Session Information
HPEF - Azkatraz 2009
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The (Possible) Domestication of House-Elves
Track : Sunday, July 19, 2009
Program Code: 650
Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009
Time: 5:30 PM to 6:00 PM  EST
Location: Cyril Magnin III (150)
SPEAKER :   Click the plus sign to see more detailed information about each speaker.
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.