Does everyone remember that really popular Harry Potter au fanfic series? That long one got REALLY popular awhile ago?
The one where all the Marauders end up dying, Peter betrays them, and worst of all, Harry grows up with Petunia and Vernon. They were not the best.
FRED AND HEDWIG DIE in that one.
Like can you believe the audacity of some people?
It was wonderfully well-written though, not gonna lie. I loved it and I'm quite a fan.
Credit for the picture: https://www.hp-lexicon.org/creature/horse/thestral/
They are bloody creepy badasses, right? Invisible, unless you’ve consciously witnessed someone kick the bucket, and pulling the Hogwarts carriages from the station to the castle and back.
All right, let’s not get overexcited and do things properly, but, for once, in a short piece of writing. More like a brainy burp, if you'll allow me.
About Thestrals
What does Newt’s book say about them? Well. Nothing. Or, to be more accurate, there is no entry for ‘Thestral’. When you look up ‘Winged Horse’, there is one phrase (not even a sentence!): ‘... and the rare Thestral (black, possessed of the power of invisibility, and considered unlucky by many wizards)’ (Scamander, 1927). That is all in official magizoological literature. Quite meagre, eh?
So we’ll have to trust Rowling, I guess. What do we learn in Care of Magical Creatures? That’s in chapter Twenty-One of Order of the Phoenix: They prefer the dark. The Forest is their natural habitat. They are rare, Thestrals, and Hagrid is probably the only one who has managed to train a herd. They are attracted by the smell of raw meat, which they eat, as they are scavengers. We know Hagrid feeds them cows. He calls them with a sort of shrieking cry resembling that of a monstrous bird. They have blank, white, shining eyes, dragonish faces, long black tails, leathery wings, and skeletal bodies. They do tear the flesh from the carcasses they eat with their pointed fangs. They are ‘dead clever and useful’, and besides pulling the school carriages, the only job the Hogwarts herd has is to take Dumbledore on his longer journeys.
So basically they look very Cocteau-ish. Cocteau was that French author-painter-cineast who explored the world between life and death in many of his plays and films, and, incidentally, often used a horse-head to materialise this (see picture below).
The Ministry of Magic has classified Thestrals as dangerous (XXXX). Hagrid says it’s because of the reputation they have of being bad omens, not because they are more dangerous than other creatures. They simply look after themselves, and retaliate if you annoy them. Natural.
The Hogwarts herd started with a male and five females. Among the herd, Hagrid’s favourite is Tenebrus, who was the first to be born in the Forbidden Forest. Once they are tamed, Thestrals will never get their rider lost. Their sense of direction is amazing, and you only need to tell them where you want to go to be brought there.
Additional information can be found in Chapter Thirty-Three of OoP: Apparently, Thestrals understand human speech, and they do fly fast, hardly beating their wings. When they touch ground, there is no thud, because they do it lightly as a shadow.
Thestrals and Death
Apart from their being rather otherworldly in appearance, or, I’d rather say back-from-the-deadly in appearance, Thestral have that ominous trait of being invisible to mortals who don’t have an understanding of death through seeing someone die. Through this, Rowling is able to take the reader onto a path to comprehend the variety of attitudes humankind can display when confronted to death as a concept before it can become a reality.
Death should be a reality to anyone at least in a biological sense because everything we eat was once living, and all our wooden furniture, houses, and musical instruments, for instance, are actually made of slaughtered trees or dead herbaceous plants.
On a humanly biological level, death is not always a reality. As in, many people don’t come to terms with the fact that we are all going to die one day, because we are animals. Whether there is life after death or not is another question, which can be biologically answered (yes, there is, because your matter is being recycled by other living things), or spiritually answered (yes, there is, because you believe in a myth/religion that tells you that there is life after death in some form; or no, there isn’t, because you think you vanish entirely into nothing the moment you die - this, incidentally, sounds very weird to me, because of the laws of conservation of mass). Death is fascinating to some, scary to some (probably most people - when they are asked about it, they often reply, like Voldemort, that there is nothing worse than death - OoP, chapter Thirty-Six, The Only One He Ever Feared), but unless you come to terms with it in some way, there is always that little pang when you think of your last moments and the length of your life on the planet.
Thestrals are some sort of way Rowling has to show us this variety. I think it is somehow summed up in that dialogue Harry and Hermione have while coming back from Hagrid’s lesson on Thestrals (OoP, Chapter Twenty-One, The Eye of the Snake):
‘[...] but Thestrals are fine - in fact, for Hagrid, they’re really good!’
‘Umbridge said they’re dangerous,’ said Ron.
‘Well, it’s like Hagrid said, they can look after themselves,’ said Hermione impatiently, ‘[...] but, well, they are very interesting, aren’t they? The way some people can see them and some can’t! I wish I could.’
‘Do you?’ Harry asked her quietly.
She looked suddenly horrostruck.
‘Oh, Harry - I’m sorry - no, of course I don’t - that was a really stupid thing to say.’
‘It’s OK,’ he said quickly, ‘don’t worry.’
Hermione is clearly fascinated by death and its various personifications; that’s her ‘brainy’ side. Harry on the other hand has already started on the path to get himself acquainted with the reality of death, not only because he has no parents left (but no real recollection of them either, or conscious knowledge of death - he has, I think, a conscious knowledge of absence), but because he witnessed Diggory being killed in June the year before. From that moment on, he’s been on a journey towards an opening of mind and towards an acceptance of death that will culminate with his walking into the Forest at the end of Deathly Hallows. Apart from Thestrals, in his fifth year, he meets Luna, who has her own journey to make since her mum died when she was nine (so basically about 5 years previously, since she’s 14-ish in OoP, being a fourth-year). She seems to have come to terms with death and in her own way helps Harry. For instance, after Sirius’s death, she is the only one with whom he can discuss him, to his own astonishment. I’ll dwell about Luna’s relation to death in another paper, I think. It deserves it.
We cannot see Thestrals, but we cannot see death either (Willson-Metzger, no date). So in that sense they are a sort of death creature, yet they are most alive. They have a part to play in the unfolding of the plot in OoP as in they allow the start of Harry’s friendship to Luna, but then provides means of transport to the Ministry for the Dumbledore’s Army nucleus, giving those who cannot see them some sort of way onto the path Luna, Harry, and Neville have already undertaken.
Are there such horses in Muggle mythologies?
Let’s do this quick: no.
BUT you couldn’t imagine I could let this be. So I searched my books (I have a pretty number of them), and the internet. I stumbled upon a paper by Leah on Mugglenet (2004) about a Celtic legend involving… tadaaaa… a horse. Well yeh, like most legends in these parts of the world, you’d tell me, because it’s a means of transport, human’s best friend, was revered for centuries, buried with their owners, or having their own burial services. Yeh.
At first the telling of the story was confusing because it involved a kestrel, which is a bird and a Quidditch team (and has a vague resemblance to thestral), but the writer was talking about a horse. So I looked the story up from the source she mentions (Berresford Ellis, 1999). I also checked the French version of the tale (Luzel, 1887). The details vary, but the essentials are coherent. My point is that Leah has a point. There are similarities between the horse in the story she mentions and Thestrals.
So. To make it short, it’s the story of N’oun Doaré (means ‘I don’t know’). He was a child when he was found in a hedge by Bras, a noble man from Brittany. He and his wife Anvab adopted him and raised him. The boy was called N’oun Doaré, because the only thing he could reply to any question at the beginning was ‘I don’t know’. When he was of age, the boy was sent by Bras to a cousin of his who was a renowned druid, until he was seventeen (the same ‘coming of age’ as in the Harry Potter books). Then Bras officially adopted N’oun Doaré as his heir, and went to town to get him a sword and horse. The horse they got on the road from a man clad in black, who was leading a sorry skeletal horse indeed, that looked like the Mare of Death, but N’oun Doaré chose that one. The man told him it had a magical halter. It was full of knots, and each knot untied would mean the mare would transport the rider wherever he wished, by magic. The French version I read said the mare would take the rider 1,500 leagues from where he was. This reminds me strongly of the capacity Thestrals have to travel wherever the rider asks them. The rest of the story is worth reading, but has no more to do with a thestrally horse.
Did Rowling know about this story? I don’t know. She is learnt in French, in legends, and many other parts of culture, so maybe. Anyway, it is interesting to know that such characteristics as, for instance, the ability to go to the bidder’s chosen place by magic, are shared by other literature.
Somehow, the fact that Thestrals are quite unique makes them even more interesting. So I guess there might be more to come about them.
If you have info about thestrals or thestrally creatures in any mythology, pray tell me in the comments sections!
Sources
Mugglenet paper by Leah: https://www.mugglenet.com/2004/10/the-legend-behind-thestrals/
Berresford Ellis, P. (1999; 2002). The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends. Robinson. London. 463-483. Retrieved from: https://yes-pdf.com/book/4406
Luzel, F.-M. (1887). Contes Populaires de Basse-Bretagne. Retrieved from: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_populaires_de_Basse-Bretagne
Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bloomsbury, London.
Rowling, J. K. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, London.
Scamander, N. (2001; 2018; [1927][J.K. Rowling]). Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Bloomsbury, London, in association with Obscurus Books, 18a Diagon Alley, London.
