Mr. and Mrs. Granger: A Mysterious Couple
Happy Dentist’s Day! To celebrate this day, I want to look at the two dentists in the series: Hermione’s parents.
We don’t know much about them; we don’t even know their names. They appear briefly in the series and not much later on in the books. The first time the readers meet them is when Hermione and her parents pick up school supplies in Diagon Alley.
He [Arthur] was distracted almost at once by the sight of Hermione’s parents, who were standing nervously at the counter that ran all along the great marble hall, waiting for Hermione to introduce them” (CoS 56).
They also appear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 when Hermione wipes their memories. I love this emotional scene in the movie, and it was nice to see a fragment of Hermione’s home life even if it was for a short time. After that, Hermione sent them to Australia to hide them from the Death Eaters.
Apart from the fact that they like to travel, we don’t really know about her family. At the Edinburgh Festival in August 2004, J.K. Rowling that she “deliberately kept Hermione’s family in the background. You see so much of Ron’s family so I thought that I would keep Hermione’s family, by contrast, quite ordinary. They are dentists, as you know. They are a bit bemused by their odd daughter but quite proud of her all the same.”
There is an online theory that in an earlier draft of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Potters lived on an island, and the Grangers lived nearby. When Voldemort murdered James and Lily, Mr. Granger noticed an explosion and rowed out to see what happened. There, he found the dead bodies of James and Lily and a baby Harry. J.K. Rowling didn’t like that idea and moved the Potters to Godric’s Hollow. If she decided to keep that in the series, so much would have changed. Presumably, Harry and Hermione would have been much closer, and we would have seen a lot more of the Granger family.
What do you think of Hermione’s parents? Do you wish you could have seen more of the Grangers? Let us know in the comments!
