A History of Magic

The standard history of the wizarding world, on every Hogwarts book list, and the first place Harry ever reads about himself.

There is a small, devastating scene in the first novel that this entry exists to record. Harry, eleven years old, three days into knowing that magic is real, opens his new history textbook and finds himself in it. Not as a person — as an entry. A thing that happened, in the past, to a baby, written up by a scholar in the settled prose of established fact.

Rowling comes back to it six books later and takes it apart. Bagshot lived next door to the Dumbledores. She watched Albus and Grindelwald as teenagers, brilliant and drunk on each other and drafting plans for wizarding supremacy. She knew what happened to Ariana. And her History of Magic — the standard work, the one on every school list, the book that taught a generation of children what their world is — records none of it.

That is the sharpest thing the series does with a book. Not a cursed volume or a forbidden one, but the ordinary approved textbook, revealed at the end to have been written by a woman who was protecting a friend. The syllabus was someone’s private discretion all along.

On the readability rating. Regularly consulted, occasionally paraphrased, never quoted at any length. We know what it left out far better than we know what it says.

In-world history

Bagshot lived at Godric's Hollow, next door to the Dumbledore family, and knew Albus and Gellert Grindelwald as boys — a fact her published history does not see fit to record. In her extreme old age she was visited by Rita Skeeter, who extracted from her the material that would gut Dumbledore's posthumous reputation. She was later killed, and her body used, by Voldemort's snake.

Why it matters

Bagshot's textbook is where the series keeps its official version of events — and the series then spends seven books quietly demonstrating that the official version is incomplete. By Deathly Hallows the historian herself is dead in her cottage in Godric's Hollow, having been interviewed under duress, and the history she wrote turns out to have omitted the thing that mattered most.

Appearances

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) — J. K. Rowling On the first-year set-text list; Harry looks up his own name in it
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) — J. K. Rowling Its author appears as a character in Godric's Hollow

Connected volumes

Inspired The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore · The Wizarding World
Related to Quidditch Through the Ages · The Wizarding World
Related to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them · The Wizarding World
Related to Twurp's Peerage · Discworld

Catalogue record

Category: History
World: The Wizarding World
First appearance: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 1997
Readability: Described