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Snape and Vampires in Day 6 of 12 Days of Pottermore

J.K. Rowling answers the question of whether Snape was secretly a vampire in today’s 12 Days of Pottermore.

Ever wondered why vampires aren’t featured much in the Harry Potter universe?  Well, author J.K. Rowling answers that question, along with a few others regarding vampires and if they ever figured prominently in the wizarding world.

But first, you’d have to answer the riddle to get to the answers.

12 days of pottermore - vampires and snape

With vampires and authors and a gatecrashing Malfoy,
Slughorn’s Christmas party is one for (almost) all to enjoy,
much to the surprise of fans, friends and the rest,
which loony Ravenclaw does Harry bring as a guest?

That should be a fairly easy answer riddle for all you HP fans.  Even a fan of just the movies would be able to answer that.  Using the first and last name is what gets you in.

12 days of pottermore - vampire at a christmas party
pottermore.com

The three items that you’ll be able to collect once you’re in there are mistletoe berries, homemade mince pies, and a Donaghan Tremlett card.  You may have to double-click the image to get a couple of those items.

The main feature is about vampires, and you’ll be able to read Rowlings thoughts on it by clicking on the vampire that’s apparent in the room.  Your hint (aside from the cropped and zoomed image below, of course) is that the vampire Sanguini is the only face you can see in the image.

12-days-of-pottermore-06a - vampire Sanguini
pottermore.com

In her notes, she talks about how vampires are written about and featured in so many forms of media already, she didn’t want to try to add anything new to them.  But she did state that in her earliest notes in creating the Hogwarts staff, “there was a subjectless vampire teacher I had forgotten, called ‘Trocar’. A Trocar is sharply pointed shaft inserted into arteries or cavaties to extract bodily fluids, so I think it a rather good name for a vampire.”

It definitely would have been a good name for a vampire, but he obviously didn’t make that big an impression on her to officially include him, “because he disappears fairly early on in my notes.”

Something that was rumored by fans was the idea of Harry’s arch-nemesis/professor Severus Snape actually being a vampire himself.  She puts in her official statement on that particular rumor as well:

“While it is true that he has an unhealthy pallor, and is sometimes described as looking like a large bat in his long black cloak, he never actually turns into a bat, we meet him outside the castle by daylight, and no corpses with puncture marks in their necks ever turn up at Hogwarts. In short, Snape is not a re-vamped Trocar.”

It’s an interesting theory, but there also would’ve been no point in making Snape into a vampire.  Unless his vampirism could’ve explained some reason for who he was or why he does what he does, I’m glad that Rowling didn’t find it necessary to go there with him.

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