The wizarding world of Harry Potter is full of magical creatures, all carefully researched
by J.K.
Rowling.
Well, some are more carefully researched than others.
From oversized snakes to underwhelming plants, here are the things Harry Potter got wrong
about its mythical beings.
One of the first major mythological creatures that Harry, Ron, and Hermione encounter in
their adventures is Fluffy, the gigantic, three-headed dog who guards the Sorcerer's
Stone.
In the end, Fluffy turns out to be pretty lousy at the whole guard dog job because he,
or maybe they, immediately falls asleep whenever there's music playing.
Take Fluffy for example.
Just play him a bit of music and he falls asleep!"
To be fair, his poor job performance is not exactly his fault.
He's not the one who decided to put a legendary artifact behind a bunch of whimsical traps
that could literally be defeated by a trio of slightly above-average children.
Anyway, while Fluffy isn't the same creature, he's pretty clearly inspired by Cerberus the
gigantic.
three-headed dog who guards the entrance to the underworld in Greek mythology.
On the whole, Cerberus is about as effective at keeping people out of Hades as Fluffy is
at keeping people out of the third-floor corridor.
He is not, however, susceptible to the same weakness
As students of mythology may already know, subduing and capturing Cerberus without using
a sword was the last of the famous 12 Labors of Hercules, and it didn't go down with a
gentle melody from a harp.
Instead, legend has it that Herc just beat Cerberus with a rock and then put him in a
chokehold until the dog passed out, which is especially impressive when you consider
that Cerberus had at least three necks.
We get a brief glimpse of a truly magical creature in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's
Stone when Harry has to serve detention in the Forbidden Forest and catches Voldemort
drinking the blood of a slain unicorn.
According to Firenze the centaur, killing a unicorn leaves an indelible stain on one's
soul, but the trade-off is that drinking its blood will keep you alive, even if you're
hovering on the verge of death.
"It is a terrible crime to slay a unicorn.
Drinking the blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death."
If you know anything about the history of dubious and allegedly magical cures, it won't
surprise you to know that people in the past actually did believe that unicorns were real
and possessed mystical healing properties.
What might come as a surprise, however, is that this was a common belief as recently
as the 18th century, and that it wasn't the blood that people were interested in.
It was, of course, the horns.
Powdered unicorn horn was sold by hucksters and con men in the 17th and 18th centuries
as a cure-all for stuff like smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases on Earth.
Obviously, it didn't work, and smallpox continued to be a problem until it was officially declared
eradicated in 1980 thanks to vaccines, which are a handy thing to have around since unicorns
don't technically exist.
As for the powder, it could've been virtually anything, but the closest it ever came to
being authentic was when it was made from the horns of narwhals.
Really, if you didn't know that narwhals were real and unicorns weren't, that would've been
pretty darn convincing.
Even before Harry gets to Hogwarts in the first book, he encounters goblins — the
gold-loving, vaguely sinister beings who run Gringotts Bank.
Of course, these guys have since joined the ranks of fantastical creatures who've drawn
heavy criticism for bearing a striking similarity to anti-Semitic stereotypes, and folks, there's
a heck of a case to be made there.
At least the Ferengi from Star Trek and Watto from Star Wars didn't literally run banks.
The thing is, they don't exactly match up with the goblins from folklore, either.
Nowadays, thanks to their appearances in the works of J.R.R.
Tolkien and their status as a go-to, low-level monster in games like Dungeons & Dragons,
the word "goblin" is mostly associated with diminutive, inherently evil creatures.
They're the guys who are slightly easier to beat up than orcs but a little more challenging
than kobolds.
Originally, however, the word was more like "fairy" or "pixie," a catch-all term for any
small magical being that could be friendly or mischievous depending on the story being
told.
In fact, rather than the opportunistic bankers we see in Harry Potter, one of the earliest
uses of the term refers to a purely benevolent being.
The Gesta Romanorum, a collection of folktales dating to the late 13th century, contains
the appropriately titled story of "The Benevolent Goblin."
When parched travelers in a particular area announced "I thirst," quoting Jesus on the
Cross, a friendly goblin would emerge, offering the traveler a drink from a golden chalice.
Unfortunately, word got out, and an evil knight showed up and stole the chalice, ruining it
for everyone.
But hey, considering that goblins wanting their artifacts back winds up being a major
plot point by the end of the Harry Potter series, maybe that's the origin story for
why goblins and wizards don't get along.
The basilisk is a legendary animal that dates back to ancient Greece, but in Harry Potter
and the Chamber of Secrets, one shows up as the key figure in what is probably the most
well-crafted whodunnit everywhere the answer is "a giant snake that none of us have ever
seen before."
Rowling's basilisk is almost exactly like the mythological one, in that both of them
are snakes that have the power to turn their victims to stone simply by looking at them.
There is one big difference, though, in a very literal sense.
The basilisk in Chamber of Secrets is a huge, 60-foot monster whose gigantic venomous fangs
can be used in a pinch as a good-sized stabbin' dagger.
Not so with the mythical one.
Pliny the Elder, the Human Wikipedia of Ancient Rome, described the basilisk as being smaller,
only about a foot long, presumably because a snake with super powers is already pretty
scary without being huge.
It could be even more off-model, though.
The term "basilisk" is often conflated with another mythical creature with petrifying
eyes and a similar origin: the cockatrice.
One of the few creatures to show up in both My Little Pony and in the Bible, the cockatrice
has the body of a dragon with the head and wings of a rooster.
The big snake is more thematically resonant to Harry Potter, but c'mon, we all know it
would be awesome to see little Daniel Radcliffe try to fight a big ol' chicken with dinosaur
legs.
While it features prominently in Harry's herbology class in Chamber of Secrets, the mandrake
plant isn't a made-up magical bit of flora.
It's 100 percent real, and while it's not a sentient being with a cry that can strike
you dead where you stand, the fact that its roots usually have a vaguely humanoid shape
that gives it a weird resemblance to a baby has cemented its prominent place in folklore.
Harry Potter, of course, leans pretty heavily on the more magical side of things, with a
particular emphasis on the mandrake's medicinal properties.
In the book and movie, it's the main ingredient for curing petrification, but ironically enough,
the real-life mandrake, if ingested, can often result in death due to asphyxiation by paralyzing
your lungs.
It has, however, been historically used as an anesthetic to knock people out for surgeries,
and it's also the kind of very powerful hallucinogen that might make you wake up talking about
seeing a giant snake even if you've never been to Hogwarts.
"Amazing!
This is just like magic!"
As for how it differs from folklore, well, Harry Potter gets the part about the deadly
cry right, but there's also a tradition about how uprooting a mandrake will condemn the
uprooter's immortal soul to Hell.
Considering that Professor Sprout's very first assignment with mandrake is uprooting and
re-potting it, she might actually beat Professor Snape in the competition for the teacher who
presents the most undeniable danger to the students.
If you were going to list the locations in the Harry Potter series by how welcoming and
comforting they are, the top entry on your list would likely be the Burrow, the Weasley
family's improbable, towering home.
It's full of whimsical, magical things like the pesky gnomes out in the garden, the clock
that tells you where every member of the very large family is at any given time, the friendly
ghoul rattling the pipes, and ... wait a second.
A ghoul?
“What are you talking about?”
"You know, funny little green ghouls going..."
“What, like in movies and cartoons?”
“Little green ghouls, buddy!”
“Don't write ghouls!"
“I’m not!”
Ghouls have their origins in Middle Eastern folklore.
The name comes from an Arabic word which is often translated as "demon" but literally
means "to seize," and were introduced to European audiences with the translation of One Thousand
and One Nights into French in 1704.
Notably, that version doesn't include friendly pipe-rattling, instead focusing on how ghouls
are terrifying creatures who dwell in desolate places and cemeteries, where they feast on
corpses, drink blood, and occasionally lure children to their doom.
Molly Weasley is generally depicted as a good mother who only wants the best for her family,
but keeping a flesh-eating super-zombie around is probably not a great way to raise children,
even if you have four or five spares.
Then again, this is the same family that let a mass murderer live in their youngest son's
bedroom for a solid decade without knowing it.
They're still better than the Dursleys, but maybe not as much as we thought.
First introduced in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the boggarts are easily one of
the coolest ideas to show up in the Potter series.
They're all-purpose monsters from your childhood nightmares, formless creatures that take the
shape of what you're most afraid of, hiding under the bed or in the closet.
It's a great way of taking an idea so familiar to its younger audience and making it a part
of the magical world.
When you get right down to it, "boggart" is as good a name as any since its modern usage,
like "boogeyman," is a generic term for any malevolent spirit causing trouble around the
house.
Historically, though, a boggart was a specific creature from British mythology.
According to 1851's Dialect and Folk-lore of Northamptonshire, one boggart was described
as, quote,
"a squat hairy man, strong as a six-year-old horse, and with arms almost as long as tacklepoles."
That's a pretty definitive shape, but maybe the person doing the describing was just really
afraid of Wario and Waluigi.
And really, who isn't?
If you're mostly familiar with elves as Santa's singing, toymaking helpers or J.R.R.
Tolkien's beautiful immortals, here's something that might blow your mind.
From a folkloric standpoint, J.K.
Rowling's elves might actually be her most accurate additions to the wizarding world.
Rowling's elves are direct descendants from one of the most famous fairy tales collected
by the Brothers Grimm in the 1800s, which is probably best known to English-speaking
audiences as The Elves and the Shoemaker.
It's a familiar story, but in case you don't know it, it's about a poor shoemaker who's
down to his last scrap of cash who's helped by a pair of elves who cheerfully craft a
fine pair of shoes that save his business.
They continue to work for him for a while until, flush with cash, the shoemaker and
his wife buy the elves some fine sets of miniature clothing, leaving them out as a thank you
present.
The elves get the clothes, and they stop making shoes because they finally have something
of their own.
"Master has presented Dobby with clothes...
Dobby is free!"
So yeah, in the original story, the elves are just straight-up buck naked the entire
time.
That is often left out of the story, for the obvious reason that nobody wants to read or
make a fanciful cartoon for children about two elves who are just hangin' their broomstick
and bludgers out while doing some leather-working and intensely punishing themselves.
Needless to say, Rowling left that bit out too, dressing her unclothed elves in tea towels
and pillowcases.
The other big difference?
In the original story, the elves are happy to be freed, and they're never depicted as
being extremely stoked about remaining as what are essentially slaves like some of Rowing's
elves.
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