Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Places/The Burrow
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| Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Place | |
| The Burrow | |
|---|---|
| Location | Near Ottery St. Catchpole |
| Permanent Residents | Arthur Weasley, Molly Weasley, Bill Weasley, Charlie Weasley, Percy Weasley, Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Ron Weasley, Ginny Weasley |
| First Appearance | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets |
Contents |
[edit] General Overview
The Burrow is the rural home of the Weasley family, located near the fictional town of Ottery St. Catchpole.
[edit] Extended Description
The Burrow is a Wizard-built ramshackle multi-story dwelling that visibly looks like it takes magic to keep it from falling apart. It has a ghoul in the attic, gnomes in the garden and an adjacent pasture that has been pressed into use as a Quidditch pitch for years. There's a shed where Arthur Weasley, the head of the family, explores and tinkers with the Muggle artifacts he comes across, often with destructive results. Near Molly Weasley's kitchen is a grandfather clock with a hand for each family member and markings around the face for places they might be ("home", "traveling", "mortal peril").
With seven children in the family, there's not much money to go round, and a real spirit of "make-do" pervades the Burrow and its genteel poverty, but to Harry Potter, who grew up unloved and unwanted for ten years before he re-entered the Wizarding world at the age of eleven, the Burrow is his summer-holiday spot of choice, because it's filled with a family's love in enough abundance to welcome him within.
[edit] Analysis
The main purpose of The Burrow seems to be contrast. It is an overcrowded, cluttered, haphazard house held together with the wizarding equivalent of baling wire and bubble gum, and there is a very real shortage of money shown by the need to "make do". Set against this we have Harry's nominal home at Number 4, Privet Drive, a very neat and clean new house, squared at the corners, perfect in every way, with enough space that an entire room can be set aside for Dudley's broken birthday presents... and absolutely horrible to live in for anyone who has any real feeling at all. The contrast between the Weasley's physical poverty and spiritual richness, set against the Dursley's physical financial stability and spiritual emptiness, mirrors the difference between Harry's sterile life in the Muggle world, and his almost overfull life in the Wizarding world.
It is noted in A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot that Ottery St. Catchpole "on the south coast of England" is one of a number of villages where wizards settled in relatively large numbers after the ratification of the International Statute of Secrecy in 1689.
