Hmm... Interesting! A cute little charity book, sweet and sassy and mildly political.

But that's not what we're here to talk about!

1) Page one. The check-out list. How did Marcus, Cedric, A., Terry, and Ernie check out a school library book over the summer? Cedric, for instance, lives near Ottery St. Catchpole, hundreds of miles from Hogwarts, and yet he's got the book from 22 June - 3 July.

2) If Quidditch has always been a co-ed game and England even has an all-witch team, why are 75% of Hogwarts Quidditch players guys? And why do the only girls play for the "good" houses Gryffindor and Ravenclaw?

3) The copies of medieval and Rennaissance wizard correspondence have not only been corrected for spelling but also for language. Many of the words and phrasings supposedly used by Goodwin, Gertie, and Modesty are very modern. I don't have an O.E.D. with me, but I'm sure that "idiot" has only been hurled as an insult for the last 250 years or less. The same nit applies to the nineteenth-century newspaper articles.

Re: Nit 1

IIRC, Hogwarts lets out at the end of June. And some people do return their library books before the due date.

But that book is checked out by someone else in mid-July, the beginning of August, and mid-August. That book is in and out of that school library all summer!

Some students may stay at the school over the summer. If you remember when Harry falls through Tom Riddles diary in the Chamber of Secrets. He asks Professor Dippet if he can stay at the school over the summer holiday. There probably are students like that at the modern Hogwarts just in others houses we haven't heard about.

If you remember when Harry falls through Tom Riddles diary in Chamber of Secrets. He is trying to make arangements with the Headmaster Professor Dippet. There are probably students who stay through the summber holidays but just in other houses at the modern Hogwarts. We just haven't heard about them.

I guess so. It just seems like a lot of people are checking out school library books over the summer.

Maybe the school's library stays open over the summer, and students can request books via owl post? Seems like they get assigned an awful lot of homework over their breaks, and probably they would need to do some reading not in their textbooks. Sure, there's probably wizarding libraries, but what about Muggle-born students like Hermione?

Re: Nit 2

Sports do tend to be guy dominated. Also, I don't think all the players of Slytherin and Hufflepuff were specified, so for all we know, there are female players on those teams.

Regarding the Golden Snitch, I recall once hearing about a game from somewhere in South America (Argentina, I think) whose name is Spanish for duck. It sounds like a cross between handball and polo, but a live duck used to be used. For all you concerned animal lovers, nowadays they use a leather ball with handles. I don't think it was necessarily killed, though obviously it's not much good for the duck.

OK Matt... I'll buy that.

Gordon, you're right about Hufflepuff, but it does specify that Slytherin is an all-male team.

Yes, but don't forget that Slytherin is evil!

A long-after-the-fact reply to Kira's third nit...

I don't know the context in "Quidditch Throughout the Ages," never having read it, and I don't doubt that there are plenty of examples of anachronistic language, as it's pretty hard to write something sounding convincingly early-modern, especially in prose (I'm a fairly advanced student of Renaissance lit and I have a hard time with it). However, it doesn't hurt to bring up quotes:

"Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars" (Milton, Paradise Lost, first published in 16...something; I'm more of a Tudor/early Stuart person...1671, I think)

and, even more famously,

"It is a tale / Told by an idiot" (Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1606 [published 1623])

A regular walking OED, I am... ;-)

In faith, good madam, 'tis difficult to write as Master Marlowe did. We beat our petty brains about it, with little to show but some snatches and scratches of little worth. Yet from a scholar whose grasp of the historical is otherwise so commendable, this anachronism smacks of little effort.

In other words, you're quite right and my lousy attempt proves it, but the woman didn't even try! Well, okay, she tried, but not as much as a geek like me would have. Which isn't bad (can you imagine entire segments written like that dense nonsense?), it's just a nit.

You're also right about "idiot." My point was that it used to be a purely descriptive of a halfwit, a layman, or a clown, but was not widely used as an insult until later. But now I have checked the OED and I see that it was also used as an insult as early as 1375.

Oh, I believe your nit, as I said -- just quibbling about your example. (Alas, I don't have an OED on hand either, and I'm not sure U-C gives us free access to the online version like U-M did.)

Lea, I'll look it up for you on Friday morning when I'm at the school library.

According to the book, no one, wizard or Muggle, is capable of unassisted flight. The book went on to say that an Animagus could change into a bat and fly, but (paraphrase) "would have the mind of a bat, and therefore...."
This makes no sense at all. If Prof. McGonigal had the mind of a cat while in cat form, would she be capable of consulting a map? If Peter had spent 12 years as a rat with the mind of a rat, would he even remember that he was once a wizard? Would Sirius have the slightest interest in Harry while roaming around as a dog with a dog's mind?
And what could Rita Skeeter possibly do if she only had the mind of a beetle?
If the book were as old as FANTASTIC BEASTS is (some fifty editions so far, I believe) one could say that the Animagus Wizards have learned to keep their human minds intact in the years following the publication of QUIDDITCH THROUGH THE AGES, but QUIDDITCH seems to be a relatively recent book, and besides, why would anyone want to transform him- or herself in the first place if they knew they would lose their minds in the process?

Maybe it should say "have the body of a bat" which makes a lot more sense. A bat mind in a human body couldn't fly.

Padawan Observer, what the book was trying to convey is that no wizard could consciously fly without assistance (such as a broom), even if said wizard was an Animagus and could turn into a winged animal, the wizard would then apparently lose his mental powers and only be able to think like a bat.

Which actually brings up an interesting aside: how would they change back?

I read this book, and is says something like "the few animagi who can turn themselves into a bird are blessed with flight, but they are few in number.."
The part about humans flying unassisted refers to untransformed humans.
The part about "losing your mind" is if someone else transfigures you into a bird or bat.

from Harry Potter and the Socerer's Stone, pg. 25:

"Dudley's gang had been chasing him as usual when, as much to Harry's surprise as anyone else's, there he was sitting on the chimney...Harry supposed that the wind must have caught him in mid-jump."


This may be a foreshadowing of things to come for Harry and that "Quidditch Throughout the Ages" may need to be updated in the next two years.

The title on my copy is 'Quidditch Through the Ages'. Is the US edition different?

Plus in book seven, Voldemort can fly unassisted.