he seems mainly concerned with the danger to Lily but again that's natural - she's the one to whom he has an emotional connection - and he must have known, when he contacted Dumbledore, that doing so would protect (should have protected!) James and Harry as well, even if that was just a happy side-effect rather than his main goal. Nor had he known that he was putting Harry and James - or any child - in danger when he relayed the prophecy.

Dumbledore's accusation that Snape had "sacrificed" James and Harry is in fact wholly irrational and probably stemmed from his own feeling that he himself had sacrificed Ariana on the altar of his love for Gellert, and their shared political ambitions. And after ranting at and emotionally abusing Snape, Dumbledore then gave away any claim to the moral high ground by asking Snape to pay him in some way, to give him some gift in return for protecting two Order members and their child - as if the warning itself, and the risk Snape was taking to bring it, were not themselves gifts.

It is often assumed in fanon that Snape would not have cared and would not have defected had Voldemort decided to target the Longbottoms instead of the Potters. On the one hand, what canon evidence we have suggests that Snape was never a very enthusiastic Death Eater, and as a teacher he shows what is for Hogwarts an unusually strong desire to protect the students from physical danger, even when he doesn't like them. On the other hand, defection put him in danger of torture and execution not only by the Death Eaters but by the Aurors as well, so it may be that without the spur of the sudden danger to Lily he would have remained as a half-hearted Death Eater, wincing privately over the things some of his colleagues got up to and over the fact that the Dark Lord was going after a baby, but lacking the nerve and impetus to do anything about it. Especially when you see the sort of harsh, discouraging reception he got from Dumbledore when he did defect.

On what a friend of mine used to call "the third or Sellafield hand", the fact that he did choose to defect, to actually put himself into enemy hands, rather than just owl the Potters an anonymous warning, does suggest that he really wanted out, and that he had become disgusted by the organisation he found himself in and had been trying to nerve himself up to leave, even before the danger to Lily gave him the final push to do something he must have known was quite likely to result in a one-way ticket to Azkaban, even if the Aurors didn't shoot him on sight first.

The wording of the prophecy itself raises some difficult questions, and not just because nobody hearing it could really know whether the word was "born" or "borne", or because "the seventh month" could mean July, September, the seventh month of the academic year (i.e. March), the seventh month from when the prophecy was made, the seventh month of pregnancy, the seventh month of the parents' marriage and probably some others I haven't thought of yet. On the face of it, the statement "neither can live while the other survives" makes no sense, especially later on after Voldemort had used Harry's blood to reconstitute himself, and had himself become an anchor for Harry. In fact, it was more true to say that neither could die while the other survived. It only works as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since once each of them believes that they have to kill the other in order to survive, it becomes true because each is then hunting the other - even though they needn't have done.

There's a common idea in fanfiction that the prophecy was a set-up and/or that Dumbledore deliberately leaked it, and that makes a certain amount of sense. Given that Dumbledore's plan required Voldemort to attempt to kill Harry himself, not just through one of his agents, you have to wonder why Dumbledore would want to conceal from Voldemort a prophecy which would give him the idea that he needed to kill Harry himself. It's possible therefore that the original prophecy actually did say "neither can die while the other survives" and that Dumbledore concealed this from Voldemort and fed Harry a doctored version.

Laineth points out that since Trelawney saw Snape outside the door arguing with Aberforth after she had completed the prophecy, Albus must have seen him too, and yet Snape was allowed to leave without being Obliviated of the memory of the prophecy. I'm not 100% convinced of this - it may be that Dumbledore tried to Obliviate him and failed because Snape was already an Occlumens - and nor I think do we know whether or not Dumbledore already knew that Snape was a Death Eater. But if he did know, and did allow Snape to leave without being Obliviated, then it was Dumbledore who allowed Voldemort to know about a prophecy that an as-yet-unborn baby would be a threat to him.

Of course, since Snape didn't know the prophecy referred to a baby, Dumbledore might not expect Voldemort to work that out from the little that Snape had heard - but did Dumbledore know at that point that Snape had only heard half of the prophecy?

This one was brought to my attention by an essay on Half Blood Ponce's blog. Many fen assume that Snape must have known that Peter Pettigrew was Voldemort's spy in the Order, knew that Sirius was an innocent man in Azkaban and could have saved Lily and James if he had only told somebody. But in the trial scene which Harry views in the Pensieve in GoF, Karkaroff says "You must understand that He Who Must Not Be Named operated always in the greatest secrecy ... he preferred that we – I mean to say, his supporters [cut] – we never knew the names of every one of our fellows – he alone knew exactly who we all were –" and Moody comments that this was "... a wise move, wasn't it, as it prevented someone like you, Karkaroff, turning all of them in."

It's unlikely Karkaroff is lying, as he is trying to shop as many people as he can in order to curry favour, not making up excuses not to shop people. It's not impossible that Snape knew about Pettigrew, but if he did it raises all kinds of plot issues, and it's clear that it's wholly possible he knew nothing about it. If you take authorial intention into consideration, it seems likely that Rowling introduced this piece of conversation in order to show that the reason Snape didn't tell anybody about Pettigrew was because he didn't know.

Indeed, if Voldemort knew about the dynamic between them, the fact that Pettigrew had been part of the gang that bullied Snape, he would surely make sure Snape didn't know what Pettigrew was doing in case he was tempted to betray him out of spite.

The situation is complicated by the possibility that Snape himself might have been responsible for some of the Order leaks during Vold War One. It's strongly implied in Vold War Two that Dumbledore has Snape betray some genuine Order secrets to Voldemort in order to win his trust.

Snape delayed warning Sirius about the incident at the Ministry in order to put him in danger.

I've seen people seriously argue this as a canon fact and a reason for believing that Snape is eeeevil. In fact in the books Dumbledore states categorically that Snape contacted Sirius "at once" after leaving Umbridge's office, to make sure he was safely at Grimmauld Place. When Harry failed to return from the Forbidden Forest with Umbridge, Snape contacted Grimmauld Place again, where several Order members had gathered for some kind of meeting and Dumbledore was expected imminently. He warned them that Harry and co. might have gone to the Ministry, and asked Sirius to remain behind to brief Dumbledore, but Sirius declined to do so.

There is actually a gap of two or three hours somewhere during that evening, because Rowling has got the sunset happening two or three hours earlier than would be the case in the Highlands in June. But it's clear from what she has Dumbledore say that she doesn't mean there to be a gap in Snape's behaviour, and absolutely unequivocal that he warned Sirius the first time as soon as he left Umbridge's office.

There is a tendency in fanwriting to carry the characters to extremes and make them wholly good or wholly bad, instead of the complex, ambiguous souls they are in canon. Snape himself is so resolutely and realistically colourful that Rowling herself says that she loves him, but she'd like to slap him - a sentiment with which many Snape fen would agree. I've described him elsewhere as "brave, brilliant, honourable, dedicated, witty, also petty, vindictive, childish, tactless and sulky" and because of this obvious mixture of characteristics he probably suffers from the canonisation/demonisation fanon less than many other characters, but you do still see it. There are Snape fen who feel they cannot justify their love unless they turn him into some classic romantic hero, and Marauders fen who feel they can't like what was good in James and Sirius, or pity their fate, unless they can justify what was bad in them by blaming their victim.

There is an issue of canon-compatibility here. The characters behave as JK Rowling says they behave, because they are constructs of her imagination (albeit several of them are loosely based on real people at Wyedean School which had, in addition to the very Snapey John Nettleship, a large, hairy, emotionally labile biker Biology teacher; an immensely tall French mistress; a Pottery teacher identical in appearance to Rowling's own drawing of Professor Sprout; a teacher called Mr Mooney and another teacher who liked to weird students out by removing his glass eye, among others). We do not have to agree with her feelings about her characters - we do not have to give the same weight to their actions which she does - but if she likes a character then a canon-compatible version of that character cannot be so wholly, obviously bad that it would not be possible for Rowling to like them (regardless of whether we share her feelings or not), and if she dislikes or is ambiguous about a character then they cannot be so wholly virtuous that she couldn't be ambiguous about them.

No human or part-human characters in the Potterverse are wholly pleasant apart from Arthur, Cedric, Tonks, Neville and Luna (and even Arthur is flawed by his immaturity, which leads him to condone dangerously irresponsible behaviour in his children, and his willingness to bend the rules at work to suit his own preferences, and Cedric has been sabotaged by The Cursed Child, if you accept that as canon, which personally I don't)); none, probably, is wholly bad except Tom Riddle and Umbridge. Some of the other Death Eaters may be, but we don't know that much about most of them. Of the ones we do know a lot about, Bellatrix is driven by her intense love and hero-worship for Tom Riddle, and Lucius and Narcissa by their love for Draco and their sense of family.

Since the publication of DH it is not really possible to write a wholly evil Snape and remain canon-compatible: he has too many established virtues. Rowling herself said at interview that he was "immensely brave" and sacrificed himself for love, so if you accept interviews as canon there's no doubt about his courage, his devotion or his motivation. He hands himself over to Dumbledore at a time when the Aurors are torturing and killing prisoners, in an attempt to save Lily, and goes back to the Death Eaters to serve the Order and protect Lily's son, although he must know he'll probably be tortured and then killed if his deceit is uncovered. [There's no strong evidence that the Death Eaters routinely torture people for fun but they do torture for information, and Snape is a skilled Occlumens who could not reliably be interrogated using Legilimency or Veritaserum.]

He prefers to die by breaking his Vow rather than kill Dumbledore (or maybe rather than risk splitting his own soul, that part isn't clear). He runs through the school in his nightshirt because he thought he heard a scream, charges though a bathroom door without checking what's on the other side because a girl's voice cried "Murder!", and sprints across the lawn and down the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack, to the place where he was once nearly murdered, to confront the two people who had nearly murdered him, one of whom he knows to be a werewolf on the point of changing and the other of whom he wrongly but sincerely believes to be a mass murderer, and does so almost certainly because he fears children are in danger. [The Shack is known to have no exit except through the tunnel, so if all he wanted to do was catch Sirius he could have sat by the Willow and picked him off as he came out.]

He risks blowing his cover - something which would presumably result in his torture and death - in order to save other people from the Death Eaters, even when he has to defy Dumbledore's instructions in order to protect Remus during the Polyjuice chase. He refuses to fire on McGonagall, Flitwick and Sprout when they are trying to harm him, but only deflects their blows - and doesn't even do that much to protect himself from Buckbeak. His capacity for violence is strictly limited: Harry may torture somebody with Cruciatus and throw them through a glass door to punish them for being rude, Remus may throw Harry into a wall, but Snape limits himself to the magical equivalent of a slap. When he has Pettigrew, the man who betrayed Lily, in his power he does nothing worse than boss him around a bit and give him a little sting.

Clearly, opinions vary, and are free to vary, on how much comparative weight you give to Snape's virtues and faults, and whether you think e.g. that his spiteful and overbearing manner to Harry outweighs the fact that (according to Quirrelmort) he sacrificed his own friendships in the staffroom in order to protect Harry; or that his willingness to risk being sacked by Umbridge in order to protect Neville from being throttled outweighs his humiliating the boy by making rude remarks about him to other teachers in front of the class; or that his getting Remus sacked outweighs his risking discovery and death to protect Remus from being shot out of the sky during the Polyjuice chase. [Nightfall Rising has suggested that it was an act of Slytherin genius for Snape to present Umbridge, a beaurocrat, with the argument that he didn't want Neville to be strangled because it would generate too much paperwork - a motive she could actually sympathise with.]

Many fen who still deny that Snape is one of the good guys do so because they have confused "good" with "nice" - something Snape seldom is. But niceness is a slippery characteristic, which tends to be a learned social strategy rather than or more than a personality trait. It's a strategy which makes everyone's life more pleasant, and if a person is nice primarily to ease the lives of the people around them, then it's clearly a virtue: but if they do it to smooth their own path it's close to being a vice. Think how very "nice" young Tom Riddle is to Slughorn when he wants to worm information out of him.

Even if a person's pleasant manner is genuine, soft emotions are a poor motivator for doing good. If you are warm to other people mainly because of your soft feelings, the odds are good that when you're in a bad mood, you will turn cold - whereas good done for duty's sake is largely immune to mood, and if you genuinely care about the people you are being good to, rather than or more than your sense of your own virtue, then you should want whatever gives those people the most benefits, whether or not it's what gives you the most emotional satisfaction. Snape fen tend to prefer substance over style and to think that things like courage, dutifulness, loyalty and self-sacrifice are more important and provide more significant benefits to others than "niceness", but there's clearly a grey area where lack of superficial niceness can shade into actual unkindness, and it's a matter of personal taste how much you think that matters.

However, the "Snape-hater" sub-section of fandom, those who don't just feel that his vices outweigh his virtues but deny that he even has any virtues, often in a wildly obsessive and over the top way involving detailed and gloating descriptions of horrible tortures they would like to inflict on him, are really not fen of the Potter books at all - since their take on the story is clearly not remotely book-canon-compatible - but are either film-fen or, like the "Dark Harry" and "Dark Hermione" crowd, meta-fen of a certain class of fan-fiction. They tend to be either children or childish, people who are clearly projecting some unresolved issue with one of their own teachers onto Snape, whereas Snape-fen tend to be either mature adults or prematurely jaundiced, and are therefore better able to sympathise with a teacher's point of view - even a sour, disaffected teacher who dislikes most of his students. You could say that Snape tends to be liked by the same people who liked Victor Meldrew in the 1990s - and who are often old enough to have been Kerr Avon fen in the 1980s and Spock fen in the 1960s/70s.

Indeed, an essay on Pottermore - possibly authored by JK herself, and almost certainly authorized by her - categorizes Snape-hatred as a childish phase. "As children, Harry, Ron and Hermione had looked at the sarcastic and strict Professor Snape as something of a pantomime villain - the bitter Potions master, stewing in the dungeons. As adults, they learn Snape is far more complex." This is from an essay entitled The chapter that made us fall in love with... Severus Snape, so loving Snape is clearly seen as linked to increasing maturity and as the natural outcome of learning his true story. Rowling herself has said that she loves Snape, but she'd like to slap him - a sentiment with which many Snape fen would agree.

It was just about possible, pre-DH, for Snape-haters to present a canon-compatible case but their take on the story has really been thoroughly canon-shafted by DH, by Beedle (with its absolute confirmation that Dumbledore can and will twist the truth into a pretzel when it suits him, so that his statements about Snape's motives cannot be trusted) and by Pottermore. Although the saintly!sex-god!Snape of extreme pro-Snape fandom is nearly as unlikely as reeeally-eeeevil!rapist!Snape, the more serious, analytical Snape fen have repeatedly proven that they had a much better eye for the structure of the story and a much better instinct for where the plot was heading than the Snape-haters did - probably because Snape fen tend to be decades older than Snape-haters, and have had time to have read or watched far more stories.

They it was who spotted from the outset that Dumbledore's little speech about the nature of truth in the first book meant that he was, and was intended to be, a rather dodgy character, and that his statements about Snape's motives should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt - and, by extension, that this was going to be a series in which characters didn't necessarily tell the truth, and statements which sounded like The Voice of the Author might turn out to be misdirection. They spotted that McGonagall was biased against Slytherin and that the Marauders' treatment of young Severus was "relentless bullying", not just a bit of harmless rivalry - both since clearly stated on Pottermore. They spotted that Remus was shifty and weak, long before Harry called him out on it in DH. Above all they nearly all knew at once that Dumbledore had ordered Snape to kill him and that Snape was still on the Order's side, not just because they understood the characters but because they understood the author, and the plot.

Conversely, although Snape, like Harry, is arguably saint-like in his heroic self-sacrifice, a canon-compatible Snape cannot be all sweetness or all pleasant, by a fairly wide margin, unless you're going to assume that most of his apparent personality is an act or that, like Harry and the Horcrux, his intrinsic nature has been warped by the Dark Mark; and the faction who portray Snape as a suave and charming romantic hero also tend to be film- or fanfic-fen rather than book-fen. Rowling herself says of Snape that "Snape is all grey. You can't make him a saint: he was vindictive & bullying. You can't make him a devil: he died to save the wizarding world." I would place him higher than that because I value social niceness less and duty and honour more than she does, but the principle is sound.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Snape is fairly closely based on Rowling's Chemistry master John Nettleship, who genuinely was a sweet guy but who could be spectacularly tactless, and had difficulty hiding it if he didn't like a student, because he had Asperger's Syndrome and didn't know how to dissemble and who was, when JKR knew him, in the midst of a messy divorce and half out of his mind with chronic insomnia. It's unlikely Snape has Asperger's, since he must have to be a champion dissembler to survive as a spy, so his surly, abrasive and sometimes odd behaviour requires other explanations.

That he is sarcastic is neither here nor there, really, since sarcasm is a form of humour highly regarded in Britain, and his criticism of his students always seems to be aimed at making them better students. His verbal attacks never really go very far, except for the "I see no difference" comment which in context is actually wholly ambiguous: there's nothing to say whether he means "I see no difference between Granger's teeth now and before" or "I see no difference in severity between what Malfoy has done to Granger and what Potter has done to Goyle". If he does mean it as a crack about Hermione's buck teeth it's a rather cruel joke, but not necessarily intended to hurt: John Nettleship once quite innocently told his very tall, willowy wife, whom he adored beyond measure and wouldn't have hurt for the world, that when he first met her he thought she was something for growing beans up, just because it struck him as a funny idea - and then couldn't understand why we, his friends, went "Oh, John...."

There's an episode of the comedy panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats do Countdown in which, for reasons which are obscure, a photo' of one of the panellists is photoshopped to give him what looks like a Burberry slipper instead of a face, and one of the other guests says something like "I literally can't see any difference." Quite clearly this was not intended to wound but merely to tease, and probably Snape's remark was also meant to be understood as a joke, not as a genuine comment on Hermione's appearance.

OK, it would be a bit of a spiteful joke - but Snape almost certainly knows that Hermione helped to throw him into a wall and knock him out a few months previously (because he knows who was armed in the Shack), and then left him without medical treatment for about an hour, to the endangerment of his life; and he probably doesn't know (because a severe blow to the head wipes out what immediately preceded it) that knocking him out was an accident and that the Trio were only trying to disarm him. Also, as terri_testing has pointed out, Snape probably knows Hermione was in some way involved in the unprovoked spraying of Slytherin students, including Draco and his friends, with Swelling Solution in second year. This caused similar injuries to the one Hermione has now suffered at the same students' hands, so Snape may feel it's tit-for-tat. He knows at any rate that the ingredients for Polyjuice were stolen from him and that Hermione subsequently had an accident with Polyjuice, and he probably knows or suspects that those ingredients were taken at the same time as the accident with the Swelling Solution, which was therefore probably deliberately engineered by Hermione and her friends. From his point of view he has very good reason to feel a bit spiteful towards Hermione at this point, and that aside, Snape never seems to try to cause really serious distress, in the way that, say, Harry's auntie Marge does.

He does call Hermione an insufferable know-it-all - but a) this is both true and relevant to her class performance and b) we're told that this is only what all her classmates call her, including her close friends. When Ron says "You asked us a question and she knows the answer! Why ask if you don't want to be told?" he has fundamentally misunderstood the reason why teachers ask questions of a class, which is to find out whether a particular student or the class, generally, have reached a stage where they know the answer. Snape already knows the answer himself and knows that Hermione probably knows - although it was petty or thoughtless of him to ask for "anyone" and then ignore Hermione, instead of saying "anyone other than Miss Granger". [Petty or thoughtless or maybe quite deliberate and a cunning way of making sure that the identification of werewolves will stick in Hermione's mind.]

Ron is being somewhat hypocritical to complain of Snape calling Hermione something which he himself, we are told, calls her "at least twice a week". Snape has no reason to expect in advance that it will particularly upset her, and indeed it's not clear why it does. I don't think she's given him any reason to think that his opinion is that important to her, and teachers are not generally very respected in British culture, so one can't say he ought to know his words would matter because he's a teacher: almost the reverse, since teachers are expected to be critical and he especially is. He must at least strongly suspect that Hermione was involved in stealing the ingredients for Polyjuice from him the previous year, since she ended up furry, so he has no reason to think she has much respect for him: and indeed, only a few months later she would be part of a group who threw him into a wall and knocked him unconscious, and she would be more concerned about whether she was going to get into trouble for it than whether he was seriously hurt.

Indeed, despite the Shrieking Shack incident, the fact that Hermione was so upset because Snape made a not all that insulting comment she was used to hearing from her friends could be seen as evidence for the HGSS scenario. We've seen how Hermione hung on Lockhart's every word in second year, and the fact that she minds Snape's opinion so much could be evidence that she's transferred her crush to the man who defeated Lockhart in a duel.

He is certainly never remotely as vicious and abusive as Dumbledore, his own teacher, was to him when he was twenty and trying to defect. But he does seem actively to enjoy causing mild to moderate stress and frustration, and scoring off people - even people who are in his power and so can't really defend themselves - in a very childish way, and he cheats by behaving like a name-calling student to the students, and then pulling rank if they respond in kind. He likes to annoy people, to wind them up and then watch them do a slow burn so he is, at least in this fairly limited way, a spiteful gloater, and the crack about Hermione's teeth and the childish accusation of "know-it-all" suggest that the problem may be that Snape doesn't know from one minute to the next whether he's staff or student. He is, after all, the youngest teacher in the school (except, briefly, for Remus, who is just a few months younger), teaching in the place where he himself was taught, with colleagues who have known him since he was eleven and sometimes treat him as if he still was.

[Whether Remus is more or less mature than Snape - or Sirius - is an interesting question. He seems less bound by resentment, shows greater fairness and detachment (when he isn't trying to placate Sirius), his dislike of the use of Dementors even on the guilty speaks well for his emotional and ethical maturity, and his willingness to accept that it's right that he should resign his post because his behaviour has endangered students shows admirable disinterest and self-awareness. On the other hand he is vastly, even criminally irresponsible in his willingness to risk Harry's life rather than own up to his own childhood misbehaviour, he is on the side of rule-breaking even when part of his job is to uphold school rules, he's an emotional coward who tries to wimp out of his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend and reacts very violently when Harry tells him off for it, and his encouraging children to reveal their deepest fears in front of the whole class suggests a worrying lack of imagination.]

According to what Ron has heard before starting at Hogwarts, presumably from his brothers, Snape has the reputation of being biased in favour of his Slytherins. We don't really see this much, except in a Quidditch context, but he does let Draco get away with some overtly annoying behaviour. Draco is the son of his friends, perhaps even his godson, so he must have known the boy since he was a baby, and there is a common theme in the books of people being biased in favour of their darlings and seeing no wrong in them: Hagrid with Norbert and Aragog; the Dursleys with Dudley; Hermione with Crookshanks etc..

Snape is rather unprofessional in the way he lets his dislike of Harry show. He has perfectly sound reasons to dislike Harry in his own right, quite apart from Harry's resemblence to James, and it must be a rare teacher who doesn't detest at least some of their students - but they're supposed to do a better job of concealing that dislike.

As a result he is partly to blame for Sirius's death, although not for the reason Harry thinks. It was perfectly reasonable for Snape to needle Sirius, since Sirius was always needling him. He has every reason to feel about Sirius the way Harry feels about Dudley, but he still tried to save him, just as Harry saved Dudley. But when Harry went to fetch help for Barty Crouch Snr in GoF, Snape obstructed him. The timing of Dumbledore's appearance suggests that Snape was avoiding saying "The Headmaster is taking a leak" (and yes, Rowling does think about these things - think of the chamber pots Dumbledore found in the Room of Requirement), and Snape may have his own good reasons not to want to help Crouch, whose policy of torturing prisoners during VWI must have made Snape's task of betraying former comrades who trusted him exponentially more upsetting, but he also seems to be enjoying himself by being obstructive to Harry in a petty way. As a result, it's really not at all surprising that Harry did not immediately think of going to Snape when he had the vision of Sirius imprisoned at the Ministry - based on prior experience he had good reason to expect Snape would be obstructive and unhelpful, even if he was mistaken about that.

A bit like Harry, when he saved Dudley from the Dementors but then didn't bother to tell Vernon and Petunia that chocolate would make him feel better, Snape is protective but not very kind: he cares very much about other people's physical safety, but not much about their emotional state. He is dismissive of Bellatrix's suffering in Azkaban, although it must have been terrible, and launches a verbal attack on a Harry who has obviously just had a severe nosebleed. He must know that since Tonks is quite unconcerned, any more serious injuries Harry may have sustained have already been fixed, and he has lots of reasons for being in a bad mood - he's been called away from his dinner, so he's hungry and probably has low blood-sugar; he's missed the Sorting of what he knows will probably be his last batch of First Years as Head of House, before he will have to kill Dumbledore; and he's just been bounced out at by a Patronus which takes the form of one of his worst nightmares.

Nevertheless, on the face of it it was quite irrational of him to blame Harry and take points from him, since the blood on Harry's robe would surely indicate that he'd been delayed for medical reasons. Maidofkent points out, however, that had Harry been where he was supposed to be, any accident he might have had would have happened in front of witnesses and he would still have been with the body of the students. Even though Harry has clearly suffered some form of injury, Snape has reason strongly to supect he was injured while doing something he shouldn't have been doing in a place where he shouldn't have been.

If that is what Snape's thinking in that scene, he's right, Harry is to some extent to blame for his own tardiness because he chose to spy on Draco, and he has nearly disrupted Snape and Dumbledore's vital plans by doing so - but it's difficult to see how Snape could know this, as it's unlikely he's had time to speak to Draco. I suppose it's possible Ron and Hermione may have told the staff that Harry hasn't showed up and that they last saw him go off following Blaise Zabini, leading Snape to question his Slytherins, or that he has overheard Draco and his gang sniggering about it; and it's also possible, given that protecting Harry is one of Snape's principal goals in life, that he had already noticed and worried about Harry's non-appearance, and now he's doing the "Haul your child out of the way of a speeding truck and then scream at it to get rid of the adrenalin because you've had such a fright" thing.

Saying that Tonk's werewolf Patronus looks weak in that scene may be Snape's way of regaining a sense of control over a terrifying memory - and we know he still is terrified of Remus as an adult, because in PoA he backs out of the room, not taking his eyes off close-to-full-moon!Remus. It may be a simple observation that Tonk's new Patronus isn't very bright or clear. Or it may be a valid comment on Remus's unreliable nature, or on the fact that basing your Patronus on someone you love but whose reciprocated love you can't rely on is a bad idea. If the latter, there must be some ironic thought going on about his own doe Patronus, which is very bright, but represents a relationship even more hopeless than Tonks's with Remus. Maidofkent suggests that Snape's Patronus is his happy thing because it represents the fact that he is still serving Lily and doing his duty by her - and if so it would say a lot about him that the thing which made him happy was the thought that he was doing his duty.

We do know, because he later sets Harry an essay on the subject, that Snape thinks that Patroni aren't necessarily the best way to fight Dementors, and we know that Tonks is so depressed over her on/off relationship with Remus that she loses her bright colours and ends up with drab hair. So the Happy Thought which powers her Remus-shaped Patronus isn't going to be very happy at all, and Snape would be right to think it might not protect her in an emergency.

Incidentally, Rowling's fudged interview explanation as to why Snape is the only Death Eater with a Patronus - that the Death Eaters were somehow too evil and Dementorish themselves to be able to conjure something so pure - makes absolutely no sense, since we are shown that Umbridge has an especially powerful and bright Patronus; but it does indicate that Rowling herself thinks of Snape as essentially pure-hearted and very different from the common run of Death Eaters. A much more sensible explanation would be that the Dark Mark somehow interferes with the ability to produce a Patronus, and Snape has to conceal the fact that he alone can do so, because it would give away the fact that he is doing something to block the Dark Mark's influence, and is therefore not loyal to Voldemort.

When Snape confronts Sirius and Remus in the Shrieking Shack he believes, wrongly but with good reason, that they are there to kill Harry and that Sirius is a senior Death Eater, so it's reasonable for him to want them sent to Azkaban. As with Bellatrix, however, even if Sirius had been the dyed-in-the-wool villain Snape thought him, his suffering in Azkaban had still been dreadful and it was cruel and unpleasant of Snape to gloat openly about handing him back to the Dementors - albeit that Harry too had been keen to do just that half an hour previously, and Snape was very overwrought by this point, being in the very place where Sirius and Remus had nearly killed him as a boy, and here they were again with Sirius still gloating about the murder attempt as if it had been yesterday, and winding him up.

He probably has a rather callous attitude to animals - he encounters them mainly as potion ingredients, shoots down flies, tests a potion on Trevor the toad and seems to be amused when Mrs Norris is frozen by the Basilisk, although what is amusing him is probably the sight of Dumbledore and McGonagall with their noses an inch from Mrs Norris's fur, rather than the injury to Mrs Norris herself (or perhaps he knows about McGonagall's Animagus form and is smiling at the thought that one "cat" is examining another). But a certain callousness towards non-human animals seems to be the norm at Hogwarts, and at least Snape doesn't torture experimental animals with Cruciatus, as false!Moody does without anybody apparently finding it odd; or encourage his class repeatedly to break a captive animal's bones, as Remus does; or allow his class to stick pins into a half-transformed hedgehog which is still conscious and suffering, as McGonagall does; or (maybe) feed a Hippogriff on piles of slaughtered pets and relish the idea of setting his dog on an elderly cat, as Hagrid does.

As regards Snape's threat to poison Trevor the toad, there is a kind of universal fanon, a misunderstanding of language, whereby people in general assume that anything labelled a poison must be lethal. In fact any substance which does more harm than good is technically a poison. Since the Shrinking Solution is intended to be drunk it's unlikely that it contains anything really dangerous - if it had something like ricin in it which was deadly if not properly cooked you'd expect Snape to emphasize this, and he doesn't, so it probably wouldn't do anything irreversibly dreadful to Trevor however much of a hash Neville made of it. Also note that in PS Flitwick uses Trevor to demonstrate making an object whizz around the room, even though this was probably quite scary for him, and in GoF Harry himself uses Trevor to practise the Summoning Charm on.

It's noteworthy that when Snape flees aross the castle grounds after killing Dumbledore, he allows Buckbeak to strike at and claw him and doesn't try to defend himself, even though this is an at-least-pony-sized flying carnivore with big claws, and could easily have killed him. It would surely have been quite easy to knock Buckbeak out of the sky and it would not have slowed Snape's progress any more than Buckbeak himself was doing. It's difficult to see any self-serving or political reason why Snape would fail to defend himself here - it's just more evidence that he isn't by nature a very physically violent person, and/or that his own safety just isn't one of the things he takes into account, and/or that he doesn't want to kill an innocent beast who is only doing his job - although we don't know whether it's Buckbeak or Hagrid to whom Snape is being kind here.

It's also telling to look at what kind of pressure Dumbledore thinks will influence Snape's behaviour - especially if you believe that Dumbledore is wise. When Dumbledore is trying to get Snape to agree to kill him, he raises the need to protect Draco's soul, Snape's promise of obedience and his own hope for a clean, merciful death - at no point does he say "If Draco doesn't kill me and you don't at least try to do so yourself, you will die of your Unbreakable Vow." Before the Polyjuice chase, portrait!Dumbledore warns Snape to keep his head down and not do anything which might blow his cover, because it's important that he should remain in Voldemort's favour so that he can protect the students - at no point does Dumbledore say "If you blow your cover you'll be killed". Clearly, Dumbledore does not think that Snape is strongly motivated by his own survival - and we see that despite the portrait's warning, Snape still risks discovery in an attempt to protect Remus (whom he doesn't even like) during the Polyjuice chase.

JK Rowling says of Snape's death "Snape didn't die for 'ideals'. He died in an attempt to expiate his own guilt. He could have broken cover at any time to save himself but he chose not to tell Voldemort that the latter was making a fatal error in targeting Harry. Snape's silence ensured Harry's victory."

Since Snape believed himself to be sending Harry to his death (unless Dumbledore had confided the meta-layer of the plan to him off-stage), it probably wasn't guilt over his part in the deaths of Lily and James which moved him here, but guilt that he had ever contributed to Voldemort's rise - and I would say that feeling guilty because you joined a political movement which turned out to be evil was an ideal. It's also slightly perverse of Rowling to deny Snape political ideals when John Nettleship was a lifelong and very active socialist, and it doesn't really fit with the fact that Snape was willing to go along with Dumbledore's plans in the end even though they might entail the death of Lily's son, and the fact that he took risks to save people even though that might risk blowing his cover.

Clearly, serving Lily wasn't the only thing he cared about. As Silvialaura put it on the discussion group Loose Canon, in reply to a suggestion that Snape had had no choice about loving and serving Lily, "He did chose to stay, fight and screw up his life after Lily died, instead to mourn her in a nice resort in the Caribbeans... So at one point he must have changed from 'I want Lily' to 'I want Lily safe even if she's not mine' to 'I want to work for the same things Lily wanted' and eventually, 'I want to work for things that are right even if Lily may not agree'."

[N.B. The Cursed Child acknowledges that Snape worked for the cause itself, not only for Lily, and I suppose that's been authorized by Rowling, but The Cursed Child also rubbishes some of the other characters and it's probably cheating to cherry-pick what's good in it and treat that as canon while ignoring the train-wreck of the rest of it.]

As for the rest of her statement about Snape's death, I presume that JK means that Snape understood what Voldemort meant about the Elder Wand, knew that he could save himself if he admitted that it had not been he who disarmed Dumbledore, but kept quiet about it and died rather than reveal information which would have helped Voldemort in his forthcoming battle with Harry.

The oft'-repeated claim that Snape is a bad teacher, or that he "tortures" his students by his sneering put-downs, is rather childish. In real life sarcastic, sneering teachers tend to be quite popular, especially with boys. [Yes, Harry and Neville find Snape's sarcasm annoying but they aren't real boys - they are figments of the imagination of a woman.] Nor is Snape the only teacher at Hogwarts to employ this kind of sneering criticism: it is Filius Flitwick who sets a student the punishment of repeatedly writing "I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick".

American fen tend to take Snape's sarcasm as more serious than it is, and the Marauders' attack on Snape as less so, because in the US sarcasm is generally seen as some sort of verbal attack, and there is a tradition of hazing and pranking which is more or less culturally sanctioned. But here there is very little tradition of hazing (and where it does occur it is usually stamped on from on high), so the Marauders' treatment of Snape is not only cruel but unusual, while sarcasm is a standard form of humour. It is not, as American fen often assume, something designed seriously to undermine the victim, because both sides know it isn't serious and indeed, although Harry and co. find Snape's catty remarks annoying there's no evidence that anybody except Hermione is actively upset by them.

Here in Scotland it's perfectly normal for working class men to address each other as "Ya mangy cunt" and mean it fondly. There's this odd British detective series called Rosemary and Thyme, made between 2003 and 2007, about two landscape gardeners who solve crimes. One of the episodes is set in a boys' boarding school and there's this delightful schoolmaster in it, kind, gentle, a bit old-fashioned, cares deeply about the school and about the boys - whom he addresses collectively, with the deepest affection, as "you disgusting little maggots".

And although classroom put-downs are nowadays regarded in some quarters as a crime, The Times Educational Supplement apparently used to have a "Best teacher put-downs" feature, where sarcy remarks to students were celebrated as an art form. [I don't know how long this ran for but I saw a good example being quoted in another publication.] Winston Churchill's talent for verbal put-downs - some of them far crueller and more heavy-handed than anything Snape ever comes up with - is widely celebrated and treated as a sort of national treasure, and the artist Rigby Graham, who came from the same sort of area as Snape, was so widely admired for his spectacular rudeness that apparently people used to frame his rude letters and hang them on the wall. In netspeak, Snape likes to pwn his students, in a way which is rather immature but not necessarily any more truly malicious than when teenagers do it to their mates.

Half Blood Ponce has also pointed out that the Wizarding World regards it as absolutely normal for parents publicly to humiliate their children by sending them Howlers.

Snape's job is to get the children though their OWL and NEWT exams, and he does. Even Umbridge, who is trying to find fault, says that his classes are quite advanced for their age, and he himself says that he expects them all to pass OWLs - showing more faith in Neville than McGonagall does. Only as regards the Slytherins, whose head of house he is, is he responsible for their well-being and happiness, as distinct from their pass-rate: and he seems to take care of them fairly well. For the rest, he does a competent job of getting them through their exams and keeps them alive while he's doing it, which is what he's paid to do, so as far as that goes he's a fairly good teacher.

It's true that Rowling has called Snape a bully to his students, but he certainly isn't a bully in the classic sense of selectively picking on the weak, since he is about equally abrasive to the powerful (except Riddle, whom he is stitching up): in fact he seems to be the only character able and willing to bawl Dumbledore out when he thinks the old man is being an idiot. And one must remember that as a teacher, to some extent it's his job to be a bit of a bully, as it is for a sergeant in the army.

Greyscale cartoon showing a policeman interviewing a wild-looking monk who is clutching a bent traffic sign which he has evidently been using as a club

From Cracks in the Cloister: Muffins with the Monks by "Brother Choleric"

At least, it's his job to boss the students around a bit, especially in a subject which (like the army) provides such rich possibilities for serious injury, and if he doesn't have the calm natural authority that, say, McGonagall has it's almost bound to come out rather too strident. And teaching can be terribly stressful. One of my friends quit teaching after "something in [her] psyche went ping" and she picked a particularly annoying pupil bodily off the floor by his hair. And it wasn't that she got into trouble, because she didn't: she left because she was sincerely afraid that if she stayed she would sooner or later really snap and kill one of the little horrors.

Snape's not as good a teacher as Grubbly-Plank or Sprout, but probably at least as good as, and in some cases clearly better than, most of the rest of the staff. You also have to ask what each teacher is trying to achieve. As far as Potions goes, Slughorn is probably more likely to inspire students to develop a love of the subject - Snape more likely to imprint their minds with accurate recipes which might save their lives in an emergency. We are told that Harry brews better during his practical Potions OWL because he no longer has Snape breathing down his neck and making him nervous - but the fact that he is able to brew his test potion at all is presumably because Snape has hammered the recipe into his brain with constant repetition and nagging.

The situation between Snape and Neville is peculiar. Undoubtedly Snape is overbearing and over-critical towards Neville and undoubtedly this is the wrong way to handle him. Yet, we see Snape give Neville one detention in six years and never take any points from him, apart from the one incident where he takes ten points for brawling from Harry, Neville and Ron as a group. On the face of it it seems absurd that a boy whose parents were tortured into madness by Death Eaters, and whose other relatives repeatedly put him in fear of death in an attempt to squeeze more magic out of him, should have as his Boggart a teacher who is an overbearing nag but who almost never actually punishes him. My initial thought was that Snape's constant criticism makes Neville feel he is a hopeless wizard and his family will therefore kill or disown him - or that he fears Snape will attack him for being bad at magic the way Great-Uncle Algie did, since he sees the Boggart-Snape as reaching for a wand. Duj has also pointed out that the Boggart class takes place only an hour or two after the incident with Trevor and the shrinking-potion, and Neville has just seen Snape again as they entered the staff-room, so it may be that Snape is on Neville's mind that afternoon in a way he probably would not have been at any other time.

But then I started to wonder what plot purpose is served by the Boggart incident. PoA and GoF reflect each other. In PoA everybody, especially Snape, mistakes an ally (Sirius) for an enemy and wrongly believes that he is a Death Eater who has come to Hogwarts to harm Harry. In GoF the same people mistake an enemy (false!Moody) for an ally and fail to realise that he is a Death Eater who has come to Hogwarts to harm Harry. Looking at the two books as a pair, I now suspect that the business of Snape being Neville's Boggart is a deliberate foreshadowing of Snape's big revelation at the end of GoF, and that Neville, with his family connections, knows that Snape is a former Death Eater.

Snape's irritation with Hermione is not unreasonable prejudice but largely justified - although he could certainly be more polite about it, and on the occasion where he calls her a know-it-all he's being genuinely unfair, because he asked for anybody in the class to answer. In general, though, when a teacher asks a question of the class they want to engage the whole class, not just the most able students, and find out who knows what: they don't want to be being constantly answered by one student who they already know knows the answer, especially as that may eventually discourage others from even trying. And students at well-run British schools are expected to be able to demonstrate original thought and analysis: quoting the textbook without adding any personal input is seen as a mediocre answer, and of course any good teacher would be dissatisfied with a mediocre answer from a supposedly star student.

I've been told several times that that's not the case in the US and that students in the US are expected to just quote what they have read, and not start to develop their own ideas until they get to postgraduate level. This explains why so many US fen think that Snape is being unfair to Hermione here. In case anybody thinks I'm making it up about the expectation at British schools being different, here's an interesting article about how quite young British children are increasingly being taught metacognition: not just independent thinking, but thinking about how they think. [Terry Pratchett, btw, said that witches have First Sight and Third Thoughts: that is, they see what is really there rather than what they expect to see, and they think about how they think about thinking. Second Thoughts - metacognition - was something he regarded as completely normal.]

Nevertheless it's probably fair to say that Snape would be an even better teacher, more likely actively to inspire his students as opposed to shoving them through the goalposts of OWL and NEWT like an overloaded wheelbarrow, if he didn't hector and hover and get on his students' nerves quite so much. Although it's true that he does need to micromanage to some extent to keep the class from blowing themselves up, it's also true that he's a nitpicking, negative person who rarely if ever gives anybody any house points (although when he takes points it's rarely more than ten, to McGonagall's fifty) and is much more likely to criticize than praise his students. Being a competitive person himself he may feel that sniping at the students will make them work harder to prove him wrong, because that's how he would react in their place - but it's quite the wrong strategy with nervy students like Neville who need to be encouraged.

In fact we see Snape praise a student only twice - once when he holds up Draco's work as an example of good practice during the first lesson, and once, grudgingly, to Harry during the Occlumency lessons ('I don't remember telling you to use a Shield Charm ... but there is no doubt that it was effective ...': from someone as negative as Snape this is praise indeed). There's no doubt that the fact that Snape praises Harry here is an important point which we should notice, not just a throwaway line JKR put in as an afterthought, because she has allowed readers to see some of her working notes for OotP and there's a column for the Occlumency lessons, which includes a session in which "Snape grudgingly approves ish".

In addition, he in a sense praises Harry by omission when Harry breaks up the incipient wand-fight between Snape and Sirius at Grimmauld Place. Sirius is angry with Harry, but Snape is not, and just accepts Harry's impartial intervention and doesn't have any problem with a fifteen-year-old telling two adults how to behave. This, combined with the careful pre-planning of the scene where Snape expresses approval of Harry (albeit somewhat lukewarm and stiff approval) when Harry finally makes some effort in the Occlumency lessons, suggests that JKR is showing us that Snape doesn't have a problem with Harry when he can see that Harry is doing a good job. Nightfall Rising has pointed out that the idea of a young(ish) boy trying to stop two adults from fighting will also have great resonance for Snape.

He is not, as often portrayed in fanon, bound to rubbish anything done by Harry or anything done by any Gryffindor even if it's obviously good. We see him as a boy make a remark about Gryffindors preferring brawn to brain, in response to a gratuitous insult to Slytherin, but except for the brawling incident we never see him take points from any Gryffindor other than the Trio, and prior to DH we only once see him give detention to a Gryffindor (Neville) other than the Trio - and the detention with Hagrid which he gives to Neville, Ginny and Luna in DH is more of a covert reward, since he must know it's going to devolve into a meeting of the Harry Potter Fanclub.

Harry expects Snape to mark him "Exceeds Expectations" when he makes a good potion (although this is just after the Pensieve debacle and Harry's potion is, for whatever reason, broken and lost), so even though he hates Snape he expects Snape will mark him reasonably fairly according to his performance. And Snape comes from the sort of area where "not bad" is the height of praise, so most of the time he will acknowledge good work by keeping silent, or even just by criticizing it in a less vitriolic tone than usual. Any truly canon-compatible Snape is going to be sour, difficult and ill-mannered, probably rather spiteful and a bit childish and sulky, not sweet or charming. But he will also be brave, protective and self-sacrificing, and I would argue that the idea that he is unreasonably prejudiced against Gryffindors is not only not canon but not canon-compatible, since if this prejudice (so beloved of fanon) really existed you'd expect to see some evidence of it. There is some evidence that he really is biased in favour of Slytherins, or at least that some of the students believe he is, but not that he is biased against any particular house, so whatever prejudice he may have comes from unfair love rather than unfair hate.

Much has been made of the fact that many of the crowd Snape hung around with at school later became Death Eaters, and judging from what Lily says, it was apparent that they were heading that way by the end of fifth year. Schoolboy Snape makes an excuse for a friend of his who supposedly tried to use a Dark spell on somebody, under unknowm circumstances, while Snape was not present. It is not clear, when Snape says that Mulciber's behaviour was just a joke, whether he means "It was Dark magic but it was funny" or "He was only kidding that he was going to use a Dark spell."

The same people who say that this proves that young Snape was an evil bully tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that Remus did little to stop his friends' bullying behaviour, and even joined in with it, while he was a prefect (his is the first voice on the Map to jeer at Snape, and the Map was made in fifth year). They forget that James, Sirius and Remus were best mates at school with somebody who grew up to murder (that we know of) twelve Muggles, Bertha Jorkins and Cedric Diggory, and single-handedly sought out and resurrected the Dark Lord - and I find it hard to believe there weren't at least some signs that Peter was a bit sinister while they were still at school. James not only remained friends with Sirius after Sirius came close to murdering a classmate, but actively encouraged him to go on persecuting his victim. Harry not only remained friends with the Twins after their near-murder of Montague, but persuaded Hermione not to help Montague by telling Madame Pomfrey how he'd been injured. Remaining loyal to friends whose behaviour is becoming increasingly worrying seems to be a Hogwarts Thing, but as usual only Snape gets blamed for doing what everyone around him is doing.

A thorough, heavy-duty essay on Pottermore, entitled The chapter which made us love... Severus Snape, sums up what is presumably an at least semi-official take on the man:

"This pattern [in which Snape appears to be an enemy and then is shown to be on Harry's side after all] is woven through each book - Snape is bad, Snape is good. Snape's a total git. Snape saved your life over and over. When Snape is tasked with the awful burden of killing Professor Dumbledore, he fulfilled everyone's narrative perfectly: here was the final proof that Snape was untrustworthy, yet we learn that he had to kill Dumbledore for noble reasons that barely anyone knew about.

"Snape's bravery is staggering. He is always viewed as the cartoon bad guy, yet what he furtively does for Harry along the way is his tragic secret - one nobody would be likely to figure out. Of course, Snape being who he is he makes no habit of being cheery, which doesn't help matters.

"It's almost like Snape created a kind of butterfly effect across all the books. It was Snape who overheard the prophecy that would go on to define Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter's lives for years afterwards. The prophecy can be seen as the catalyst for everything; it led to the death of Lily, his great love, and Snape spent the entire course of Harry's (and his own) life trying to make amends. If you think about it, Snape could be seen as the greatest instigator of the story's events."

The comment that "barely anyone" knew about Snape's motives for killing Dumbledore does sound as if a few more than just the two of them knew, and tends to bolster my suspicion that Aberforth and/or Hagrid knew about it....

"Snape dies looking into Harry's eyes. The eyes of the boy who survived, because the woman he loved died. The eyes of the boy who looks the spitting image of his father; the man who bullied him, then married the love of his life. Imagine having to look into those eyes in that moment; the eyes that both pained you intensely and yet made you feel love more than anything in the world. Snape's final moments are perhaps the bravest we have seen of any character.

"Within Deathly Hallows' lingering, final chapters we understand that Snape lived his life as a tortured, double-agent, constantly flickering from the good side to the bad like a broken light, and all in the name of an undying love that cemented his loyalty to Harry and Dumbledore.

"Right from the start in Philosopher's Stone, three, naïve children thought that the big meanie Potions professor was the antagonist trying to steal the stone. It is only at the end that we understand that he was the one trying to stop it all: always the silent hero behind the shadows. In 'The Prince's Tale' we unfurl the layers of quite a remarkable man. One whose name would be given, very deservedly, to one of Harry's future children.

"Snape has taught us that there are no good men and bad men, that we are born full of foibles, and complexities and painted in thousands of different shades. Whether we choose to see Snape as that mean professor, calling Harry 'our new celebrity', or as the chivalrous hero casting a meaningful Patronus, is up to you. But as Dumbledore often likes to say; 'It is our choices that show who we truly are'. Snape made some bad choices, and sometimes he was hard on Harry for no good reason. But he did spend much of his life making choices that would go some way to repair the one, truly terrible one."

Since it's on Pottermore and it's something a lot more than a few throwaway lines, this is presumably Rowling's own view of Snape, either written or authorized by her - that although he was "mean" and sometimes unfair to Harry he was loyal to both Harry and Dumbledore, tortured, tragic, noble, "staggeringly brave", the chivalrous silent hero hidden behind the shadows, a complex and remarkable man motivated by undying love and by the desire to put right his own boyhood errors, and the prime mover of the story. As Rowling has said on Twitter "He could have broken cover at any time to save himself but he chose not to tell Voldemort that the latter was making a fatal error in targeting Harry. Snape's silence ensured Harry's victory."

That Rowling herself apparently considers Snape to be the engine which turns the plot, and to have ensured Harry's victory by holding his tongue and turning down the chance to save himself, is a strong indication that the chapter-title The Flaw in the Plan refers to him. It is not, in the end, Harry's capacity to love which is the flaw in Voldemort's plans, as Dumbledore had expected: it is Snape's warm-hearted capacity to love, and Harry's cool-headed near-total lack of self-interest, which leads both of them to become a willing sacrifice to bring the monster down.

It may be just about possible to make a canon-compatible reallyeevil!Dumbledore, if you go only by the books and assume that every good thing he says or does is insincere. But you can do that with most characters, and if you accept interview canon and authorial intent - which personally I do so long as it doesn't clash with the books - Rowling does seem to think that Dumbledore is still on average one of the good guys, even though her attitude towards him is equivocal. While we don't necessarily have to agree with her, that does mean that a fully canon-compatible Dumbledore cannot be so unpleasant that Rowling herself could not rationally consider him to be one of the good guys.

Conversely, there's a really creepy cult-like group of Snape fen on the net who believe that Snape was evil but then was redeemed by the love of a perfect, saintly Dumbledore. That doesn't work either, because Rowling has made it perfectly clear that even if Dumbledore is kind-of sort-of maybe one of the good guys, she intends him to be as dodgy as fuck.

One of the first things to remember about Dumbledore is that whether you like him or not, he certainly had a horribly upsetting childhood. His sister was attacked and badly damaged when he was only ten, and then he had to live for months or years with knowing that his father was in a sort of concentration camp, being tormented by Dementors until he went mad and starved to death, and there was nothing he could do to save him or alleviate his suffering in any way. At this time of huge psychological stress young Albus was almost certainly rather emotionally neglected, not in a malign way but because out of the three Dumbledore children he was the one who needed attention least desperately. His combination of intellectual vanity and emotional coldness may well have come about in part because as a child all the attention he could get was a "Well done, dear" whenever he won some new prize at school, so he associates emotional comfort with being seen to be brilliant.

That he was unhappy about ending up as Ariana's carer is understandable, if not very noble. Not only was he being asked, at not-quite-eighteen, to sacrifice all the brilliant future he had thought he had in order to spend his life hiding and protecting his mad sister, but she had just killed their mother during one of her magical seizures, and might at any point randomly kill him too. Then just a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday his sister died, in a way which left him so guilt-stricken that ninety-seven years later his desire to see her again and to apologize to her would cause him to put on a cursed ring which would precipitate his death; his brother became his enemy; and his first and, so far as we know, only love turned out to be a dangerous psychopath, all in a day.

In just a couple of months, then, he lost his entire remaining close family - mother, sister and brother - and both found and lost the love of his life. Aberforth lost his family too, of course, but he at least chose to reject his brother rather than being rejected by him, and he had nothing to feel guilty for - and even so he's not Mr Stability. So in Albus we are looking at somebody who, like Harry, Snape, Remus and Sirius, has a lot of trauma in his background; a badly damaged person whose emotional scars sometimes warp his behaviour.

In addition, I've always supected that Dumbledore is mildly autistic and has difficulty reading social cues, which he compensates for by using low-level Legilimency to monitor the effect his words and actions are having. The main reason is that most of the time he seems quite sensitive to what Harry is feeling, yet he seems unaware that suddenly refusing to speak to Harry or even look at him during fifth year will upset him - suggesting that when he has to avoid touching Harry's mind, he can no longer predict what the boy will feel. This would also explain why he is often spectacularly insensitive towards Snape, the Occlumens, even though there are indications that he is fond of him. Also it tends to run in families, and there is no doubt that both Aberforth and Ariana were a bit strange. Ariana's odd behaviour and extreme reaction to stress could be as much to do with her internal wiring as to trauma, and Aberforth's apparent preference for goats over human company would be fairly typical.

In GoF, Dumbledore says that "My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practising inappropriate charms on a goat. It was all over the papers, but did Aberforth hide? No, he did not! He held his head high and went about his business as usual!

silhouette of a nanny goat with small horns, standing with her rump towards the viewer

Of course, I’m not entirely sure he can read, so that may not have been bravery ..." The goat reference is a standard British joke - anybody who is considered to be rural and unsophisticated is likely to be accused of being a "sheep-shagger". Albus is hinting that his brother has sex with goats, whilst at the same time not really suggesting he does, because he knows that everyone who hears him will know that it's a standard joke, and none of them will think he really means it. The reference to Aberforth not being able to read may be significant. It can hardly be literally true, since he attended Hogwarts, but it may mean that he is dyslexic - and dyslexia is one of the "autistic spectrum disorders" which are often associated with some degree of autism.

There are other hints, such as Dumbledore's exceptional intelligence and extreme tallness, the wild eccentricity of dress and manner which indicates that he doesn't give a damn what other people think of him, and the fact that he fails to use any tact or manipulation when dealing with Fudge, even though it would be in his best interests and those of the Order to do so. All of this would be consistent with Asperger's Syndrome.

I have had one person with mild autism say that Dumbledore is too good at deceit to be autistic, and another ditto say that actually they themselves are quite good at deceiving; but in any case being a Legilimens should make it easier for him to be deceitful because he can tell whether or not people are believing what he says, and can learn what works by trial and error instead of having to read social cues. At any rate, it's a possibility, and one which means that his sometimes crashing insensitivity, especially to Harry, to Snape and to Sirius, may not be intentionally cruel.

Accusations have been made that Dumbledore is a narcissist or a psychopath. Although he can be ruthless and emotionally cruel at times, he seems to have loved Grindelwald, to wish that he could protect Harry from the coming war and to be genuinely moved by Snape's devotion to Lily's memory, all of which would be unlikely in a psychopath, as is the fact that he submitted to Harry feeding him the torturous potion in the cave, to serve a cause which could no longer be of any benefit to himself. If he is a psychopath, he's one whose underlying nature is so good that being born without social controls or empathy has not deprived him of the will to sacrifice himself for others.

As for being a narcissist, he boasts openly of his own abilities and doesn't so much blow his own trumpet as an entire brass band, but he doesn't seem to care much, if at all, what other people think of him, whereas narcissists crave fawning admiration. In the scene in GoF where Karkaroff spits on the ground at Dumbledore's feet and Hagrid attacks Karkaroff in retaliation, Dumbledore becomes sharp and angry not with Karkaroff but with Hagrid, which hardly seems the action of a narcissist. Indeed it is McGonagall who acts like a narcissist when she is flattered, not enraged, by the fact that Harry Cruciates Amycus Carrow and throws him through a sheet of glass just for spitting at her. It seems to me far more likely that Dumbledore's open praise of and irritating smugness about his own genuinely high abilities echoes Sherlock Holmes - a fictional character who is most definitely a high-functioning autist - when he said that false modesty was as dishonest as false vanity; especially given that Rowling is an avid fan of early detective fiction and probably knows Sherlock's statement well.

Canon Dumbledore is dishonest, although, like the Trio, it is likely that he is (at least sometimes) dishonest for good reasons. There is no doubt that Rowling means him to be a liar, by omission if not commission. In Beedle she quotes Dumbledore's speech from the first book, where he says that the truth is a beautiful and terrible thing which must be treated with great caution, in the context of an essay supposedly written by Dumbledore in which he presents himself as not being one of the credulous people who believe that the Deathly Hallows are real - written at a time when he had the Elder Wand in his possession, could lay his hands on Death's Cloak at any time, and was hot on the trail of the Resurrection Stone. It's clear Rowling is enjoying rubbing it in that she had signalled right there in the first book that Dumbledore was a bit dodgy, but most people didn't notice.

Rowling's attitude to Dumbledore isn't as warm as it sometimes appears. Among other things she said at interview that she really liked the idea that all the time these two old men, Dumbledore and Riddle, were making their grand plans, the mastery of the Elder Wand was decided by a scuffle between two schoolboys. And we can see absolutely that she means Dumbledore to be fallible, because after all the emphasis on Dumbledore solemnly advising Harry to say the name "Voldemort", and what sage counsel it seemed to be at the time, it turned out to be disastrously bad advice. Rowling is rather fond of setting up scenes where a character expresses views in a solemn, sententious way which makes it seem as if they are The Voice of the Author, and then having them turn out to be flat wrong - I think particularly of the bit where the centaurs advise Hagrid that his attempt to civilise Grawp is doomed to failure.

I'm not sure if the discrepancy over exactly when Dumbledore borrowed James's Cloak is meant to be a sign of his dishonesty, or a sign that the Dumbledore at King's Cross is just a figment of Harry's imagination, or whether it's just a continuity error. Be that as it may, in the King's Cross scene Dumbledore tells Harry that he saw the Cloak for the first time, and borrowed it, in the last week of October 1981, a few days before the Potters died. Yet, Lily wrote a letter to Sirius some time shortly after Harry's first birthday party, in which she refers to the fate of the Mackinnons as if it is recent bad news, and comments that Dumbledore "still" has James's Invisibility Cloak, which he has evidently had for long enough for James to get frustrated at no longer having it. If Dumbledore indeed borrowed the Cloak only a few days before Lily died, she must have written this letter immediately before her death (and James was getting impatient after only a few days without his Cloak).

We know that the Mackinnons were killed two weeks after the Order group photograph was taken, so Lily's letter must have been written three or four weeks after the photo' was taken. Moody lists a very large number of events which happened between the Order photograph and Voldemort's downfall, such that it is not really credible that the photo' could have been taken only three or four weeks before the end of the war. Rather, it looks as though Lily's letter was written just when it sounds as if it was written, in early to mid August soon after Harry's birthday, and the photo' was taken three or for weeks previously. Dumbledore must in fact have borrowed the Cloak no later than late July 1981, and probably some weeks earlier.

Whether this is really due to a continuity error or not, in-universe we have to say that either the Dumbledore Harry sees at King's Cross is just a figment of Harry's imagination; or if he is really Dumbledore, either he is blatantly lying to make himself appear better to Harry even at a time when what he is saying is meant to be full of great emotional truth, or he is fooling himself to make himself appear better to himself, or his memory has genuinely been scrambled by old age. Or - and if this were a real-world psychic experience this would be the most likely, and it may well be what JKR intends - the Dumbledore at King's Cross is really Dumbledore but the process of his manifestation is a joint exercise between himself and Harry, and sometimes Harry's imagination gets in the way and changes how Dumbledore manifests. Either way, it means that if the Dumbledore Harry speaks to in the astral King's Cross is really and purely Dumbledore, then either Dumbledore is prepared to lie by commission as well as by omission, or his memory is very unreliable: at any rate, that anything he says has to be treated with caution.

Nick Moline of the Harry Potter Lexicon team has suggested that perhaps Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak twice, and then conflated the two in memory. For example, he might have borrowed it in July for another Order member to use, given it back in August, then started to wonder about its properties, and borrowed it again in October to examine it more closely.

Terri_testing has suggested that Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak from James with the deliberate intention of depriving him of it in the event that Voldemort should break through the Fidelius and arrive at the house. If, which I don't think we know, Dumbledore was already aware that Voldemort was in possession of the Resurrection Stone, he would clearly not want Voldemort to get hold of the Cloak as well, raising the possibility that if Voldemort were ever to defeat him, Dumbledore, in combat he would become master of the Death Stick as well, complete the Hallow set and become Master of Death.

A number of things which Dumbledore does raise questions about wartime conduct and how far the end justifies the means. Voldemort is undoubtedly a very destructive force, especially when combined with Umbridge, and his victory would result in widespread oppression and many innocent deaths. Combatting him is undoubtedly a Good Thing, but then there are questions about how far that justifies the Order side in carrying out acts which are themselves morally dubious. To a considerable extent this is a matter of personal opinion, but it does make it hard to portray a canon-compatible Dumbledore as either wholly good (because he does a lot of morally dubious things) or wholly bad (because he does most of them in an attempt to save the world from Voldemort).

Another complication is that the plot is written in such a way that even wild schemes by Dumbledore usually turn out all right. One could say that the fact that his schemes usually do (by the grace of the author) turn out OK does not absolve him from having taken stupid risks with other people's lives. On the other hand, we are shown that at least some of the mysterious silver instruments in his office are artificial clairvoyance machines. We do not know how effective or accurate these are, but if they work well then the risks Dumbledore takes are probably much smaller than they seem, because he has a method of choosing schemes which he knows are likely to succeed, however wild they may appear.

Involving pre-pubertal or barely pubertal children in a war is the sort of thing which in the real world lands people in front of a war crimes tribunal. Yet, short of closing the school or moving it to a new location, which the Ministry probably wouldn't have allowed, Dumbledore didn't really have a choice about the students being at least to some extent involved in the war, because Voldemort had decided to make Hogwarts in general and Harry specifically his target. Much depends, then, on whether you think Dumbledore put Harry and/or the other students in more or less danger than they would have been in without his intervention; and if you conclude that he did put Harry in increased danger, was this justified in order to help save the wizarding world from a ruthless dictator, or not?

It is implied in canon, though not absolutely proven, that in order to reinforce Snape's position with the Dark Lord Dumbledore sometimes has him betray Order members, some of whom die as a result. If so, you have to ask whether he is justified in sacrificing as passive pawns people who trusted both him and his judgment, who had indicated a willingness to die in battle by joining the Order but whose consent to becoming murder victims in order to further the cause had probably not been sought in advance.

Dumbledore definitely has a vicious streak. He enjoys baiting the Dursleys with the floating glasses, although they are defenceless against magic. He is absolutely vicious and abusive towards Snape when he comes to defect (and one has to remember, when a character whom Rowling seems to like behaves abusively, that she herself married somebody who turned out to be a wife-beater, so there must be a level on which she finds those traits attractive and the fact that she likes a character doesn't necessarily mean that they're not abusive). He accuses Snape of ridiculous things - of course Snape had only asked Voldemort to spare Lily, there was no possible excuse he could have given him for sparing James and Harry; and it was irrational to suggest that Snape had offered Voldemort James and Harry's lives in exchange for Lily's, since Snape wasn't so far as we know in a position to put Harry and James in any more danger than they were already in. That we know of, once he had inadvertently drawn the Dark Lord's attention to the Potters by relaying the partial prophecy, there were two possibilities confronting Snape: James, Harry and Lily die, or James and Harry die and Lily lives.

It was not in Snape's gift to save James and Harry, other than by defecting to Dumbledore, which he did. Dumbledore then sacrificed any moral high ground by then suggesting that he wouldn't act to save the Potters unless Snape gave him something in exchange. And then he borrowed James's Invisibility Cloak which was meant to hide the wearer from Death, and hung on to it for months when he knew James was in danger.

After Lily's death he tormented Snape when he was in an agony of grief, lacerating him with harsh reminders of Lily when it would have been quite sufficient just to say "There is still something you can do for her: you can protect her son." When Barty Crouch Jnr is unconscious Dumbledore rolls him over by kicking him over with his foot - which isn't as bad as Sirius bashing unconscious Snape's head against the ceiling, but is considerably rougher than Snape's careful conjuring of a stretcher for unconscious Sirius.

He showed a crashing insensitivity not just to Snape but to all the Slytherin students when he took the House Cup away from them in first year, especially as it was done publicly and slowly, keeping them on tenterhooks as they waited for their success and pride to be unfairly taken away from them. He behaved equally insensitively towards Sirius when he excluded him from any decisions to do with his own godson and then set up lessons between Harry and Sirius's rival Snape, in Sirius's own house, without even warning him - and in VWI he had apparently been quite willing to believe that Sirius was a mass-murderer, without a trial.

Aberforth speaks about how ruthlessly Dumbledore uses his agents. Dumbledore says himself (or the him in Harry's head says) that he delayed confronting Grindelwald - leaving him free to go on killing and oppressing for longer than was necessary - out of emotional cowardice; that he did not trust himself with the power he would have had as Minister for Magic; that he was not a suitable person to wield the Elder Wand. He tells Harry that the ability to love is "The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's!" - that is, he (or perhaps Rowling herself) cannot conceive of anybody simply not being interested in power.

Yet, there are mitigating circumstances for most of this. The fact that he knows himself to be an untrustworthy person to wield power suggests that he is genuinely trying to be better, and in some ways it's more admirable for an unpleasant person to strive to be good than it is for somebody like Neville for whom goodness comes naturally. If he is an autist then he may not understand how terrified the Dursleys are of magic, or how cruel he is being to Snape, or how miserable and frustrated Sirius is, unless he makes the effort to read them (which in Snape's case may be impossible). And it seems to me that his viciousness to Snape - an Occlumens whose true motives he cannot access - surrounding the endangerment and death of Lily was because he was projecting onto Snape his own guilt about Ariana, and assuming that Snape was as careless and self-centred as he himself had been at that age. And when Snape reminded him that he had said he would keep "her" safe, and had failed, it was probably Aberforth against whom Dumbledore then lashed out - although it was Snape who suffered for it.

Still, it's quite creepy to think that in the very first scene of the very first book, where Dumbledore is brushing off McGonagall's questions about the death of the Potters by concentrating on sucking sweeties in a disingenuously childish way, he had come there fresh from lacerating Snape with his verbal and emotional cruelty while the man was helpless in an agony of grief, to punish him for reminding Dumbledore of his own teenage failure to save his sister. And this was after he, Dumbledore, had knowingly deprived the Potters of the cloak which "hides from Death" at a time when he knew they were in grave danger, either to satisfy his own greed to possess the Deathly Hallows or to reduce the risk of Voldemort getting hold of them. [As it turned out it was unlikely that having the Invisibility Cloak to hand would have made a difference to the Potters' fate - but Dumbledore didn't know that when he deprived them of it.]

I do not hold with those who blame Dumbledore for sending Snape into danger. The war against Voldemort was Snape's fight at least as much as Dumbledore's, and a good commander does not hold particular soldiers back from the battle just because they are friends of his.

Dumbledore could certainly have done more to ensure Harry's well-being at the Dursleys', and indeed to ensure the Dursleys' well-being, after he had embroiled them in a wizard war without asking first: they would probably have resented Harry less had they been given any money to help with his upkeep, and feared him less had they been given any counselling on how to deal with his developing magic. Yet, it's probably understandable if Dumbledore expected the Dursleys to be more warm to Harry and his magic than they were, because the main thing Dumbledore knows about Petunia is that she wanted to go to Hogwarts, and wrote him a nice letter begging to be allowed to forge her own connection with the magical world.

Fanon paints the Dursleys as hideously abusive, and then fanon breeds more fanon with the widespread assumption that Dumbledore showed great callousness in sending Harry back to be tortured by his monstrous relations. But in fact Harry wasn't starved (except for three days in CoS), or beaten, or raped or, so far as we know, made to do excessive chores on a regular basis - that's all 99%-pure fanficcery. It's unlikely that he confides in Mrs Figg, whom he mostly only sees once a year and doesn't like, that the Dursleys verbally hector him, make him sleep in a walk-in cupboard while Dudley has two full-sized rooms or give him a packet of paper hankies for his birthday while they heap Dudley with presents, so at this point all Dumbledore knows for sure against the Dursleys is that they indulge Dudley's desire not to take his cousin along on his birthday outing, or on what are evidently very rare holidays. Mrs Figg may have confided her (not necessarily correct) suspicion that the Dursleys had such a spite against Harry that they wouldn't send him to stay with her if they thought he enjoyed the visit; but she may equally have told Dumbledore that Harry did not enjoy his visits to her, showing that whatever the Dursleys' faults, he found being with them less unpleasant than looking at a lot of photographs of cats.

Dumbledore still sends Harry back after he finds out what the Dursleys are like - but what the Dursleys are like is not physically abusive or even very physically neglectful, except for the three days when they locked Harry in his room in CoS. Dumbledore isn't sending Harry back to be dreadfully ill-treated, but to safeguard his own life for another year by continuing to endure a socially stressful situation for a couple of weeks, before decamping to The Burrow or Grimmauld Place.

Dumbledore is such a tricky character that it's difficult to pin down instances where he does something good for disinterested reasons, rather than to serve the anti-Voldemort cause - although serving the anti-Voldemort cause is in itself a Good Thing. He is respectful to and thoughtful about house-elves and treats them as proper persons, and tried to protect the last British giants. He dislikes the use of Dementors to control prisoners, which is a virtue even if it springs from what happened to his own father, rather than from abstract ethical reasoning. Yet he seems to have done nothing to ease the harsh conditions in which his one-time lover Grindelwald is kept for decades - although it may just be that his influence does not extend that far.

His desire to save Draco from corruption and his offer to hide his family seem sincere and he is still teaching Draco as Draco threatens to kill him, just as Snape still teaches Harry as Harry pursues him across the grounds maybe fifteen minutes later.

Initially, his desire to have it be Snape who kills him, not Draco, is surely mainly because he doesn't know whether the mastery of the Elder Wand will die with him, if he dies willingly, or be passed to his killer, and he wants to make sure that if it's the latter it will go either to Snape or (if it should be the poison which kills him) to Harry. However, by the time we get to the conversation on top of the Tower, Dumbledore already knows that the mastery has been lost to Draco, so that's no longer a factor. We know he knows that the mastery can be passed by disarming, not just by killing, because Beedle quotes an article which Dumbledore wrote about the Hallows, in which he refers to "the way in which it has always passed allegiance between owners – the next master overcoming the first, usually by killing him".

Is his attempt to persuade Draco and his parents to go into hiding disinterested kindliness, or is he hoping to keep Draco away from Voldemort because if Voldemort kills Draco he will get the wand? It's impossible to tell. I don't personally see any reason to think that Dumbledore isn't genuinely concerned for Draco - but his plans are so layered that it's very hard to prove that any of his actions are disinterested. This is another case where Dumbledore is mistaken, incidentally - had the Malfoys accepted his offer and gone into hiding, Narcissa wouldn't have been there at the last to protect Harry, and Harry wouldn't have been able to disarm Draco and so gain the Mastery of the Elder Wand, and so it might just have killed him when Voldemort fired at him, instead of protecting its master by killing the Horcrux inside him.

When Dumbledore begs Snape to kill him, on the tower, the mastery of the wand is already lost. Is his concern for Draco, or to buy himself a clean death, or to save Snape from the consequences of breaking his Vow? If his main concern is to save Snape, is it for Snape's sake, or to preserve his agent? It's impossible to say. This is the big problem with Dumbledore: his schemes are so complex that many of his actions have multiple possible interpretations, all equally canon-compatible unless and until Rowling tells us which is which. All we can say is that canon does not actively support the idea that he never cared about Snape's life except for the use he could make of him, and cannot be used to support that interpretation, but it doesn't strongly support the idea that he did care, either. His comment on Snape's death - "Poor Severus" - is extremely tepid: but then, he is dead himself at this point, so for him dying young probably comes under the same sort of category as losing your job or having to move house. If this is really Dumbledore, and not just a figment of Harry's imagination, then he knows beyond doubt that death is not the end.

His relationship with Snape is peculiar. I don't blame him for worrying about Draco's soul and not Snape's because it's already been firmly established that a split soul can be healed by remorse, and fairly firmly established that it is murder, rather than killing per se, which splits the soul. Either way, he has every reason to think that Snape's soul will suffer no lasting damage - but he could have said that, instead of dismissing Snape's fears. On the other hand, Albus is in probably severe pain and has just learned he only has a year to live, and of course he cares more about protecting a student's soul than a colleague's, and so would Snape if he stopped to think about it. Snape is allowing his abandonment and father issues to get in the way of his job, so Albus can be forgiven for being a bit short here.

On the other hand, his behaviour to Snape when they argue in the Forest really is peculiar, even harsh, calling him out on his promise of obedience in order to make him do something he really doesn't want to do - yet, by doing so he saves Snape's life, since Snape will die if he breaks his Vow to help Draco kill Dumbledore, so here Dumbledore is in some sense acting like Snape himself, or like James for that matter, i.e. protecting Snape from danger of death while still not being particularly kind to him. [And yes, Snape dies in the end anyway, but that was bad luck - he easily could have survived if things had gone even slightly differently.] At times he speaks to Snape as if he was still a schoolboy, or as if he were an interesting psychological specimen; at others he is on the back foot and defensive because Snape seems to be one of the few people willing to shout at Dumbledore and tell him when he's being an idiot.

The fact that his behaviour towards Snape is erratic and that he mishandles him as badly as Snape himself mishandles Neville (and you can kind of see where he gets it from) doesn't necessarily mean that he isn't fond of him. Rowling has suggested at interview that Dumbledore is emotionally damaged by the Grindelwald affair and has been unable to form really close relationships, so he is emotionally incompetent. But he speaks of Snape with more sympathy than he does most people (even if he doesn't show it to his face) and seems genuinely overcome by his life-long devotion to Lily. Here, again, he may be comparing himself with Snape - the fact that he has taken a fatal curse out of his desire to see Ariana one more time and apologise to her, or the fact that his love for Grindelwald turned much more sour even than Snape's love for Lily, so he doesn't even have undying devotion to a memory to keep him warm.

He probably could have done more than he did to reconcile Harry with Snape, but we see in DH that once he realizes that Voldemort can see into Harry's head, he doesn't actually want them to be close because if Harry is fully convinced that Snape is on the Order side, that may put Snape in danger. Hence portrait!Dumbledore warns Snape to make sure Harry doesn't realise whose the doe Patronus is. Snape's survival is one of his primary goals, and while there's no way to tell how much of this is down to genuine care and how much just because Snape is vital to his plans, there's no reason why it can't be both.

I don't see any reason to doubt that Dumbledore is genuinely fond of Snape, of Harry, of Hagrid and Slughorn, within the limits of his own emotional constipation and his tendency to project his own faults onto others and then blame them for them. That he is nevertheless willing to endanger Harry and Snape, and sacrifice them if he has to in order to bring Voldemort down, is not an indication that he does not love them but that, like Captain Carrot in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, he believes that "personal is not the same as important". After what happened with Grindelwald it would be hard for him to believe anything else - otherwise he would, like Bellatrix, have let the world burn to save his deranged lover.

When Dumbledore says to Snape that "we Sort too soon" he appears to be saying that Snape was so brave he should have been in Gryffindor - but perhaps also that he himself should have been a Slytherin. His dominant characteristic is an ambition - his desire to beat Tom - and willingness to do almost anything to further that end. He himself says he allowed Grindelwald to murder unchecked for longer than necessary out of emotional cowardice. There's nothing brave about his willingness to die on the Tower, since he expects to have only a few weeks to live anyway, and by his own account part of his reason for wanting Snape to kill him is to make sure his death will be easy. None of the challenges he faces require much courage on his part, since he so far outclasses the opposition. But he does show great courage when he orders Harry to keep on giving him the poisonous potion in the cave, evidently expecting in advance that it will be so unpleasant that he will plead with Harry to stop.

His belief in "the greater good" is widely mocked, and it's true that it's the sort of idea which can easily be hijacked and misused by somebody like Umbridge. But personal is not the same as important, and any commander has to make difficult and sometimes ruthless decisions to achieve their military goals, even when those goals are clearly virtuous. If you say that the end never justifies the means, you end up with the ridiculous situation of the three Ten Boom sisters in wartime Holland, who bravely hid several refugee Jews from the Nazis, but when a Nazi officer asked one of them directly if they were hiding Jews she said "Yes" and betrayed them all, because she did not feel that the end of saving lives justified the means of telling a lie.

Many people will feel that Dumbledore goes too far the other way, but in the end it's a matter of personal taste just how far you think that the end of saving the world from a murderous dictatorship justifies the means. Barty Crouch Snr thought it justified torture and murder. Snape (if he is telling the truth about his involvement in the capture of Emmeline Vance) evidently thought it justified the sacrifice of fellow Order members. Harry thought it justified lying and cheating and using Imperius. You may think that training an eleven-year-old schoolboy up to be a nearly-kamikaze warrior is a step too far, or you may think that Voldemort would always have tracked Harry down, however far he fled, and that Dumbledore's dodgy schemes represented the best hope for Harry himself, as well as for the world (or at least that Dumbledore genuinely believed that they did). It's a grey area.

Then one can ask why it fell to Dumbledore to make those decisions. People who set up freelance vigilante groups are usually pretty cracked, and we can see that as a teenager he had toyed with the idea of becoming a dictator himself, although his attitude to Muggles was patronising rather than murderous. Yet, the corruption and incompetance of the Ministry is such that there was a clear need for an independent group, and given Dumbledore's power and his personal knowledge of Riddle, it would have been a dereliction of duty if he had not acted. And his motivation seems to be disinterested and impersonal - he fights Voldemort because he thinks it's a thing which needs to be done, which he himself may be able to do and which it is therefore his duty to attempt - and that disinterested choice is arguably more ethical and admirable than when Severus and Regulus chose to fight Voldemort because he had threatened someone they loved, having been willing to support him up to that point.

Dumbledore would perhaps have done better to learn to control his own lust for power and to have accepted the post of Minister, so he could guard the wizarding world in an official capacity. But we don't know enough about how the Ministry is organised to be able to say for certain that that would have worked better than, or as well as, setting up the Order as an independent group.

Draco is commonly portrayed in fanfics as having a heart of gold, and/or as a pathetic abuse survivor and Tormented Soul. Some fanwriters then react against this by declaring that an IC ("in character") Draco must be a little monster.

Canon Draco is an openly racist bigot - yet, it would be difficult for him to be anything else when we first meet him. He has probably never been away from his father's influence for more than a few days before, and Lucius is such a bigot that he wrote to Dumbledore demanding that he purge from Hogwarts' library any books which mention magic-to-Muggle marriage, for fear they might encourage Draco to sully his pure blood (it's in Beedle).

It seems unlikely that Draco has been abused: the Malfoys seem to be a very close if slightly warped family, and when we first meet Draco he boasts of his ability to extract presents from his father. At the same time, Lucius seems quite short and irritable with Draco and is very critical if he fails to outperform Hermione, so Draco may feel - like Neville - that his family's love is conditional on his performance. Later on, knowing that his father is in Azkaban and he can't help him must be horrible, although at least by that point the Dementors have left. It may be that Dumbledore's concern for Draco during HBP is powered partly by fellow feeling, since his own father died in Azkaban.

Draco is rude and a bigot and snob from the outset, sneering at Ron for his shabby, Muggle-loving family. Yet, when we first meet him he has probably never been away from home before, or even been to school (it's interview canon that Purebloods are usually home-schooled), and is probably quite nervous and out of his depth, and hoping to curry favour with Famous Harry Potter. That he wants to curry favour with the boy who disembodied Voldemort suggests an admirable lack of loyalty to the Dark Lord, and he may in fact be jealous of Ron, who is probably more of a Pureblood than he is, and already has an in with Famous Harry when they encounter each other on the train.

Draco it is who starts the war between himself and Hagrid by trying to shop him over Norbert, but Hagrid then fans the flames. Draco has every right to resent a man who sends him into a midnight forest full of giant man-eating spiders, with nothing but another child and a nervous dog for company, and then jeers at him for being afraid. Draco continues their war in a nasty, snidey, gloating way with a strong admixture of racism, and blames Hagrid and Buckbeak for the consequences of his own stupidity, but Hagrid also holds Draco up to ridicule in front of the class just because he doesn't want to do extra work with the Skrewts, and mocks him over the ferret incident, so Draco's spite is not wholly without reason.

At the World Cup, Draco racially abuses Hermione, calling her Mudblood etc. and appearing to gloat at the idea that the Death Eater wannabees may kill her. But while he is gloating, he is incidentally giving her a useful warning which protects her from danger.

He's a bully to Neville and the Trio but not, that we see, as vicious as the Marauders were to Snape, and in attacking Harry he is fighting three on three, not four on one. If anything, he is challenging Harry from a position of weakness, since Crabbe and Goyle are less handy lieutenants than Hermione and Ron. That he physically attacks Harry and breaks his nose at the start of HBP is bad, and twice before he has launched largely-unprovoked attacks on Harry on the train - but then both of those previous attacks had ended with Draco, Crabbe and Goyle warped by what must have been painful and humiliating hex injuries, being brutalized by the Twins and then stuffed into the luggage rack and left there by the Trio for eight hours without medical assistance or, so far as we know, food or water or a lavatory break, so he has reasons to hate Harry and his friends.

He is willing to kill at a distance, by leaving poisons or curses lying around, but is unable to kill Dumbledore face to face. His attack on Harry on the train, where he stamps on and breaks his nose, may seem brutal - but it was written against a background of a spate of real-life incidents in Scotland where attackers jumped up and down on their victims' heads until their skulls burst and they were left dead or permanently brain-damaged, so Draco's assault on Harry is comparatively small beer.

Generally speaking Draco is a brat, a bit of a little shit - yet, it is understandable that he tries to Cruciate Harry when Harry catches him weeping in the boys' lavvie, because his previous experience does not suggest that Harry will show him any pity when he is in pain. He behaves like a total arse after Harry rescues him from the Fiendfyre during the final battle - yet, a few months beforehand he had taken a considerable risk in not betraying the Trio's identity to the Snatchers. Dobby says that he is a bad master to house elves, but he has learned that from his father and he is clearly not happy about being ordered by the Dark Lord to Cruciate a prisoner. "Moderately unpleasant, a bit of a bigot and a bully but not iredeemable, with some good points and reluctant, when push comes to shove, to seriously injure anybody" probably sums him up fairly well.

The idea that James and Sirius even might have been nice boys came about, I suppose, because many readers didn't realise that Rowling was writing a sort of detective fiction from Day One and that many of her characters therefore tell lies, even in what appears at first sight to be exposition. In the first book Hagrid says of James and Lily that "nicer people yeh couldn't find", and people jsut accepted that, and didn't re-evaluate it later when they discovered that Hagrid also thinks Aragog is a darling. Many people took Remus's statement that the cause of the enmity between young Snape and James and Sirius was that Snape was jealous of James's prowess on the Quidditch pitch at face value, and then used this to excuse the behaviour seen in the Snape's Worst Memory scene as a one-off. Some became so wedded to this idea of their interactions that they missed the point that we learn in DH that James and Sirius began their bullying of Snape before they even got to Hogwarts, just because he wanted to be in Slytherin, and that Remus had therefore been lying.

At least one Marauders fan, very disturbingly, argues "Harry loves James and Sirius, therefore James and Sirius are Good. James and Sirius are bullies, therefore bullies are Good, therefore their actions must be justified, therefore any person who is bullied must be Bad, therefore Snape is Bad. I am a bully, therefore I am Good and anybody I choose to persecute is Bad and deserves to be hurt." [This is my own paraphrase of her argument, but it's an accurate paraphrase, just more concise. She devotes her time to writing long, elaborate poems describing how she would like to torture Snape to death, and really did claim that because she is a bully like James and Sirius that proves that she is a Good Person and has a special infallible instinct which tells her when other people are Bad, and therefore anybody she bullies must by definition deserve to be bullied.] Other fen of the Marauders have claimed that they weren't bullies at all, that they only picked on Snape and did so only because they could sense that he was deeply evil, or because they had a rivalry of equals.

This is frankly ridiculous. On Pottermore, Rowling characterises James's and Sirius's treatment of young Severus as "relentless bullying". She has stated that at least part of the reason James and Sirius picked on Snape was because James was sexually jealous of his friendship with Lily. She has Dumbledore tell Harry that James was to Snape as Draco is to Harry. She draws a clear parallel between the Marauders and Dudley's gang by giving Dudley a side-kick named Piers (an old French variant of Peter) who is described as rat-like, and who helps Dudley to bully by holding down his victims. She has Sirius, in a moment of seering honesty and self-awareness, say that Peter typically attaches himself to "the biggest bully in the playground". We get to see detention records which show James and Sirius constantly in trouble for randomly hexing other students. Lily accuses them of "hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can", and Remus says outright that James hexed people for fun. Rowling has Snape say that they attacked him as a gang, and since she shows us nothing which contradicts this (except for a suggestion that during seventh year Snape and James duelled one on one) she presumably means it to be true - even though Snape's statement that James would never attack him unless it was four on one was an over-simplification, since we are shown an attack by James and Sirius with Peter as support and Remus abstaining. Possibly Snape sees the fact that a prefect sat by and failed to intervene as part of the attack, just as one would if one were assaulted in front of a police officer, and they did nothing to stop it.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, when Rowling was asked to write a short piece for charity she chose to write a vignette of James and Sirius in the summer between their sixth and seventh year, already members of the Order of the Phoenix and already valiantly fighting what are probably meant to be Death Eaters, but finding time along the way to jeer at and make fools of two innocent Muggle policemen. They may persecute Snape more selectively and intensively than most of their other victims, but Rowling couldn't make it plainer that she sees them as basically just liking to pick on anybody they perceive as weaker than themselves.

Part of the problem is that it seems to be the case that in the US, schoolboy pranks are an acceptable and common form of humour, while sarcasm is comparatively rare and seen as aggressive, meaning that if an American is being sarcastic they probably mean to be genuinely nasty. This leads many American fen to over-estimate the degree to which Snape is being aggressive when he makes sarcy remarks, while seeing the Marauders as just playful. But here in the UK it's sarcasm which is an acceptable and common form of humour, while the kind of extreme "pranks" the Marauders go in for are rare and seen as a form of assault; so the Marauders have to have been quite aggressive to have behaved that way (albeit that practising spells on each other is fairly common at Hogwarts).

The fact that Rowling clearly sees the Marauders as extreme bullies comparable to Dudley does not mean that she sees them as iredeemable. She shows us Dudley beginning to mature and to appreciate the fact that Harry saved him from the Dementors, so if James had lived and Sirius hadn't had his mind damaged in Azkaban, they too might have come to appreciate the risks Snape takes for the Order. In the real world, Nelson Mandela was apparently a bit of a thug and a bully when he was a teenager, and a terrorist as a young man, but he spectacularly grew out of it and got wisdom. So the fact that James and Sirius were rather unpleasant boys does not necessarily rule out the possibility of their someday growing into good men, if they'd had half the chance, just as Snape grew out of having been a member of a terrorist organisation at nineteen

About James we know very little, and most of what we do know is highly unpleasant, so a saintly James is really a non-starter. However, we do know very little about him. Many people seem to have liked him, so it's fair to say that he probably had many good points which we just don't know about, and it's quite unlikely that he was wholly bad. He might have been a wonderful poet, or a lifelong campaigner for house-elf rights - we just don't know.

What we do know about him that's good is that, according to Dumbledore, he would not have been willing to execute Peter Pettigrew in cold blood as he grovelled for mercy - which puts him one up on Remus and Sirius, who were working themselves up to do just that. He drew the line at actually murdering a classmate, and was willing to take a risk to save him - although if the werewolf incident occurred after he had mastered the Animagus transformation, the risk was "Being seen to be an unregistered stag Animagus" rather than "Being eaten", since we know were-Remus wouldn't attack him in beast form. Remus does however say that James risked his life, which suggests it was before he became an Animagus. He wasn't prejudiced against werewolves or Muggleborns (or, probably, against half-bloods, since Remus and Peter were both half-bloods) and he dedicated himself to making Remus's experience of being a were less painful and miserable. He provided Sirius with a safe haven when Sirius broke up with his family. He was brave enough to join the Order of the Phoenix whilst still a teenager, and willing to fight against Voldemort.

What we know about him which is neutral is that he comes from a privileged, caring background and is highly talented both academically and on the Quidditch pitch. He can have an amusing, charming manner. I put his reputed hatred of the Dark Arts down as a neutral characteristic because there's a whiff of hypocrisy there, considering that the Dark Arts seem to be any magic which is trangressive, dangerous or unauthorised, and James himself is an unregistered Animagus, puts bystanders in danger from an official Dark creature, and collaborates in producing and using The Marauder's Map which most wizards would probably regard as a Dark Arts object in itself, since it's basically a covert surveillance device capable of invading the privacy of everybody in the area. Nowadays he'd probably be a computer hacker, spying on other people through their webcams.

As for negatives, we see that James starts at Hogwarts already filled with house prejudice, and interrupts Severus and Lily in order to sneer at Sev's desire to be in Slytherin, without any provocation. Severus then gives as good as he gets by suggesting that Gryffindors are thick, and James responds by escalating to minor physical violence and trying to trip him. James is clearly the one at fault here - he initiates the verbal argument without provocation, and then when Severus responds he escalates it. This sets the pattern that we see in fifth year, where James has such a sense of entitlement, or such scorn for somebody who is obviously poor and working-class, that he believes that he has the right to do whatever he likes to Severus, and punishes him if he dares to defend himself.

While we do not know for sure how much bullying of Severus went on prior to fifth year, the fact that either James or Sirius (we're not told which) dubs him "Snivellus" before they even get to Hogwarts, and they are still using that nickname at the end of fifth year, combined with the fact that Sirius was willing to try to murder Severus some time earlier in fifth year, strongly implies that the bullying was ongoing throughout their time at Hogwarts. And it was bullying, not just rivalry, because it was four on one - unless you think that the Marauders were such incompetent fighters that four on one was even odds. Rowling herself calls it "relentless bullying", implying numerous incidents over an extended period.

James saves Snape's life, but then goes right back to launching a totally unprovoked attack on him just because he is bored. At the very least, this suggests a startling lack of finer feelings - at worst that he saved Snape because he didn't want to lose his toy.

Unless you want to propose a setup in which James is bisexual, and persecuted Snape because he secretly fancied him and wanted to get his attention - in the same way that awkward boys try to get a girl's attention by pulling her hair - the fact that James saved Severus and then went right on bullying him in a very vicious and humiliating way is a strong indication that his saving of Severus was not done because he cared about him in any way. At the same time, Snape was not necessarily right to believe that James saved him only to keep the Marauders out of trouble. It's quite possible that James did have a sense that murdering a classmate - any classmate - was an unacceptable act, even though he clearly thought that bullying was OK.

The Marauders are not the worst bullies they could be. So far as we know they don't rape their victims, or extort money from them. But the attack on Snape at the end of fifth year has a number of aggravating features. It's completely unprovoked. Hoisting Snape up by his ankle could be seen just as horseplay, since Remus says that that spell (which is Snape's own invention anyway) was very popular in fifth year, and that at times you could hardly move for being hoisted up by your ankle, but when Snape swears at his attackers, James punishes him for it - again, he is showing that he has such a massive sense of entitlement that he believes that he has a perfect right to treat others however he likes, and nobody must cross him. The message he is sending to Snape is "You're so low that I can do what I like to you and you're not even allowed to object." We see this on the very first day that they met, when James has to escalate the aggression because he can't deal with the fact that when he was rude about Slytherin, Snape answered back.

Although Sirius claimed that James hated Snape because Snape was into the Dark Arts, we can see that James started picking on young Severus when he knew nothing about him except that he wanted to be in Slytherin. Rowling has said that the bullying was at least partly motivated by James's sexual jealousy of Sev's friendship with Lily, and yet at a time when James wants to impress Lily he can think of no reason for his persecution of Snape except "He exists". He appears in fact to be trying to use Snape as a hostage - hoping to coerce Lily into going out with him because if she doesn't he'll continue to torment her old friend. But the message he is giving Snape is "Your crime is your very existence and you have no way out of this hell except to kill or die".

According to the prequelle-ette which Rowling wrote for charity, James and Sirius were already Order members and fighting Death Eaters by the summer before their seventh year, while taking time off to bait a couple of innocent Muggle policemen. During seventh year James, despite being Head Boy, continued to hex Severus, showing a total disregard for the school rules it was now his job to uphold. Sirius and Remus present this hex-war and mutual or even as instigated by Severus, but this seems unlikely because James was able to conceal it from both Lily and the staff, and it was James who had the Map which enabled him to see where Lily and the staff were at all times. The implication is that it was James who decided when and where they would fight. It's hardly surprising, then, that Snape joined the Death Eaters, after seeing James join the Order and become Head Boy, whilst still having a vicious streak and a total disregard for the rules he was meant to be upholding, and apparently a sneering attitude to Muggles too. Snape had every reason at that point to think that the Order side was a party of thugs, and Lucius and co. probably went out of their way to appear refined and civilized, until he was in too deep to get away.

Depending on whether or not James really did remove young Snape's pants, the attack on Snape by the beech tree ended with a minor sexual assault, if he carried out his threat, or sexual harrassment if he only threatened to. In the films James only suggests taking off young Snape's trousers but in the books it was his pants. Pants in Britain means underpants, and we know that that's so in this case because Snape was bare-legged under his robes. Motivated, according to Rowling, by sexual jealousy, James was proposing to expose Snape's bare genitals to a baying mob - the sort of thing which might well have earned him a prison sentence in the Muggle world.

There is an anomaly concerning James's behaviour in seventh year. Remus and Sirius say that James continued to fight Snape in seventh year but suggest that it was one on one and mutual, or that Snape was the attacker - although it seems more likely that James set the timing of their encounters, since he had the means to see that there were no staff around, and Snape did not. Snape says that James never attacked him except four on one. We don't know whether Snape is wrong here, or whether he's right and the other Marauders continued to join in in seventh year, or whether it's true that Snape's encounters with James in seventh year were one to one, and Snape does not consider these to be attacks but rather duels.

But whatever the precise details, James was Head Boy, and he was prosecuting an illegal private quarrel through the corridors of Hogwarts. He clearly had little or no sense of duty or of respect for the rôle and the rules he was meant to be upholding. He was, in effect, a corrupt official.

Even worse, he routinely collaborates in allowing were-Remus to run in areas where there are potential victims (we know this because they had many near misses), putting innocent bystanders at risk of being infected or killed. His desire to help Remus is admirable in itself, but he could have insisted that if Remus was going to run loose as a were it had to be deep in the Forbidden Forest or on empty moorland, where he would not encounter other humans - but clearly he did not do so. Instead, he took stupid risks with other people's lives, and continued to do so when he was Head Boy and an Order member.

Most disturbing of all is his behaviour to Lily. We've been told on Pottermore that James's treatment of Snape amounted to "relentless bullying", i.e. it took place over a long period, and we see that James and Sirius in fifth year are still using the nickname "Snivellus" which they gave to Snape on his first day at Hogwarts, so the implication is that they bullied him pretty solidly during the intervening five years. Rowling has said that James's motive was at least partly sexual jealousy. So, James wasn't Lily's boyfriend at this point, and neither was young Severus, he was just her friend, and yet James was so obsessively possessive and jealous, even at age eleven, that he resented the idea of Lily even talking to another male, saw her as in some sense his property whether she liked it or not, just because he fancied her, and punished a classmate for years for daring to be her friend.

In fifth year he tries to force Lily to go out with him against her will, despite her appearing to dislike him intensely, by in effect holding Snape hostage and threatening to go on persecuting him unless Lily relents. When she tries to protect her friend, he threatens her with violence for daring to oppose him - "Don't make me hex you." This is an absolutely classic example of an abuser's attitude to their victim: "I'm going to hit you, but it will be your fault for not doing as you're told". In seventh year Lily starts dating James because she believes he has grown up a bit, but in fact he is deceiving her in a very nasty way, betraying the Head Boy/Girl job which they share (and which she probably takes seriously) and continuing to hex her old friend, which is something he evidently knows she would hate if she knew about it, since he goes to the trouble of hiding it from her.

According to Pottermore, once they were together James drove a wedge between Lily and her sister by being obnoxious to the Dursleys, and one of the main reasons the Dursleys resented Harry was because he looked like James and James had been so nasty to them. In this case,there was right and wrong on both sides. This is what Pottermore says:

"James was amused by Vernon, and made the mistake of showing it. Vernon tried to patronise James, asking what car he drove. James described his racing broom. // Vernon supposed out loud that wizards had to live on unemployment benefit. James explained about Gringotts, and the fortune his parents had saved there, in solid gold. // Vernon could not tell whether he was being made fun of or not, and grew angry. Then evening ended with Vernon and Petunia storming out of the restaurant, while Lily burst into tears and James (a little ashamed of himself) promised to make things up with Vernon at the earliest opportunity."

James committed the first sin, by finding Vernon funny and letting him see that he did, but after that they were as bad as each other. Although James does seem to have laid it on with a trowel about how much richer than the Dursleys he was, which is a very crass, low-class thing to do in British culture.

Judging from his behaviour at school, it seems distinctly possible that if they had lived James would have continued to deceive Lily when it suited him, quite possibly including with other women. At least, he might well have been faithful to Lily because he loved her and never felt tempted to stray, but if he did ever feel tempted to stray then the fact that Lily wouldn't like it wouldn't have stopped him. The fact that he threatens Lily when she defends her friend makes it possible he might even have become a wife-beater (for as long as it took Lily to hand him his balls in a shoebox). In this case, the fact that Rowling evidently quite likes James doesn't help much. He can't be so totally evil that there's nothing there to like at all, but since Rowling herself married somebody who turned out to be a wife-beater, and whom she must initially have liked, the fact that she likes James doesn't mean that he isn't a wife-beater in embryo.

James comes across as a swaggering, privileged Hooray Henry who gets a buzz out of persecuting what he sees as his inferiors. We're actually told that he looks like a boy who has been "well cared for, even adored", and that he is a top student, and Rowling has said that he was the beloved only child of aged parents. We know so little about him, though, that it's possible to make him more sympathetic by assuming he actually has low self-esteem for which he is compensating. His parents could be in some sort of bad odour, for example - maybe his dad spent seven years in Azkaban for fiddling Hippogriff races. Or he might have a really small dick....

Actually, his problem may have been that he was praised too much. Some studies have shown that praising children all the time, for everything, can actually undermine their confidence, because they don't know whether they've genuinely done well or not.

One noteworthy thing we can say in his favour is that if he knew that it was Harry who was the target of Voldemort's attention, then he could have saved himself by abandoning his family when they went under Fidelius, and he did not do so. And he appears to have been a very fun, lively dad, if not an entirely responsible one when it came to dangerous sports. Yet JK Rowling's comment in an interview with Today in 2007 that "you could make a very good case for Arthur Weasley being the only good father in the whole series" suggests that she herself doesn't think that much of James's parenting skills.

Sirius is equally unpleasant in many ways, and even more reckless with other people's safety, but in his case we get to see clear mitigating circumstances, and we see enough of him to get to know some of his virtues, as well as his faults. He comes from a difficult and stressful home life where he evidently suffered some of the same emotional abuse as Harry, in that he was constantly compared with another child and found wanting. If his mother's portrait is anything like the woman herself, then there's a streak of madness and obsession in the family - bearing in mind that Bellatrix is his cousin.

He collaborated with James in baiting Severus from the outset, for nothing - but he was in a precarious position, because he had honestly admitted his own connection with Slytherin, and therefore there was a risk that James would turn on him too if he didn't curry favour. He took an equal part, so far as we know, in recklessly endangering innocent bystanders by encouraging were-Remus to run in areas where there were other humans about. In the prequel we see that like James he was probably already an Order member and heroically fighting enemy wizards during the summer between his sixth and seventh years at school, but also that like James he makes time to bait and jeer at two innocent Muggle policemen, just because he can. Like James, the detention records show he had a long history of hexing people for fun.

He either intentionally tried to murder Severus (probably to prevent him from finding out that three of the Marauders were studying to be Animagi), or recklessly endangerd him without caring whether he would be killed or not, and in so doing he tried to make Remus unknowingly complicit in killing or infecting a fellow student. At the very least this would surely have got Remus expelled and wrecked his future - at worst, it might even have got him executed, to say nothing of the psychological injury he would have suffered. Yet, even for this there are mitigating circumstances.

We know from his tombstone that James was born in March 1960. We know that Sirius was in the same academic year as James, we know that he was arrested early in November 1981, and we know Rowling has said that he was "about twenty-two" when he was sent to Azkaban. In 2015 she Tweeted that Sirius was born on 3^rd November 1959,.

Sirius says that his Uncle Alphard left him money, and that when he was seventeen (i.e. of age in wizard terms) he bought his own flat. It's possible that Alphard died some time after Sirius's seventeenth birthday, but the coupling of being seventeen with buying a flat somewhat suggests that Sirius already had the money but had to wait until he was of age before getting his own place. If that's the case he probably bought his flat as soon as he could, i.e. round about November 1976. Prior to that he says that he had camped out at James's place during the school holidays, plural, and prior to that - but after turning sixteen - he had split from his family.

Assuming that Sirius bought his flat soon after turning seventeen, there are only three holidays - the Christmas, Easter and Summer holidays of his fifth year - which he could have spent with James. If he really spent holidays, plural, with him, then these must have included the Easter and Summer holidays, and we don't know about the Christmas one. Possibly Christmas was when he and his family had their final fight.

We do not know exactly when Sirius tried to lure Severus into a close encounter with were-Remus - an act comparable to trying to feed a classmate to a grizzly bear, or deliberately infecting them with Aids - but Snape says Sirius was sixteen at the time. It was probably a significant period prior to the underpants incident, since when they come out from their DADA OWL Snape is ambling along in an academic haze and apparently not on the alert for danger from the Marauders, even when they settle down near him and begin talking, and even though they have all just been concentrating on an exam question about werewolves. Evidently, by this point the Marauders have been behaving themselves for long enough that Snape no longer expects attack from them - so that tends to set the werewolf "prank" in early to mid fifth year.

We cannot know whether the so-called "prank" happened before or after Sirius's split from his family but it must have been within a few months either way, plus Sirius and his parents were probably at odds well before he left home. It seems likely, then, that at the time that Sirius either intentionally tried to kill Severus, or recklessly endangered him without caring whether he would be killed or not, he was under immense psychological strain. This goes some way towards explaining both his reckless or murderous behaviour and why he wasn't expelled for it: he didn't really have anywhere to go, if his place at boarding school was removed.

Nevertheless it was an act of reckless criminality, the sort of thing which in the real world would likely have resulted in a gaol sentence, and he tried to make Remus an unwitting participant, without regard to the damage that that would do to somebody he's meant to love. He may be slightly sociopathic - although not completely so, since he clearly loves James.

Although Sirius's likely poor mental state in fifth year is a mitigating factor, his reasons for persecuting Severus were even less noble than James's. Sexual jealousy in a hormonal teenager is understandable, but Sirius by his own admission seems to have persecuted Severus mainly because he was physically unprepossessing and an "oddball"; and despite what he later says to Harry about Dark Arts, his actual grievance against Severus (the boy whom he had previously tried to murder) during the underpants incident seems to be that he had a big nose and oily skin. This contrasts with Harry's sorrow and empathy when he sees Luna being persecuted (insofar as it's possible to persecute somebody so serenely unconcerned). Harry, we are being shown, is the better man, and this is reinforced when we see how much kinder Harry is to Kreacher, and are told that Sirius's unkindness to Kreacher contributed to his death.

Although Dumbledore seems to think Sirius was impatient and cold to Kreacher because he was a low-ranking creature who symbolised his awful childhood, I've always thought it was probably more to do with Kreacher's obsessive behaviour. Many people have trouble dealing with the fact that the feelings of a mentally ill person are real people-type feelings, even if their cause is a delusion. And Sirius must have had a bellyful of humouring the mentally ill from dealing with his own mother.

We can say that during the underpants incident, although Sirius likes to bait Severus by hexing him and rendering him helpless, the really nastiest bits - forcing their victim to eat soap because he dared to protest, saying that his crime is just that he exists, stripping him (or proposing to) and displaying his genitals - were all James's idea. We may say that Sirius is a bully too, and perhaps even a murderer manqué but he doesn't fight as dirty as James, he's not as cruel, and he doesn't come across as having that same air of entitlement - that sense James has that he has a right to do what he likes to everyone else and nobody must object.

As an adult Sirius's hatred of Snape seems to be an obsession, a phobia (even Remus calls it a prejudice), and therefore something he can't entirely help. He's been in Azkaban for nearly twelve years, he spent much of that time and of the intervening year as a dog, he probably hasn't even seen Snape for eighteen years, and yet when he meets up with Remus and Harry at the Shrieking Shack, as soon as Remus mentions Snape, Sirius reveals that he is still gloating over the murder attempt (or whatever exactly it was) and saying that Snape - who Rowling herself says Sirius had bullied relentlessly, who he doesn't know is listening, and with whom he has probably had no interaction for eighteen years - had deserved it. Whether he means that Snape deserved to die or just deserved to be given a fright isn't clear, but once Snape reveals himself, Sirius goes on baiting him and sneering at him even when his own life depends on winning Snape round. It seems to be a point of madness in him, like his mother's ranting - which is really not surprising, after all that he has suffered. He seems obsessed with Snape's physical appearance, his oddness.

[I'm fairly sure Sirius is gay, and that the girly posters on his bedroom wall were just a sop to his parents. The closest emotional attachment in his life seems to have been to James, we're told that during the aftermath of the DADA OWL a girl eyes him up and he doesn't notice, there's never any mention in the books of a girlfriend or any social connection with any female other than Lily and his mother, and his obsession with Snape seems to revolve around the fact that he finds him physically unattractive - something which you would expect to be very low in his priorities if he were straight. On Pottermore JKR has Remus commenting about a handsome friend who survived Azkaban and who always gets the women - but that may mean the women go after him, rather than vice versa. I suspect that Rowling originally started to write Sirius as gay, then realised that that might make his desire for fourteen-year-old GoF Harry to turn into a clone of James seem a little creepy, so she tried to backpedal.]

Nevertheless, even though Sirius hates Snape and wants to rubbish him, he still tells Harry that he never heard a rumour that Snape was a Death Eater. Within the limits of his own prejudices he seems to be extremely honest. He even says that Peter typically attaches himself to the biggest bully in the playground, so he knows what he and James were. And he actually thinks about ethics, about right and wrong, more than most of the characters; even if that doesn't necessarily stop him from doing wrong. His insistence on young Snape having known a lot of curses and having been an expert on the Dark Arts even as a boy - which is not supported by the other evidence - may be because he has enough honour to feel bad about his and James's "relentless bullying" of Snape, but he's also (even) more immature than Snape so when he knows he behaved badly, instead of saying "I did a bad thing and I must put it right" he tries to convince himself that he had been justified; he tries to reassure himself that Snape was a formidable opponent and that attacking him many on one wasn't as unfair as he really knows in his heart that it was.

Even his continued boasting about the werewolf incident may be because he knows perfectly well that he did a bad and stupid thing which endangered not only Snape but Remus too - his old friend Remus who is right there beside him - but he's never going to say "Oh God, Remus, I must have been out of my mind - I could have got both of you killed". He knows he ought to feel very guilty, but is sulkily determined not to.

And he says that the knowledge that he was innocent of the crime he had been imprisoned for protected him from the Dementors in Azkaban, so if he had started to brood about the things he really was guilty of, his bullying of Severus and many others and his putting of both Remus and Severus in extreme danger, that guilt might have made him vulnerable to the Dementors, so he would have to excuse his own actions to himself. Indeed, thinking about the Shack incident would have to lead to thinking about Remus, then about the fact that he had wrongly believed that Remus was the traitor, then about the fact that this had led him to recommend to the Potters that they should make Peter their Secret Keeper - another train of thought he really couldn't afford, in Azkaban.

He behaved in a thuggish, brutal way during PoA, slashing the Fat Lady just because she wouldn't let him into the Gryffindor common room, and handling schoolboy Ron so roughly that he snapped the boy's leg like a branch, so you can see that the violent heart which led him to try to kill young Severus is still there. The worst thing we see is that when he has Snape as an unconscious, unarmed captive he either deliberately bumps his head against the ceiling or at best carelessly fails to prevent it, putting Snape at severe risk of dying from Second Impact Syndrome.

We have to allow for the fact that Sirius is twelve years out of practice at using a wand, here, and probably dazed by malnutrition, and Snape has just threatened to send him back to the Dementors. It's not really surprizing if he isn't up to realising that Snape is just trying to protect Harry because he thinks that Sirius is what Peter really is, and that Snape's intention to send him, Sirius to the Dementors should therefore be judged alongside his, Sirius's intention to execute Peter in cold blood for having done what Snape thinks that he, Sirius did. Even so, Sirius's knee-jerk brutality contrasts badly with Snape's knee-jerk gentility when he in turn has Sirius as an unconscious, unarmed captive, believing him to be a mass-murderer who betrayed Lily to her death and has come to finish the job by killing Harry, and he nevertheless carefully transports him on a stretcher. Snape the guttersnipe has better manners than Sirius the wealthy Pureblood.

But here again Sirius is hugely stressed, not to mention mentally addled by exposure to Dementors, by malnutrition and by time spent as a dog, and if he were not so stressed, in his fifth year and here in Harry's third year, he would probably have been better able to control his violent impulses.

In her essay Severus vs. Sirius: A Short Meditation on the Nature of Love Mary Johnson argues that Sirius was crazed and blinded by his own vengeful nature in that he kept trying to kill rat!Peter, when his own freedom and exoneration depended on his being able to prove that Peter was still alive. I feel in fairness that I should point out that we don't know whether Sirius's desire to kill Wormtail was crazed or not, because we don't know what happens to Animagi who die while transformed. If killing Wormtail the rat would result in a freshly dead human Peter Pettigrew, leaving his corpse somewhere where the Aurors would find it would be quite an effective way of proving that he hadn't died in an explosion twelve years ago, without the risk of his running away again.

Sirius is willing to execute Peter in cold blood, but Remus seems to be the instigator, and Sirius has the greater grievance. He expects Harry to be James redux, and is angry when he isn't, but much of the advice he gives Harry is sensible, and he does love him: we see for example that he bought Harry his first broom as a baby, and then he made the effort to buy him a racing broom even when he was a fugitive and doing so might have got him caught. At Grimmauld Place he needles Snape constantly (and Snape needles him back, but Sirius seems to be the one to escalate the conflict); but then he is under a great deal of strain, living in the family house where he had been so unhappy, unable to go outside, marginalized by Dumbledore and hitting the bottle, and his hatred of Snape seems to be a kind of neurosis.

And he is very young, in a sense. He may be technically thirty-six when he dies, but he has really lived as a relatively normal human having relatively normal social interactions for only twenty-four years: the other twelve years he was in solitary confinement and/or a dog. He was probably fairly happy between leaving the family home at sixteen and a bit and being arrested at just turned twenty-two, and for about six months after fleeing on Buckbeak and before returning to the U.K. - a total of around six happy years. The other thirty years were all more or less horrible.

Like Snape, he had to endure a terrible bereavement for which he was partly responsible (it was he who persuaded the Potters to make Peter their Secret-Keeper), so like Snape he had both grief and guilt to deal with, with the additional twist that another friend whom he had trusted, Peter, had set him up and got him sent to Azkaban for life for a crime he hadn't committed (although as a spy Snape, of course, had to betray people who trusted him to the Aurors). Sirius does get a few more good things in his life than Snape does, and is treated with more kindness and appreciation by more people - but then, nearly twelve years with the Dementors is probably substantially more destructive of self than anything Snape had to endure, so the two men are about equally tragic.

In the films Remus talks about Lily being a kind and loving person who could see the best in everyone and who made people feel good about themselves, making it seem that young Sev must have been truly horrible if he could trample on the feelings of such a saintly person and drive her away. Fanon tends to assume that that's true in the books as well - but if it is we aren't told or shown it. The closest we get in the books is that Harry thinks that a statue of Lily looks kind, and Hagrid says of both James and Lily that "nicer people yeh couldn't find" - but Hagrid also thinks Aragog is a lovely person.

Rowling herself has tweeted that "Snape was a bully who loved the goodness he sensed in Lily without being able to emulate her. That was his tragedy." but as with her flatly untrue statement that Harry never saw somebody in pain without trying to help them, this seems to be a case where she's forgotten what she wrote, because there's nothing in the books to suggest that Lily is particularly pleasant - even if Snape thought she was. I take authorial comment as canonical only where it doesn't clash with the books - and in this case, it does.

Book Lily is very brave and is both academically and magically gifted: she has extraordinary control over her wandless magic as a child; Hagrid says she was one of the best witches he ever met; Slughorn says she was one of his best-ever students, brave and funny and with an intuitive grasp of Potions; JKR says Voldie tried to recruit her, despite her blood-status. But she seems to be at best only averagely kind. She was credited with great kindness by fanon because of the films and because when we initially read OotP it looked as if she had spontaneously stepped in to protect somebody from a rival house out of the goodness of her heart - but now we know she was protecting an old friend we can see she was just doing what you would hope any half reasonable person would do if a friend was attacked in their presence. In fact she appears rather harsh and negative and is quite a poor friend to Severus, so no scenario in which she is perfect and saintly can really be canon compatible.

She does show some kind concern over young Sev's family situation but fails to stick up for him when her sister mocks him, and then blames him when he drops a branch on Petunia, even though everything about that scene suggests that this was involuntary magic of the kind which led Harry to inflate Vernon's sister. To be fair, duj has pointed out that Lily seems to have a remarkable degree of control over her own wandless magic, for one so young, and may not realise that many magical children of their age are prone to these spontaneous magical outbursts which they can't control or prevent.

Lily and Severus collaborate to nose about in Petunia's room, but when Tuney finds out and is angry, Lily puts all the blame onto Severus and punishes him with cold dislike, at a time (their first journey to Hogwarts) which ought to have been happy for both of them. And she is probably the girl heard laughing at him as he struggled with a broom.

Most telling of all is the courtyard scene. Lily knows that Severus had a life-threatening experience a few days ago, from which he had to be rescued, and this is the first time she has spoken to him since. Yet, she shows no shred of concern, no interest in how he is or whether he was frightened, but instead launches straight into criticizing his choice in friends. And then, having already accepted the Marauders' version of events, she refuses to take Severus's word on what happened, even though he is meant to be her friend and is actually telling the truth, as far as his promise to the staff about not talking about what Remus is will allow him. In fairness, the fact that he has been bound to secrecy means that he is unable to produce any evidence for his theories about Remus, even of the "I tell you I saw it with my own eyes" variety, so of course he comes across as if he's just waffling - but she could have given him the benefit of the doubt, or at least been kind enough to pretend to.

This of course causes more trouble between them. When Severus says "I won't let you -" it seems likely that he's trying to say "I won't let you sleepwalk into danger", but then he realises that his promise to the staff means that he can't tell her that James Potter's immediate circle includes a werewolf and a would-be murderer (even though in the event they weren't the ones he should have been worrying about). But since he can't say that, Lily - perhaps understandably, since she has no way to know he's been bound to silence - just thinks he's trying to run her life for her. They both come from the sort of area where sexism was still rampant and we see that young Sev's own father apparently bullied his mother, so it would be a fairly natural assumption.

Then there's the underpants scene. I don't hold it against her that she had to suppress a smile when she saw her friend's bare legs, because that was probably affectionate, if mildly inappropriate under the circumstances. But according to Rowling she was to some extent flirting with James, or at least finding him attractive, under circumstances where his behaviour ought to have genuinely revolted her. "How did they get together? She hated James, from what we've seen." JKR: "Did she really? You're a woman, you know what I'm saying." "From what we've seen" has to refer either to the courtyard scene where Lily says James is a toerag, or more probably to the underpants incident, bcause that's the scene where we see Lily actually interact with James. In any case the courtyard scene came first, so whichever incident JKR is thinking of when she says that Lily secretly rather fancied the bully she superficially appeared to hate, this was already the case during the underpants scene.

Lily has a right to be angry when Sev turns on her in his rage and distress, but it's clear from what she says later that he's been using the word "Mudblood" for a long time and she has tolerated it, until it was applied to herself. Part of the problem, it seems, is that she has been giving him mixed signals for a long time, and perhaps hasn't made it clear that she expects to be treated differently and more respectfully than other Muggle-borns - either because she feels she is speshul or just because she thinks Sev should treat her better because she's his friend (which could be argued either way, morally).

Of course she felt shocked and betrayed, and to desert him at that point was perhaps understandable, although poor-spirited: a more ethical and less self-regarding person would have stuck up for a victim of bullying because bullying is wrong, regardless of their personal relationship or whether or not they were polite or even likeable. But she doesn't just leave: she joins in with the bullying, calls him "Snivellus" and mocks him for his poor clothes, which she knows he is sensitive about.

Just imagine if Ron and Harry were going through one of their difficult patches (as we see from the courtyard scene that Lily and Sev's relationship had become difficult), and Ron was attacked by Draco's gang, Harry came to help him but did so in a way which Ron felt to be condescending, and Ron in his fury and panic reacted something along the lines of "Get lost, freak." We would all, I think, understand it if Harry replied "Fine: sort it out yourself then" and stalked off - but what would we think if Harry instead sided with Draco's gang, joined in in attacking Ron and used his intimate knowledge of him to jeer at his poverty and hurt him as badly as possibe, and then refused to accept Ron's apology but instead treated him with absolute contempt, and subsequently became best buddies with Draco instead? If we say that this is acceptable behaviour for Lily but not for Harry, are we not buying into the sexist idea that a woman's capacity for friendship isn't expected to be as deep or loyal or honourable as a man's?

This is another example where the current generation are shown to be better than the previous one. Lily's turning on Severus and joining in in bullying him contrasts poorly with Hermione's endless patience and kindness towards Kreacher, even though he racially abuses her at every chance he gets.

When Severus comes to apologise to Lily, she not only rejects him in a very cold way but puts words into his mouth, won't let him speak for himself, and tells him that "my friends" don't know why she still sees him - not "my other friends". She couldn't make it plainer that she doesn't regard him as a friend, and hasn't done for some time. What we don't know is whether it is only Severus she treats this coldly and harshly, or whether she's like that to all her friends. It may be that she's liable to blow hot and cold to anyone who gets close to her (she's Petunia's sister, after all, and shares a quarter of her genes with Dudley), in which case she and James arguably deserve each other.

In fact, there's a certain amount of evidence that indeed she was like this to everyone. On Pottermore we're told that one of the reasons the Dursleys disliked Harry was because James had swanked about his wealth and been obnoxious to them, so evidently Lily didn't protect Tuney from James, just as she hadn't protected Sev from Tuney. In the letter written after Harry's first birthday party Lily is quite pleased that young Harry has broken an ugly vase which Petunia sent her for Christmas, so we see that Petunia made at least some effort to stay in touch, and Lily didn't value it. It's noticeable that Harry meets two close schoolfriends of his father's and also talks to at last three other people (Rosmerta, McGonagall, Hagrid) who seem to have liked James, but the only people he meeets who were directly connected with Lily at school are Snape and Slughorn. There are no queues of Lily's old friends waiting to come forwards.

JK Rowling said something to the effect that Lily might have loved Severus if he hadn't drifted towards the Death Eaters, but in the courtyard scene Lily is criticizing the behaviour of Sev's friends, not his own behaviour, so this must be early in the "drifting towards the Death Eaters" process, and yet it's clear that she is already far from being a kind or caring friend. My own theory, which fits with the fact that Lily eventually took up with a swaggering bully whose behaviour towards her (trying to force her to date him by holding her friend hostage, and threatening to hex her for defending her friend even when he, James, is the one at fault) suggested that he might become abusive, is that Lily liked her friends to be followers and acolytes, and her lovers to be dominant and masterful. Poor Severus was too spiky and independent to make a good acolyte, and too gentle and insecure to be masterful to someone on whom he doted like a puppy, so he fell between two stools. If he had done what James would probably have done if he needed to apologize to Lily, and had just said "Look, I've said I'm sorry and I'm sorry, OK? Don't make a meal of it." she would probably have said "OK" and accepted it, but he didn't have the self-confidence to shrug off his own guilt the way the Marauders do.

But then, low-grade friend though she seems to be, it's unfair to make Lily a villain either. To begin with, we only see those scenes from their friendship which Snape chooses to show to Harry to explain how he got where he did, and how he ended up as both Lily's inadvertent betrayer and a slave to her memory: there must have been a thousand incidents from their friendship which Harry never sees, and which may have been much kinder. Indeed, if we accept interview canon then there have to have been. JK Rowling has tweeted that Snape "loved the goodness he sensed in Lily without being able to emulate her. That was his tragedy." and we see very little sign of goodness in the Lily of the books, who is therefore a bit of a Mary Sue - we're supposed to like her and believe that she is good and speshul because the author says she is, without any actual evidence.

[It seems as if Rowling is quite unaware of how harsh and cold and disloyal Lily appears, but that may be because - according to John Nettleship - the disdainful way Lily treats Severus was the normal way girls really did treat boys at Wyedean, Rowling's secondary school. John, the Ur-Snape, saw nothing wrong with this as he believed that females were intrinsically superior to males in all ways, which may explain why young Sev is such a doormat to Lily.]

Then, Lily is not of a much higher social class than Snape. The fact that Petunia is so worried about what the neighbours will think of her strongly suggests that the Evanses were no higher than lower middle class or even upper working class, to Snape's lower working class. And they too come from the industrial Midlands. If we allow that Snape's negativity, dourness and reluctance to give praise where it's due are partly cultural, the same must apply to Lily and Petunia. You also have to consider that Petunia probably got her snobbery and her scorn for people from a poor address like Spinner's End from their parents, so it probably took an act of bravery and independence for Lily to be friends with Severus, and she would have had to struggle with a worm in the back of her brain that told her he wasn't good enough, and that glossy, wealthy James was what she should aspire to.

Then, when we look at Petunia's complaint about how their parents favoured Lily, and the way she herself sets Dudley so far above Harry, and the way Lily sneers at Petunia's gift behind her back, this all suggests that the Evanses may have been the sort of family who played favourites, and where people were always moving in or out of favour. So Lily may only be doing to Severus what she has learned from her parents as being normal behaviour towards someone you (at least some of the time) love. Just as Severus puts up with her blowing hot and cold, because he seems to come from a family where people are randomly unpleasant towards what should be their nearest and dearest.

And although Lily is partly to blame for the break-up with Severus, because she gives him confusing signals about whether it's OK for him to say "Mudblood" or not, and never seems to give him a clear choice between herself and his dodgy proto-Death Eater friends but goes from criticism to reassurance to cutting him off dead, she is very young, and managing the moods of a stroppy, sullen teenage boy is a difficult task even for an experienced adult. The fact that James felt he had to hide his continuing hex-war with Severus from her in seventh year tends to suggest that she did still care at least a bit about her old friend, even if she wasn't going to admit that to him.

The fact that she didn't even consider accepting James's offer to leave Severus alone in future if she would only go out with him seems rather poor spirited - after all, James didn't say she had to go out with him more than once, yet she wasn't even willing to sacrifice one afternoon to save her supposed friend from persecution. That she apparently accepted it when Severus called other people Mudblood, but not when he applied it to her, suggests that she was self-centred and regarded herself as more important than other people, but that may have been the result of a misunderstanding of the fact that he called her a "filthy Mudblood".

The word "filthy" is ambiguous. A few times we see it being used in a context where it seems that somebody really is being accused of having dirty blood, but most of the time when we see it being used by JK's characters (or by herself in real life) it seems to be being used just like the other f-word. When JK jokingly called a friend of hers "a filthy, filthy liar" she didn't mean they were literally dirty. Since Snape later uses "filthy" to describe pure-blood James ("your filthy father"), when he calls Lily a filthy Mudblood he too probably just means it in the way he might say "a blasted Mudblood", but if Lily had suffered any serious racial abuse recently she might have thought that he was literally saying that her blood was dirty, in which case her extreme anger is more understandable.

Although Lily's behaviour towards Severus often seems harsh and cold, she may not be aware of this, and Rowling herself may see nothing wrong with it, because according to John Nettleship this hard offhand behaviour really was how the girls treated the boys at Wyedean, Rowling's secondary school.

Then there's the odd bit of business about the doe Patronus. After reviewing Snape's memories in the Pensieve Harry says that Snape's doe is the same as his mother's Patronus, but we're not told how he now knows this. He didn't know it before: he spent endless hours speculating as to whose Patronus the doe was, and never thought of Lily. What he did feel was that the doe was "inexplicably familiar" and that he had been waiting for her to come.

The most mundane explanation for this is that Harry had seen his mother's Patronus when he was little, although he didn't consciously remember it. The least mundane is that Snape's doe Patronus isn't just the same as Lily's, it is in some sense Lily herself, watching over her old friend as he tries to protect her son. That may seem farfetched, but Dumbledore (and therefore Rowling) seems to be thinking something of this sort when he comments on Harry's Patronus that "You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night." That seems to suggest something a bit more mystical than "When you felt the need for a father's support you subconsciously recalled your father's Animagus form, which you had witnessed as a baby", and makes the idea that Snape's Patronus is in some sense Lily herself at least vaguely canon-conmpatible. And the fact that James felt the need to lie to her about his continued hexing of Severus suggests she never quite lost all concern for him.

Fanon is divided as to whether Lily would be horrified by Snape's overbearing manner and medium-level hostility towards Harry, or not. But since she's Petunia's sister and her own manner towards young Severus was quite harsh and critical even when she was still saying they were best friends, I suspect she would regard being fiercely protective of someone's safety whilst being quite hostile on an emotional and social level as normal behaviour, as it quite possibly was in the area they both grew up in.

In OotP Sirius and Remus tell Harry that James and Lily began dating in seventh year after James "deflated his head a bit" and "stopped hexing people just for the fun of it". Based on this passage, it's common to see Marauders fen stating as canon that James became a reformed character for Lily's sake, and often saying that this made James a better man than Snape, who didn't reform until after her death.

In fact, Rowling has said that Snape joined the Death Eaters at least partly in the hope of impressing Lily - which is not as daft as it sounds, because the Death Eaters in Vold War One weren't as hostile to Muggle-borns as they would be once Umbridge got involved (it's interview canon that they actually tried to recruit Lily) and he had good reason to suspect Lily of being attracted to thugs who threatened her with violence ("Don't make me hex you"). So he did change for her, albeit in a monumentally stupid way which turned out to be disastrous. Quite apart from this, the evidence for James's reform is ambiguous at best.

To begin with we have the prequel-ette which Rowling wrote for charity, which shows James and Sirius already members of the Order of the Phoenix and valiantly fighting Death Eaters, but taking time off to jeer at and bait two innocent Muggle policemen. She couldn't make it plainer that she sees them at this age as liking to pick on anybody they perceive as weaker than themselves. She's given this piece a date which puts it in the summer between their sixth and seventh years but if, as is quite possible, she miscalculated and meant this scene to be taking place the following summer, just after they finished at Hogwarts, that's actually worse because it would mean James was still Muggle-baiting after he took up with Lily.

Then, Sirius is honest within the limits of his own prejudices, and describes himself and James as "arrogant little berks" (which incidentally is a stronger swear than it appears as it's short for "Berkshire Hunt", which in turn is rhyming slang for cunt), but he's still a biased source when it comes to Snape, and Remus will say whatever he thinks Sirius wants to hear. They admit to Harry that James went on hexing Snape during seventh year and that he concealed this from Lily. "'She didn't know too much about it, to tell you the truth,' said Sirius. 'I mean, James didn't take Snape on dates with her and jinx him in front of her, did he?'" Remus makes it sound as though Snape was the instigator by this point and James was just retaliating - "[Snape] never lost an opportunity to curse James so you couldn't really expect James to take that lying down, could you?" - but then Remus was also the one who said that the original cause of the enmity between Severus and James was that Severus was jealous of James's popularity and Quidditch prowess. We now know the latter to be flatly untrue, both because DH has shown us that James attacked Severus without provocation first, solely because he wanted to be in Slytherin, and because JKR has said at interview that James picked on Severus in part because James was jealous of Sev's friendship with Lily.

So, Remus is not a reliable source when it comes to young Sev's relationship to the Marauders, and anything he says about it should be treated with caution. The fact that James was able to conceal his ongoing hex war with Snape from Lily, despite dating her and sharing a Common Room with her, and the fact that the staff evidently didn't find out about it either, suggests that their antagonism was at the very least mutual and that James was using the Marauder's Map to to make sure they only fought when there were no staff or prefects nearby.

As far as it concerned Snape, then, far from reforming his aggressive behaviour in order to please Lily, James simply learned to deceive her as to what he was doing, and only pretended to be reformed. Worse, he was carrying on this secret hex war when he was Head Boy and it was his duty to uphold the school rules, so he also showed dishonesty in office.

[If you want to make the best of James, and you believe Remus's claim that Snape was the instigator in their continuing battles during seventh year, you could argue that James acknowledged in his heart that Snape had good reason to want to curse him, and felt that simply pulling his Head Boy rank and taking points from Snape instead of giving him a fight would be cheating.]

Then, we're told on Pottermore that one of the reasons the Dursleys resented Harry was because James had been quite obnoxious to them and had swanked to them about how wealthy he was. We don't know when this occurred or when Tuney and Vernon started dating, but this incident had to have happened after James and Lily started dating, so again it shows James still being arrogant and bullying Muggles, at least in a minor way, after he and Lily got together - and apparently having no respect for Lily's family. Then we learn from Lily's letter to Sirius that James is impatient and wants his Cloak back so he can go out wandering, even though he's supposed to be in hiding, so he's still restless and irresponsible in the lead-up to his death, whether or not he's still a bully at this point.

James does seem to have been a doting father and that's a point in his favour, but not one which makes him better than Snape. Snape's protection of his Slytherins and his refusal to admit when they misbehave suggests that given the chance he would be a very indulgent and protective father, who was convinced that his little darlings could do no wrong.

One thing we can say about James is that if he knew that it was Harry who was Voldemort's target, he could probably have saved himself by deserting his family, and he didn't. Again, it doesn't make him better than Snape who takes such huge risks for the cause, but it does mean that James loved his family, and was brave.

In the books, we're told that James was a Quidditch player, but not at what position. The films make him a Seeker like his son, and the fact that he is seen playing with a Snitch suggests that he does at least fancy that position. But Rowling says he was a Chaser, so he was a Chaser.

There's a common assumption in the fandom that James, Sirius and perhaps Lily were Aurors, like the Longbottoms. There is no evidence for this in the books, and what little evidence we have from Pottemrore suggests that James lived on his inheritance.

Indeed, it's impossible that James and Lily could be working Aurors. We're told in OotP that Auror training takes three years, so the earliest they could have qualified as Aurors would be three years after leaving school, in June 1981. Lily's letter, written shortly after Harry's first birthday party, so in early to mid August 1981, makes it clear she and James have already been in hiding for long enough for James to get bored and frustrated. So even if she and James had trained as Aurors - a thing for which there is no canon support at all - they could never have worked as qualified Aurors, since the latest they could have gone into hiding would be just after finishing training.

This is another one which is 100%-pure fanon. What we know about Marlene is this: Marlene was an Order member; she was in the Order photograph; she was killed by Death Eaters, along with her whole family, two weeks after the photo' was taken; and her death occurred not very long before Lily wrote a letter to Sirius ("Wormy was here last weekend, I thought he seemed down, but that was probably the news about the McKinnons", which sounds as if he'd only just heard about it), which letter was written soon after Harry's first birthday party, and therefore probably in early to mid August 1981.

We can say that Lily herself may have been fond of Marlene, because she says in her letter that "I cried all evening when I heard", and this was at a time when Order deaths were so common you might have expected her to be somewhat hardened to them. You could even, at a stretch, take her letter as evidence that Peter was fond of Marlene, since she expects the news of Marlene's death to distress him. But there's nothing to suggest that she is addressing someone who had a special connection to Marlene, other than being fellow Order members - and if Sirius and Marlene were an item, why hide it?

Nor is it at all likely, as sometimes portrayed in fanfiction, that Marlene and Lily were close friends. In her letter to Sirius, Lily refers simply to the deaths of "the MacKinnons" as something which may have depressed Peter, with no suggestion that Marlene was more significant to her than Marlene's family.

In canon Padfoot, Sirius's Animagus form, is initially assumed to be a Grim - a supernatural black dog the sight of which is an omen of death. This is an actual creature from British and Scandinavian folklore where it is usually called a Church Grim or Kirk Grim, although the "real" Grim (unlike most traditional black dog spectres) isn't an ill-omen. Many fen assume that Padfoot actually is a Grim and on one level it's hard to know what to make of this, since in the Potterverse a Grim seems to be just a big black dog and you could say that any big black dog was a Grim. All we can say is that nobody seems to suffer death as a direct result of seeing Padfoot.

In folklore the Grim is a guardian spirit who protects the church it is attached to - believed in Sweden to be the ghost of a real black dog who was buried alive in order to create such a guardian. Nothing about Padfoot suggests that he is a ghost. The Swedish Grim also appears as a goat-headed man and the English one as a cockerel, raven, ram or horse or as a small dark humanish creature - you could make a case for it being a house-elf who is an Animagus, and who serves a church and vicarage.

painting of a thin, sinister black dog with huge, glowing eyes

Barghest, from Inkwell Inspirations

There are many British legends about spectral black dogs, and there is archaeological evidence of a Bronze Age cult which sacrificed dogs and put their bodies into water at sacred sites along with offerings of gold or bronze. Generally speaking these spectral black dogs have abnormally large (saucer-sized), burning eyes and where their type is described they are always or nearly always hounds. Padfoot is described as bear-like, which suggests that he is too heavily-built to be any kind of hound, not even a boarhound.

Personally I think that Padfoot is a Newfoundland - and is probably intended to be. Newfoundlands are very big and hefty and one of the colours they come in is solid black with yellow eyes, which is how Padfoot is described. They've been bred to be assistants and even lifesavers to Newfoundland fishermen, trained to jump into the sea and tow drowning men and even small boats to shore,

photo of black Newfoundland dog atanding next to a woman who is seen from the chest down, with a field and a car behind them: the dog's head is level with the woman's bust

Black Newfoundland, from askIDEAS

and so they have webbed feet and a heavy double coat which acts as both waterproofing, insulation and flotation device, which would go a long way towards explaining how Sirius/Padfoot managed to make it to shore from Azkaban.

However, Sirius is definitely playing with the idea of the Grim, even if he looks more like somebody's lolloping pet, and so is Rowling. "Padfoot" is one of the names given to the spectral hounds of British folklore, variously called the kirk grim, barguest (and dozens of variant spellings thereof), Black Dog, and (as listed on Inkwell Inspirations) "Black Shuck, Hairy Jack, Skriker, Padfoot, Churchyard Beast, Shug Monkey, Cu Sith, Galleytrot, Capelthwaite, Mauthe Doog, Hateful Thing, Swooning Shadow, Bogey Beast, Gytrash, Gurt Dog, Oude Rode Ogen, Tibicena and Dip". One possible interpretation of "barguest" is "bear ghost", the Black Dog does occasionally manifest as a bear, and Sirius, of course, grew up in Grimmauld Place.

In canon Harry associates the fact that his Patronus is (as he thinks) a stag with the fact that he knows his father's Animagus form was nicknamed Prongs, and Remus (not the authorial voice) confirms that yes, Prongs was a stag. Snape's Patronus is described as a doe, and one which apparently represents Lily to him and to Dumbledore in some sense, since when Dumbledore sees it he asks about Snape's continuing attachment to Lily's memory. Harry later says that Lily's Patronus was also a doe but it's never explained how he knows this. He doesn't recognise the doe as connected with Lily when he first sees her, although she does seem familiar in some way, so it's not clear whether his later assertion that she is the same as his mother's Patronus is because he has now genuinely remembered seeing his mother cast a Patronus, or whether he is just guessing based on what he saw of Snape and Dumbledore's conversation about it in the Pensieve.

I gather that in the U.S., stag and doe are generic terms for male and female deer. For this reason it is widely assumed, at least among American fen, that the fact that James is represented by a stag and Lily by a doe shows that they were perfectly romantically compatible, although there's nothing to say which came first. It may be that that was what Rowling intended - and that she was let down by a lack of biological knowledge.

Be that as it may, this is a British story using British terminology, and here in Britain a stag, a.k.a. a hart, is a male red deer (whose mate is called a hind), and a doe is a female roe or fallow deer (whose mate is a buck). Even if they are foreign deer - and I suppose there's no reason why they shouldn't be - so far as I know British English would still only pair stags with hinds, and does with bucks. James's and Lily's symbols are different species, so the message seems to be "They may look superficially compatible, but really they aren't."

photo of roe buck running across dry grass

Roe buck, Capreolus capreolus, in Czech Republic August 2005, from NaturePhoto

If you really need them to be the same species, and assuming that they are British deer, we can probably rule out the roe deer,

photo of muntjac buck standing in long grass, with stripes on his forehead and noticeable upper fangs

Muntjac buck, Muntiacus muntjak, from Real Big 5 (distressingly, a hunting website telling you how to kill them)

which is not much bigger than a fox terrier and therefore noticeably smaller than the other two, meaning that it's very unlikely anyone could possibly mistake one for a stag - although they do have quite prong-like antlers. We can also be 99.99% certain they aren't muntjacs, an Asian deer which is in the process of going native in Britain but which is not only very small but often has visible fangs, and has tiny, backwards-pointing antlers which grow from a long pediment, giving them the appearance of being partially enclosed in a kind of furry sleeve. For Prongs and Lily's Patronus to be the same species we have to assume they are either both fallow deer (a buck and a doe) or both red deer (a stag and a hind), and that a mistake has been made.

full-face photo of pale brown and white fallow doe with large, limpid eyes and jet-black nose

Fallow doe at Gaziantep Zoo, Turkey, photographed by Nevit Dilmen, 31^st October 2009, from Tom Clark: Beyond the Pale

photo of white-spotted chestnut fallow buck with big antlers, lying down in rough grass

Fallow buck at Weald Country Park, from Essex Country Parks

Fallow deer are medium-sized; come in a free assortment of colours from black through a range of browns to skewbald (patched brown and white, equivalent to US "paint"), cream or white;

photo of mixed group of fallow deer in long grass, four does with heads down, three bright chestnut with white spots and one dark chestnut with faint spots; and three bucks with heads up, one bright chestnut which white spots, one white and one black

Fallow deer, Dama dama, from Royal Horticultural Society

if brown or skewbald usually have silver spots all over their backs, at least in summer; have a cute, short and sometimes slightly "dished", Bambi-like face with big, winning eyes and ears; and have palmate antlers - that is, their antlers have a central flat plate with spikes sticking off it like fingers, similar to the antlers of a moose only not quite so exaggerated.

Red deer on the other hand are quite big (smallish pony size), have spots only as babies and are nearly always orangey-brown shading to beige underneath, although white, black and grey-brown individuals are occasionally seen. They have tree-like antlers; a long, straight, narrow face like a cross between a racehorse and a very refined sheep; and the adult males have long shaggy fur on their necks.

photo of young red stag with small antlers in three-quarter view, standing on a high grassy point with a loch, a sweep of mountains and distant white farm cottages behind him

Juvenile red stag above Loch Ewe, Aultbea, Wester Ross, from flickriver, photo' by David May

Remus says that Prongs was a stag. However, we can surmise that Prongs was quite a young deer, with very small antlers. To begin with, he was apparently able to get down the low, narrow tunnel under the Whomping Willow, which he would surely not have been able to do had he had a wide rack.

Then there's Harry's Patronus, which Harry and Dumbledore both believe to be a representation of Prongs - although as neither of them has seen Prongs, and Dumbledore had only caught a brief glimpse of Harry's Patronus during the Quidditch match in which Draco's gang faked being Dementors, this is more of an informed guess. If it is an accurate representation of Prongs it's further evidence that Prongs had little teenage-boy-deer antlers, because when Harry first sees his own Patronus clearly he thinks it's a unicorn or a horse, and Aberforth is able to convince the Death Eaters that it's a goat, suggesting the antlers are not very noticeable and that they don't project very far to the side.

It's conceivable, therefore, that Remus might be wrong to say that Prongs was a stag, and Harry may also be wrong to think that his Patronus is one. Prongs might in fact have been not a stag but an unspotted chestnut fallow buck, with antlers too small and new to tell whether they were going to be palmate or not.

photo of two hinds nose to nose in a field, on the right the head and shoulders of a brown individual and on the left a cream hind standing with her rump towards the viewer, both seen from shoulder-level up

Two hinds, from South West Deer Rescue and Study Centre, photographed in Surrey by Edward Johnes

It's also possible that Prongs might genuinely have been a stag, and Harry might be wrong about Snape's Patronus being a doe, and be thinking of her as a doe just because he doesn't know the word "hind" - and there's certainly something to be said for Snape's Patronus having the long nose and supercilious expression of the red deer, rather than the wide-eyed cuteness of the roe or fallow. Either of these errors would make it possible for Prongs and Snape's Patronus to be the same species.

It's also possible that both Dumbledore and Harry are mistaken in thinking that Snape's Patronus is identical with Lily's, and that they are merely very similar. It's possible that Snape's Patronus is a doe - big eyes, cute nose and all - but Lily's was a hind.

In the playground scene young Snape is described as watching Lily in an almost greedy way, but his greed cannot have been sexual in character, unless he was an incredibly early starter, for he was a pre-pubertal child of around nine at the time. Eleven-year-old Harry is also described as staring at Lily in the mirror "hungrily", and nobody assumes this means he wanted to have sex with her.

Snape's nine-year-old passion for Lily was of a piece with - and very possibly inspired by - Charlie Brown's fascination with his little red-headed girl. So young Sev's greed must have been for something else - for the magical power Lily displayed, for the chance to have someone his own age with whom he could share the magical side of his being without being thought a freak, for friendship, for confirmation that the magic world existed outside his own family, for a bit of colour and beauty in his mostly-depressing life. She then went on to be one of the few people that we know of in his life who was ever kind to him, at least some of the time, and we see from his devotion to Dumbledore that Snape will probably be loyal to anyone who shows him affection, even intermittently.

[It may well be that that was how Tom Riddle recruited Snape. We see from the way he charmed the information about Horcuxes out of Horace Slughorn that Tom was very good at putting on fake kindness, fake affection, to win people over; and the fact that he apologized to Snape before killing him suggests that Tom may genuinely have felt as much real fondness for Snape as he was capable of feeling for anyone.]

Since we can see that young Severus was already devoted to Lily before he was old enough for that devotion to have a sexual element, there's no reason to think that his teenage and adult devotion to her was wholly or mainly sexual either. Sociological studies in Israel many years ago indicated that on hard-line kibbutzim where the children all slept at night in a communal Children's House, those children were unlikely to develop sexual feelings for each other in later life, even when they were totally unrelated, because their early experience had caused them to see their house-mates as siblings, not romantic propects. It's highly possible that two children who had been close friends since they were nine would also see each other as brother and sister, and thematically that would tie Snape's undying devotion to Lily in with Dumbledore's century-long grief for Ariana.

At the same time, the courtyard scene does suggest that Snape's teenage love for Lily might have been at least partly sexual. His relief at discovering that Lily still disliked James must have been partly because she wasn't about to put herself in danger from Sirius and Remus, but his floating-on-Cloud-Nine happiness does suggest that there was more to it than that. However, his devotion predated his capacity for sexual preferences, and there's no evidence that that platonic devotion ever went away, whatever else may have been laid on top of it. Hence, there's no canonical reason to think that his long-term dedication to Lily's memory was primarily sexual in nature, although it's just about canon-compatible on a longish hook.

Mediaeval coloured drawing, set in a 'portrait' oblong red, white and blue outline, showing a lady in a blue dress looking down from a low tower made of pink and green brick and decorated with gold crenallations; below her a man in a red robe and sitting on a dappled grey horse holds in his left hand a grey falcon and in the right a sheet of parchment he is either giving to or receiving from the lady; both have golden hair and there are armourial bearings above them

We know he gave Voldemort the impression that his interest in Lily as an adult was primarily sexual possessiveness, but nothing in canon suggests that he was telling the truth. Indeed the way he seems to make Lily the lodestar of his life suggests that even his sexual interest in her tended towards a Mediaeval style of formal "courtly love", where the desired girl becomes a sort of idealised personal goddess or private monarch rather than a sex object.

Even the scene in the courtyard where young Snape says to Lily "I won't let you ..." follows on from the abortive conversation about what Remus is, and so is probably protective rather than controlling. In context it seems likely that what he was trying to say was that he wouldn't let Lily sleepwalk blind into a closer relationship with a gang which she didn't know included a werewolf and a would-be murderer, but he then realised he couldn't explain what he meant without breaking his promise not to out Remus.

We see, in that scene, that Snape is still devoted to Lily but she seems to be cooling towards him (she shows no concern about the fact that he has had a life-threatening experience since the last time she spoke to him, but launches straight into criticising him). However, his continued affection cannot be said to be stalkerish because she encourages him in it, reassuring him that they are still best friends even though it seems unlikely that this is still the case from her point of view.

We know he continued to carry a torch for her and hope for a reunion after she had broken off their friendship, because Rowling has said that he joined the Death Eaters in part because he hoped to impress Lily - but this is not unreasonable given that she had started dating a bully who had publicly threatened her with violence, suggesting that she might be turned on by thugs. We don't know whether Snape showed any unreasonable expectations of an adult relationship with Lily, or made a nuisance of himself to her in any way - it's not inconceivable that he might have done, but there's no canon evidence for it.

And far from being controlling towards her, he seems to be as devoted as a puppy. It's true he seems quite blind to her upset after her argument with Petunia - but then Lily seems to get angry and blame him for things which aren't really his fault quite a lot and he just accepts it. You could say he isn't taking her emotions seriously - or you could say he's being tolerant and accepting of her combative personality - or you could say that life has already taught him to expect to be kicked in the teeth even by loved ones.

In any case Snape's presumed-to-be-at-least-partly-sexual feelings for Lily seem less extreme and dangerous than Harry's feelings for Ginny, which cause him to feel as if jealousy is a raging monster trying to break out of his ribcage.

I gather some fen have accused Snape of suffering from Nice Guy Syndrome, where a man cultivates a friendship with a woman in the hopes of getting to sleep with her, and if she doesn't he attributes this to his being too "nice" and says that women evidently prefer brutes. To begin with the way it's described on the net all sounds terribly American: here in the UK guys who are a bit whiny and needy will probably still get laid so long as they're not violently revolting, because we don't really have the same construct of masculinity. But in any case Severus was genuinely Lily's friend since well before sex could have been an issue; he is reassured by her that he is her best friend; that we see he doesn't ever try to press her for sex or act as if he thinks he is entitled to her, he just lusts wistfully from afar; and considering the way we see James treat Lily while trying to "win" her, and yet she takes up with him anyway, it seems she genuinely does prefer brutes.

In fact it is James who shows some of the "Nice Guy" symptoms. Interview canon is that James persecuted Severus because he was jealous over Lily, so even though she wasn't his girlfriend, or for that matter Sev's girlfriend, and for most of their time at Hogwarts she had shown no interest in him, James was still so jealous over and possessive of Lily that he couldn't stand the idea of her spending time with another male, and spent seven years persecuting another boy to punish him for having dared to have met Lily first. He acted as if his status as Quidditch Jock should entitle him to Lily's favours if he wanted them, and was prepared to use underhand tactics including emotional blackmail and bullying in an attempt to force Lily to date him - we see him attack her friend and then offer to stop persecuting him if Lily will go out with him, without apparently caring in the slightest whether it's what she herself wants or not. When she protested about the attack on her friend and tried to stop it, James threatened her with violence. Later he successfully persuaded her to go out with him, not primarily by reforming his behaviour but by getting better at lying to her to conceal it. According to Pottermore, once they were dating he was obnoxious to her family and drove a wedge between her and her sister and brother-in-law, by being obnoxious to them and bragging to them about how much richer than them he was - although he was provoked, in this case, by Vernon's assumption that he was unemployed because he was lazy, rather than because he was independently wealthy.

Snape, so far as we know from canon, never even asked Lily to go out with him, far less tried to force her to against her will. That we know of, the only thing he ever pressed her to do was to accept his humble apology, and so far as we know he accepted her refusal and never bothered her again. JKR has said that he joined the Death Eaters in part because he hoped to impress Lily, so he was still in some sense "carrying a torch" for her, but Sirius and Remus seem unaware of the strength of his feelings for Lily, which is strong evidence that he left her alone and didn't try to get her back once she'd taken up with James.

That he continues to be so devoted to Lily's memory may seem a bit obsessive but he is still only in his thirties when he dies, and Lily's death is less than seventeen years ago. It is less than ten years ago when we first meet him. In any case infinitely extended, devoted teenage love and undying devotion to a dead loved-one are two of JKR's favourite tropes - possibly because it means she doesn't have to write the older characters a current love-interest.

Dumbledore is portrayed as still so obsessed by his sister's death that nearly a century later he puts on a cursed ring which ultimately precipitates his own death, just in the hopes of being able to see her again and apologize for his role in her untimely demise; and Rowling has said that he Never Loved Again after Grindelwald. Sirius is still so devoted to James fifteen years after his death that he tries to make Harry be James redux.

On Pottermore we're told that Minerva McGonagall fell madly in love with a Muggle neighbour named Dougal McGregor in summer 1954 when she was eighteen, then jilted him and broke both their hearts because she didn't want to have to give up magic to live in the Muggle world. She worked for two years at the Ministry before starting teaching at Hogwarts in December 1956, but continued to carry a torch for Dougal (even after he married someone else) and Could Love No Other for twenty-eight years - despite repeated proposals of marriage from her former boss at the Ministry, Elphinstone Urquart - until 1982, when she heard that Dougal had died, and promptly married Elphinstone. He died in an accident three years later, leaving her to a state of perpetual widowhood, even though at fifty she was not all that old for a witch.

And almost everybody in the Potter books, if they marry at all, marries somebody they already knew and probably fancied at school. James and Lily, Molly and Arthur, Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione, Hannah and Neville, Draco and Astoria, Bellatrix and Rudolphus, probably Lucius and Narcissa and Andromeda and Ted (because if you do the maths Andromeda probably fell pregnant with Tonks immediately after leaving Hogwarts, if not before).... So even if you think Snape's behaviour is obsessive, it seems to be pretty much a cultural norm for his society.

There is a scene in the films - and only in the films - where Snape is at the Potters' house at Godric's Hollow after the attack, cradling Lily's dead body in his arms, crying, and ignoring baby Harry and his cut face. This is widely held up as proof that his love for Lily was obsessive and that he was callous towards baby Harry. But aside from the fact that in the books he was in Dumbledore's office at Hogwarts at this point, even within the film universe his action was not unreasonable. Since Avada Kedavra leaves no marks, he couldn't know Lily was dead until he had examined her, and if she had been alive but unconscious her medical condition would probably have been much more urgent than Harry's. That's if he could even see Harry. The Fidelius protected the knowledge that the Potters lived at that house, and we're told that you could look through the window at them and not see them, so the charm concealed the Potters but not the house. We know Snape hadn't been let inside the Secret, because if he had been he would have known Peter was the traitor. Whether the Fidelius was still in place or not, it wouldn't stop him seeing Lily, because she no longer lived at that house; but if the Fidelius was still active, he wouldn't be able to see Harry, living in the ruins.

It's often assumed in fanfiction that the Evanses must have been lovely people and would therefore have been kind and welcoming to the scruffy boy their daughter had befriended. In favour of this idea, we know that Snape was at their house at least once because he and Lily went into Petunia's room, and we are told that the Evanses were very taken with the idea of Lily being a witch and having special skills, so they might well have been keen on her having another magical child as a friend.

Against it, however, they were Petunia's parents as much as they were Lily's. Petunia may well have got her lower middle class snobbery and fear of what the neighbours might think from them (if not from them, then from whom?), and she made it clear she despised Snape for his poor origins and ragged appearance, and that she regarded Spinner's End as a very poor address. Somebody must have given her the idea both that Spinner's End was a bad address and that it was OK to look down on people for coming from a bad address, and it seems more like the sort of thing she would get from her parents than what she might learn at school. If what Petunia says is true her parents were also prone to playing favourites. On this basis, it's unlikely young Severus would ever have been flavour of the month: at best they might have tolerated him to his face and carped about him behind his back.

Excessivelyperky points out "... both Evans girls married up from their original station. There is no family so aware of their place and determined to keep it, I think, than the ones who live next to a rundown area - the distance might be a few blocks, but the social distance is sometimes measured in parsecs. The Evans parents might well have been terrified that Lily was going to end up in Spinners End if Severus and Lily had stayed close, not realizing Sev's upward drive and his escape hatch through magic. They might have been greatly relieved to see James on the horizon ... They were quite likely adoring of Vernon Dursley - a steady, somewhat older man who was already established in a good, middle-class job."

There is a questionmark about when the Evanses knew that Lily was a witch, and that she and Severus had something vital in common. I would have expected that the wizarding world would contact the parents of Muggle-borns as soon as their children started to manifest wandless magic, to prevent them from accidentally revealing the existence of wizards to Muggles. According to Pottermore Hogwarts has a "Quill of Acceptance" which writes down the name of every magical child born in Britain, as they are born, so there are people in the wizarding world who would know in advance which Muggle-born children they needed to keep an eye on. Yet when young Severus first speaks to Lily, she seems to be already well-practised at magic, and yet does not know that she is called a witch.

Also if Severus knew the Evanses well and they were good to him, that might make it less likely that he would become a Death Eater - although since this was the era of nuclear panic, when many Muggles believed that Muggles were about to destroy the world, he might think that wizards taking control and ruling over the Muggles was the only way to save them.

Percy Weasley is stiff, very ambitious, easily impressed by authority and a bit sycophantic. His rigid nature and doubtful social skills may indicate that he has mild autism, which can manifest as this sort of obsessive stiffness as well as as wild eccentricity. But he is also very conscientious and the common fanfic idea that Percy is actively evil, and might even become a Death Eater, is not supported by canon.

A bad impression is given by the fact that Percy believes the reports in the press that Harry is deluded or lying about the return of Voldemort, and advises Ron to stay away from Harry. We know that he was completely wrong, and it's certainly not very nice of him to advise somebody to desert a friend just when they are being attacked from all sides. However, looking at it from Percy's point of view, he doesn't know Harry very well and he does know Ron very well, and must therefore know that Ron is a bit of a fantasist who often wildly inflates his own achievements in order to win applause. It's not surprising if Percy assumes, wrongly, that Ron's best friend is somebody who has a lot in common with Ron, and is therefore likely to be spinning tall tales. And his purpose seems to be to protect Ron, which means that he compares favourably with the Twins who tormented Ron when they were all little, and are still quite cold and unpleasant to him as adults (they're coldly insistent on him paying full price for their wares and not expecting a family discount, even as they fawn on Harry).

You also have to consider that Percy will want Harry and Ron to be fantasists, to be wrong about the whole Voldemort thing, because if they're telling the truth then his pet rat Scabbers, whose fuzzy belly he probably kissed and whose tiny feet he fondled, was nothing but a mask being worn by a mass-murdering Death Eater.

The Weasleys were very angry because Percy came to the family home for a Christmas visit, bringing Scrimgeour with him, and Scrimgeour then took the opportunity to try to recruit Harry. They assumed that Percy had been only pretending to want to visit them, as an excuse to enable Scrimgeour to buttonhole Harry, and they threw him out without giving him a chance to defend himself. However, given Percy's stiffnes and apparent gullibility and naivety, it seems far more likely that it was Scrimgeour who deceived Percy as to the purpose of their visit, not Percy who deceived his family.

His least attractive characteristic, his tendency to fawn on authority, he may have learned from his mother. There's at least a hint of the sycophant in the way Molly dotes on and fusses over Famous Harry and kits him out in fine robes which flatter his green eyes, while sending her own son to school with dreadful second-hand maroon dress robes which have been picked out with no attention either to what he likes or what suits him.

When the Trio end up at The Hogshead in DH, Aberforth is strongly critical of the way his brother's schemes were always likely to get his followers hurt, and his use of underage agents. "My brother Albus wanted a lot of things, and people had a habit of getting hurt while he was carrying out his grand plans. [cut] Nice job, I hope? Pleasant? Easy? Sort of thing you'd expect an unqualified wizard kid to be able to do without overstretching themselves?" This has naturally led many fen to portray him as much nicer than Albus, and more reluctant to involve childen in a war.

A few hours later, however, Aberforth complains about having had hundreds of students evacuated through his pub, and says "And it never occurred to any of you to keep a few Slytherins hostage? There are kids of Death Eaters you've just sent to safety. Wouldn't it have been a bit smarter to keep 'em here?" and Harry replies that Albus would never have done it. It seems, therefore, that Aberforth is at least as ruthless as his brother, when it comes to using children as tools in a war - so long as they're Slytherins.

When we see Barty Crouch Snr. give Winky clothes at the World Cup he is being harsh and cold, and the impression is created that he is brutally punishing his cowering slave for having been too frightened to carry out a task he had set her. This is reinforced by later revelations about Crouch having condemned his own son to Azkaban, and having authorised the VWI Aurors to torture and kill.

If you pay close attention to what's revealed at the end of GoF, however, you find that Crouch had given Winky great authority over his household, and had let her nag and emotionally blackmail him into taking his son to the World Cup very much against his better judgment; and she had then wimped out of the arrangement she herself had insisted on, with potentially disastrous consequences. Although Crouch's subsequent treatment of her was harsh, it was not the harshness of a control freak who had been disobeyed by a subordinate, but of a man who had placed great trust in somebody and been badly let down.

House-elves are often portrayed as simple-minded, and this goes with the idea that Winky must be a pathetic victim rather than an adult woman who insisted on responsibilities which she then welched on. This is based in part on the fact that the first elf we meet, Dobby, is a bit of a twit who tends to overthink the problem, and on their disjointed way of speaking. Yet the traditional folkloric creature they are based on, the hob, house-brownie or gruagach, is a kind of semi-domesticated ogre, quite strong and fierce, very proud and not at all child-like. Even the elves' habit of punishing themselves if they feel they've done wrong is not actually any madder or more childish than Catholic monks scourging themselves in penance for unclean thoughts.

Nightfall Rising has pointed out that the house-elves' dialogue ceases to sound at all child-like if you imagine it in a Jamaican accent. This suggests that their odd way of speaking isn't a sign of childishness or stupidity but is an adult patois or pidgen, a localised dialect of English spoken by a group who were trying to be bilingual, but whose own original language is so structurally different from English that their version of English comes out a bit grammatically peculiar.

It's an interesting fact that despite widespread and rather patronizing sympathy for the elves, I have never seen any fanfic which was written before DH, and which portrayed Kreacher in a sympathic light. In pre-DH fanfics he is always either played as a villain, or killed off to get rid of him. The morality of the Potter books is often rather dubious - sneering at people who are overweight, playing Hagrid's bigotry against Muggles for laughs, giving the Trio and the Twins a free pardon for what is often quite appalling behaviour including kidnap and deliberately scarring somebody's face - but as far as Kreacher goes, JKR undoubtedly has the moral high ground and has dealt with him with more kindness and generosity than any of her fen.

Most American readers initally assumed that the Salem Witches' Institute, mentioned during the World Cup sequence, was a school - especially as Rowling has said that she mentioned an American school in the books. However, that must refer to the South American school in Brazil, at which Ron says Bill had a penfriend.

photo showing upper bodies of six naked middle-aged women seated around a table, all in greyscale apart from a yellow sunflower lying on the table

Six of the original Women's Institute calendar girls, from Mail Online

In May 2015 JKR confirmed that the Salem Witches' Institute isn't a school, but is, as I had long assumed, a piss-take on the Women's Institute (thanks to maidofkent for spotting this). Here in Britain the Women's Institute is an English and Welsh network of women-only social clubs dedicated to charitable works, self-improvement, amateur dramatics etc.. At the time Rowling was writing GoF they were in the news because a group of elderly WI members had just raised money for a leukaemia charity by appearing in a tasteful and entirely naked calendar - later the subject of the mostly-true film Calendar Girls.

[As at summer 2015 a similar but discrete Scottish organisation, the Scottish Women's Rural Institute, is in the process of changing its name to the Scottish Women's Institute.]

In June 2015 Rowling went on to announce that the forthcoming Fantastic Beasts film would feature an American magic school which is not in New York, and which had a name given to it by settlers but was founded with a considerable input of indigenous, Native American magical practices. This turned out to be Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, located on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. The written screenply for Fantastic Beasts is considered to be book canon and the existence of Ilvermorny is also supported by Pottermore and by a statement by Rowling outwith the films, and as such is now canonical.

Because the only part-Veelas we get to know personally - Fleur and Gabrielle - are French, and also I suppose because the Malfoys have a French name (Mal Foi = Bad Faith) and look as if they might have some Veela blood (although this is never stated in canon), there is a tendency in fanfic to portray all Veelas as French. Fleur is certainly evidence that French Veelas - or at least Veelas or part-Veelas who mate with French partners - do exist.

In reality, however, Vilas or Wilas are beautiful, fierce, all-female fairy warriors found in Slavic and Polish folklore. In the Potterverse a crowd of Veelas provide a sinister spin on cheer-leaders for the national Quidditch team of Bulgaria which, although a long way south of Poland, has significant Slavic input in both culture and ethnicity, and speaks a Slavic language.

There is a widespread assumption in fandom that the Potterverse witches and wizards must be Wiccans or some other type of pagan. As a pagan myself I might find this idea attractive, but we see Hogwarts observe Christmas and Easter holidays, as well as Hallowe'en, and Rowling has stated that all Muggle religions are also found in the wizarding world, except Wicca.

That sounds like a touch of spiteful sour grapes, especially coming from somebody who used to be an amateur astrologer (an illustrated birth-chart which Rowling drew up for a neighbour turned up on the Antiques Road Show), but it does make a certain sense. Wiccans have fixed ideas about how magic works which aren't compatible with what wizards do in the Potterverse, so it wouldn't really be possible for a Potterverse witch/wizard to be a Wiccan unless they altered the religion so much that it wasn't really Wicca any more anyway.

This one probably came about because Rowling said that Snape was the only Death Eater to have a Patronus, because the Death Eaters associate with things like Dementors which are the antithesis of a Patronus, and he had to hide the fact that he had a Patronus from the others in case it gave away his true loyalties. But interviews, Pottermore etc. are only canon if they don't clash with the books, and in the books Umbridge both associates with Dementors and has an especially strong, bright Persian cat Patronus.

I suggest, therefore, that if Death Eaters really don't have Patronuses it's because the Dark Mark somehow interferes with Patronus-casting, and Snape has to hide the fact that he has a Patronus because the fact that he can cast one is a sign that he is using Occlumency to shut Voldemort out of his mind. As well as, of course, the fact that if anybody on the Death Eater side recognised that his Patronus matched Lily's it would raise questions about where his loyalties lay, and whether it was possible that he could serve Lily's killer sincerely.

Add-on: canon has now imitated fanon, and Pottermore has come up with a brief essay claiming that indeed only good people have Patronuses, and that Umbridge was only a bit morally dubious and that was why she had one. I regard this as a case where Pottermore cannot be regarded as canon because it contradicts the books. Umbridge in the books appears to be seriously evil, and yet she doesn't just have any old Patronus - she has an unusually bright and strong one. What's more the description of casting a Patronus in the books makes it clear that what you need to cast one isn't virtue but a strong happy memory - and there's no law which says evil people can't be happy.

Rowling probably did intend the murder of Moaning Myrtle and the making of the diary Horcrux to be the first of Tom Riddle's Horcruxes, and most people go along with that. That murder took place during Riddle's fifth year at school, so when he was fifteen or sixteen. However, Dumbledore tells Harry that Riddle killed his own father (and presumably made the ring Horcrux) in the summer of his sixteenth year. This is almost certainly the result of Rowling getting confused between Riddle's sixteenth year and the year he was sixteen, but it isn't really credible that Dumbledore would make that mistake. This amounts, therefore, to a firm statement that Tom killed his father in the summer that he was fifteen - that is, the summer before the start of his fifth year at Hogwarts.

Yet, Dumbledore himself calls the diary the first Horcrux Tom made - "The careless way in which Voldemort regarded [the diary] Horcrux seemed most ominous to me. It suggested that he must have made – or been planning to make – more Horcruxes, so that the loss of his first would not be so detrimental." For both of Dumbledore's statements - that the diary was the first Horcrux Tom made and that he killed his father during his sixteenth summer - to be true, and for Rowling's claim at interview that Tom used his father's death to make the ring Horcrux to also be true, you would have to assume that Tom put off making a Horcrux out of his father's death for about a year after the actual murder.

Dumbledore evidently believes it can be put off at least to some extent, assuming that he himself believes the ring Horcrux to have been made using the murder of Tom Riddle Senior, because he tells Harry that Tom killed his family using Morfin Gaunt's wand, then returned to the Gaunts' house, replaced Morfin's wand at his side, gave Morfin elaborate false memories to wake up to and only then took the Hallow ring which he would turn into a Horcrux. Depending on whether he Apparated to the Gaunts' place or walked, there could have been a delay of half an hour, even an hour between killing his father and getting his hands on the ring.

Again, Rowling says that Tom used Myrtle's death to make the diary Horcrux, but if he stopped writing in the diary once it became a Horcrux - which we don't know - he evidently didn't turn it into a Horcrux until some weeks after Myrtle's death, because the diary speaks of Headmaster Dippet's attempts at damage-limitation following her death.

To add to the confusion, the scene at Little Hangleton at the start of GoF says that Voldie's family died fifty years previously, which if accurate would place their deaths in summer 1944 when Tom was seventeen {we know that the Chamber of Secrets was opened in the academic year 1942/43, fifty years prior to Harry's second year in 1992/93, and we know that the year the Chamber was first opened was Tom's fifth year). We must assume they're speaking loosely.

This isn't the only oddity in the Horcrux sequence. Everybody in the books assumes - because Rowling wants them to assume - that Tom Riddle made the tiara Horcrux after he left school, and concealed it in the Room of Requirement on the day he visited Dumbledore to apply for the DADA job. That's perfectly possible: but there's absolutely nothing in the books to say that he didn't visit Eastern Europe and find the tiara during the school holidays, and hide it in the Room of Requirement while he was still a student.

In fact, much of what Harry thinks he knows about the Horcruxes is just Dumbledore's guesswork. Rowling probably does intend it to be accurate guesswork, but there's no proof in the books to say it is. It's never even established whether the Horcruxes just anchor the remaining fragment of soul to the body, or whether when the body is killed and revived a Horcrux is used up. If the latter, then either one of the Horcruxes which we see being denatured was already empty, or there was another one we don't know about.

As for how they are made, it surely isn't just by committing murder, or every murderous wizard would be immortal. Peter killed twelve people at a stroke and yet he isn't immortal, and it's not because they were Muggles, because Rowling has said Tom made a Horcrux by killing his Muggle father. It's murder which creates the soul-fragment, but there has to be something else involved to store it in an object.

Whatever it is, if Dumbledore believes Tom used his father's death to make a Horcrux then he also believes either that the spell, or ritual, or whatever it is can be done in the absence of the object which is going to contain the Horcrux, or that it can be done some time after the murder which created the soul fragment, because he tells Harry that Tom didn't gan possession of the ring which he then turned into a Horcrux until some time (probably 20-60 minutes) after murdering his father.

We also have to remember that Tom accidentally turned Harry into a Horcrux, presumably using one of the bits which had just been split off his soul when he killed Harry's parents, even though so far as we know his abortive attack on Harry happened a couple of minutes after killing James and only seconds after killing Lily. This suggests that whatever he had to do to create a Horcrux, aside from the murder itself, had already been done before coming to the Potters' house - because he hadn't had time to do it after killing James and Lily and before attacking Harry, unles it was just swigging a potion - and either he didn't need the Horcrux object with him for that stage, or he was planning to use something which was already in the house, or he brought something with him.

It also shows that it's possible for the spell or whatever to go wrong and put the Horcrux into the wrong object. I would suggest that Tom actually intended to make a Horcrux from Harry's death, so he came with whatever spell it was already primed and ready to run - or perhaps it was a potion he had just swallowed - and then when his attempt to kill Harry rebounded it split off the soul fragment(s) he had just made from killing Harry's parents, so that the Horcrux in Harry was made using Lily's death - which perhaps explains why it doesn't seem to have damaged him.

This idea is often stated as definite fact - generally by people who wish to exaggerate Hermione's already rather callous behaviour - because the centaurs of Ancient Greek myth were rowdy drunks who were reported to often carry away and rape human women. But within the fictional world defined by the Harry Potter books, the centaurs of Hogwarts are fully sentient flesh-and-blood beings, not animated Greek myths or beasts primarily ruled by instinct, so to assume that they must be rapists because their ancestors 2,500 years and 1,500 miles away were reputed to be rapists is like assuming that modern humans neccessarily carry out human sacrifice because the Ancient Greeks did. In fact, it's worse than that, because being part equine the centaurs may well have a much shorter generation time than humans, making Ancient Greece almost as far away, for them, as the Ice Age is for us.

drawing of chunky piebald centaur, with a bobbed tail bound with a blue-green ribbon

Plus, we are actually told that post-centaur Umbridge had mussed-up hair with twigs and leaves in it, but "otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed". It sounds as though she might have been literally "dragged through a hedge backwards", or thrown down on the forest floor, but not otherwise physically injured. Even allowing for the fact that if their human parts are human-sized and their equine bodies are gracefully in proportion, centaurs must be more pony than horse, and also that when equines mate they insert only the first few inches of the penis, the rest being just a kind of gantry to bridge the considerable gap between the stallion's hind quarters and the mare's, rape by something with equine genitalia would surely cause bruising and bleeding, which we see no sign of.

Umbridge is certainly psychologically damaged - but then she's been held prisoner by a mob of creatures about whom she has a phobia, like Ron with the Acromantulas, and she obviously has serious issues about control. If you take authorial intent into account, Rowling's bothering to state that Umbridge was physically unscathed apart from having messy hair seems to be there to make it clear Umbridge had not been seriously molested, despite the centaurs' historical reputation.

However, it may well be the case that Umbridge was enough of a bigot to assume that the centaurs were mere beasts ruled by instincts, and must therefore be rapists because their ancestors 2,500 years ago had been, and this may have been at the root of her phobia about them. Especially since, if they are very horse-like in their physiology, some of them may well have been wandering around with spontaneous erections.

Goblins are creatures from European folklore, traditionally believed to be fierce, greedy hoarders of gold and jewels. Warner Brothers, for reasons best known to itself, decided to turn the goblin bankers of Gringotts into a nasty anti-Semitic-cartoon version of Jewish bankers: wizened little old human men with big hooked noses, wire-rimmed spectacles, pallid skin and business suits. Fanart has generally followed suit - even though Rowlings's canonical goblins are very different

Rowling's goblins are a ferocious, quarrelsome warrior people about 4'6" tall (a head shorter than Harry when he is eleven)

pencil drawing of Griphook the goblin, Harry and Hagrid careering down a sloping, stalactite-lined tunnel on a little wooden gurney on rails, Griphook impassive, Harry gleeful and Hagrid covering his eyes

JK Rowling's own sketch of Griphook, Harry and Hagrid descending into the tunnels under Gringotts

with clever-looking faces, "swarthy" skin and thin and/or pointed beards, long spindly fingers, long feet and slanted black eyes with no whites to them. They speak a rattling, pebbly language. The clothes of the Gringotts goblins are not mentioned, other than those of the uniformed guards at Gringotts, who wear scarlet and gold - but it's fairly safe to assume, I think, that pin-striped city suits don't enter into it. In the Fantastic Beasts script Gnarlak is said to resemble a mafiosi and to be "well dressed, for a goblin", which implies that he is only moderately well-dressed and that most goblins aren't even that - definitely no pin-stripes, although of course this script hadn't been written when Warners was designing their version of the goblins.

The diet of Rowling's goblins is that of a woodland omnivore - "lumps of raw meat, roots and various fungi" - and the glittering marble halls at Gringotts seem to be window-dressing for the humans. Behind the scenes, their own buildings are gnarly caverns and tunnels.

Detail showing JK Rowling's own sketch of Griphook

Other than their eyes and beards, their facial features aren't described but Rowling draws Griphook as having a round bald skull, tall narrow pointed ears, arched brows and a nose which is high at the bridge, then drops a couple of inches almost straight down, then turns up and out into a needle point - like a budgeriegar's beak which has been turned up at the tip. His beard and moustache are thin, dark and so long that they blow back past his shoulders as the Gringotts cart hurtles down-slope.

Indeed, the fact that Rowling's goblins are so clearly not human makes what Warners has done with them worse. It must have taken real effort to take these fierce little folkloric aliens and turn them into Nazi-cartoon Jews, just because they work in a bank.

I go into this in more detail in my essay on British references in the Harry Potter books, but basically there is a lot of confusion about the value of magical versus Muggle money, and fanwriters tend to either wildly over- or under-estimate the value of a Galleon.

Rowling has said on her website that a Galleon is worth £5 in Muggle money, and in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them film script it says that £174m equates to about 34m Galleons, which indeed makes a Galleon just over £5. However, the conversion rates on the backs of the original 2001 printings of the Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them booklets have it as £3. This could reflect fluctuations in value over time, or it could mean that a Galleon is worth £5 in equivalent purchasing power but only £3 on the exchange rate when spent in the Muggle world. The latter would mean that wizard money would lose much of its value when converted to pounds, which would help to keep the wizarding world isolated.

To give an idea of scale, at the time that the Potter books are set in a loaf of bread would have been about 60p (with 100p in a £1), a paperback book maybe £5, a one-bedroom flat in a medium-priced area about £50,000, a bus fare for a journey of around five miles maybe £1.20. A normal annual salary for an office worker outside London at that time would probably have been about £19,000, but both salaries and prices were and are significantly higher in London.

What a Galleon cannot be, despite its portrayal in fanfic, is made of solid gold in any normal sense. An amount of even low-carat gold small enough to be worth only £3 in 1990s Muggle London would be so tiny that a gust of wind could blow it away, whereas we know that Gallleons are both large in diameter (the Muggle Mr Roberts at the World Cup compares them to hubcaps, although we know that's an exaggeration since they fit into pockets), and thick enough that, like real British pound coins, they can have writing around the edge. In addition, gold is heavier than lead, yet after the Triwizard Tornament Harry casually hands George a bag containing a thousand Galleons, and they are both easily able to lift it. Galleons must be either gold-coloured, like the Muggle £1 coin, or at a pinch gold-plated or made of a small amount of real gold which has been magically inflated in some way without gaining mass.

It is quite possible that JK herself initially vaguelly thought of the coins as real gold and silver, before she hsd to decide on an exchange rate. When Hermione hands out the DA fake Galleons in OotP, Ron "became very excited when he first saw the basket and was convinced she was actually giving out gold." But since it makes no sense for the coins to be actual gold, perhaps we can assume that wizwitches use "gold" loosely to mean mobney, just as Muggles sometimes call all money silver or brass.

On Pottermore, there's a reference to James "explain[ing] about Gringotts, and the fortune his parents had saved there, in solid gold." Again, Rowling probably is thinking of Galleons as real gold, but Pottermore is only canon if it doesn't clash with the published books, and the exchange rate of Gl1=£3 is printed on the FB and QTtA booklets. We must assume therefore that the Potters have ingots or golden goblets and plates in their vaults as well as coin.

The same issues apply to the idea that Sickles are made of real silver. The simplest explanation is that, like real British coins, they are simply gold and silver coloured.

Incidentally, and despite Jo Rowling's well-known problems with maths, the value of a Galleon as £5 appears to have been carefully selected. A Galleon is 493 Knuts, so if a Galleon is worth £5 in purchasing power a Knut is almost exactly 1p. It is very unlikely that this came about by accident - especially as Ron refers to something as "not exactly ten a Knut", echoing the real British expression "ten a penny".

There are some problems however with the prices of things in the wizarding world. The issue of what Ollivander lives on if wands only cost seven Galleons can be explained by saying that school wands are subsidized by the Ministry, and/or that Ollivander also makes specialist wands used by adults for particular tasks and that these are much more expensive. That we see owls being paid variously five Knuts and one Knut for the Prophet just suggests that, like the daily free British paper Metro, The Daily Prophet derives its income from advertising. However, unicorn horns at twenty-one Galleons and beetle-eyes at five Knuts a scoop and a pile of sweets for eleven Sickles and seven Knuts do seem improbably cheap - but we must remember that magical manufacturing processes are going to reduce the cost of producing things such as sweets, which will require fewer staff and less machinery than in the Muggle world,

This one has become common, espcially on Pinterest, but in fact is impossible. The snake at the zoo is specified as a boa constrictor, which means he or she is non-venomous and has a head shaped a bit like that of an earless pitbull. Nagini is venomous, so definitely not a boa - and her head is triangular, which means she's probably some kind of viper.

photo of loosely coiled fawn-coloured snake marked with choclate diamonds, looking towards the viewer

Bushmaster, Lachesis muta, from Phenomena & Medicine

photo of fat snake with a triangular head with pale eyes and a turned up point on the nose, lying in a series of left-and-right loops, and patterned in smudges of cream, soft brown and grey with a thin pink stripe along the spine

Hog-nosed pitviper, Porthidium nasutum, from Wikipedia: Porthidium nasutum

The fact that during the encounter with her at Bathilda Bagshot's place she bites Harry without poisoning him (that is, that she can choose whether or not to inject venom), and that her bite causes copious bleeding and damages tissue so that it is hard to heal also indicate that she is a viper.

She doesn't correspond exactly with any real species. Her great length (at least twelve feet) and diamond pattern suggest a bushmaster (Lachesis muta) but her triangular head and immense thickness in proportion to her length (her neck is described as being as thick as a man's thigh) suggest a Gaboon viper (Bitis gabonica) or a hog-nosed pitviper (Porthidium nasutum). But the longest known Gaboon viper was just under six foot and although their bodies are immensely thick, their necks are quite thin; and while hog-nosed vipers have both triangular heads and thick necks they are only two feet long.

Of course, the scene in which Nagini is described as having a neck as thick as a man's thigh is the one where she is set on to eat Charity Burbage's body. We don't see if she succeeds or not but it would be an impossible task for a twelve-foot snake, who might just about manage a piglet - so this suggests that Voldemort has engorged her, in which case we don't know how long she now is or how thick she might be when she's her proper length. So she could be a bushmaster - their heads are at least a little bit triangular - and normally about as thick as a man's forearm. Or she could be a hybrid of some kind - snake hobbyists do cross-breed vipers. Bushmasters are pitvipers, and they and other species of pitviper are so-called because they have a little pit between eye and nostril which enables them to sense infrared, which explains how Nagini could "see" Harry and Hermione through Harry's Invisibility Cloak.

This one is not so much fanon versus canon as fanon versus reality. There is a recurring theme in fanfics in which somebody, usually Snape, falls on such hard times in the wizarding world that they end up forced to choose between becoming a prostitute in Knockturn Alley or starving to death. The Diagon/Knockturn Alley complex is treated as an isolated bubble, divorced from the Muggle London which surrounds it, but if you know the area - and I knew it very well in the 1980s - this plot only works if you come up with a reason why the starving person can't just walk out through the door of the Leaky Cauldron and into the Muggle world. Especially if he's Snape, who knows the Muggle world so well.

[We actually see something like it in DH, with the Muggle-borns who really ought to know how to survive in Muggle London yet are stranded in Diagon Alley, so it's an idea which has some canon support. But the Muggle-borns have been deprived of their wands and so possibly can't get out through the hole in the wall that leads to The Leaky Cauldron. Or perhaps they go out but come back, drawn to the magical world.]

Any starving person entering Muggle London in the Charing Cross area where the Leaky Cauldron appears to be situated would find (in the 1980s, and probably still today) the following within a radius of about a quarter of a mile:

A catering van which handed out free hot soup and coffee to the homeless every evening.

white church with spire and pillared front, seen across bowl of fountain

St Martin-in-the-Fields from Trafalgar Sq, from Daily Photos & Frugal Travel Tips: the homeless are or used to be allowed to kip in the crypt

A church which allowed the homeless to sleep in its crypt.

A weekly open-air fruit-and-veg market from which food could easily be pilfered.

Hordes of tourists willing to give money to beggars and even more money to people who could busk with a convincing act - such as doing real magic but dressing it up to look like very good sleight-of-hand stage magic.

At least two very good and very, very cheap all-you-can-eat restaurants (one Italian, one Chinese) in which to spend the proceeds of busking. [If you want local colour, outside the Italian one there was sometimes a young woman who busked by doing a dance act with a python, whom she would allow you to stroke.]

A large Chinatown with its own internal rules where a willing worker would probably be able to get a job as a waiter or kitchen assistant without involving any tedious paperwork.

The wide shallow fountains of Trafalgar Square, littered with coins thrown in by people making a wish. You wouldn't make your fortune there because the denominations are usually small, but you could easily collect enough for a sandwich, especially if you had a wand and could Accio coins without having to get wet.

As a last resort, vast flocks of Trafalgar Square pigeons who could potentially be nobbled and put in a pie. These have largely been chased away nowadays, but there used to be vendors selling little cups of grain with which to feed the pigeons, who would then swoop down and perch on you.

You could probably manage to be fairly hungry in the Charing Cross area in the 1980s if you were unsuccessful at busking, since the mobile soup kitchen was only there in the evenings and the fruit market was only once a week, but actually starving to the point of desperation would take real effort.

Some fan-writers use "slavefics", in which one character is literally owned by another, as an excuse for a dubious scenario which borders on, or outright portrays, eroticized rape. If handled sensitively, however, slavefics serve a similar function to hurt-comfort fics. If the enslaved character expects to be hurt by the "owner", is totally in the owner's power, and the owner instead treats them with kindness and respect that demonstrates that the owner is in fact trustworthy, and helps break down the barriers between them.

I've never seen any slavefic, though, which really thought through the social implications. If the fic is set in the present day then they all seem to go "Everything is pretty-much the same, except there are slaves". And, OK, the wizarding world is its own self-maintained ghetto and about 250 years behind the Muggle world in many respects, but having slavery in the magical world to some extent entails acquiescence, however reluctant, by the Muggle-borns and half-bloods - unless your story is set in a pure-bloods-only enclave. Slavery in the Muggle world is even more problematic.

It's easy enough I suppose to imagine a slave scenario in the modern USA - you just have to assume that the outcome of the American Civil War was different. But if the US, or even part of it, still openly permitted chattel slavery then unless the rest of the world was also very different the US would be a pariah state, like North Korea - with all the consequences that might have for the political, economic and military history of the 20^thC.

You can probably get away with a slavefic set in the Soviet Union or its descendants quite easily but setting one elsewhere in Europe, and especially in the UK, is problematic. The owning of slaves hadn't been legal in England or Wales probably since the Dark Ages and was specifically banned in Scotland in 1778. The Slave Trade in British territories was abolished in 1807 - even though this was strongly against Britain's financial interests - after the second-known mass humanitarian protest campaign. [The first one, also in Britain, had been a few decades earlier and was against the ill-treatment of Jacobite prisoners of war.]

All slaves still working in British-ruled territory were freed in 1833, and throughout the 19^thC Britain put pressure on other countries to end slavery in their territory too. It's a little-known fact that some of the wars of conquest fought by the British Empire during the mid to late 19^thC were motivated not solely or perhaps even primarily out of expansionist greed, but in order to choke off the slave trade in other countries and liberate slaves (that was what Gordon of Khartoum was doing in Sudan), and in 1890 Britain handed the strategically important island of Heligoland to Germany in return for control of Zanzibar, where there was still slave-trading it wished to suppress.

Most strikingly, ever since 1740 Britain's unofficial second national anthem has been the one that has the chorus "Rule Britannia, // Britannia rule the waves; // Britons never never never // Shall be slaves". Any story set in the UK in which Muggles, Muggle-borns or half-bloods accept the existence of slavery without protest, therefore, requires either foreign conquest or a significant reworking of the entire culture.

This is another case of fanon versus reality. There seems to be a common belief among non-British fen that because it has old buildings Britain, or at least London, is stuck in some kind of a timewarp.

So, we have references to cobbled streets in London, although there are no cobbled London streets anymore, unless you mean streets paved with brick - and even those are very rare. There are a few real cobbled streets and lots of brick ones in Edinburgh and Falkirk, but not in London, for a long time.

Also, Sherlock Holmes-style pea-souper fogs, a.k.a. "smog", haven't been seen in London since the 1950s when the use of very smokey low-grade coal was banned. It was still the case in the 1980s that if you spent a day in central London and then blew your nose, a sort of black tar came out, but even that was no longer true by some time in the '90s. Heavy fog is actually extremely rare in London proper, although it's probably still common in the Harrow area to the north of the city. This is because the Harrow area consists of a wide flat plain with one enormous, steep-sided hill in the centre, and on top of that hill is a church with a very tall spire with a lightning-rod on top.

photo showing old-fashioned iron lamppost with glass cage-style top and crossbar, in front of a modern suburban scene

Early 20^thC gas-fired street light, showing the crossbars used to support the lamp-lighter's ladder, from Join me in the 1900s: STREET SCENES early 1900s

This arrangement tends to draw bad weather in and then send it circling around the base of the hill all night. I spent most of my childhood and teens in and around Harrow in the 1960s/70s and we used to get fog so thick that if I held my hand out at arm's length I could barely distinguish my fingers, and raging thunderstorms which passed overhead two or three times during the night as they circled round Harrow Hill and came back for another go.

There's somebody who's done a very nice clean, simple series of covers for the Potter books using silhouettes and the one for The Philosopher's Stone shows Dumbledore using his Deluminator to put out a streetlight -

Typical concrete street-light circa 1960, from Beno.org.uk: street scenes and street furniture - lamp posts

but the light is the old cage-topped type of gas-light we see in the illustrations of the lantern near Mr Tumnus's house in Narnia - in Surrey! It would be like having a covered wagon on Wall Street.

You do sometimes still see those old-fashioned lanterns preserved as an ornamental feature - there are several in central Falkirk, re-worked to run on electric light, and with the crossbars which used to support the lamplighter's ladder repurposed as a frame for hanging baskets of flowers. A hundred and fifty such lamps have been kept working near the Houses of Parliament as a historical curiosity, and I know that there were a few still working on gas in Edinburgh's Grassmarket up to the mid to late 1960s. But they are not something you would expect to find in a modernish estate in Surrey in the 1990s, unless they were plastic and you bought them from a naff garden-ornaments catlogue, or the whole street was very tweely retro, for which we have no evidence. [We know the estate the Dursleys live in is almost certainly fairly modern because the streets all have flower-themed names, which tells you the whole thing was pre-planned and built all at the same time, and there are few such planned estates earlier than mid 20^thC.] Modern British streetlights commonly look a bit like a concrete toothbrush with a bent neck.

Also, it's possible the practice survives in some private fee-paying schools, but most Britons haven't called the school holidays "the hols" since about the 1950s.

There is a widespread assumption in fandom that there are far too few black or gay students shown at Hogwarts, and many fen have accused the books of being racist as a result. However, this is generally due to people making erroneous assumptions about British population demographics based on an American model, and/or not thinking about the mathematical implications of how tiny the wizarding world is.

Rowling's estimate of the number of students at Hogwarts ranges from 280 to 1,000. I make it about 650, based on things like the number of Thestral-drawn carriages it takes to transport years 2-7, with Harry's year and the year below them being unusually small because they were conceived at the height of a war. In the 1990s the proportion of Britons who were black was about 2%, or one in fifty (since risen to one in thirty-three), so there should be around thirteen black students at Hogwarts in Harry's day, and twenty when Albus Severus starts at school, assuming the population-demographics of the wizarding world to be similar to those of Muggles. Given that we know the names of fewer than fifty Hogwarts students in Harry's time, and at least four of them (Blaise, Dean, Lee and Angela) are black, if anything the number of black students is on the high side.

[This does not apply to the Fantastic Beasts film which is set in New York and therefore really should have more black characters. This is Warners' fault, because JK's screenplay leaves the appearance of most of her characters open. Jacob Kowalski is probably Jewish and hence probably not black, and the Goldstein sisters are also probably Jewish and anyway one of them is blonde. Mr Bingley the bank manager is presumably also white, in 1920s New York. The other characters including Newt could be any ethnicity you like, but Warner's chose to make them white.]

As at the 1991 census the proportion of non-white Britons was 7%, which rose gradually during Harry's schooldays. There should be at least forty-seven non-white students at Hogwarts in Harry's day, including the thirteen black students, and the great majority of the other thirty-four should be of South Asian origin - Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis. About fifteen students should be Moslem, with the numbers increasing over time. Yet the only South Asian students we get to see are the Patil twins, who are probably Hindu (Patels usually are) - so it isn't black students who are under-represented, but Sikhs, Moslem Pakistanis etc.

Of course, the demographics of the wizarding world may not follow the Muggle one, and wizwitches could have a higher proportion of black citizens and a smaller proportion of Asians. But one certainly cannot accuse Rowling or Hogwarts of being racist for not having the same propotion of black students you would see in America, when it seems to have substantially more than the UK average. You could reasonably claim prejudice in relation to the lack of Moslems - but somehow American fen never seem to complain about that. [And yes, I know that most people nowadays, especially Americans, spell it "Muslim" but "Moslem" is how it's usually pronounced here - with a schwa in the first syllable and an 'e' in the second - and "Muslim" always looks too like "muslin" to me.]

Similarly,the proportion of Britons who self-identify as gay or bi is just under 2% (substantially higher in young people nowadays but that doesn't necessarily affect Harry's time at Hogwarts a quarter of a century ago), so there should be about twelve gay or bi students at Hogwarts at any one time, so on average six girls and six boys. That means that any gay or bi students looking for a same-sex partner with compatible sexuality will have on average five fellow students to choose from, of whom maybe two or three will be in vaguely the right age bracket, and only one or two will be in the same house. Given such a small field to choose from, the odds of finding somebody you really liked and fancied would be slim.

Realistically, therefore, we can expect there to be very few same-sex couples among the students - even if the proportion who admit to being gay or bi is higher than among Muggles. Most bi students will end up with other-sex partners and most gays will look to the Muggle world, because that's the only way they're going to meet enough prospective partners to have a decent chance of finding somebody they can stand sharing a kitchen with long-term.

Even for adults, it's not much better. If Rowling is right and there are only three thousand British wizwitches, there will be fewer than thirty gay or bi wizards and the same with witches. Even if I'm right and the population is about ten thousand, that still leaves fewer than a hundred gay or bi wizards and the same for witches. And that covers the whole age-range from cradle to grave, so they probably have about forty people to choose from who are even very vaguely the same age. Again, most gay wizwitches probably end up seeking partners in the Muggle world, because they couldn't find anybody in their own world who was unattached and whom they could stand.

Leaving aside for the moment the statistical blip which would be created by having more than two black students (Dean and Blaise) in Harry's year, some fanwriters have chosen to write Harry or his father as black, on the grounds that there's nothing in the books to say that they aren't. Genetically, however, it would be unlikely that Harry would end up with seriously dark skin and bright green eyes. Not impossible, I guess, since some of the Pathans have dark skin and silver eyes and I've seen photographs of dark-skinned but blue-eyed Africans, but unlikely, and indeed in PS Harry looks in the Mirror of Erised and sees his own face "reflected, white and scared-looking", in PoA when he argues with Vernon he is "white-faced and furious", when he was feeling feverish and unwell in OotP he "caught sight of himself in the window opposite; he was very white and his scar seemed to be showing up more clearly than usual" and in DH when Harry's scar has been hurting him Hermione says he is "white as a sheet", so his starting point cannot have been very dark - but at the same time whenever he is described as white he is stressed or unwell, so he could be darker when he is healthy.

The fact that Harry's mother was a redhead means that she would pprobably have had very pale skin. Not all redheads are Caucasian but the few that aren't are still mostly quite fair (and often very freckly) skinned, even if they are Afro or Afro-Caribbean. Also, the fact that Lily's sister is blonde makes it virtually certain that they are a white family. However, genes for dark colour are generally dominant to pale or "dilution" genes, so if James was dark it would be possible for Harry either to be as dark as his father or to be an intermediate shade.

photo showing a swarthy many in spectacles, wearing full Highland dress including a blue and green kilt, holding hands with a tall blonde woman wearing a floaty, off-the-shoulder pale blue dress

JK Rowling with her husband Neil Murray, from BlogQpot

If you accept unpublished authorial comment as canon, Rowling's own drawings show Harry as white, but she has also said that her idea of Harry's appearance is very like that of her current husband as a boy. Her husband is a white man by European standards, but in many photographs of the couple he appears browner than the average northern European, and may well be Hispanic in the British sense of being of ethnically Spanish or Portuguese origin. It is therefore perfectly canon-compatible, and even mildly canonical, to make James Hispanic or Greek or, in view of the long association between gypsies and Divination, a Romany. According to Pottermore James's mother's name was Euphemia, which is really a Greek name even though occasionaly used in Victorian/Edwardian Britain - so there is plenty of scope to say that James is half or a quarter Greek, and quite brown, so long as Harry himself is pale enough to be white when he is scared or unwell.

There is also no intrinsic reason why James shouldn't be black - we know that black purebloods do exist in Britain, because JK has said on Pottermore that the Shacklebolts are a pureblood family, as probably are the Zabinis - so long as Harry ends up pale enough to look white when stressed.

[I refuse to use the current American buzzword "people of colour", first because it's a linguistic atrocity - we don't say "people of freckles" or "people of blondeness", so why should skin colour be treated as if it was so much more important and defining? - and secondly because it makes no scientific sense. True white - which nobody is anyway, unless they're extremely ill and/or anaemic - is the combination of all colours, while the only humans on Earth who can actually be said not to be coloured are the small handful of truly black people who come from Equatorial Africa. The rest of us, pink, beige, cream, copper or brown or - in the case of the Saan - slightly khaki as we may be, are all coloured.]

The fact that Kingsley Shacklebolt seems to be black rather than just mixed race is actually a bit problematic. We're told that the Shacklebolts are one of the "Sacred Twenty-Eight" British pureblood families, so as at the 1930s they were considered a British family and, as far as they were letting on anyway, they had only bred with other magic folk for centuries. So, OK, the black community in Britain goes back a long way - Kingsley's ancestors could have been Roman legionaries or Elizabethan merchants. And, OK, racial type will always tend to be conserved, and only gradually diluted, because children imprint on their parents and therefore tend to choose sexual partners who look similar to themselves.

But the wizarding population is small - perhaps ten thousand in the UK - and would have been less in the past because the overall population was less. During the period covered by the Harry Potter books about two percent of the British population was black and if it's the same for wizards that's two hundred black witches and wizards of whom let's say sixty at most were purebloods - and the percentage of black Britons would probably have been smaller in the past, as well as the overall population size being lower. Go back to those Elizabethan merchants and there might have been twenty black purebloods in Britain, of whom maybe four were of marriageable age but not yet married. Even if the proportion of black citizens is higher among wizwitches than among Muggles, there still won't be more than eight or ten.

If Kingsley really isn't mixed race then his family have been black for long enough for any other ethnic type they may at some time have included to have been diluted out. Given the very small number of black purebloods they had available to choose a mate from, if they really have been in Britain a long time, and have been both black and pureblood for a long time, that suggests incest and/or a deliberate, planned preservation of racial purity (either by the Shacklebolts seeking only black partners or by the white pureblood community around them refusing to marry black partners) which sits ill with the wizarding world's apparent lack of concern with race in the Muggle sense.

It makes more sense, I think, to assume that the Shacklebolts are an African or Caribbean family (despite their English surname), or possibly African-Americans, who had not been in Britain for very long as at the 1930s. Shacklebolt could be the son of somebody who came to Britain as a child in the 1920s, from an area where black people marrying only black partners required no special effort because they were strongly in the majority. Then you only have to assume one generation of happening to choose a partner who looks like oneself from a population where there aren't many of those around, rather than a centuries-long campaign of racially-motivated cousin-marriages.

It has also been suggested that the book on the Sacred 28 may have used the term "British" to include families in the Empire - in which case Kingsley's family could have come to the UK more recently than the 1930s. It's certainly true that some, maybe most black families in the British Caribbean regarded themselves as British in the early to mid 20^th C. Nevertheless, Warners' decision to put Kingsley in African robes is annoying, because it makes him look like a foreigner instead of the black Briton with a bit of a London accent whom we meet in the books.

Snape's colouration, with sallow-pale skin, black hair and dark eyes, suggests that he is Hispanic (in the European sense), North African or Sephardi Jewish in origin. Native Britons with black hair generally have either dark skin and dark eyes or pale skin and pale eyes: John Nettleship's eyes were in fact a mid grey, and many black-haired, pale-skinned Britons have blue eyes. One exception is an odd population in the far north of Scotland who have black hair and black eyes and skin which is white (well, unpigmented) if protected from the light, but tans dark brown on the slightest exposure to sunlight. However, the only person I know from this group is bright albino-style pink where he isn't tanned, not fishbelly-pale.

Snape could, however, have come by his odd colouring through having some North Welsh blood, as there is a strong Hispanic streak in North Wales, derived either from shipwrecked sailors of the Armada or from Roman Legionaries.

In some of my own fics I've made Hermione part Jewish, based simply on the fact that "Granger" sounds as if it could as easily be German as British, many British Jewish families came here from Germany and a high proportion of British dentists have traditionally been Jewish. All we really know, however, is that her family clearly aren't devout Christians - she never goes home for Easter and they seem to regard Christmas as just an opportunity to ski - but by the same token, of course, she doesn't go home for Passover either. Rowling's own drawings show her as white with quite light brown hair.

In the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, however, Hermione is played by a black actress. If the play isn't canon with the books - and in my opinion it can't be, because it conflicts with the books too violently at too many major points - then a black Hermione in the play is certainly no more anomalous than the pretty Hermione and handsome, middle-aged Snape, brown-haired Ginny and blue-eyed Harry and brown-eyed, thirty-something Lily we see in the films.

However, JK Rowling has apparently said that the play should be regarded as canon. Personally I think this is one of those cases where her interview statements need to be discounted because they clash with what's in the books and the books have primacy, but if you want to try to shoehorn the play into book canon then a black Hermione is one if the things you need to square with the books. It's also interesting in itself to see how much leeway there is in canon for the backgrounds of various characters, especially since the fact that Dean Thomas's elaborate back story got edited out for length reasons has left the story without a fully-developed and definitely-known-to-be-black character.

[Dean was originally meant to be a major character like Luna or Neville. He believes that he is Muggleborn and that his father deserted their family when he, Dean, was a baby and just never came back, but in fact his father was a wizard and a hero of Vold War One, killed in combat with Death Eaters. But all this got edited out, along with Ron's anti-Voldie Slytherin cousin Mafalda Weasley.]

So, we have two conflicting bits of secondary canon - two of Rowling's own drawings, showing Hermione as apparently bog-standard white British, contrasted with her own statement at interview that there's nothing to say Hermione isn't black. What does primary canon say?

It's unlikely book Hermione is fully black or Asian because her hair is described as brown, not black - black people who have brown or mahogany-red hair do exist, but they're rare. But there's certainly nothing in the books to say Hermione isn't mixed-race, and her super-bushy hair could easily be Afro-frizzy.

Rowling herself has discounted her own drawings (which show a white Hermione) from canon, since she has said that canon doesn't specify Hermione's ethnicity, which is almost 100% true. We're told from the outset that Hermione has brown hair which is bushy - which pretty-much rules out her being Asian, since nearly all Asians have straight black hair - but we are not told whether her hair is light or dark brown, which allows some room for manoeuvre. In PoA and DH we're told she has brown eyes, which are compatible with really any ethnic group. Like Harry's, however, Hermione's skin cannot be a very dark brown because it is noticeably pale when she is stressed.

In PoA we're told that "Hermione's white face was sticking out from behind a tree" - although this was when she was watching Harry trying to coax Buckbeak into hiding among the trees, so she was very anxious and can be assumed to have been several shades paler than normal. Earlier in the same book she is "pink in the face" when Harry and Ron tell her off for talking to McGonagall about Harry's new broom. In GoF when the Dark Mark is set off at the World Cup Harry looks at Hermione and is "startled to see her face so white and terrified", which both rules out her being very dark brown and supports the idea that she maybe isn't usually very white - although as it's August that could just mean she has a tan. In HBP the Twins' trick telescope gives her "a brilliantly purple black eye" which contrasts with her skin sufficiently to make her look like "half a panda", and we're also told in DH that when she's tired she has visible purple shadows under her eyes, which in itself rules out her being the very dense black you see in people from e.g. Southern Sudan. On the other hand, at the end of the summer holiday at the start of PoA she is described as "very brown" - presumably she is sun-tanned but it does give us some leeway on how dark her base colour is, and tells us that she isn't Celtic sheet-white, because that kind of colour doesn't really tan.

Basically, canon Hermione cannot be a very dark colour but if you ignore the drawings, she certainly could be mixed-race caramel, North African or any lightish variant of "black", so long as she is pale enough to look white when scared and pink when annoyed/embarrassed. If you say that like Hermione at the start of PoA, the brown Hermione of the play has added a sun-tan to a naturally light brown complexion and that she has dyed her hair because it was going grey (or maybe in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, since the story is set in 2017), then the play could potentially be in the same universe as the books, as far as Hermione's ethnicity goes. Indeed that really is the least of the play's problems in re. its canon status.

In GoF Amos Diggory asks Arthur Weasley whether all the children he has with him are his. Since Arthur and Molly are both redheads, and presumably have very pale skin, this has been presented as evidence that Hermione cannot be even slightly dark, otherwise Amos couldn't have thought she was Arthur's child. But the party Amos is asking about includes Harry, with jet-black hair, and Hermione who, whatever colour her skin may be, definitely has brown hair, and two redheads cannot have a brown- or black-haired child without some very fancy genetic footwork. So Amos either knows nothing of genetics or doesn't know Molly is a redhead, and either way his wondering whether Hermione is Arthur's is not evidence that she couldn't be mixed race. Given how small the British Pureblood gene pool is, and that it includes the Shacklebolts and (probably) the Zabinis, there must be a lot of mixed-race Purebloods.

It's worth noting that for those characters who definitely are black - Kingsley Shacklebolt, Angelina Johnson, Lee Jordan, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini - their ethnicitiy is touched on only briefly, so basically any character whose ethnicity isn't specified and who hasn't been stated to have pale skin, hair or eyes potentially could be black. [Technically even the pale ones could be "black" in the sense of ethnically African but pale ethnic Africans, while they do exist, are seriously rare.] A particularly good candidate for a major black character in my opinion would be Poppy Pomfrey. Her appearance is unspecified and Pottermore implies that she retires in 2014, with Hannah Abbott-Longbottom then applying for her job. That gives Poppy an age-range which would fit with the idea that she could have been a Muggleborn child who came to Britain in 1948 on the Empire Windrush, the ship which brought migrants from the Caribbean in response to an NHS recruitment drive. Then you can say, she always wanted to be a nurse like her mum, and finding out that she was a witch didn't change that.

Flitwick and Moody also have definite possibilities - I don't think the colouration of either of them is specified except that Moody's natural eye is dark, and Flitwick's hair is white, which is probably due to age rather than genes. I rule out Pomona Sprout only because Rowling's own drawing of her shows clearly that she was based on a real person (the sculptor Phyllis Lewis, who taught a ceramics class at Rowling's school), who was very proud of being the model for Sprout, and was white, and is dead, and so it would seem disrespectful to change Sprout away from her original. Minerva I think needs to be white just because she is already a Protestant Scot with an Irish Catholic surname, so to make her black as well would seem like overkill, as far as involved back stories go.

Rolanda Hooch is probably a redhead (and therefore pale-skinned, whatever her racial type), since she has yellow eyes - or rather, she was a redhead before her hair went grey. That I'm aware of, I've only seen two yellow-eyed humans in my life, and they both had bright red hair. If, however, you want to assume that Hooch's yellow eyes are some kind of magical manifestation then there's nothing to say she couldn't be black - and if she was a really dark, Equatorial black with yellow eyes that would look fabulous. She probably isn't, because if she was her appearance would be so striking that it would probably be remarked on - but it's not impossible.

Anyway, book Hermione is of any ethnicity which is compatible with having bushy brown hair and looking white or pink when very stressed, film Hermione and Rowling's-own-drawings Hermione are white even when not stressed, and stage Hermione is black or half black. That means that the play isn't in the same universe as the films - even though it would probably be easier to make it fit with film canon than with book canon.

Alternatively, you could see the play as a play on all levels - that is, you could see it as telling a canonical story while being performed by Muggle actors and not by the canon characters they represent. In that case, the appearance of the characters and their costumes as seen in the play becomes divorced from their "real" appearance, and you can say that this story "really" happened to the film characters. Some people do the same thing with the films, seeing the books as "reality" and the films as a rather loose Hollywood retelling of those "real" events, related to the books in the same way that the film Titanic is related to the real-life shipping disaster on which it is fairly loosely based. At least one fanwriter has proposed that the Potterverse has a separate existence from any of the stories about it (except her own, for these purposes) and that the books themselves are Rita Skeeter's slightly romanticized and error-riddled account of that higher reality.

Despite what Rowling has said about the play being canon, however, it's hard to see a way in which anything even vaguely like the events of the play could have happened in the book universe, because it depends on major plot-points which flatly contradict the books.

Some fen have criticized as unrealistic the number of white Potterverse characters who do not have brown hair, since in England and the US brown hair is by far the most common colouring for whites. But while true black hair is rare among white Britons everywhere except Wales, very dark brown hair which most people would probably consider to be black, or at least blackish, is extremely common in Scotland, and blonde and red hair are fairly common. If you take a random group of twenty white Scots in any large city probably six of them will have black or near-black hair, three blonde and one or two red, and in the Highlands the proportion of non-brown hair will be even higher.

In fact, research has reportedly shown that one quarter of the UK population is carrying a single, recessive gene for red hair - and since that apparently includes the black and Asian communities, who are unlikely to be carrying red, the proportion among whites must be somewhat higher. Harry is certainly carrying red, and unless his father was noticeably brown and bequeathed brownish skin to his son, that means that Harry is at increased risk of developing skin cancer.

Incidentally, when Harry looks at a photo' of Kendra Dumbledore, Albus's and Aberforth's mother, it says that he "thought of Native Americans as he studied her dark eyes, high cheekbones and straight nose". We don't know how literally Rowling intends that to be taken but it's not impossibly that Kendra actually was a full- or more likely half-blooded Native American. In the Muggle world that would be unusual in Somerset but there's a definite Native American streak in the Orkney and Shetland Isles, because men from the islands went to work for the Hudson Bay Company and then came home with native wives. Given how freely wizwitches move around and that nearly all of them, wherever in the British Isles they come from, end up at the same school, there's nothing to say Dumbledore's father couldn't have married a woman from the Orkneys.

JK Rowling has said that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child should be regarded as canon, but it's difficult to see how it could be, or how anything even vaguely like it could happen in the book universe, because its plot depends heavily on things which flatly contradict the books.

To start off with, the Time-Turner in the play is nothing like the one in the books. In the books, you turned the Time-Turner over, one turn per hour, and it took you back a few hours but no more than that, and then to get back to the time you started from you just had to live through the extra time you'd gained. In the play, the Time-Turner can jump you back for more than twenty years (without having to turn it two hundred thousand times), but you can only stay for a few minutes, after which you jump forwards again to the time you started from.

In the books, you cannot normally alter time. You can only go back and take action in situations where you don't already know what happened, or you do know and know your own actions (even if you don't recognise yourself), and once you've done whatever it was you find out that you had always done it, even if you hadn't realised it before. So, Harry and Hermione believe that they have just heard Macnair chopping Buckbeak's head off, but then they go back in time and rescue Buckbeak and they hear Macnair whacking the fence with an axe in his frustration, and it turns out that that was what they had heard before, and it had always been the case that they had untied Buckbeak and walked him away.

The first time around the sequence of events that night, Harry sees what he believes to be his father's ghost, standing on the far side of the lake and casting the Patronus that drives away the Dementors: then he uses the Time-Turner to go back in time and finds that he himself is the figure which the earlier him had already seen, so he is following time around a loop and that loop in time has always existed. One of the great pleasures of PoA was that the time-loop had been so beautifully thought-out.

In the play, however, using the new model of Time-Turner, it is possible to go back and change events so that the future you came from no longer exists. No attempt is made to explain what happens if you create a "temporal paradox" - that is, if you change the future in a way which makes it impossible for you to have come back and changed the future, resulting in an action which you both have and cannot have performed.

OK, the Time Turner in the play is supposed to be a new design, so we can accept I guess that actually it's an almost completely different thing which shares nothing with the device in the books except its name. Hermione does tell Harry in PoA that "Nobody's supposed to change time, nobody! [cut] Professor McGonagall told me what awful things have happened when wizards have meddled with time ... loads of them ended up killing their past or future selves by mistake!" For the past self to kill the future self would not create an anomaly - the future self would simply arrive back in the future as a corpse. For the future self to kill the past self would create a temporal anomaly. We're not told what happens then, except that it's horrible.

Pottermore goes further, perhaps to pave the way for the kind of Time Turner seen in The Cursed Child.

As our investigations currently stand, the longest period that may be relived without the possibility of serious harm to the traveller or to time itself is around five hours. We have been able to encase single Hour-Reversal Charms, which are unstable and benefit from containment, in small, enchanted hour-glasses that may be worn around a witch or wizard's neck and revolved according to the number of hours the user wishes to relive.

All attempts to travel back further than a few hours have resulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved. It was not realised for many years why time travellers over great distances never survived their journeys. All such experiments have been abandoned since 1899, when Eloise Mintumble became trapped, for a period of five days, in the year 1402. Now we understand that her body had aged five centuries in its return to the present and, irreparably damaged, she died in St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries shortly after we managed to retrieve her. What is more, her five days in the distant past caused great disturbance to the life paths of all those she met, changing the course of their lives so dramatically that no fewer than twenty-five of their descendants vanished in the present, having been “un-born”.

Finally, there were alarming signs, during the days following Madam Mintumble's recovery, that time itself had been disturbed by such a serious breach of its laws. Tuesday following her reappearance lasted two and a half full days, whereas Thursday shot by in the space of four hours. The Ministry of Magic had a great deal of trouble in covering this up and since that time, the most stringent laws and penalties have been placed around those studying time travel.

Evidently it is possible to create a temporal anomaly in the book universe, and according to Pottermore it's possible to go back a very long way and then snap forwards again, and to change time. This still doesn't match up with what happens in the play, though. Pottermore says it's dangerous to go back more than five hours; it's possible (though undersirable) to go back a long way and then stay for days; when you snap forwards again you have aged through the intervening years even if you didn't consciously live them; and if you change the timeline a lot of people - not just the person who did the time-travelling - are aware of it.

In the play the boys are able to go back over twenty years and then snap forwards again, but they can only stay for five minutes and they don't end up twenty years older (possibly the five-minute time-limit protects them from that). When they change the timeline nobody except the time-traveller is aware of it.

A large part of the plot of the play depends on it being possible to brew Polyjuice in a few hours, despite it having been firmly established in the books that it takes a whole month to prepare. Also (although this last is only a minor plot point) no explanation is given as to why time-returned Scorpius can see through the Fidelius on the Potters' house at Godric's Hollow, although he isn't a family member and hasn't been let into the secret by the Secret Keeper.

Then there are the characters. A black Hermione is a bit of a stretch, canon-wise, given how often her face is described as white in the books, but can just about be shoehorned in, and having her become Minister for Magic is a nice touch - although it does make you wonder what happened to Kingsley, the post-war Minister according to interview canon, who was surely not old enough to retire, and seemed like a very competant candidate. [This incidentally means that making a putatively black Hermione Minister for Magic is not an advance for racial equaity, since it entails dumping the definitely black Kingsley - in fact since play!Hermione only ended up black because a black actress did the best audition, the original plan was presumably to replace a black male Minister with a white female one.] But we're supposed to believe that this Hermione can hear that a list of ingredients needed to make Polyjuice have been stolen, and not recognise that they are the ingredients for Polyjuice, despite having stolen them herself to make that very potion in second year. Thick!Hermione is far more of a problem, canon-wise, than black!Hermione - although I suppose she could have been Obliviated.

Snape is well handled, although his tone of voice is slightly off, but Harry is suddenly a whiny bully who pulls rank and threatens Minerva to force her do his bidding against her will, and Minerva doesn't tell him to go take a long walk off a short plank. He has acquired a raft of phobias of which there was no sign in the books [Harry let's-sneak-about-the-castle-in-the-middle-of-the-night Potter is afraid of the dark? Really?] and has a difficult and hostile relationship with young Albus Severus, despite the loving understanding he showed him in the Epilogue. Ron has been reduced to a mere buffoon whose sole purpose in the plot seems to be to be mocked and humiliated by the other characters, and Petunia has been stripped of the odd moments of sensitivity she shows in the books, and turned into a heavy cartoon villain.

We are required to believe that Ron believes that a woman of twenty is the girlfriend of a boy of twelve, and doesn't even wonder about it. We are required to believe that Harry now believes in prophecy so absolutely that he will bully McGonagall into helping him to destroy his son's friendships because of a prophecy.

Above all we're supposed to believe that Cedric Diggory, the parfait gentil knight of the books, generous and honourable, is so petulant and spiteful that he can be turned into a murderous Death Eater by a single setback - just because in the altered timeline he is cheated out of Triwizard victory in a way he finds humiliating. I suppose the point being made is "Decent people can become Death Eaters" but if Cedric, with the character established for him in the books, became a Death Eater it would surely be for what seemed to him noble reasons, such as because he was worried about climate change and thought that a wizard takeover could fix it - he wouldn't suddenly turn into a monster out of a mere fit of pique, as he does in the play. The message in fact seems to be "There is no such thing as a good person - everybody is vicious if you scratch the surface".

Then there's the whole business of Voldemort deciding he wants an heir, and impregnating Bellatrix, and Bellatrix supposedly being eight months pregnant in the Malfoy manor scene and nobody noticing or commenting on it. The first problem with this is that Voldemort wants to live on in his apartment, not in his descendants, but I could see him wanting a child of his body in order to possess it and use it to renew his physical form - although in that case he would probably prefer a male. And, OK, Bellatrix is in love with him and the fact that he treats her like dirt and publicly humiliates her at the start of DH doesn't necessarily rule out his impregnating her six weeks later. Even the fact that the way in which he surrounds himself almost exclusively with males suggests that he is probably either gay or sexless isn't insurmountable, with magical assistance - even if the whole scenario does read like a bad fanfiction.

But he's half reptile at this point - does he even have human genitals or (more importantly) gonads? And the body he is using has been made from Nagini's venom, his father's bone, Harry's blood, Peter Pettigrew's hand and - JKR has hinted both in the books and at interview, although never outright stated - an aborted or stillborn foetus probably taken from Bertha Jorkins. Whatever small amount of DNA might have been left in Tom Riddle Senior's more-than-fifty-years-dead bones would share half of its all-Muggle genes with his son, but the main contributers to Voldemort's genetic makeup at this point were surely Peter and Bertha, and any child he fathered should be theirs. If you want the damn' play to be canon I think you have to assume that Bellatrix made herself pregnant without Tom's involvement, using a lock of his hair, with roots, acquired during Vold War One when he still had his original body

Another minor point of canon confusion is the fact that the Hogwarts students in the play wear the uniforms from the films, which are not compatible with descriptions in the books. Yet, the play cannot be in the same universe as the films, because of the major change in Hermione (unless you assume some sort of magical transformation or glamour, or treat the play as being at a remove from the story it is telling). The film-type uniforms don't in themselves rule out the play being in the book universe, but you'd have to assume that the uniforms have changed since 1998 when the books ended - and in my opinion it would be a disturbingly retrograde step for Hogwarts to have moved from the adult style of the students' robes in the books to something so consciously childish. Although I suppose you could just see it as the uniforms becoming more Muggle.

The script isn't all bad. If you can ignore the fact that it isn't compatible with the books, the plot is clever and quite well-thought-out in itself. It shows two Slytherin boys (Albus Severus and Scorpius) in a very positive light. It gives Draco some good character development and shows him being cautiously friends with Harry. It shows a Snape who survived the final battle and who then spent twenty years still risking his life for the Order, despite living under Voldemort's rule; who sacrifices himself again not once but twice, dying horribly in the altered timeline in order to restore the timeline in which he knows he died twenty years ago; who says that although he started to fight for the Order for Lily's sake, over the years the cause has become his own. It's also interesting that what changed the timeline so drastically that Voldemort won was that DeathEater!Cedric killed Neville, thus showing that Neville was as vital to the victory and as much the prophesied child as Harry.

Presumably Rowling herself has approved all these points. However she presumably also authorized whiny!bullying!Harry, thick!Hermione, insane!DeathEater!Cedric and all the other things which are wrong with the story, and it would be cheating to cherry-pick only those few things which one likes.

If you can somehow cram it into canon then the plot itself provides a new way of restoring to life any character who died in canon after the end of the Triwizard Tournament. You just have to assume that when they put the timeline back at the end of the play, it ended up still with some differences which mean that Snape, or Remus, or Hedwig, or whoever you choose survived.

Fanon versus canon:

how much of what we think we know about the Harry Potter universe owes more to fanfiction than to the books themselves?