Страница 2 из 10
Chapter One
The Evolution of the Flying Broomstick
No spell yet devised enables wizards to fly unaided in human form. Those few Animagi who transform into winged creatures may enjoy flight, but they are a rarity. The witch or wizard who finds him‑ or herself Transfigured into a bat may take to the air, but, having a bat's brain, they are sure to forget where they want to go the moment they take flight. Levitation is commonplace, but our ancestors were not content with hovering five feet from the ground. They wanted more. They wanted to fly like birds, but without the inconvenience of growing feathers.
We are so accustomed these days to the fact that every wizarding household in Britain owns at least one flying broomstick that we rarely stop to ask ourselves why. Why should the humble broom have become the one object legally allowed as a means of wizarding transport? Why did we in the West not adopt the carpet so beloved of our Eastern brethren? Why didn't we choose to produce flying barrels, flying armchairs, flying bathtubs — why brooms?
Shrewd enough to see that their Muggle neighbours would seek to exploit their powers if they knew their full extent, witches and wizards kept themselves to themselves long before the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy came into effect. If they were to keep a means of flight in their houses, it would necessarily be something discreet, something easy to hide. The broomstick was ideal for this purpose; it required no explanation, no excuse if found by Muggles, it was easily portable and inexpensive. Nevertheless, the first brooms bewitched for flying purposes had their drawbacks.
Records show that witches and wizards in Europe were using flying broomsticks as early as AD 962. A German illuminated manuscript of this period shows three warlocks dismounting from their brooms with looks of exquisite discomfort on their faces. Guthrie Lochrin, a Scottish wizard writing in 1107, spoke of the 'splinter‑filled buttocks and bulging piles' he suffered after a short broom ride from Montrose to Arbroath.
A medieval broomstick on display in the Museum of Quidditch in London gives us an insight into Lochrin's discomfort (see Fig. A). A thick knotty handle of unvarnished ash, with hazel twigs bound crudely to one end, it is neither comfortable nor aerodynamic. The charms placed upon it are similarly basic: it will only move forwards at one speed; it will go up, down and stop.
As wizarding families in those days made their own brooms, there was enormous variation in the speed, comfort and handling of the transport available to them. By the twelfth century, however, wizards had learned to barter services, so that a skilled maker of brooms could exchange them for the potions his neighbour might make better than himself. Once broomsticks became more comfortable, they were flown for pleasure rather than merely used as a means of getting from point A to point B.
Chapter Two
Ancient Broom Games
Broom sports emerged almost as soon as broomsticks were sufficiently advanced to allow fliers to turn corners and vary their speed and height. Early wizarding writings and paintings give us some idea of the games our ancestors played. Some of these no longer exist; others have survived or evolved into the sports we know today.
The celebrated a
The famous painting Gьnther der Gewalttдtige ist derGewi
In Ireland die game of Aingingein flourished, the subject of many an Irish ballad (the legendary wizard Fingal the Fearless is alleged to have been an Aingingein champion). One by one the players would take the Dom, or ball (actually the gallbladder of a goat), and speed through a series of burning barrels set high in the air on stilts. The Dom was to be thrown through the final barrel. The player who succeeded in getting the Dom through the last barrel in the fastest time, without having caught fire on the way, was the wi
Scotland was the birthplace of what is probably the most dangerous of all broom games — Creaothcea
Creaothcea
Shuntbumps was popular in devon, england. this was a crude form of jousting, the sole aim being to knock as many other players as possible off their brooms, the last person remaining on their broom wi
Swivenhodge began in Herefordshire. Like Stichstock, this involved an inflated bladder, usually a pig's. Players sat backwards on their brooms and batted the bladder backwards and forwards across a hedge with the brush ends of their brooms. The first person to miss gave their opponent a point. First to reach fifty points was the wi
Swivenhodge is still played in England, though it has never achieved much widespread popularity; Shuntbumps survives only as a children's game. At Queerditch Marsh, however, a game had been created that would one day become the most popular in the wizarding world.