Did you ever wonder while watching the Harry Potter films or reading the books why the classes in Hogwarts were so small? I mean, they were, weren’t they? What was described by the author as a school that housed 1,000 students, there sure didn’t seem to be 1,000 students. Sure, you could make arguments for hiring extras being expensive or that Hogwarts was really just super progressive and part of the selling points for discerning wizard parents was the smaller, more intimate class size, but the internet has decided that the numbers simply don’t add up.
What are those numbers, exactly? BuzzFeed describes a fan theory that crunches all of the numbers and uses the series’ history to come to a rather sad conclusion. Those numbers are that there are 1,000 students and seven years at Hogwarts. If you divide 1,000 by seven you get 143. Then divide those students up by the number of houses within Hogwarts, which is four, and that brings you to 35. Yet in Harry’s classes we only see about 18 students, which is around half of that number.
This Tumblr user came to a conclusion that is downright depressing.
https://marauders4evr.tumblr.com/post/140524900827/oh-my-god-i-just-realized-something-for-years
Yes, you are reading that correctly; this Tumblr user is saying that because of the war against Voldemort, there were less children born between the years of 1979 and 1981, meaning that the Hogwarts class of 1998 was considerably smaller. If this is true, well, that’s for J.K. Rowling to decide. She’s currently debating the finer points of the European Union and RT’ing photos of runaway children on Twitter, which seems a bit more important than this theory. But still, it’s something to think about and adds some more depth to the already rich world of Harry Potter.
(Via BuzzFeed)
