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The (Possible) Domestication of House-Elves
Program Code:
650
Date:
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Time:
5:30 PM to 6:00 PM
EST
SPEAKER
:
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about each speaker.
Yolanda Carroll has a Bachelor of Arts in both English and Political Science from Baylor University. Besides Harry Potter, she is in and has contributed to several fandoms for various animes (Japanese animation series). Yolanda has attended several Harry Potter conferences and enjoys getting together with other HP fans. She loves to travel and is learning Japanese. Yolanda is the proud aunt of one niece and two nephews.
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Description
In this presentation, I will define and discuss the three possible ways that house-elves might be bound to their wizard family: domesticated, enslaved or neither. In the case of “neither”, elves willingly bound themselves to wizard families. In the case of domesticated, a certain kind of helpful elf that craved a symbiotic relationship with wizards were allowed or brought willing into wizards’ homes and chose to stay binding themselves to the wizard family they lived with. I do believe that house-elves being bound to one family could have been their own doing. I base this on stories of beings or spirits that have supposedly bound themselves to a particular family. In the case of house-elf enslavement, house-elves may not have voluntarily bound themselves to wizards. One argument for enslavement is that house-elves do not have a choice to obey or leave their masters unlike their closest mythological cousins, brownies.