The Terrible World-building Of Harry Potter Maps

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#possiblehistory #harrypotter #maps #badmaps #danielradcliffe #jkrowling
But PH, why did you make a Harry Potter video? I... don't know...

J.K. Rowling wrote a neat set of books during the early 2000s, called Harry Potter. These Harry Potter books were fun as they allowed you to emerse yourself in a fantastical world.

But unlike a series like Lord of the Rings where J.R.R. Tolkien has so meticulously planned out the entire world most of the worldbuilding didn't even make it to the books, J.K. Rowling has a more "live and let live" attitude to the Harry Potter world, making it very difficult to find consistencies between the larger worldbuilding. Sometimes the Harry Potter universe has 500 million wizards, sometimes 260 thousand, depending on when you ask.

So apparently, according to J.K. Rowling, the entire world of Harry Potter has a total of 11 wizarding schools to fit the entire world into, and attempting to divide the world into just 11 categories is a recipe for disaster. Yet we're still going to try today, so strap in!

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[possiblehistory]

Why did I make a video about Harry Potter maps on my history channel? I don't know, but I hope you all still enjoyed it anyway as a fun extra release, don't worry, the regular alternate history video will still release on Saturday.

As always, thank you for watching, and to support the content consider leaving a like and a comment to help against the algorithm, and subscribe for weekly history content!

[Marshmellow]

She honestly could have said most countries have their own school, named like 5 and left the rest up to the audience’s imagination and most people would have been cool with it.

[hicetnunc]

There's a lot of sketchy worldbuilding going on in Rowling's work, but the "1 in 10 is a wizard" number has got to be the most ridiculous, if that's really from her. There's just no way the wizards would have to keep their world secret if every 10th person going around had magic powers.

[leaderunithl]

I’ve seen someone online argue just how much of a missed opportunity this was for worldbuilding. It seems to be a universal thing in the HP universe that wizard schools lag severely behind the muggle world. Imagine a school in Austria that only enrols wizards living in the 1541 borders of the HRE; or imagine wizarding schools acting as refuge for otherwise extinct peoples, a school in Greece that openly worships the Olympians, or one in Egypt that still venerates Amun-Ra.

Instead of just 11 around the world, there could’ve been hundreds in just Europe or Africa alone, each of them a microcosm of millennia old traditions in their area. You could even have schools in places like Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley that are so old that no one really knows _when_ they were formed.

[SickegalAlien]

What's most amazing to me, is that Rowling absolutely didn't have to do it.
She looked at it, thought for a while, and specifically decided "yeah, I'm going to step on the rake."

[Frenchaboo]

I live in Eastern Europe and I was already questioning Rowling when I was maybe 12, feeling gaslit by the fact she kept describing BULGARIA as a cold decrepit country where people need to wear fur coats and hats, and for some damn reason the school has a super Germanic name. Bulgaria is literally the golden coast of Eastern Europe, peak summer destination for good weather and beach parties lmfao.

[biropgrules]

Frankly, the way the actual books implied every nation just had their own schools(With the three we knew by name being specifically referred to as the greatest in europe) made perfect sense.

[jorikrouwenhorst]

Honestly seeing both maps makes me think most wizards and witches are probably home schooled.(seriously putting Dutch students going to the French one is just insulting)

[dogski]

This is a part of a greater problem with Rowling’s world-building philosophy. Instead of saying “of course there’s many, but here’s a few examples” she goes “yeah, but only a handful exist and I came up with them in 15 minutes”. She didn’t say “of course there’s many Jewish students at Hogwarts - Anthony Goldstein for example- Hogwarts welcomes all” she just said “yes, there’s a Jewish student, his name is Anthony Goldstein, no I will not list more”. Same thing with these schools.

[frankenstein]

Rowling's attempts to expand Harry Potter to a worldwide scenario make me really question her geographic and cultural knowledge outside of Britain.

[Banter]

According to each dormitory containing 5 pupils if I remember rightly, times 2 for both gendered dorms, times 7 for the 7 years, times 4 for the houses, brings the hogwarts student total to 280.

J.K. Wasn’t kidding when she said she wasn’t good at maths.

[iansahleen]

Imagine giving Indian and Chinese kids magical powers, making them go to the same school and not expecting nothing to go horrificly wrong

[NosebleeddeGroselha]

Having 11 schools for the entire world and mixing up a bunch of people who shouldn’t be mixed up is the most “A British person organized it” thing in the world

[DisneyDahling]

Fun fact: The official Japanese Harry Potter merch store uses the Japanese school name but it's changed to "Mahou Dokoro" instead of "Mahou Tokoro" because it is gramatically very weird, and also I think most Japanese people don't know it's supposed to be a school name because it sounds incredibly stupid. The pronunciation that JK wrote is also wrong.

[adrianguevara]

I just hate that in the cauldron of fire we're exposed to much more about the wizarding schools with the tri-wizard tournament and mentions of a brazilian school, because everything pointed to roughly every country having a school and then she comes up with this random idea of only 11 schools in the whole world

[lnt]

Putting China, Korea and Japan into one school for historical reasons is absolute madness to me

[baguettegott]

Rowlings Worldbuilding is so funny. It's so incredibly successful at creating a mood and an atmosphere (for some time there just about every human I knew felt at home in hogwarts), and so unfathomably horrible at LITERALLY everything else. Nothing makes sense, nothing is consistent, and most of the time it falls immediately apart when you try to extend it past the walls of Hogwarts (let alone the borders of the UK).

[tuliofaustino]

just to leave a note that in the portuguese sense, the translation "castelobruxo" means that the castle is the wizard

[georgeiii]

Imagine the language barriers in the schools in Africa, SA, Oceania, Asia, and Western Europe. Also, whilst schoolchildren in Britain have to take an 8hr train trip to get to Hogwarts (something that already doesn't make sense because it relies on all wizards living in London), kids in Africa or South America have to travel across a continent.

[nikoliniminizoaki]

Personally the way I understand the whole "11 schools" is "the 11 schools the anglo-centric magical government recognises", because it feels really stupid that countries with different religion, language and traditions would hold the exact same magical standards as Hogwarts does, to me it makes more sense of the other 10 schools to be sister schools of sorts. There's many more schools, many are homeschooled, they just don't recognise the rest as of any significance.