Back to WritingWizards Everywhere and When
When Rowling said that all Muggle-born wizards and witches have a magical ancestor somewhere in the family tree, she effectively confirmed that magic, if it can be said in her world to be genetic, is a multiple-gene characteristic. A single-gene model does also permit a recessive gene to lie dormant for several generations, granted, and one can postulate that the wizard community could be a sub-population with a very pronounced tendency for that particular recessive gene to be expressed. Things like that happen in the real world.
But if magic is a single recessive gene in the Potter world, it doesn’t make sense for as many Muggle/wizard pairings to result in magical children as evidently happens. (In fact, of the known Muggle/wizard pairings, every one of them resulted in 100% magical children.) Here is why:
- If there is a counterpart dominant “Muggle” gene (M) that overcomes the presence of the magic gene (m), then in fact, the only way a Muggle/wizard pairing could result in any magic children is if the Muggle partner is Mm, one dominant Muggle gene and one recessive magic gene, and that pairing only results in 50% wizard children rather than the 100% that we see in the books. The pairing is Mm (carrier Muggle) x mm (wizard) = 50% Mm, 50% mm. Incidentally, this is also the only way that a single-gene model allows Muggle-born wizards to be born; a pair of carrier Muggles results in 50% Mm (carrier Muggle), 25% MM (non-carrier Muggle), and 25% mm (wizard).
- If the magic gene does not have a counterpart dominant Muggle gene to overcome its expression, then it shouldn’t be able to skip generations in phenotypes. If it’s there, it’s expressed. There should be no Muggles carrying it and therefore no Muggle-born wizards. The pairings are mm (pureblood wizard) x 00 (Muggle) = 100% m0 (halfblood wizard), and m0 (halfblood wizard) x 00 (Muggle) = 50% m0 (halfblood wizard), 50% 00 (Muggle).
Essentially, with a single-gene model, we can have Muggle-born wizards permitted or we can have 100% magical offspring from wizard/Muggle pairings, but not both. The incompatibility of the single-gene hypothesis with the Potter universe indicates very strongly, if not definitely, that magic is a multi-gene trait. This ties in well with the presence of certain characteristics, such as Parseltongue, that most wizards do not have, but are known to be inherited. In a multiple-gene setup, there may be any number of “Muggles” walking around who have some portion of the required genotype to express magic, but not the whole thing.
And too, we must remember that Rowling’s wizards have been secluded from the general population for about 320 years and mostly married amongst themselves. This resulted in a very high rate of duplication in a child’s magic genes, since children would inherit magic from both parents, usually. Such children could also marry Muggles and expect to have all magic children themselves (though these children could not have the same expectation in a marriage with a Muggle) because of the gene duplication.
Before seclusion, however, wizards mixed freely (for the most part, though families like the Blacks probably still isolated themselves). The magic genes were spread throughout the population, making it less likely that a Muggle/wizard marriage would result in all magical children, as the wizards themselves tended to have less completeness in their magic gene sequences for being of mixed ancestry, and much less duplication of genes, unless both parents just happened to contribute a copy of a particular magic gene. (In this case, the Blacks actually had a perfectly valid point that marrying with Muggles could dilute the magic strain and result in more non-magical children born.) But this also resulted in there being a Muggle population with apparently quite a lot of carriers of pieces of the magic genotype. If two of them with the combined genes necessary to complete the sequence paired off, there could be a Muggle-born wizard. The bit in Deathly Hallows about the Department of Mysteries’ research that “magic is only passed on when wizards reproduce” turned out to be correct in essence, though undoubtedly the Death Eater Ministry distorted the actual findings, which would have been that magic is only passed on when people carrying the magical genes reproduce. And those genes had to get into the Muggle gene pool originally through a witch or wizard.
The British Isles, it seems, have a rather high concentration of witches and wizards. This is no surprise, actually. Rowling has based her world very strongly on folklore and legend, and the British Isles have a lot of wizards and magical creatures featuring in their national legends. I would be willing to bet that not all areas of the world have a similar concentration. Some would have higher concentrations and some lower.
American Witches and Wizards
Many fan-fiction writers seem to want to have American characters, for instance, but I have serious doubts that there would be that many American witches and wizards—at least, of strictly Anglo descent. There certainly would have been no widespread migration of British witches and wizards to America in the early colonial years. Rowling’s admission in the fourth book that there is a “Salem Institute for Witches” in Salem, MA might seem to contradict this guess, but not so fast. Let’s look closer at this first. The timing is wrong for it to have been coeval with the witch trials, the location is wrong for that implied date of founding, and for there to be two schools in America (yes, two. That is a women’s school, and there would be one for the boys too) at such an early date is well in excess of the requirements of population.
First, the timing. In the alternate universe, wizarding seclusion took place in 1689. In the real world, the Salem witch trials took place after this, and one can apparently assume that they occurred in the alternate universe as well, or the Witches’ Institute wouldn’t be in Salem. Does anyone seriously believe that the Ministry of Magic (which would have jurisdiction over any witches and wizards in the colonies at that point) would let real witches be executed after seclusion? Nuh-uh. In the alternate world, as in the real world, those executions were of innocent “Muggles” who were scapegoated for, essentially, being different. We don’t need to posit actual witchcraft taking place in Salem that Muggles took the blame for. They were under Seclusion by then, and it was official policy to hide magic and suppress memories of it whenever it was observed by Muggles. Puritan hysteria, as happened in the real world, is more than sufficient to explain the disgraceful acts in Salem. And that leads to...
The location. Let’s take a reality check here. Most of the British colonies were founded by people fleeing religious persecution, yes, but what did they do as soon as they arrived? Why, they started persecuting other religions themselves, that’s what. The colony of Massachusetts was arguably the very worst offender. Potterworld wizards seem not to have the common sense they were born with, granted, but it is stretching credulity to suggest that they would voluntarily go with the Puritans to Puritan colonies and live under such rule without the protection of local magical authorities that they would have had in Europe even before Seclusion. If we are going to hypothesize migrations of any witches and wizards from Britain into early America, we should ignore Salem. I’d fix my eyes squarely upon Rhode Island and Philadelphia instead. Those areas were founded on religious freedom for all.
And finally, population. The few witches and wizards who settled in early America didn’t need a school yet, because there just wouldn’t have been that many of them. Probably no more than a few dozen. Their children would have been sent abroad to Hogwarts or educated at home. The need for an American school of magic (or, rather, at least two, as that one is a women’s school only) only came about after the severance of ties with Britain. I would date the founding of the Salem Institute to the 1780s or 1790s rather than the 1600s. One now wonders if the few American magical families might have chosen to send their children to Beauxbatons briefly, out of solidarity with the French, but it may be that the French language proved to be too much of a barrier. The French Revolution and Napoleonic wars may also have given them anxiety, necessitating the founding of American schools of wizardry. The school for girls was probably put in Salem basically to thumb one’s nose at the Muggles. If American wizard families did send their kids to France at first, then the school might not have been founded until the centennial of the witch trials. There is a comparable school for boys somewhere along the East Coast too, and to guess the location of this school, I’d look at any area with a strong history of Masonic connections in its prominent families. (While we’re running on in this vein, the back of the Declaration of Independence might give directions.)
However, America is a melting pot, and there is no need to focus strictly on Anglo-origin witches and wizards when there are probably quite a good many more who are of different ancestry. I am inclined to look highly suspiciously at southern Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, for Dark magic traditions. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consider areas of the Appalachian Mountains, or much of the desert West. Why not? They have their own magical beast, the jackalope, and all kinds of local folklore and legends. One would also expect a high concentration of Parselmouths in the West, all things considered; it would definitely come in handy. One wonders if, in the alternate universe, a folklore character like Paul Bunyan was a wizard who was able to channel his magic into extreme height and strength. Perhaps the various con artists that preyed on the settlers in the West were simply highly proficient with the Imperius Curse, and Jesse James was an accomplished (if self-taught) Dark wizard. But the odds are that the ethnic group with the highest concentration of witches and wizards in America is the Native Americans themselves. With all due respect to Stephenie Meyer (that is to say, none whatsoever), I think they would be far more likely to be wizards (and Animagi) than werewolves in a fantasy alternate universe setting. It’s easy to get going with this once it is started, needless to say; that is a great thing about having an active imagination. People who are determined to write fan-fiction stories with characters from America have a wealth of possibilities to look at that are indisputably American. They have no need to make it a badly thought out mirror of the types of witches and wizards in Rowling’s alternate Britain.
Origin of an Insult?
With her statement about where Muggle-born wizards come from, Rowling also effectively confirmed the theory that has been making the rounds among older fans for some time; namely, that the term “Mudblood” originally was not a catchall slur for a wizard of Muggle birth, nor was the term “mud” or its synonyms used to refer to actual Muggles (as we see one of the Gaunts referring to Tom Riddle Sr. as a “filthy, dirt-veined Muggle”). The theory went that “Mudblood” originally was a slur against wizards whose true ancestry was “muddied” because paternity at some point was unknown or misattributed. With Rowling’s information that Muggle-born wizards do have a magical ancestor somewhere back in the family tree, the obvious conclusion to draw is that this was an undocumented extramarital or premarital relationship that just didn’t produce a wizard child, but a carrier of the partial genotype. Wizards keep genealogical records, after all. They know who is related to whom, if it is legally documented. And for all that families like the Blacks would blast off a member of the family who married a Muggle, the writers of records like Nature’s Nobility would still have made note of the fact, because the connection would (after seclusion) have been highly likely to produce all wizard children.
Undoubtedly, some Muggle-borns have had magic genes in their family histories dating from before Seclusion, when wizards and Muggles mixed openly and intermarried all the time, and not all children would have been wizards. The family tree books probably wouldn’t have been kept then. The magical ancestor could have been perfectly up front, with a legal marriage or acknowledgment of paternity, just from before a time when wizards kept detailed records of who was a wizard and to whom they were related. If the wizard or witch did not manage to pass on active magic to the first generation of children, it makes sense that the family of carriers would have been completely off the radar of whoever wrote the first edition of Nature’s Nobility. But, unfortunately, I still doubt that this accounts for all of the Muggle-borns. Even if they were to trace their family trees back, I rather suspect that somewhere the wrong father would be put on the tree, because there would have been no records proving otherwise.
And with the increasing mixing of wizard and Muggle cultures in recent years, one has to wonder just how many alleged Muggle-borns are actually halfbloods whose biological fathers never stepped up. The back story of Dean Thomas is a decent comparison. Dean is a halfblood whose wizard father was killed for refusing to go along with the Death Eaters, and his mother never knew of the magic. (Presumably they were not married, or it would have been a matter of public record in wizarding books.) This back story shows that Rowling has probably thought about this possibility herself, though Dean’s story is not nearly as cynical as hypothesizing halfbloods from extramarital affairs where the woman either could not get the wizard father to admit paternity (in which case the woman probably would have been single) or pushed it off on another man in her life, such as a Muggle husband, rather than admitting that she had been unfaithful. This is a rather ugly and unpleasant line of theorizing, one that seems not to apply to the most prominent example of a Muggle-born, Hermione Granger. It seems unlikely that Rowling would do this for Hermione’s background. She probably chose the nicest possible way for Hermione, that of legally acknowledged relationships between wizards and Muggles way back in the day, that produced carrier children for many, many generations. In all probability, she is very distantly related to Hector Dagworth-Granger, actually, just as Slughorn thought at first.
The theory about the insult “Mudblood” arose because this term has always been a bit peculiarly formed for a slur. White supremacist groups have a bogeyman that they call “the mud race,” which is basically a foul expression of the idea that everyone someday will be the same light tan color because of inter-racial marriage (which, incidentally, probably won’t happen, as a great many people tend to prefer that their mates look similar to themselves, and racism has nothing to do with it). Rowling seems to be making a reference to this kind of talk. But with wizards, true racism seems to be basically a non-issue. In real-world racist circles, the slur refers to a brown tone of skin, which is therefore not applicable to bigotry in Rowling’s world. But it also refers to the “muddying” of ancestry, and that does apply to Rowling’s world.