Harry Potter’s Wizards Stopped Making Babies Because of Voldemort (Maybe)

Jill Pantozzi | May 26th, 2016

J.K. Rowling has said Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has around 1,000 students at any given time. So how come there are so few students in Harry Potter’s class? A new fan theory suggests Voldemort is to blame for the lack of baby making. Harry Potter, the gift that keeps on hurting!

Buzzfeed recently gave attention to an interesting theory from Tumblr user marauders4evr.

In case the embedding isn’t readable for anyone it says:

Oh my god…

I just realized something.

For years, we’ve all wondered how there can be 1000 students (according to J.K. Rowling) in Hogwarts when there are only a handful of students in Harry’s year.

The math doesn’t add up.

We’ve all just assumed that it was an error.

But what if there’s normally dozens of students in each house, in each year?

What if Harry’s year was the exception?

What if there were less students in the Hogwarts Class of 1998 because the period when the other kids would have been conceived (1979-1981) was when Voldemort’s reign of power was at its peak? Between the dozens of adults who joined the Order, the dozens of civilians who were killed in Death Eater raids, and the dozens of adults that didn’t want to bring a child into the world, just then…It’s actually entirely possible that there was a baby drought for a few years in the wizarding world, leading to a smaller class size a decade later.

Rowling hasn’t addressed this intriguing theory yet but it does make a lot of sense when you think about it. Or, it could all mean nothing and more kids could have been sorted into other Houses that year. The Sorting Hat puts them where it feels they belong, after all, and isn’t trying to achieve an equal number in all houses. What do you think?