As promised, Harry Potter author and all-round excellent individual JK Rowling has treated fans to a brand new short story for Halloween. The story is a profile of one Dolores Umbridge, otherwise known as one of the most villainous villains in the Potter books and films, and the Hogwarts headmistress you love to hate.
Today, on Pottermore.com, the Rowling-created website focusing on the unknown parts of the Harry Potter mythology, the author posted a short story that features Dolores Umbridge, the villainous Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher from the fifth novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Umbridge, the condescending, torturous teacher with a cheery demeanor, was given a descriptive and telling background that explains a bit more history of the character.
Read the short story below cortesy by Pottermore.com
The story of Dolores Jane Umbridge
Dolores Jane Umbridge was the eldest child and only daughter
of Orford Umbridge, a wizard, and Ellen Cracknell, a Muggle, who also
had a Squib son. Dolores’ parents were unhappily married, and Dolores
secretly despised both of them: Orford for his lack of ambition (he had
never been promoted, and worked in the Department of Magical Maintenance
at the Ministry of Magic), and her mother, Ellen, for her flightiness,
untidiness, and Muggle lineage. Both Orford and his daughter blamed
Ellen for Dolores’s brother’s lack of magical ability, with the result
that when Dolores was fifteen, the family split down the middle, Orford
and Dolores remaining together, and Ellen vanishing back into the Muggle
world with her son. Dolores never saw her mother or brother again,
never spoke of either of them, and henceforth pretended to all she met
that she was a pure-blood.
An accomplished witch, Dolores joined the Ministry of Magic directly
after she left Hogwarts, taking a job as a lowly intern in the Improper
Use of Magic Office. Even at seventeen, Dolores was judgemental,
prejudiced and sadistic, although her conscientious attitude, her
saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and
stealth with which she took credit for other people’s work soon gained
her advancement. Before she was thirty, Dolores had been promoted to
Head of the office, and it was but a short step from there to ever more
senior positions in the management of the Department of Magical Law
Enforcement. By this time, she had persuaded her father to take early
retirement, and by making him a small financial allowance, she ensured
that he dropped quietly out of sight. Whenever she was asked (usually by
workmates who did not like her) ‘are you related to that Umbridge who
used to mop the floors here?’ she would smile her sweetest, laugh, and
deny any connection whatsoever, claiming that her deceased father had
been a distinguished member of the Wizengamot. Nasty things tended to
happen to people who asked about Orford, or anything that Dolores did
not like talking about, and people who wanted to remain on her good side
pretended to believe her version of her ancestry.
In spite of her best efforts to secure the affections of one of her superiors (she never cared particularly which of them it was, but knew that her own status and security would be advanced with a powerful husband), Dolores never succeeded in marrying.
While they valued her hard work and ambition, those who got to know her best found it difficult to like her very much. After a glass of sweet sherry, Dolores was always prone to spout very uncharitable views, and even those who were anti-Muggle found themselves shocked by some of Dolores’s suggestions, behind closed doors, of the treatment that the non-magical community deserved.
As she grew older and harder, and rose higher within the Ministry, Dolores’s taste in little girlish accessories grew more and more pronounced; her office became a place of frills and furbelows, and she liked anything decorated with kittens (though found the real thing inconveniently messy). As the Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge became increasingly anxious and paranoid that Albus Dumbledore had ambitions to supersede him, Dolores managed to claw her way to the very heart of power, by stoking both Fudge’s vanity and his fears, and presenting herself as one of the few he could trust.
Dolores’s appointment as Inquisitor at Hogwarts gave full scope, for the first time in her life, for her prejudices and her cruelty. She had not enjoyed her time at school, where she had been overlooked for all positions of responsibility, and she relished the chance to return and wield power over those who had not (as she saw it) given her her due.
Dolores has what amounts to a phobia of beings that are not quite, or wholly, human. Her distaste for the half-giant Hagrid, and her terror of centaurs, reveal a terror of the unknown and the wild. She is an immensely controlling person, and all who challenge her authority and world-view must, in her opinion, be punished. She actively enjoys subjugating and humiliating others, and except in their declared allegiances, there is little to choose between her and Bellatrix Lestrange.
Dolores’s time at Hogwarts ended disastrously, because she overreached the remit Fudge had given her, stepping outside the bounds of her own authority, carried away with a fanatical sense of self-purpose. Shaken but unrepentant after a catastrophic end to her Hogwarts career, she returned to a Ministry, which had been plunged into turmoil due to the return of Lord Voldemort.
In the change of regimes that followed Fudge’s forced resignation, Dolores was able to slip back into her former position at the Ministry. The new Minister, Rufus Scrimgeour, had more immediate problems pressing in on him than Dolores Umbridge. Scrimgeour was later punished for this oversight, because the fact that the Ministry had never punished Dolores for her many abuses of power seemed to Harry Potter to reveal both its complacency and its carelessness. Harry considered Dolores’s continuing employment, and the lack of any repercussions for her behaviour at Hogwarts, a sign of the Ministry’s essential corruption, and refused to cooperate with the new Minister because of it (Dolores is the only person, other than Lord Voldemort, to leave a permanent physical scar on Harry, having forced him to cut the words ‘I must not tell lies’ on the back of his own hand during detention).
Dolores was soon enjoying life at the Ministry more than ever. When the Ministry was taken over by the puppet Minister Pius Thicknesse, and infiltrated by the Dark Lord’s followers, Dolores was in her true element at last. Correctly judged, by senior Death Eaters, to have much more in common with them than she ever had with Albus Dumbledore, she not only retained her post but was given extra authority, becoming Head of the Muggle-born Registration Commission, which was in effect a kangaroo court that imprisoned all Muggle-borns on the basis that they had ‘stolen’ their wands and their magic.
It was as she sat in judgement of another innocent woman that Harry Potter finally attacked Dolores in the very heart of the Ministry, and stole from her the Horcrux she had unwittingly been wearing.
With the fall of Lord Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge was put on trial for her enthusiastic co-operation with his regime, and convicted of the torture, imprisonment and deaths of several people (some of the innocent Muggle-borns she sentenced to Azkaban did not survive their ordeal).
Birthday: 26th August
Wand: Birch and dragon heartstring, eight inches long
Hogwarts house: Slytherin
Special abilities: Her punishment quill is of her own invention
Parentage: Muggle mother, wizard father
Family: Unmarried, no children
In spite of her best efforts to secure the affections of one of her superiors (she never cared particularly which of them it was, but knew that her own status and security would be advanced with a powerful husband), Dolores never succeeded in marrying.
While they valued her hard work and ambition, those who got to know her best found it difficult to like her very much. After a glass of sweet sherry, Dolores was always prone to spout very uncharitable views, and even those who were anti-Muggle found themselves shocked by some of Dolores’s suggestions, behind closed doors, of the treatment that the non-magical community deserved.
As she grew older and harder, and rose higher within the Ministry, Dolores’s taste in little girlish accessories grew more and more pronounced; her office became a place of frills and furbelows, and she liked anything decorated with kittens (though found the real thing inconveniently messy). As the Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge became increasingly anxious and paranoid that Albus Dumbledore had ambitions to supersede him, Dolores managed to claw her way to the very heart of power, by stoking both Fudge’s vanity and his fears, and presenting herself as one of the few he could trust.
Dolores’s appointment as Inquisitor at Hogwarts gave full scope, for the first time in her life, for her prejudices and her cruelty. She had not enjoyed her time at school, where she had been overlooked for all positions of responsibility, and she relished the chance to return and wield power over those who had not (as she saw it) given her her due.
Dolores has what amounts to a phobia of beings that are not quite, or wholly, human. Her distaste for the half-giant Hagrid, and her terror of centaurs, reveal a terror of the unknown and the wild. She is an immensely controlling person, and all who challenge her authority and world-view must, in her opinion, be punished. She actively enjoys subjugating and humiliating others, and except in their declared allegiances, there is little to choose between her and Bellatrix Lestrange.
Dolores’s time at Hogwarts ended disastrously, because she overreached the remit Fudge had given her, stepping outside the bounds of her own authority, carried away with a fanatical sense of self-purpose. Shaken but unrepentant after a catastrophic end to her Hogwarts career, she returned to a Ministry, which had been plunged into turmoil due to the return of Lord Voldemort.
In the change of regimes that followed Fudge’s forced resignation, Dolores was able to slip back into her former position at the Ministry. The new Minister, Rufus Scrimgeour, had more immediate problems pressing in on him than Dolores Umbridge. Scrimgeour was later punished for this oversight, because the fact that the Ministry had never punished Dolores for her many abuses of power seemed to Harry Potter to reveal both its complacency and its carelessness. Harry considered Dolores’s continuing employment, and the lack of any repercussions for her behaviour at Hogwarts, a sign of the Ministry’s essential corruption, and refused to cooperate with the new Minister because of it (Dolores is the only person, other than Lord Voldemort, to leave a permanent physical scar on Harry, having forced him to cut the words ‘I must not tell lies’ on the back of his own hand during detention).
Dolores was soon enjoying life at the Ministry more than ever. When the Ministry was taken over by the puppet Minister Pius Thicknesse, and infiltrated by the Dark Lord’s followers, Dolores was in her true element at last. Correctly judged, by senior Death Eaters, to have much more in common with them than she ever had with Albus Dumbledore, she not only retained her post but was given extra authority, becoming Head of the Muggle-born Registration Commission, which was in effect a kangaroo court that imprisoned all Muggle-borns on the basis that they had ‘stolen’ their wands and their magic.
It was as she sat in judgement of another innocent woman that Harry Potter finally attacked Dolores in the very heart of the Ministry, and stole from her the Horcrux she had unwittingly been wearing.
With the fall of Lord Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge was put on trial for her enthusiastic co-operation with his regime, and convicted of the torture, imprisonment and deaths of several people (some of the innocent Muggle-borns she sentenced to Azkaban did not survive their ordeal).
Birthday: 26th August
Wand: Birch and dragon heartstring, eight inches long
Hogwarts house: Slytherin
Special abilities: Her punishment quill is of her own invention
Parentage: Muggle mother, wizard father
Family: Unmarried, no children
Hobbies: Collecting the ‘Frolicsome Feline’
ornamental plate range, adding flounces to fabric and frills to
stationary objects, inventing instruments of torture.
Thanks Jk. Rowling the best Halloween gift EVER! We Love You !!!!
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