Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Places/Slytherin House

Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Place
Slytherin House
Location	Hogwarts dungeons
Permanent Residents	Slytherin students, The Bloody Baron
First Appearance	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

General Overview

Slytherin House is one of the four Houses in Hogwarts. The common room is located deep within Hogwarts, apparently in the Dungeons. Students are Sorted into Houses by the Sorting Hat upon their initial arrival at Hogwarts based on their character. While students remain at Hogwarts, they each represent their House; a tally of House points is kept, with good behaviour and good marks adding to that total, misbehaviour and bad marks subtracting from it. The House Cup is awarded each year to the House with the greatest tally of House points.

Extended Description

Housemaster: Professor Horace Slughorn (about fifty years before the series opens, and again throughout book 7); Severus Snape (books 1 through 6)

Founder: Salazar Slytherin

Coat of Arms: silver serpent, green

Ghost: The Bloody Baron

Characteristics: "These cunning folks use any means, To achieve their ends."

Location of common room: The Slytherin common room is a low-ceilinged, dungeon-like room with greenish lamps and chairs. It is located in the dungeons, behind an apparently blank stretch of wall. The author has commented that it is actually located under the lake.

While we see the inside of the Slytherin common room in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron's sojourn there is necessarily brief. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry claims that he was a member of Slytherin house to avoid identifying himself, and gives a description of the Common Room as proof. This description does not quite match what he saw in the earlier book, but it is sufficient to mislead his captors.

Residents of Slytherin house will be selected according to the biases of the founder of the house, Salazar Slytherin. As Slytherin is known to have departed the school in anger at the decision of the other School Founders to allow teaching of magic to those who had Muggle ancestry, it is not terribly surprising that those modern wizards who believe in the superiority of the Pure-blood wizards should end up Sorted into Slytherin house. This is also reflected in the common room password the one time we hear it used; at Christmas in Harry's second year, it is "Pureblood".

Shortly before the end of the last book, Voldemort decrees that all houses at Hogwarts shall be terminated, except for Slytherin. Luckily, this decree has no effect.

Analysis

The number of students actually in each House is uncertain. We only ever hear of five boys and five girls in each year, but we have been told by the author in an interview that the average class size (all residents of one House for one year) is about thirty. Thus we must assume a population of 210 per house, fifteen boys and fifteen girls each year.

One gets the impression from things said in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that House honours, notably the House cup and the Quidditch cup, are generally held by either Slytherin house or Gryffindor house, with Ravenclaw house occasionally winning an upset victory. It is to stymie Slytherin house's long run of House cup victories that Professor McGonagall chooses to relax the rule about First Year students and brooms for Harry.

One must wonder whether the placement of the Slytherin common room under the lake is an author's mistake. It is true that in the same book where we enter the Common Room, we also see the Chamber of Secrets, which also has a major connection to Salazar Slytherin, including a statue of him on the far wall. It is also true that Harry remarks on the water on the floor of the Chamber, which leads us to believe that the Chamber is located under the lake. It is certainly possible that the author had slightly confused the two locales, and having placed the Slytherin common room under the lake in an interview, then had to keep it there in later parts of the story.