Healers and dragon keepers are frequently mentioned. The carrier discussion mentioned multiple random and weird jobs.

I guess that engineering is a thing, maybe even profitable one. Note Malfoy making fun of Weasleys living in cheap home. It seems imply that construction is not significantly cheaper with a magic* and it is done by specialists, not everybody with a wand.

*probably required proofing against accidental and normal magic, wards and additional expenses caused by society are enough to not make magic construction nearly free.

 

The comparison to real world furniture making is interesting to me, because a while back I tried coming up with a framework of what wizard furniture could be like in the HP universe. Yes, I was bored.

I decided that maybe you could have a pecking order of perceived quality depending on the furniture's construction. From most prestigious/expensive to least expensive (tl;dr alert):

Tier I: Purely transfigured and "fortified" furniture
Transfigured from raw, unformed material into a finished product with no manual construction in between. Since it's transfiguration, the original material probably doesn't matter, though I'm assuming it has to be more than nothing for the object to be permanent.

Then the completed furniture is charmed to give it resistance to normal wear and tear, as well as damage from stray magic. These charms are intended to be as permanent as the object.

In my head, there's a magical mechanic where a transfigured object ("magic always leaves traces") is more difficult to apply lasting protective spells to than a regular object. There is no canon evidence of this at all - I just like the implications in this context. :-D

So you would then have only a small minority of wizards capable of doing this work (through some combination of difficulty and technique hoarding), and as such they would charge huge sums of money for it. This is the stuff you would find in mansions and as treasured heirlooms.

The only real benefit it has over Tier II is that you can create some truly fantastical shapes of furniture that would be impossible to do "Muggle-style." But the prestige among wizards would likely come from the fact that it's as purely magical as anything can be, yet as permanent as any non-magical object.

Tier II: Standard construction from wizards, magically fortified
By "standard construction," I mean that the furniture is actually constructed from real material - i.e. a piece of wooden furniture would be made from chunks of wood, cut to size and assembled together. The sizing and cutting of the material would probably be done by magic, the joining of the pieces might be magic, and certain decorative touches might be transfigured.

Then it's given protective charms like the Tier I stuff. Ultimately it is no more or less durable than that stuff, but (for the reason I invented above) it's easier to apply the protective charms to. The finished product is generally considered good quality by all but the snootiest of wizards.

Tier III: Muggle made furniture, magically fortified
Given the same high quality magical protective treatment as the above types, but considered low-rent for obvious reasons. The furniture owner would acquire the furniture from the Muggles themselves, then hire a wizard specializing in furniture preservation.

The actual quality of the furniture would vary because Muggle furniture varies. But in my mind, you'd tend to see lower quality or used (junkyard/hierloom) Muggle furniture done up in this way, because people who can afford good Muggle furniture would instead buy from more respected wizard craftsmen.

Tier IV: Untreated Muggle furniture, etc.
See also: untreated homemade furniture, or furniture with badly applied protective charms from the owner

Tier V: Magically created furniture done by inexpert owner
Transfigured, then possibly magically protected by your average skill wizard. Generally only done by the poorest of wizards, because they don't have the skill to make the item permanently stable (or permanently protected from wear and tear).

Protective charms would periodically wear off or react badly to stray magic, and in some cases the furniture might even lose some of its form, for reasons similar to what Taure was talking about with "complete transfiguration."
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I quite like the implications of setting things up this way. It would mean, for instance, that a purely magical piece of furniture might be considered top quality or bottom quality, depending on who did it and how they did it. The same basic pecking order can apply to some other things like home construction.

 

Canon describes few different jobs, but I don't think that's the real thing. It was following the author's plot.

I always thought that one comparison you can make between the muggle world and the magical world suits this issue. If in the muggle world there are hundreds of different jobs like: electrician, plumber, mechanist, newspaper seller, artisan, builder, shoemaker, butcher, grocer, etc, etc, etc. I'm 100% certain they have its correspondent magic profession. Not necessarily the same with a magic name, because that's what crappy FF.net authors do, but as sure as hell there are a lot of wizards/witches working in jobs that aren't: Auror, ministry bureaucrat, healer, teacher, curse breaker or dragon handler.

 

Meh, I always thought jobs like that would be more confined, less single minded electricians, and more general house-builder-man(TM) that combines all of them, sort of like the way modern blacksmiths essentially have to take on the role of the smith along with everyone who would have worked in the shop during the eleventh century.

But there's little indication that there are a large variety of jobs within the magical world though. It makes it ripe for world development by FF authors though so who am I to complain

 

Did JKR ever state one way or the other which murders were used for any of the Horcruxes, or is that left up for grabs?

He had murdered at least four people by the time he left Hogwarts, but the interesting thing about those was that they were indirect. He used the basilisk to ice Myrtle, and since his uncle Morfin's wand was confirmed as the murder weapon, he either bewitched his uncle to carry out and confess to the killings, or used his Uncle's wand before arranging for the confession.

In my eyes, those would still be valid murders, but I just want to know what people think as to whether or not he used deaths like Myrtle's. Dumbledore, IIRC, seemed to feel that Tom would have wanted to use significant deaths.

 

I want to say that the murders associated with each Horcrux is related to the Horcrux themselves. For instance, Myrtle's created the Diary, his father was used for the ring (which he took from Morfin that night IIRC), and that Smith lady made the Cup. The weird ones are the Diadem, the Locket, and Nagini. I believe that Nagini could not have been created any later than Bertha Jorkin's death and I think Taure has confirmed that to be true. I would guess that the Diadem's murder took place in Albania as that was where Riddle found it and that appears to be his M.O.

I actually don't remember where the Locket came from. Was it at Borgin and Burkes, too? I'm distinctly getting that impression of that but I can't for the life of me figure out why. I'm pretty sure that the Smith woman didn't have it...

 

Myrtles's murder for creating the diary, Tom Riddle Sr's death for the ring and Harry's planned death for his final horcrux.

Hepzilbah Smith's murder for the Hufflepuff's Cup and framing the elf afterwards, Frank's death for Nagini. Oh and he kills Burke for the locket horcrux. As a punishment of sorts for ripping of his mother, as worthless she was.

The Diadem is the only horcrux where the victim isn't mentioned in the books.

 

Smith had the Locket and the Cup. She had recently acquired the Locket from Borgin and Burke.

 

Yeah I remembered what happened after Rache posted. Tom's mom sold it to Burke, it stayed there for twenty years and Smith bought it. I still disagree that Frank's death could be used to create the Nagini Horcrux; Voldemort shows distinctly too much control over Nagini at that point and is, I believe, able to command it from outside the room/earshot (similar to using Nagini to attack Arthur Weasley in the Ministry of Magic).

I still don't get why Voldemort waited so long to complete all of his Horcruxes. It appears that he created his first five by 1950 (he's said to have been just out of school when he kills Smith. He immediately goes to Albania to create the Diadem Horcrux). It makes no sense to wait thirty years to create one from Harry's death as he won't know of the prophecy until 1980 or so. Furthermore, what object did he intend to use as a Horcrux and why didn't he use that instead of Nagini?

 

He never found anything of Gryffindor's, but I don't know that that's a reason to wait so long.

 

I suppose once you have a Horcrux you're immortal so you could basically wait forever searching for a Gryffindor item, but that doesn't mesh well with his "seven is the most powerfully magic number" thing as you'd presumably want to then reach seven parts as quickly as possible.

 

He was busy waging a war to properly search for objects that might be worthy of holding his soul.

 

Rowling said he killer random Albanian peasant while making Diadem Horcrux.

 

It could be that he had to wait a significant amount of time between Horcrux created and the next Horcrux to make. Or it could be that he didn’t encounter killings important enough to make one.

I'm betting on my first theory. He just killed an Albanian peasant to make the Tiara. How lame is that?

 

What kind of shoes do they wear with their uniform at Hogwarts? Yes, this is super important.

 

I believe it's just plain black shoes.

 

We get a uniform list in Philosopher's Stone.

Since its not on there, I doubt there are 'uniform' shoes. Students can presumably ware what they like, within reason.

 

Robes seem to be the uniform, so I always imagined Harry wore his normal clothes under those with something like old converse or vans.

 

We all know Tom Riddle put up the curse on the D.A.D.A position, but why didn't Dumbledore remove it? Did Dumbledore not know about the curse? He had to be aware that something was going on, right?