It’s Official. I’m a Slytherin and I’ve joined the Dark Side.

One of my kids loves to read and is interested in magic. She finally discovered the Harry Potter series. In other words, she has wasted (I mean, “spent”) the last couple of months reading the books and watching some of the movies. I’m not a big Potter fan, but I can appreciate what a richly imaginative world the author, J.K. Rowling, created with the series.

Recently, my daughter brought over the laptop computer and asked me to take the Hogwarts school’s sorting quiz. In the books, there is a magic hat that sorts incoming students into one of the four houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin. The online quiz is a personality type indicator that assigns you to one of these houses based on your answers.

In the books, the Sorting Hat explains each of the houses as follows. I lifted these quotes from the Harry Potter wiki page, which I’ll link below this post.

"You might belong in Gryffindor,
Where dwell the brave at heart,
Their daring, nerve, and chivalry
Set Gryffindors apart"

"You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true,
And unafraid of toil"

"Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,
If you've a ready mind,
Where those of wit and learning,
Will always find their kind."

"Or perhaps in Slytherin,
You'll make your real friends,
Those cunning folk use any means,
To achieve their ends."

Gryffindor and Slytherin are the two strongest houses. While there are good and bad features and complex people in each of the houses, the story’s heroes are Gryffindors and its villains are Slytherins. To oversimplify things, those two houses are good and evil.

Aside from the dog, I was the last person in our family not to have taken the sorting quiz, my daughter said. Even her younger sister took it, not knowing much about Harry Potter herself, and she cried when she was sorted into Slytherin, the house most closely associated with the story’s villains. (The personality type for Slytherin is a fit for those who are more aggressive and less patient, which does describe our younger daughter much of the time.) My wife and our older kid had ended up in one of the “better” houses, though no one made it into the heroic Gryffindor.

SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to discuss the quiz and my results. If you’d like to take it yourself before being tainted by the rest of this post, you can follow this link to the sorting quiz.

You’ll be ruined, I tell you, ruined!!! Don’t spoil the fun by reading. Before you go any further, take the quiz. When you come back in about two minutes, let me know how you did.

Quiz link: http://www.playbuzz.com/karenl32/hogwarts-house-sorting-quiz-pottermore-version#eightieth

My quiz started off easy. Question 1: Dawn or Dusk? I went with Dawn. Next question: River or Forest? I chose River. Moon or Stars? Black or white? Heads or tails? Left or right?

And then came the more difficult questions where I started running into trouble. The next one read, “Four boxes are placed before you. Which one would you try and open?”

One of them had the mark of Merlin on it. Well, that’s an easy choice. Merlin was a pretty cool wizard in the King Arthur stories (though I wasn’t sure what he had to do with Harry Potter). So I chose the Merlin box.

Later on, there was another quiz question or answer choice that mentioned Merlin. Again, I took the bait on that one. Big mistake.

The rest of the quiz took me a couple of minutes to finish. When I got my results, it was a tie. My answers were a match for both Ravenclaw (smart people) and Slytherin (the dark side). My percentages were the same for both.

But when I read the descriptions of each house after taking the quiz, I learned that famous Slytherin alumni apparently included the great wizard Merlin. (J.K. Rowling must have done some revisionist history there, though most stories about Merlin are mostly fictional.) In other words, by choosing his name each time I saw it in an answer choice, I had been unknowingly giving a boost to my chances of matching Slytherin.

Merlin, you've cursed me!

With my kids watching over my shoulders, I was about to declare myself a Ravenclaw. It seemed like a good fit, since I consider myself a wise old man. And though my Slytherin score was high, it would have been lower without me clicking on Merlin every time he came up. In fact, the other two percentages were fairly close also. Maybe it would have been a fairly even split all around. How boring.

But then my youngest daughter, who had cried when her sister had inducted her into the evil Slytherin, proclaimed “Daddy, we’re in the same house!” And I realized that was much more important than being a wise Ravenclaw. I hugged her and agreed that we are very much alike. And of course, I told her that I was thrilled to be with her in Slytherin. My older daughter laughed at both of us for our evilness, so I was glad to provide some company for her younger sister.

And that is how I came to join The Dark Side. So take that, world! Muhahaha! (With evil laughter, he opens his wings and flies into the night.)

Quiz link: http://www.playbuzz.com/karenl32/hogwarts-house-sorting-quiz-pottermore-version#eightieth
Wiki link: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Gryffindor (replace Gryffindor with any of the others to get its page)
Images are from the movies (Warner Brothers) or the books' websites (Bloomsbury/Arthur Brown/Scholastic). Public Domain on the others.