This article required a fair degree of revision in view of Rowling’s endorsement of the 1960 birth date for the Marauder cohort. With one fell swoop she immediately disallowed nearly every date in the earlier version of this piece which had been derived from the Black family tapestry sketch. For it now seems that the dates on that document simply do not work with the statements made by characters in the books, or pointed out by the limited 3rd-person narriator related to actions or events which are a part of the story. The tapestry sketch, not really being a part of the story, does not trump the information in the books. They trump it.

I have also incorporated some recent tweaking regarding some of the Weasley family’s birth years in accordance with information in the essay entitled ‘The Weasley Calendar’, which was also done to bring the probabilities closer to what had actually been mentioned in passing in the books as well. Information on Rowling’s official website does not trump information in the books either.

Rowling’s statements in interviews do not trump what is in the books either. And should not be expected to. In an interview Ms Rowling is speaking off the top of her head without access to any of her references. Sometimes it comes across as if she is making stories up up on the fly to amuse the questioner and the audience. There is no reason to hold her or the official canon to them. Particularly since there is just as much of a chance as not that she will only contradict them when someone askes her another question later.

None of this tweaking is authorised, you understand. But it matches up with what we have been told in the text.

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So.

Forget the date of the International Act of Wizarding Seclusion. Forget the estimated date of the founding of Hogwarts Academy. Forget the estimated date that the Hogwarts Quill went into commission.

In this essay, we are only concerned with the events which are more-or-less directly connected to the seven-part adventure of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord.

Which is to say, the very late 19th and most of the 20th century.

Until February of 2006 we still had only two “solid” dates from which we attempted to calculate any of the Potterverse’s events of the 20th century. The first was the information on Albus Dumbledore’s chocolate frog card, which states that Albus Dumbledore defeated the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945. And that doesn’t really get us very much forwarder, since it now seems apparant that Grindelwald hadn’t really got squat to do with Voldemort or Harry Potter. Or at least not directly, even if his story did refelect upon Dumbledore.

Our second date was given us by Nearly Headless Nick, who states in CoS that he was executed in 1492, and that he would shortly be celebrating the 500th anniversary of his death. (I think the date originally intended here was 1592, which would have both matched up with his statement of the year before and his mode of dress, but we need not explore this glitch further, it is probably a typo that the editors missed and has nothing to do with the events of the 20th century.)

All other statements within canon up to February 2006, then, were based upon “relative” rather than “absolute” dates. Which is to say that the dates were relative to the date of Sir Nick’s execution, which served as our base point.

Yes, in fact, he was. This information has since been confirmed in October 2007 when Harry Potter became featured as the Wizard of the Month on Rowling’s official site.

As of February 2006, we thought we got a bit of a break. JK Rowling was asked by a charitable group known as Book Aid if she would donate a page of her own work for auction as a fund-raiser.

She donated a sketch covering the last 6 generations of the Black Family’s geneological Tapestry.

With dates.

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Admittedly there were enough bugs and glitches attendant to these dates to make it difficult to know which ones were actually safe to use to reason from, even then. But I will not examine that particular issue here. A fuller exploration of that matter is below in the essay regarding ‘The Noble House of Black’.

Since the release of DHs, it has become evident that the actual dates on this piece of paper are all but completely unworkable.

Which certainly isn’t to say that we had not put a great deal of work into it by then.

Although the information on the tapestry sketch raises almost as many issues as it settles, one of the issues which seemed to have been settled by it was the confirmation of all our calculations of the year of Harry Potter’s birth. He is known to have been born in the same year as Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy’s birth year is clearly stated as being 1980. Nothing either in the books nor on the website has ever really called this date into question.

Of course, from the very beginning, the soundness of calculating from the original 1492 date was immediately contradicted by any attempt to cross-check related data against a Real World calendar as to the timing of events actually mentioned in the series. And if this date was adjusted to comply with the actual timing of some of these Real World events, the 1945 Grindelwald date is rendered even more irrelevant than it was already.

For example, that 1980 birthday for Harry Potter was immediately called into question by even the most cursory look at any Real World calendar.

The action of Chapter one of PS/SS opens with Vernon Dursley setting off to work on a “dull, grey Tuesday morning” which all subsequent statements imply to have been the First of November, 1981, some 15 months after Harry’s birth.

Except that if you look at any calendar for 1981, you will see that the first of November is quite clearly a Sunday; a day upon which Vernon and Petunia might be heading off to church, but on which Vernon would certainly not be heading off to the office.

Unless the day the story opens is not actually the 1st of November, and baby Harry was not merely off the map for the “missing” 24 hour period generally assumed, but had been kept in seclusion for a period of some three days, it is not possible for the narration we are given to be applied to the Real World year of 1981. (And even this re-evaluation would not explain the radio announcer’s mysterious admonition that Bonfire night is “not until next week, folks”, unless the broadcast was actually taking place late in October rather than November, which makes no sense whatosever, given the rest of the text. It would not add up even if the 1st of November had been on a Tuesday.)

In order to find a First of November that does take place on a Tuesday, you have to step forward to 1983. Which would shift Harry’s birth date to July 31, 1982. Which does not comply with having the 500th anniversary of Nearly Headless Nick’s death (in 1492) take place in Harry’s 2nd year, since in that case Harry’s 2nd year would have been the academic year of 1994-95.

So. Would correcting the date of Nick’s execution to 1494 resolve the problem?

Well, it would certainly resolve that problem. But does it solve all of them? In a word, no. Let alone the fact that it adds the complication of having Dumbledore defeat the Dark wizard Grindelwald the same year Tom opened the Chamber, Myrtle was killed by the basilisk and Hagrid was expelled.

For that matter the year earlier, Nick had been sighing that he had not tasted real food for nearly 400 years, not 500. That would move his execution to 1592 (which would at least fit the description of his costume), and raises no other conflicts, but it will not move November 1, 1981 to a Tuesday, regardless. Even though it does make our confidence in using the 1492 date just a little more shaky.

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So what about some of the other events in the series that are verifiable by a good look at an almanac?

In PoA Buckbeak’s execution is set for June 6, at sundown. It is a major plot point that there was a full moon that night.

That turned out to be an eventful evening. We not only overheard what we assumed to be Buckbeak’s execution (it wasn’t), Scabbers, who had been missing, presumed dead, for months unexpectedly reappeared, we witnessed the showdown in the Shrieking Shack, learned the truth about just who really betrayed Harry Potter’s parents to Voldemort, got through a large-scale Dementor attack, and watched Harry and Hermione’s daring trip back in time to rescue Buckbeak and Sirius Black. One of the side events of that action-packed evening was Professor Lupin’s having gotten caught out in the light of the full moon without having taken his wolfbane potion.

This climax of PoA took place in 1994, according the 1492-based calculations. Was there a full moon on June 6 in 1994? Well, as anyone who has been hanging around the fandom since the book came out in 1999 could tell you, no. There was not. The “Moon in June” wasn’t until the 23rd that year.

So would resetting the wayback machine to 1996 and moving Harry’s birthdate to 1982 fix this? No. The full moon in June was on the 1st in ’96. Closer, certainly, but still nearly a week off.

Searching through that almanac, the first year we find where the full moon in June took place on the 6th is the year 2001. I don’t think so. Harry Potter was not born in 1987 whatever you may try to say. Digging back further we finally find a June 6 full moon in... 1982.

Well, that’s interesting. Was this the master calendar used for all dates, every year, throughout the entire series perhaps?

Well, it’s possible, certainly. But not a done-deal. Although it is interesting to note that both year 3’s first Hogsmeade weekend, which included Halloween itself, and year 5’s second Hogsmeade weekend which included Valentine’s day did land on weekends in ’82. But both landed on Sunday rather than Saturday. I suspect that there are additional such inconsistencies throughout the whole series. And I can guarantee that they are not all going to be resolved by a single global adjustment to Nick’s 1492 base date. It is obvious that we are on “Rowling time”, which conforms to no known rational calendar. Ms Rowling made no real attempt to put the Potterverse’s days of the week or phases of the moon into proper synchronization with those of our world. It is useless to attempt to adjust the timelines to allow for this. The tale takes place in Storybook Land. In Storybook Land, all times are one.

Ergo; we shall, provisionally, just have to assume that the weeks, months and years in the Potterverse are all the same lengths as ours, and continue to nod politely at the dates she has given us, as she has given them to us. Ms Rowling has warned us that she is not at her best at maths, so anything to do with numbers tends to all come unstuck at any given moment. (One of the people in the Café Dangereux where I sometimes hang out has commented that JK Rowling’s use of numbers is “impressionistic” rather than realistic. This is a very nice way of describing it.)

And, like I say, we were finally given confirmation of one point at least. Draco Malfoy, who shows up on the Black family tapestry, through his mother, is listed as having been born in 1980. And Harry Potter who is Wizard of the Month in October 2007 was as well. So we were right. We need no longer fret about Harry’s birth year.

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Which perhaps is just as well. I will admit that I was rather fond of my calculations as they stood and was just as glad to be able to go on playing with some of them for a bit longer. Even if I did end up haveing to do a major retrofit in the wake of DHs.

The Black family tapestry did temporarily force at least a few adjustments onto my calculations, however. In GoF, Sirius Black tells us very clearly that Severus Snape hung out with, among others, “the Lestranges, a married couple now in Azkaban” when he was a boy at Hogwarts. In OotP we learned that these particular Lestranges were Rodolphus Lestrange and the former Bellatrix Black, Sirius’s own first cousin.

With the release of the Black family tapestry sketch, we learned that Bellatrix Black was born in 1951.

The only way that Severus Snape could be at school at the same time as a Bellatrix Black who was born in 1951 would be if she was born after September 1, and he was born no later than 1958. Not the 1959 that I have been endorsing ever since I started posting my opinions on the web. Nor the HP Lexicon’s 1960, which I have never agreed with.

1958. Nothing. Else. Works.

And at that she’d be a 7th year when he went up as an ickle Firstie.

And that worked, too.

The dates throughout the collection were therefore updated to reflect this new interpretation.

Well. Oops. I adjusted at the wrong end of the equation. Now that the 1960 birth date is official for the Marauder cohort, in the books, the adjustment needs to be made to the Black family tapestry sketch instead. Even if the whole exercise is simply because Rowling cannot count (the woman literallly cannot count to four) and wrote down the wrong dates.

Possibley in both places.

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Since I put the first iteration of this essay collection together I have been scattering bits and pieces of timeline backstory theory throughout it and by now it would be a real chore for anyone to try to go through and sort it all out. Therefore; I am going to try to summarize and repeat the various calculations pretaining to the backstory here, along with my sources and the lines of reasoning I have used, just in case anyone is interested in comparing my theories regarding the master backstory timelines alongside those of more widely-known sites such as the Harry Potter Lexicon.

I will not be extending this chronology into the body of the series as we have it in the books. Whatever might have been going on during any period that Harry was an active partcipant would be better discussed in an essay related to analysing that particular adventure. This chronology then only goes as far as the day that Harry boarded the Hogwarts Express for the first time.

The sources I have used are, in order of preference; statements actually made in the books; statements made later by JKR in interviews, or on her website, the Black family tapestry sketch; or extrapolations from what may be suggested by the above in the absence of hard data. There are also a couple of points made in the background by the overlay of some dates of events in the Real World, although there is some risk using those, since the Potterverse is manifestly not the Real World.

You will also notice that I do not mention the films at any point of this. The omission is quite deliberate.

So; Sundry timeline calculations regarding the Potterverse backstory as of October, 2007 go as follows:

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First out, and off the radar; we need to make a side note that in the first four books, we get a couple of references which imply that there was evidently a very dangerous, unidentified Dark wizard active at some point in the later half of the 19th century. It was mentioned in passing on more than one occasion that Lord Voldemort is “the most dangerous Dark wizard in a hundred years.” Or words very much to that effect. In short; the wizarding world, in Rowling’s original iteration, has been in something like this situation before. Possibly more than once, and most recently about a century ago. It survived that crisis, but it probably hadn’t quite believed that it was going to.

In HBP Rowling seems to have abandoned this line of background. People in the course of the story are now hyperbolically declaiming that Lord Voldemort is the ultimate in eeeeevil. And is the most dangerous Dark wizard Of All Time. Neither of which statements seems even remotely plausable.

I also find such hyperbola in bad taste. But I am not writing the story.

Although I do have to concede that this rather tacky device does conveniently bypass the consideration that unless the career of the last major Dark wizard took place on the continent and was upstaged by mundane events inside or outside of Great Britain, the whole thing managed to completely escape the attention of British Muggles.

In DHs, this particular factor seems to have been instrumental in the lack of mention given to Gellert Grindelwald, whose activities at the other end of Europe seem to have passed the average wizard-in-the-street in Britain by without much attention, or concern, until nearly the mid-20th century.

However, clearly not all Dark wizards are equal. In HBP even Albus Dumbledore appears to have scaled up his oppinion of the danger represented by Tom Riddle to the point of suggesting that he is possibly the most dangerous Dark wizard “of all time”, at least when speaking of him to Harry. And we can probably agree that no earlier candidate has ever presented quite such a sticky issue as the problem posed by those multiple Horcruxes.

The first solid piece of (relative) information we were given to calculate from concerns the Riddle diary. Harry Potter did not come into possession of the Riddle diary until January of 1993. And the fact that the date on the diary’s cover is exactly 50 years earlier, is a Major Clue in the course of the novel. Ergo: the date on the diary was 1943. The academic year of 1992-93 is Harry’s 2nd year; the academic year of 1942-43 was Tom Riddle’s 5th year.

Known events of the Academic year 1942-1943/Tom Riddle’s 5th year, are:

Tom Riddle is appointed as a Prefect.

At some point in the year Tom Riddle, who has come across the term, asks Horace Slughorn to explain Horcruxes. (It is not clear whether this conversation took place during this year or the following one. It could be either. But we are not likely to get any further information on the matter.)

The Chamber was opened. The Basilisk was released. There were attacks on students, most were petrified, and later revived, one student (Moaning Myrtle) was killed.

This death took place quite late in the year. The Headmaster was about to send the students home some 2-3 weeks before the end of term in response. (Note: if the procedure was as it was shown to be at the end of OotP, the standard exams for that year would not have been given yet. The NEWTs and OWLs would probably have been underway but not yet complete.)

Rubeus Hagrid, a 3rd-year student was discovered to have been trying to raise an acromantula inside the castle, and was expelled. There were no further attacks. The attention of Albus Dumbledore, may have been more closely directed at Riddle after this date. In response, Tom Riddle closed the Chamber of Secrets and did not reopen it during his remaining time at Hogwarts.

From statements related to this information we can calculate that:

Rubeus Hagrid, whose birthday is December 6, acto JKR’s website, would have been born in 1928. He started Hogwarts in the Autumn term of 1940 and lost his father at some point during 1941 at the age of 12 or 13. (Possibly due to the Muggle war? The Germans bombed more than just London.) Someone, until this point it has been presumed to have been Albus Dumbledore, took responsibility for the orphan who had no other surviving human relatives. It is uncertain whether this is in fact the case. The Board of Governors or even the Wizengamot may have ended up getting involved. It is possible that the school itself took responsibility for the boy.

The wizarding world is small enough for sponsorship by non-relatives to probably be standard procedure in such cases. Certainly in the case of a child such as Hagrid who could not readily be palmed off onto the Muggle authorities. Nor could he be left to wander about at liberty, unsupervised.

In an interview made shortly after the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire JKR informed us (in response to a reader’s question) that Severus Snape was 35 or 36 years old. She then went on to volunteer the information that Albus Dumbledore was 150 (since reconsidered), and that Minerva McGonagall was “a sprightly 70”. This information was then assumed to be current with the internal timeline of the story arc as representing the matter as it stood during the summer of 1995, the point to which the series had progressed when the statement was given.

Given that, acto JKR’s website we now know that Minerva McGonagall’s birthday is October 3, If we provisionally assume that she was born in 1925 she would have started Hogwarts in the Autumn term of 1937 and finished with the class of 1944. She would have been in her 6th year and completely out of the loop when the Chamber was first opened and Hagrid expelled. She would be expected to have remembered the uproar of the events of that period.

Her extreme confusion during CoS as to Salazar’s Chamber however suggests that the age of “70” stated in the interview must have been “impressionistic”, for Minerva gave us no indication that she had ever lived through events of that sort once already. It is for this reason that I am inclined to place Minerva’s birth date no later than 1923, making her Hogwarts years the period from 1935 to 1942, finishing the year before young Riddle discovered the entry to the Chamber.

For the record, and as a piece of Real World background information; The year 1920, like the year 1946, was, in the Real World, the first full year after a major war was concluded (and, in the case of 1920, the year after a deadly pandemic as well). With much the same effect upon the Muggle birthrate. In fact, in England the year with the highest number of recorded births in the entire 20th century was 1920. With a recorded 1,126,800 births in that year alone.

We do not know for certain whether the Potterverse had two major World Wars in its 20th century, let alone a flu pandemic. We have assumed that the events of the Potterverse have paralleled those of the Real World, but we cannot be certain of it from what we were ever told in canon. However, until we have been given information which makes it clear that this is not the case, I will continue to reason as if Muggle history has proceeded in the Potterverse much as it has in the Real World.

If the incidence of magical births to Muggle births which appears to be the case from the calculations in other essays in this collection, the above 1,126,800 recorded births would have included about 13-14 Muggle-born magical children, Close to twice as many as the usual number prior to that time of 7 or 8. Compared to the usual 10 or so purebloods in that year. And I don’t know how long it took for this sudden boom in the Muggle-born birthrate to taper off. These children would have started arriving at Hogwarts Academy in a wave beginning with the Academic year of 1931-32. It may have taken a little time for the information to have spread to the older generations whose own children were already out of Hogwarts that Muggle-born students at Hogwarts were now easily outnumbering purebloods, but the information would have gotten there eventually. In any event, mutterings about this “innundation of mudbloods” would soon have taken an upsurge in the households with pureblood supremecist tendencies, which would have quickly been being parroted in the Slytherin — and other — dormitories.

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