hi. i was just reading a post a couple of days ago and it was talking about how the potters, blacks, weaslys, and the malfoys being all related. but then i was reading another post on being purebloods and it got me thinking, if all the families are all related to each other doesnt it mean that none of them are purebloods anymore. think about it james potter married a muggle (lily evans) and so did others from the black & potter family making them half blood or quarter blood or somthing along those lines, therefore, making the weaslys and yes even the malfoys half blood (i wonder what draco and lucis would say to that). its just a thought though abd i dont know if i right. tell me what you think please.

you've got a good point there. but we don't know who exactly married who in all 4 familys. remember, the weasly's were all pure-bloods. people in their family must have been marrying pure bloods for genrations! and james potter's parents were pure bloods, and his grandparents, and great grandparents, and so on

James' marriage to Lily has no bearing on the purity of the Weasleys' and Malfoys' blood. Imagine food coloring in a stream. The only water affected by the food coloring is the downstream water, not the upstream.

yeah, the malfoys are purebloods

thanks for you analysis. i would love to know more of your thought. thanks[font=Arial Black][size=3][i]

I'm not sure what else there is to say. Everyone has said that the Malfoys are pureblood and that Lily's joining the family doesn't change that. One more thing, no one's really sure that James Potter is the "male Potter" listed on the Black Family Tree.

i don't think so man...malfolys are pure-bloods because those ego maniacs will never marry anyone who is a muggle. just because one guy, who is a distant relative married a muggle does not mean that the existing family members become half bloods right away...it will be only those who are heirs from that marriage..

i think JKR is making a point of how pointless bloodlines are. everyone is realted to everyone no one is prue blood and in real life very few people are only black or only white everyone has at least one great great grandfater or second cousin who is in another ethnicithy. JKR is telling us this is stupid.

OR i could be over anilizing it

somewhere along the lines of this the malfoys must have a great great great great gradmother or something. and before voldemort, not everyone was evil. these people could include a far distnt relavtive that affects the malfoys pure blood status. i quite like the idea of this topic!

The Weasley's are not exactly pure-bloods. Ron says that he has an distant uncle or something who is an accountant and in the CoS he says that wizards had to marry muggles because they would have died out, pretty much saying that there was a marriage in there including a muggle. I'm not saying that Ron isn't pureblood, he might be but the whole Weasley family might not all be purebloods.

~Filius~

guys can i just add a question on this post? no one can be a pure blood because the first ever pereson in their families had to be a muggle born!!!
please let me know

and to your question
idont think malfoys are pure bloods

i never really thought about that. good question though hermione.! as in to answering that question... it is like answering the question "which came first, the chicken or the egg." I do believe that muggles came first, and from there a "magical" muggle born baby came from that. Therefore the malfoys would technically NOT be pure blood. but they would have like 1/999999999999% muggle blood. it would be so small that it probably wouldnt even matter... and it would be no where near halfblodd status.

another random question... anyone know who was the first wizard/witch?

[quote name='mexell' date='Feb 9 2007, 03:30 PM' post='321022']
[quote]another random question... anyone know who was the first wizard/witch?
[/quote]

Gandalf? Ha, just kidding. My guess would be that it would be Merlin because he is probably the most famous ancient wizard. Was he muggle-born?? Interesting....I doubt that this will have any significance in DH. It would be cool if JKR wrote a whole history of the wizarding world.

~Filius~

Maybe they are Pure-Bloods and the half-blood thing only applies to direct families not like 2nd cousins once removed and all that stuff.

You bring up a really good point. I think, though, that some of the family probably is pure blood and some might not be. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley are both pure bloods. If Mr. Weasley had married a muggle, his children would be half bloods. Mr. Weasley, however, would still be a pure blood. I think that some of the Malfoys probably are pure bloods, but the ones farther along the line probably have at least a little muggle blood. I think that the difference is they have tried very hard to keep the line of Malfoys pure blood. The Blacks did, as well. We don't know about the Potters because we don't know much about Harry's family, but they were against Voldemort so I can't see them being the kind of people who decide they must keep their line pure. The Weasleys, however, don't worry about that. Their herritage is all pure blood, but there could be people in the family who are half blood or who are muggles.

As for the question about having to be born from a muggle in the first place, I have absolutely no idea. We don't know if wizards or muggles came first or if they both came at the same time. I do, however, think that that would not be enough to have the entire family considered half bloods.

I also have no idea who the first wizard or witch was. That is a good question, though.

JKR says on her websites that none of the families that exist today are actually pure any more. They simply cross off the squibs and muggles off their family tree to propagate the myth that they are in fact of noble and pure blood. In contemporary tiems, the term pure blood has come to represent more about the legacy and standing of particular families and nobility rather than blood purity. It would have been near impossible for them not to be touched by Muggle blood somewhere or the other. For example, the Black family has it's share of squibs and those who married muggles, but the direct lineage that may be traced from Sirius to Phineas Nigellus remains that of those who did not mix with muggle blood, but they may have married into families that had some intermixing with muggles or muggleborn so none of them would be 100% pure



In fact the cousin you speak of was a squib as clarified by JKR on her website. She intended to put that bit of information in the fourth book, but then chose to leave it out. Weasleys are pure bloods and that's why they are referred to as blood traitors, since they do not believe in the pure blood exclusivist agenda.

That's really confusing and I don't exactly know what to say. But I do have to say 'what really is a pure blood?' Because sometime when the wizard community STARTED that person was probably the offspring of a muggle creating the idea that that so called 'pure blood' was actually a muggle born. ANSWER: There is no such thing as a "pure-blood"!

thats not how it works the child they have wouldnt be poorblood if you marry some1 that is a half blood or a quarter blood or a muggle born but if you are a pure blood ya stay a pure blood and lily wasnt a muggle she was a muggle bourn muggles cant use magic but lily could because she was a muggle borne witch

Hmm. Which came first, the muggle or the magic? I say, everyone is magical, but not everyone has the skill to use it. Woah. I just worked that out in two seconds. I amaze myself.

There’ve appeared some very good points and arguments in the discussion.

As for the original question, I think we have to distinguish between a nuclear and an extended family. The Malfoys as a nuclear family – Lucius, Narcissa and Draco – are definitely pure-bloods as their most direct predecessors, that is their parents, are purebloods. When we think about the Malfoys in terms of an extended family – with all their aunts, cousins, second cousins and the like – this extended family may not be purebloods as there certainly has been a certain degree of intermarrying.

Now, more along the philosophical note of “all wizards are originally Muggle-borns anyway.” I think I agree with the statement that first there were only Muggles, and to some of them children with magical abilities were born. I can imagine the parents with such kids putting them away as they were afraid of their community's reaction and of being different. In the past, it was common to ostracize the members of a community on the simple basis of them being different. And magical abilities are a whole lot of difference, I would say. So technically, the first wizards must have been Muggle-borns. And being expelled from the majority society, they sought for the refuge with those of their own kind – with other Muggle-born witches and wizards. Maybe as a revenge against the Muggles who drove them out, they decided to marry only other fellow witches and wizards. Though originally Muggle-borns, they in a way labeled themselves as pure-bloods – they could have labeled themselves magic-bloods in the same way. I think, the word pure equals rather with magical abilities than with a degree of, or lack of, Muggle blood in one's veins and family trees.

But this confusion applies only to the very first generation. They were the Muggle-borns, but their descendants were born of a marriage between a witch and a wizards, and thus in a way they were pure-bloods. So it was the second generation who actually started the pure-blood lines.

That’s for the technical side, but I think that an insistence on the concept of pure-blood has become a mere cover for something else since then. More that a degree of magical “blood” in one’s family, the concept expresses the family’s beliefs and attitudes to the world – for example, if they see themselves as superiors above all other beings, magical or not.

~Jana

I agree with Jana. There are a lot of really good posts and points in this thread. And I really liked your philosophical approach, Jana. Very interesting! Unfortunately, I tend to be a stickler for "facts" and JKR's comments, which I guess takes me away from the more interesting philosophical way of thinking. Oh well. I am what I am.

So, as someone else already mentioned, JKR said that "true pure-blood" wizards don't exist in HP if they ever even existed in the past. This leads me to believe that muggles did indeed come first, and therefore, the first line of wizards were muggle borns, not pure-blood.

However, she went on to say that to be considered pure-blood, a person's parents and both sets of grandparents had to be wizards. But, some of the more "strict" schools (like Durmstrang maybe) required several more generations to be considered pure-blood.

By this line of thinking, Harry and Ginny's children will be considered pure-bloods because their parents and both sets of grandparents were wizards.

So, you don't have to come from a long line of pure-bloods to be a pure-blood. I guess that just makes your blood-purity stronger.

I’m glad you like my reasoning, Insomnia. To be honest, I somehow had to make up for my ignorance of the information Ms. Rowling reveals in her interviews. It’s not that I'm not interested in them, I am and much. But having started to read the books only some two years ago, and being an active fan for the past half a year, I somehow haven’t covered all the canonical knowledge, that is the one outside of the books, yet. Had I known her words, I wouldn’t have come up with the theory, as I too tend to stick to the canonical facts, given that I know them, of course.

I agree with you on your last point that being able to trace witches or wizards among one’s relatives further than two generations back may make the blood-purity somehow stronger.

I only wanted to add the obvious, that the whole concept of blood-purity functions as a parallel with the Jewish holocaust during of Second World War. If a person was to prove that he or she wasn’t a Jew they had to provide evidence that neither their parents nor their grandparents were Jews. So again, it went two generations backwards, like with the blood-purity in the books.

By drawing this analogy of considering someone superior only on the basis of their predecessors and “blood,” Ms. Rowling shows that any kind of such stratification of the society is negative, be that in a Muggle or wizarding world.

I hope I haven't got off-topic too much.

~Jana

Where purebloodedness is concerned, you only have to take a look at the Gaunts to realise that trying to maintain an undilluted link can have disasterous effects. Therefore as you rightly say Laura....



...although the longer line of pureblood you come from does not necessarily mean your line is stronger. There will eventually be a weak link in the chain as I mentioned with the Gaunts. So if that reckoning is correct, then the stronger wizarding families need to be dilluted once in a while with muggle blood to maintain some kind of balance, normality or equillibrium.

I thought you were a pureblood when you just had pureblood parents, if they were "mudbloods" you were also a "mudblood".. but it seems to be way more complicated. so, if you have a grandfather who is a halfblood, and he marries a pureblood, does that make you not a real pureblood?