The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter (28 page)

“Pud” is a British abbreviation for pudding, which is a creamy, mushy, often-sweet food. And creamy, mushy, and sweet is the ideal description for Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop (which also serves coffee). Decorated with bows, lace, and other frills, the tea shop is frequented by Hogwarts couples, so there’s a lot of hand-holding and smooching going on here.

Scrivenshaft’s Quill Shop chose the ideal spot for a retail business that sells parchment, quills, and inks. Students burn through these supplies like water—it’s the equivalent to having an Apple computer store on a college campus. Quills are not only utilitarian but also beautiful—for example, students might splurge on a long pheasant-feather quill the same way Muggle students might opt for a hot-pink iPod.

The store is aptly named: a “scrivener” is a scribe, clerk, or secretary; a “shaft” is a handle, such as that on a quill.

The Three Broomsticks is
the
place for hot butterbeer, along with stronger beverages, such as mulled mead and red currant rum. The proprietor, Madam Rosmerta, is attractive, outgoing, and well-liked; all important attributes in a female barkeep. In Celtic mythology, Rosmerta was the goddess of abundance and good harvest.

The Three Broomsticks could also be the “inn” Hermione Granger refers to as the headquarters for the 1612 goblin rebellion, and that would give the inn a rich, interesting history.

Descriptions of the Three Broomsticks evoke a strong sense of the Shire’s the Green Dragon in Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings.
Both are described as crowded, inviting, cheerful, and smoke-filled. Of course, nearly any good bar could be described that way—and that is the point: the Three Broomsticks is a place you’d want to hang out.

Like any thriving city, shops in Hogsmeade go out of business and/or change ownership from time to time, but the city remains a haven for wizards.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry isn’t the only game in town; at least two other large wizarding schools exist in Europe: Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and Durmstrang Institute for Magical Study. And there are smaller schools at which you can hone your wizarding skills; but like the three largest schools, they are nearly impossible to locate without insider information, because each school guards itself and its secrets zealously.

To those who have no business being there (that is, nonmagical folks and even uninvited wizards), a wizarding school appears to be a dangerous, abandoned wreck of a building, one that would be marked “Condemned” in the Muggle world. In addition, every wizarding school is protected by spells that make it Unplottable and, thus, keep away unsuspecting Muggles and devious wizards.

Beauxbatons Academy of Magic is located in a warm, breezy palace in the Mediterranean, where students wear lightweight, luxurious silk robes. These students find Hogwarts Castle, by comparison, to be cold and damp—which, let’s face it, it probably is, given the climate in Great Britain! The Beauxbatons student body is co-ed (although the girls, with their dizzying beauty, tend to take center stage), and they speak both French and thickly accented English, so we can presume the school is located in the south of France.

The coat of arms (which is more formally called a heraldic device) for the school is two crossed golden wands, each with three stars emanating from it. A wand in the magical world is akin to a sword in medieval times, and the combination of swords and stars has historically been common in heraldic devices. Finland’s provinces, in particular, combine swords with stars, but so do the coats of other nations and regions. Having three stars, in particular, is common on heraldic devices of countries, states, and religious groups. In the United States, three stars on a flag or coat of arms usually refers to the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial); in other parts of the world, it may relate to three provinces coming together to form a nation or to the importance of the Blessed Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) in that faith. Note that, in medieval times, stars were referred to as mullets, which carried a far different meaning than that of the popular haircut of the 1980s.

Beaux bâtons
is French for beautiful sticks, which likely refers to beautiful wands. But the girls of Beauxbatons (and their wands) are just as intelligent as they are beautiful; when they arrive at Hogwarts for a tournament, they sit at the Ravenclaw table, indicating that they are as brilliant and clever as the wizards in that Hogwarts house, which is famous for its intelligence.

The headmistress of Beauxbatons is Madame Olympe Maxime, who has a tanned, pleasing face but is indescribably large—clearly she has an ancestor who was a giant. However, Madame Maxime refuses to discuss this detail of her patronage because of rampant racism against wizards with giant blood somewhere in their ancestry. Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundskeeper who had a giantess mother, is smitten with Madame Maxime.

Although Madame Maxime’s name could be construed to relate to her size, French for maximum is
maxima,
not
maxime.
Therefore, her name may, instead, refer to Hagrid’s vision of her:
Olympe
is translated to heaven (after the God Olympus), and
maxime
is French for maxim, which is a statement of general truth; thus, “true heaven.”

Fleur Delacour is Beauxbatons’ most revered student; she is chosen from her school to represent Beauxbatons in the Triwizard Tournament (which is discussed later in this chapter). Fleur, like her peers, is beautiful and well-skilled in wizarding arts, but she can be less than tactful and often scorns and criticizes Hogwarts. Her first name, Fleur, is French for flower; apropos for her beauty. Her last name can be translated in a variety of ways; the most logical is beyond (
dela
) the princely court (
cour
), indicating that she is out of reach, or out of the league of, the boys at Hogwarts. She is one-quarter veela—magical creatures who seduce men with their beauty (see Chapter 2).

Whereas Beauxbatons students are beautiful, if a bit aloof, students and staff at Durmstrang are described as both unapproachable and unattractive. Although a co-ed school, boys dominate at Durmstrang, which gives every indication of being located in a cold, mountainous nation, given that students at Durmstrang wear fur capes and speak with thick Slavic accents.

The most chilling aspect of Durmstrang’s curriculum is that professors teach the
use
of the Dark Arts, not just the
defense
against them, as is the practice at the other wizarding schools. Appropriately, when at Hogwarts, Durmstrang students sit at the table with Slytherin house, which has produced more Dark Wizards than any other Hogwarts house. Durmstrang’s approach is roughly the equivalent to teaching students in local high schools how to make bombs: what are the odds that all students will use that information for the good of humanity? Continuing this analogy, at Hogwarts, students would learn how to diffuse bombs and how to take charge during a bomb threat!

Many believe Durmstrang is a wordplay on the German phrase
Strang und Durm,
which translates to “storm and stress,” and that interpretation is quite likely. However, Durmstrang is probably not a German school, because the climate in Germany does not match the descriptions given by Durmstrang students. More likely, the school is located in a Slavic nation: Russia; Bulgaria; Ukraine; and the like.
Strang
translates to