Harry Potter

The World of Harry Potter

Read Michael's Take on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at the SF-Fandom Harry Potter Forum.

The world of Harry Potter is really our world, but we Muggles don't realize that magic folk like Harry and his friends Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley are living among us. That is the premise behind J.K. Rowlings' fantastic Harry Potter books.

When you write fantastic fiction, you have to decide where to set your stories. Should it be on another planet? In the past? In the future? Or on an alternate Earth, similar to ours but not quite the same? Or can it simply be that your story takes place in the present time, on the present Earth, in an inconspicuous way which is overlooked by the vast majority of the world's population?

Rowling's premise is that our Earth is shared by two civilizations, one very acutely aware of the other, but the other (larger, more populous) civilization at best is only vaguely aware of the smaller one.

Harry Potter spends most of his childhood living in a modest suburbab home in industrial England. His world is full of television, radio, motor cars, buses, trains, airplanes, and books. He may have heard a few fairy tales or read some magical adventure stories, but most of his exposure to magic is in his own imagination. He is completely unaware of the vast catalogue of mystical creatures such as Griffons, Basilisks, Pixies, and phoenixes.

To the Muggle civilization, these are all imaginary creatures. They, and witches on flying broomsticks, don't really exist. But to the people who are born with the gift of "magic", the world looks wholly different. Dragons are real, and were-wolves exist, and vampires really do drink human blood.

Rowling doesn't tell us how the two worlds came to exist as one, or where the magic-folk first arose. She doesn't explain how things as large as trolls and giants can have existed alongside normal human-kind throughout history, except to imply that what we deem to be folklore and mythology are derived from Muggle glimpses of the magical world.

The reader must infer that, perhaps, when there were more monsters and perhaps fewer safe havens for magic folk, Muggles had to endure occasional or even frequent disruptions of their lives by witches, wizards, and monsters. And so, when the Muggles began hunting down the witches and wizards, perhaps thinking they were responsible for all the magical mayhem in the world, it must be that the witches and wizards began banding together for their own protection.

Over 1,000 years ago Godric Gryffindor, Salazar Slytherin, Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw founded Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, apparently the first of its kind in the world. The founding of Hogwarts may mark the beginning of the organization of the wizard world, which stands apart from Muggle life. As they became more organized, wizards and witches must have realized they could live among the Muggles by avoiding direct contact with them.

The conscious decision to share the lands with Muggles, rather than to seek out and occupy vacant lands for themselves, must have been taken in order to avoid allout war. If that is the case, either the majority of witches and wizards felt they could not hope to sustain, let alone win, such a war, or else they believed they would have to destroy Muggles or somehow completely dominate them. It seems unlikely the Wizarding world was that powerful.

So, rather than establish separate kingdoms which would be subject to invasions and conflicts with Muggle kingdoms, the witches and wizards found a way to become unnoticed. But they must also have realized that they would have to contain the monsters. It wouldn't do to have trolls and giants tromping around the landscape, reminding everyone that there were also witches and wizards.

Hence, the Minsitry of Magic (in England) and its counterparts in other countries must have been established as a means of organizing both the Wizarding world and the means to contain all the magical creatures which Muggles knew about. By striving to protect the Muggles from magical creatures, the Wizarding world took on an immense responsibility. That responsibility may be why the Muggle governments came to accept the Wizarding governments.

So, Harry Potter's world encompasses both the Muggle landscape in which monsters and witches and wizards are not real and the magical landscape in which witchcraft and wizardry and magical creatures are normal, everyday experiences.

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