hermione
I've never heard anyone else wonder this, never heard anyone even mention the possibility of a connection. I'm a good Googler, but I've never been able to find any reference online, either.
Hermione is a Dark, pureblood name.
Think about it. Think of all the wizards that surround Hermione: the Muggle-borns, the half-bloods, the purebloods that are right-minded: They have names like Ron, Ginny, Fred, George, Harry, Katie, Dean, Angelina. Now let's think of people from old, pureblooded, Dark-leaning families: Draco, Lucius, Narcissa, Andromeda, Regulus, Sirius, Bellatrix.
So, how does the daughter of two rather ordinary Muggles wind up with a lengthy, obscure name based in classical mythology? Will we find out?
Hermione is a Dark, pureblood name.
Think about it. Think of all the wizards that surround Hermione: the Muggle-borns, the half-bloods, the purebloods that are right-minded: They have names like Ron, Ginny, Fred, George, Harry, Katie, Dean, Angelina. Now let's think of people from old, pureblooded, Dark-leaning families: Draco, Lucius, Narcissa, Andromeda, Regulus, Sirius, Bellatrix.
So, how does the daughter of two rather ordinary Muggles wind up with a lengthy, obscure name based in classical mythology? Will we find out?
Comments
I still maintain that Snape is a fundamentally good character too. I suspect we'll find out more about Dumbledore's death in Book 7.
If you accept that the end result of the saga is a unification of the Wizarding world, with acceptance of the "lesser" non-human/part human magical creatures as well as the full integration of the muggle-borns, then Hermione Granger is perfectly named.
Her "front name", Hermione, is Greek in origin and as you pointed out, has much in common with the Wizarding names. (Not all of which belong to "Dark" wizards; case(s) in point: Nymphadora Tonks, Ginevra Weasley)
Her back name, Granger, is perfectly Anglo-Saxon English in origin.
I've written a few essays for Harry Potter For Grownups about the naming conventions used by Rowling, and how they reflect upon the Anglo-Saxon/Norman French cultural divisions in Britain.
A break down of all the names on both "sides" shows that Rowling has uniformly given the "Good guys" Anglo-Saxon/Gaelic names:
Potter
Weasley
Granger
Dumbledore
Scrimgeour
McGonagall
Hagrid
Longbottom
and uniformly given Norman French names to the "bad guys"
Malfoy
Voldemort
Umbridge
etc.
> If you accept that the end
> result of the saga is a
> unification of the Wizarding
> world, with acceptance of
> the "lesser" non-human/part
> human magical creatures as
> well as the full integration
> of the muggle-borns, then
> Hermione Granger is
> perfectly named.
Wow! That's a huge if. And I don't accept that at all. There's nothing in Rowling's books that makes me think that the end will be in any way utopian. My best guess is that the battle against Voldemort will be over but the overall battle against injustice won't.
True, the four houses, Gryffindor/fire, Hufflepuff/earth, Ravenclaw/air, and Slytherin/water, ask to be brought together by the fifth essence that is Harry, but why should we think of Voldemort's defeat as any more definitive or final in terms of the world condition than Grindelwald's defeat in 1945?
As to comparing/contrasting with the Grindlewald scenario, that's a bit hard to do given that we know little about the Grindlewald and pre-Grindlewald eras.