Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Places/Slytherin House
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| Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Place | |
| Slytherin House | |
|---|---|
| Location | Hogwarts dungeons |
| Permanent Residents | Slytherin students |
| First Appearance | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone |
Contents |
[edit] General Overview
Slytherin House is one of the four Houses in Hogwarts. The common room is located deep within Hogwarts, apparently in the Dungeons.
[edit] Extended Description
Housemaster: Professor Horace Slughorn (about fifty years before the series opens, and again throughout book 7); Severus Snape (books 1 through 6)
Founder: Salazar Slytherin
Coat of Arms: silver serpent, green
Ghost: The Bloody Baron
Characteristics: "These cunning folks use any means, To achieve their ends."
Location of common room: The Slytherin common room is a low-ceilinged, dungeon-like room with greenish lamps and chairs. It is located in the dungeons, behind an apparently blank stretch of wall. The author has commented that it is actually located under the lake.
While we see the inside of the Slytherin common room in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron's sojourn there is necessarily brief. Also, the description of the common room that Harry gives in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to prove his assumed House association does not quite match what he sees in the earlier book.
[edit] Analysis
The number of students actually in each House is uncertain. We only ever hear of five boys and five girls in each year, but we have been told by the author in an interview that the average class size (all residents of one House for one year) is about thirty. Thus we must assume a population of 210 per house, fifteen boys and fifteen girls each year.
One gets the impression from things said in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that House honours, notably the House cup and the Quidditch cup, are generally held by either Slytherin house or Gryffindor house, with Ravenclaw house occasionally winning an upset victory. It is to stymie Slytherin house's long run of House cup victories that Professor McGonagall chooses to relax the rule about First Year students and brooms for Harry.
One must wonder whether the placement of the Slytherin common room under the lake is an author's mistake. It is true that in the same book where we enter the Common Room, we also see the Chamber of Secrets, which also has a major connection to Salazar Slytherin, including a statue of him on the far wall. It is also true that Harry remarks on the water on the floor of the Chamber, which leads us to believe that the Chamber is located under the lake. It is certainly possible that the author had slightly confused the two locales, and having placed the Slytherin common room under the lake in an interview, then had to keep it there in later chapters of the story.
