Skip to main content

harry potter - How many people actually participated in the original Voldemort conflict?


From GoF scene where Death Eaters are returning after Voldemort's return, there seems to be VERY few of them (don't recall exact # but my impression was between a dozen and two dozen).



Also, Order of Phoenix seems to have fairly few members as well.


These are probably the "officer/elite corps" of the bigger fight. Is there any estimate of how many actual participating fighters were there on both sides in the original conflict? I'm fine with either human-only totals, or overall (e.g. count giants on Voldemort's side).


On the Death Eater side, you can count/not count Imperioused people if any info like that is available.



Answer



First of all, I'm going to use the estimates from this question, they should be good enough for the number of wizards. This will remain somewhat in the background. Also, I'm only going to count human wizards, I'm not going to try and figure out the rest.


The best estimate for the number of inner circle death eaters in the first war comes from the resurrection scene in Goblet of Fire. When all of the death eaters return, there is a dialog of several pages, but I recall that there were about 12 missing, and about 30 or so present, giving the total number to be 40.


Assuming this number for the inner circle, we can speculate that there would be at least 5 outer circle for every inner, quite possibly more. So, the total number of death eaters should be between 250-300.


The best clue to the number of people fighting is the photo in Order of the Phoenix. There are 26 people who are in the photograph or mentioned as being original members of the Order. I think we can assume that there are at least 4 others for every one we know about who fought Voldemort, so maybe around 125. We know that the order was seriously outnumbered, as is stated at the end.


So, given my rough guessing, there were around 400-500 wizards actively participating in the war. Probably only 20% of the population of wizards of England. No doubt there were others who were neutral, trying to keep Muggles from finding Wizards and the like, but probably not all that many.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

harry potter - Do the Kwikspell courses work?

In Harry Potter we are introduced to Kwikspell course in The Chamber of Secrets (and never hear about it again). We see Filch taking courses, presumably by mail. The descriptions of Kwikspell make me think it is for people who are weak in magic (kind of like how Neville was supposed to be when he was younger), but had magic in them nonetheless. However, Ron's comments later in the chapter make it sound like it is mainly for Squibs to learn magic. However, it is strongly implied through out all the books that Squibs are essentially Muggles, and will never be able to do magic. How then is a Kwikspell course supposed to work? Do we have any information to know if it works at all? Is it a scam? An answer from any level of canon is welcome. Answer Kwikspell courses are (probably) useful to some wizards, but not to squibs. The Kwikspell course literature comes with two testimonials. Madam Z. Nettles of Topsham writes: ‘I had no memory for incantations and my potions were a family joke...
Post a Comment
Read more

futurama - How much time is lost in 'Time Keeps on Slippin''

In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.
Post a Comment
Read more

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...
Post a Comment
Read more

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.
Post a Comment
Read more