PS7: The Sorting Hat

"*Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!*"
— Albus Dumbledore

Professor McGonagall tells the first-years a bit about the school and they are sorted into their houses by the Sorting Hat. Then Dumbledore welcomes them, they have a feast, and find their dormitory for their first night at Hogwarts.

## Calendar and Dates

The entire action of the chapter takes place on the night of 1 September, most of it during the Welcoming Feast and inside the Great Hall.

## Interesting Facts and Notes

The Sorting Hat is the first of several key magical items we will encounter that serves as a tool for revealing character. But as we and Harry will learn only at the end of the next book, the most important aspect of the Sorting Hat is *not* what it says about a student itself, but how that student chooses to react to the Sorting.

We meet many, though not all, of the Hogwarts students in Harry's year in this chapter.

**A tall, black-haired witch in emerald-green robes stood there. She had a very stern face and Harry's first thought was that this was not someone to cross.**

Harry is introduced to McGonagall, and his first impression is very accurate. She is definitely NOT someone to cross. She will hand out punishments without hesitation when warranted, even to her own house. However, when Umbridge tried to bully her, she was utterly disdainful. McGonagall is Dumbledore's second in command at Hogwarts; she fills in for him when he's away and becomes temporary head when he is removed from his position in book two and five, and when he dies at the end of book six.

**he'd somehow turned his teacher's wig blue.**

Yet another example of unfocused, wandless, untrained magic. One wonders how many such incidents there are in Muggle primary schools as Muggleborn magical children unknowingly cast spells when they get upset. It's interesting that Harry aimed his spell at a wig. This was undoubtedly an aspect of this teacher's appearance that caught his eye as a small boy, something that looked unusual or notable. And what incident with that teacher prompted little Harry Potter to be so upset with the woman? Were teachers oppressing him because of the prejudices they sensed from the Dursleys? What a sad life he led before his eleventh birthday...

**About twenty ghosts had just streamed through the back wall**

So there are more ghosts at Hogwarts than the four house ghosts. We've never heard about any of he others, as far as we know. Perhaps some of the attendees mentioned at the Deathday Party were the other Hogwarts ghosts.

**haven't we given Peeves all the chances he deserves? He gives us all a bad name and you know, he's not really even a ghost**

He is a part of the group of ghosts, however, and somewhat under their authority. We learn in book four that the ghosts hold a ghosts' council when there are important matters for them to discuss. Peeves, as it turns out, is one of the topics they discuss quite regularly.

What is Peeves if he isn't a ghost? He's a "poltergeist," which according to folklore is a manifestation of emotions (usually adolescent emotions) which throws things around.

**they walked out of the chamber, back across the hall, and through a pair of double doors into the Great Hall.**

That is, the Chamber of Reception in which the students have been waiting is on the opposite side of the Entrance Hall from the double doors forming the main entrance to the Great Hall.

**On top of the stool she put a pointed wizard's hat. This hat was patched and frayed and extremely dirty.**

As we and Harry will learn from the Sorting Hat's song three years from now (GF12), it is more than a thousand years old.

**Quite a powerful magic item, this. It can read minds and in a few moments we find that it can hear specific thoughts and respond, as if in conversation. One wonders, in reference to Arthur's admonition about dangerous magic items, where the Sorting Hat keeps its brain...**

**"So we've just got to try on the hat!" Ron whispered to Harry. "I'll kill Fred, he was going on about wrestling a troll."**

How the elder Weasleys kept something as well-known as the Sorting a secret from Ron for eleven years is hard to imagine. There is nothing in McGonagall's introduction to indicate that the students are expected to keep this ceremony a secret. Since many if not most of the people in the Wizarding World will have gone to Hogwarts and will have sat on that stool, it seems amazing that Ron would never have heard of it. On the other hand, the Weasley family lives in isolation in Devon, with only a few other Wizarding families living in the area. Perhaps they just don't get out much. Perhaps it's the equivalent of a hazing ritual not to tell younger siblings what to expect.

**"HUFFLEPUFF!" shouted the hat. The table on the right cheered**

...

**"GRYFFINDOR!" shouted the hat and the table on the far left exploded with cheers**

...

**"RAVENCLAW!" The table second from the left clapped**

We're getting the layout of the house tables here. As we're looking from the head table, Hufflepuff is on the right. That means they're nearest the door. We learn in book four that the doors into the Great Hall do not open at the back of the room, but to the side, since Harry has to walk past three other tables to get to the Gryffindor table. We're told the locations of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor as well, so we can deduce that Slytherin is second from the right, between Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. It's probably intentional that Gryffindor and Slytherin aren't next to each other, and in subsequent books they're moved even farther apart. By the fourth book, they're on opposite sides of the hall.

**Perhaps it was Harry's imagination, after all he'd heard about Slytherin, but he thought they looked like an unpleasant lot.**

Are there any nice Slytherins? This has interested fans for years. Typically, however, they're described in less-than-complimentary terms. Is this just because we're seeing them through Harry's prejudiced point of view or are most of them really hulking, part-troll, pug-faced goons? Only in HBP4, when we meet Professor Slughorn, do we begin to see another side to the ambitious characters selected for Slytherin.

**Sometimes, Harry noticed, the hat shouted out the house at once, but at others it took a little while to decide. "Finnigan, Seamus," the sandy-haired boy next to Harry in the line, sat on the stool for almost a whole minute before the hat declared him a Gryffindor.**

Harry himself seems to take the longest time in the Sorting. As we will learn in his fifth year, other members of his year such as Hermione were also edge cases who could have been Sorted into different houses than those that the Hat finally declared for them.

**"Perks, Sally-Anne"**

Something happened to poor Sally-Anne over the years. At the end of their fifth year, students were called forward for their practical OWLs in alphabetical order, and her name was skipped. This suggests that she is no longer a student at Hogwarts.

**Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought, *Not Slytherin, not Slytherin*.**

**"Not Slytherin, eh?" said the small voice.**

As Harry observes to Dumbledore nearly two years later, after his second and third encounters with the Sorting Hat, "It only put me in Gryffindor because I asked not to be put in Slytherin." (CS18) More about this later.

**And now there were only three people left to be sorted.**

No, there are four. Dean Thomas, Lisa Turpin, Ron Weasley and Blaise Zabini.

**Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!**

As we see in later years, Dumbledore's wisdom and humour often take the form of not getting between his young charges and their food with long speeches. Any announcements are generally made after the meal except in very grave circumstances.

**Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington at your service. Resident ghost of Gryffindor Tower.**

By the end of this chapter we will have met three of the four House ghosts. We don't meet the last one, the Grey Lady, until chapter twelve:

"*They passed the ghost of a tall witch gliding in the opposite direction, but saw no one else. Just as Ron started moaning that his feet were dead with cold, Harry spotted the suit of armour.*"
— (PS12)

**Harry looked over at the Slytherin table and saw a horrible ghost sitting there, with blank staring eyes, a gaunt face, and robes stained with silver blood.**

We finally learn the story behind the Baron's bloody robes in DH31.

**It happened very suddenly. The hook-nosed teacher looked past Quirrell's turban straight into Harry's eyes - and a sharp, hot pain shot across the scar on Harry's forehead.**

A very tidy bit of misdirection. Harry's scar appears on first reading to be reacting to Harry having drawn Snape's attention, but upon subsequent reading Quirrell/Voldemort's presence next to Snape would seem to be the key factor.

**the Gryffindor common room, a cozy, round room full of squashy armchairs.**

The Gryffindor common room is round, so it's the base of the tower (as opposed to a room adjacent to the tower). The common room is quite large, since it can hold all the Gryffindor students at once, which is somewhere around 150 people. Besides squashy armchairs, the room contains a number of tables at which students can study.

**At the top of a spiral staircase -- they were obviously in one of the towers - they found their beds at last: five four-posters hung with deep red, velvet curtains.**

So the first-year boys' dormitory is on the top floor of the tower this year. Apparently, judging from subsequent returns after summer holidays, the boys keep the same dormitory throughout their stay at Hogwarts. Also note that the number of beds matches the number of first-year Gryffindor boys we've seen so far - Harry, Ron, Neville, Dean, and Seamus - so we now know that there are exactly five Gryffindor boys in Harry's year.

**He was wearing Professor Quirrell's turban, which kept talking to him, telling him he must transfer to Slytherin at once, because it was his destiny.**

A nice mixture of Sorting Hat imagery with the turban concealing Voldemort's possession of Quirrell. This whole dream is full of foreshadowing.

## Memorable Lines

> "*If only the hat had mentioned a house for people who felt a bit queasy, that would have been the one for him.*"
>
>
>
>