White Hound's essays on Hogwarts and the local area have been indispensable to me. She argues for possible locations in Scotland and routes that the train might take from London to Hogwarts, for example. I frequently refer to her pages on the school grounds, the layout of the castle, Hogsmeade, and the Forbidden Forest, and recommend that you at least skip down to the end, where she's got images like this map(there are smaller and labeled versions on several pages, specific to what the page's subject).
The Harry Potter Lexicon has a map of the Hogwarts ground floor, and descriptions of the grounds, dungeons, ground floor, and towers, as well as the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh floors.
Snipperdepipper has drawn a series of floorplans based on film!Hogwarts, which you can find here. You may be interested in Astronomy Tower Entrance, Hospital Wing, 1st Floor Corridor, and DADA Tower, as well as this top-level view, these ground floor sections (north # 1, # 2, middle # 1), and this dungeon.
Finally, Taure also has a basic map of Hogwarts and its environs.
There are a lot of students and not many professors, so it's worth considering how to handle this. Some possibilities:
“Secrets of the Classlist,” by Diana Summers, takes a quasi-canonical list of students in Harry's year (spotted in passing during the Christmas BBC special “Harry Potter and Me”) to argue that Muggle and Magical Britain are roughly demographically similar. The article tries to extrapolate this into more concrete information about various students (e.g. the surname Bones “predominates in Essex, so perhaps they live in Chelmsford”).
Be aware, however, that Summers wades into some waters that are sketchy at best. As one of my beta readers commented to me, “I can't actually think of any other place I've seen Semite used as a noun,” and Summers chooses to describe the East End of London as “exactly where you would expect to find new migrants, ethnic minorities, and other groups of poor people.” While I think that the article is still worth reading, I can't say as much for her Classlist ebook, which doesn't really give any useful information (unless you were still wondering whether Summers is a Tory who thinks of foreigners primarily in terms of racial stereotypes).
White Hound goes a bit further (in demographics breakdowns, not weird racist stuff) and proposes that, during the time that Harry attends Hogwarts, there should be thirteen black students at Hogwarts, thirty-four other non-white students (mostly South Asian), and fifteen Muslim students. She also suggests that there are probably only a dozen queer students at the time, which I'd like to argue against for a moment:
First, White Hound bases her numbers on self-identification, which depends on a person's willingness to give that information to somebody else. Even among Muggles, that “just under 2%” figure that she gives is probably lower than the actual rate. Second, Muggle culture isn't necessarily reflective of magical culture, and wixes may hold different forms of bigotry, to different degrees, and construct and enforce gender differently. A woman was Minister for Magic in 1798, for God's sake, so whatever else is going on, Dumbledore probably isn't telling witches to get back into the kitchen.
Plus, fuck TERFs. Everybody at Hogwarts is trans.
“11 Wizarding Schools: A Look at the Logistics Behind JKRs Concept of Wizarding Education,” by Eliza Grace, proposes that there are 910 children eligible to attend Hogwarts in 1991, that 182 of these are Muggle-born, and in total 750 to 850 children actually attended, with the rest homeschooled or sent to other schools.
Eliza Grace is one of the few to address a relevant question: “How many Muggle-borns are at Hogwarts?” Only a handful of Muggle-borns in Harry's year appear in the books: Kevin Entwhistle, Justin Finch-Fletchley, and Hermione Granger. If we assume that (1) these represent all of the Muggle-borns in Harry's year and (2) there are forty students in Harry's year (both of which are arguable1), then only 7.5% of Harry's year is Muggle-born. J. K. Rowlings original classlist, as (partially) glimpsed on the Christmas special “Harry Potter and Me,” shows Hannah Abbot and “Trevor” Boot as Muggle-borns, as well as the three canonical Muggle-borns, so it seems that Rowling reduced the number of Muggle-borns in Harry's year (we can only make inferences about a few of the students in his year, so there might well be other Muggle-borns whose heritage just didn't come up), but the classlist doesn't even have the right names for everybody, so you can only use it with a grain of salt.
But what if you want to argue for a different proportion of Muggle-borns without adding any students to Harry's year? Here are two ways that you can massage the numbers:
You can combine these as well, and say that Harry's year is unusually small for both reasons: because wixes were having fewer children and because the Death Eaters murdered a metric fuckton of Muggle-born children.
There are some classes which we know little about, and some subjects which seem woefully untaught at Hogwarts. Here's my spin, which you can take or leave as you please:
Several people have written curricula and schedules for Hogwarts. I don't use any of these exclusively, but they've all been useful, especially the editable class schedules sheet and the Hogwarts Curriculum Worldbuilding Resource.
Uncommonality wrote a basic year-by-year structure for a Healing N.E.W.T. , intended to prepare students for a Healer's apprenticeship:
Parchment is generally of a higher quality than paper, and it's apparently nicer to write on if you're some sort of connoisseur of writing media. Paper only won out over parchment as it became far, far cheaper to produce, but given the principles that I sketch out in Wizardnomics, the raw material costs of parchment and paper are almost identical. This is why wixes still rely on parchment.
Some students, especially Muggle-borns, buy blank notebooks in which to record notes, but most students record their notes in two ways: (1) in the margins of their textbooks and (2) on loose pages, which are then bound together at a later point. I don't know whether I'd prefer for the pages to be bound near the end of each year around exams (which would produce a set of seven volumes for each student by graduation, which feels like a nice encapsulation of your time at Hogwarts) or upon graduation from Hogwarts. In Renaissance Europe, students would typically bind their notes upon the conclusion of their studies, so the latter is more historically grounded, but wixes have been going their own way for centuries by this point and a little bit of divergence is more than fine. If the topic is of interest to you, then I recommend “ The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe.”
There are various methods of indexing a notebook on the go. One of the most popular systems, which was pioneered by John Locke, depends on a set of two pages lined with boxes, each one of which corresponds to a two-letter combination of a letter of the alphabet and one vowel that might follow (e.g. Aa, Ae, Ai…Pu, Py, Qu, Ra, Re…).2 When you intend to write something new, you first come up with a keyword to head that entry, and then check whether there is an entry in the index that corresponds to the first two letters of that keyword. If there is not, then you go to the next free page in your book, mark down the page number in the index, and proceed to write. The combination “CA” in the index might therefore read “Ca 12, 13, 28, 46,” and address everything from cats to cantaloupes.
It's harder to learn how to write well with a quill than with another kind of pen (to say nothing of pencils), but for most of the time that there's been a choice between quills and more modern pens — which have existed in one form or another for thousands of years — people have generally thought that quills were capable of more beautiful writing. Evidently, wixes agree, and fountain pens and their descendants have largely been rejected. It's true that Muggle-Borns and some Half-Bloods suffer for the fact that they haven't learned how to use quills by the time that they get to Hogwarts, but for many wixes it's probably icing on the cake that quills make it easier to sort out the riffraff. As Lucius Malfoy might say, you can often tell someone's background just by the way that they write their signature.
Ladyguinevere83 suggests that Rowling's sense of the prefect system is informed by boarding school stories and that we can look to the same to learn more about Hogwarts prefects. Besides patrols, they might assist in the library, tend to visiting teachers, manage clubs, oversee pets, and supervise younger students during “prep” or homework periods. 83 discounts a couple of these, actually, but I personally don't think that the presence of Madam Pince, say, means that there can't be a prefect or two who also have librarian responsibilities, and prep might not be mandatory but that doesn't mean there couldn't be a voluntary prep to supervise. In addition to this, prefects probably distribute house passwords, definitely escort first years to the common room and supervise first and second years during (some?) break periods, and appear to generally lend support to teachers when greater manpower (wizardpower?) is required.
COS and GOF refers to “the Astronomy department,” and HBP refers to "the Transfiguration Department," implying that there's more than one teacher per subject (there are more explicit references to this kind of setup in Pottermore, but they're hard to square with what we see in the books). If we accept this, then it's good to know how these departments might be organized.
In the “Commonwealth system,” universities typically organize their teachers into a hierarchy of Professors, Readers, Senior Lecturers, and Lecturers.
Professors are the seniormost members of their department, and in a small department there might be only one professor. Their position may be named after a specific individual that contributed to the school in general or to the creation (and funding!) of that position in particular. This contribution usually covers a stipend for the person that fills the professorship. A few examples:
At Hogwarts, McGonagall might be the Gamp Professor of Transfiguration, the Regius Professor, or even the Holyhead Professor. One might also, referring to the office separately from McGonagall, talk about the Gamp Chair of Transfiguration or Holyhead Chair or whatever. Professorships whose funding is diverted or expired are said to be “suppressed.” All that said, not every professorship is named: the Yusuf Hamied 1702 Professor of Chemistry was originally just a “Professor of Chemistry,” renamed “Professor of Organic Chemistry” and then “BP 1702 Professor of Organic Chemistry” after a donation from British Petroleum, and given its current title after a donation from Yusuf Hamied. The Professor of Music, meanwhile, has remained without tribute since its establishment in 1684.
Readers have established a strong track record of original research. Lecturers may have permanent, tenured positions or be hired on a temporary basis (the latter sort may be called “associate lecturers” instead). At an institution like Hogwarts, promotion to senior lectureship is probably based mostly on teaching ability and further promotion is not assured, but the pay may be equivalent to a reader's.
To my knowledge, the only Harry Potter story to mention readers is “ Victoria Potter and the Heir of Slytherin,” by Taure, and even then the reference is fleeting:
For the second year in a row, Victoria found herself without a Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor. Unlike her first year, however, when Professor Quirrell had disappeared so close to the end of term that Professor Dumbledore had simply cancelled the class, this time they still had two months of lessons to go before summer would arrive. Their classes were therefore covered by Madam Wigmore, one of the two Readers in the Defence department who had been studying under Professor Lockhart.
But why take higher education as our model? Rowling alone knows the exact reason, but she chose to staff Hogwarts with professors, and professors are a characteristic of universities (at least in the UK). If I had to guess, or at least give a Watsonian explanation, the reason is that Hogwarts developed at a time when "a school to which children are sent from a far distance — perhaps even a completely different country" can be described only as auniversity, and the Founders themselves might have called it such. The idea of a university for adult education along was a later development, from which Hogwarts might have been shielded by the Statute of Secrecy.
Canonically, we know that Hogwarts is a board of governors, that the board has twelve members, and that they have the authority to suspend or fire the Headmaster and to shutdown the school. Beyond this, we have to infer from the text and from the British school system in general.
Board members are usually organized into committees with purviews such as admissions, audit and risk, curriculum and standards, discipline, finance and resources, health and safety, pupil progress, site management, and staffing. “Working groups” may also be formed to tackle specific problems. It is required for a board of governors to meet three times a year, and they typically meet no oftener than that.
The board probably has a chair, who is elected by the board and helps to conduct meetings. Their term usually lasts for one year. In the COS video game, Lucius Malfoy was the chair of the Hogwarts board.
Typically, a board of governors will include the Head Teacher (or other administrator), but in COS the actions of the board are often presented as news to Dumbledore, and the Order of Suspension bears “all twelve signatures” of the board. Likewise, there are often “staff governors,” who are members of (and elected by) the staff, but it seems unlikely that any of the staff members in COS would have acted to suspend Dumbledore. If at some point there were staff governors, they might follow the practice of Muggle boards: at least one must be a teacher, and, if there are three or more staff governors, at least one other must be a member of the support staff (such as Filch or Pince).
Parent governors are parents to current students, though in most cases they are able to serve the remainder of their term if their child graduates, and are elected by the same. If there are insufficient eligible candidates, parent governors may also be parents to former students. Authority governors are nominated by the local education authority (perhaps the Ministry). There may also be governors who are present on behalf of other organizations that sponsor the school, and these are called foundation, partnership, or sponsor governors. For example, religious schools often include one or more clergy on the board of governors.
Other individuals — even students, in principle — may be “co-opted” as associate members if they have specific skills and experience. For example, Sir John Ritblat retired as a governor at Dulwich College in 2008 but has been retained as a “Special Adviser on Property Matters.” These members are not governors per se and do not vote or take part in government. There may be a clerk whose duty is to provide advice, keep minutes and other records, handle correspondence, and so forth. Clerks are similar to associate members in that they are non-voting members of the board, but dissimilar in that they are paid (typically by the school).
At Eton College, the majority of the board are elected by the provost and the fellows of the board. One of these must be an Oxford Alum, and another must be a Cambridge Alum. Besides these, one is nominated by the Council of the Royal Society, one is nominated by the Lord Chief Justice of England, and one is elected by the Head Master, Lower Master, and Assistant Masters.
The mission of a board of governors, at least in the Muggle world, is to provide vision and direction for the school, hold the headteacher to account for the school's performance, and oversee the financial performance of the school.
Both the board of governors and the Ministry of Magic have some amount of control over Hogwarts, but it isn't clear where they stand in relation to one another. Malfoy states in COS that “the appointment — or suspension — of the headmaster is a matter for the governors,” even above Fudge's protests, but Educational Degree No. 28 puts Umbridge in place as Headmaster. In the same chapter of OOTP we are told that “the Ministry of Magic passed new legislation giving itself an unprecedented level of control at Hogwarts,” which suggests that the Ministry had some control to begin with. Ministry influence is also indicated by one of the memories which Tom Riddle shows to Harry in COS, in which Dippet says that “the Ministry of Magic is even now talking about closing the school.”
Speaking of Educational Degrees, the first which we hear about is Educational Degree No. 22, which issued on August 30th, and the last is Educational Degree No. 29, which Umbridge doesn't last long enough to put into force. It seems unlikely to me that more than twenty Educational Degrees would be issued in the space of two or three months and then only half a dozen more in the following school year, so I believe that other Educational Degrees were issued in the past.
Prior to Educational Degree No. 22, the board of governors may be responsible for reviewing appointments to the staff. They may be able to review exclusions (suspensions and expulsions) of students and either reinstate students or reduce (but not increase) the term of their exclusion.
Hogwarts was founded somewhen during the 11th century, give or take a century, and its library might have been organized or reorganized at any point thereafter. It would be well for us to begin with a look at Medieval European libraries, such as they were.
Besides subject matter, books might be organized in a catalog by author, by origin (including donor), or by language. A book's position in a catalog did not necessarily mean anything about its position in the library, either. Catalogs might record the “incipit” or opening words of a particular page (usually the second or third page) and the “explicit” or final words of a page at the end of the book, as well as information like page size, columns per page, manner of binding, and descriptions of insignia and illustrations. Further complicating the issue was that multiple texts could be bound in the same volume, but only the first text would be described by the catalog. You might not care about any of that when you just want a reference book for your essay on goblin rebellions, but Medieval European catalogs were primarily for the benefit of the librarians, who wanted an inventory to guard against loss, and were rarely consulted by library patrons (who were expected to ask the librarian).
Most libraries, and therefore most library catalogs, were kept by monasteries, which predominantly kept religious works. It should thus come as no surprise that a catalog might have a dozen categories for different kinds of religious writing and throw together medicine and geography into the same group.
Medieval Europeans consistently distinguished between poetry and prose. Some catalogs combined “Christian” and “Pagan” poetry, and others intermixed them. Books might also be categorized according to the subject of time (e.g. history, the computation of time, liturgy) or law (civil law, canon or religious law, monastic rules), and these might be divided more finely (a distinction between “secular history” and “church history,” for example).
By 1497, the catalog at St. Augustine's Abbey organized books into the following categories: (1) Bibles and other religious works; (2) natural history; (3) philosophy; (4) music; (5) geometry; (6) astronomy; (7) medicine; (8) logic; (9) grammar; (10) poetry; (11) books in French and English; (12) alchemy; (13) miscellaneous items); and (14) canon law.
In a catalog belonging to Norwich Cathedral Priory, the books were categorized according to their donor as well as the following attributes: (1) Books with the letter mark “A”; (2) books obtained between 1272 and 1325, bearing a press-mark and an inscription of ownership; (3) books obtained after 1325, bearing a press-mark and an inscription of ownership; (4) books bearing only a press-mark; and (5) books without a press-mark.
At Christ Church Priory, the books were organized into the following categories, in order: (1) Grammar, (2) Rhetoric, (3) Music, (4) Philosophy, (5) Poetry, (6) Astronomy, (7) Miscellaneous, and (8) Law.
Other common categories in monastic libraries include: (1) biblical manuscripts; (2) canon (or religious) law; (3) civil law; (4) hagiography, or the lives of the saints; (5) history and geography, both church and secular; (6) homilies, lectionaries, psalters, antiphonaries, and missals; (7) martyrology; (8) medicine; (9) monastic rules; (10) scriptural commentaries and other works by the Church Fathers and other religious philosophers; and (11) miscellaneous shit.
Francis Bacon recommended organizing books into History (e.g. civil history, natural history), Philosophy (e.g. natural philosophy, philosophy of man, theology), and Poetry (allegory and mythology, dramatic, narrative or heroic), or rather Memory, Reason, and Imagination, with further subdivisions such as those described parenthetically.
Resources you might find useful for further research are “An Overview of Medieval Library Cataloguing,” by Lawrence S. Guthrie II, and “Carolingian Monastic Library Catalogs and Medieval Classification of Knowledge,” by Buford Scrivner.
In Medieval Europe, a classical education in the liberal arts (Artes Liberales) was was often organized into two categories: the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). This was distinguished from practical subjects like architecture, which might be organized into seven mechanical arts (Artes Mechanicae), and were sometimes considered foundational to three “high faculties,” these beings Law, Medicine, and Theology (which incorporated what we might today distinguish as “philosophy”). Grammarian and rhetorical texts might be intermixed, and might also be classified with poetry as “arts of language,” not least because poetry was often analyzed and discussed in the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.
One philosopher organized the Artes Mechanicae into agricultura (agriculture), architectura (architecture, masonry), coquinaria (cooking), mercatura (trade), metallaria (blacksmithing, metallurgy), militia and venatoria (warfare and hunting, "martial arts"), and vestiaria (tailoring, weaving). Another listed medicine, navigation, and the theatrical arts in place of agriculture, cooking, and trade. There have occasionally been lists of seven “fine arts,” but none so authoritative as the Artes Liberales or even the Artes Mechanicae. If we use the “Artes Elegantes” as a category, along with a fourth, “Artes Magicae,” then we could use something like the following to organize the Hogwarts Library.
| Artes Liberales | Artes Mechanicae | Artes Elegantes | Artes Magicae | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arithmetic | Architecture and masonry | Calligraphy | Charms | |
| Astronomy | Blacksmithing and metallurgy | Dance | Divination | |
| Geometry | Cooking | Literature | Healing | |
| Grammar | Engineering | Music | Herbology | |
| Law | Hunting, strategy, warfare | Painting | Philosophy | |
| Logic | Navigation and trade | Sculpture | Potions | |
| Rhetoric | Tailoring and weaving | Theater | Transfiguration | |
“Healing” is one of the Artes Magicae rather than Artes Mechanicae because Healers mostly don't use tools. In the modern world there are new arts, like photography and radio, which may be incorporated into existing categories (e.g. photography as a form of painting), inspire a complete recategorization (removing calligraphy as a primary art in order to list photography in its place), or simply ignored and placed in some nebulous “miscellaneous” section.
Even these categories could be further broken down.
Others might be spun off into their own collections. For example, “hunting, strategy, and warfare” might be made into the Artes Martiale , composed of (1) dueling (with wands), (2) fighting with sharp-edged weapons, (3) grappling and wrestling, (4) hunting, (5) logistics and strategy, (6) tactics, and (7) tracking and trapping, or some other combination (replacing “grappling and wrestling” with a more general “pankration” or “unarmed fighting,” for example, or dividing logistics and strategy or combining them with tactics and then adding archery or horsemanship).
In Cog and Star's Unionverse setting, books are organized into twenty-six classes, then sorted alphabetically by author. Each class corresponds to a letter of the alphabet:
| Astronomy | stars, space, etc. | Numbers | mathematics, numerology |
|---|---|---|---|
| Botany | plants | Oracles | divination |
| Charms | charms | Potions | potions |
| Divinity | religion, theory, etc. | Quodpot | sports |
| Ethics | morals, ethics, moral philosophy | Reference | reference works |
| Fine Arts | art, drawing, etc. | Structures | building, construction, engineering |
| Glossology | languages, linguistics | Transfiguration | transfiguration |
| History | history | Utilities | DIY guides, instruction manuals, etc. |
| Ideas | philosophy | Vitae | biographies |
| Jurisprudence | law | Warcraft | military history, military strategy |
| Kinship | genealogy, etc. | Xenial | foreign nations |
| Literature | novels, poetry, etc. | Yearbooks | yearbooks |
| Medicine | medicine, healing | Zoology | animals, creatures |
1 In “The Original Forty,” Rowling says, “While I imagined that there would be considerably more than forty students in each year at Hogwarts, I thought that it would be useful to know a proportion of Harry's classmates, and to have names at my fingertips when action was taking place around the school.”[ ▲ ]
2 “Qa” and others are excluded from Locke's boxes because “q” is always followed by “u” in English.[ ▲ ]
