Quidditch
From Free net encyclopedia
Quidditch is a fictional airborne ballgame played on broomsticks, a sort of magical variant of football or polo. It was devised by J. K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series.
Quidditch is the most popular game of the wizarding world. There are numerous professional teams and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has one team for each house in the school. In the fourth book, Harry attends the Quidditch World Cup for international teams. Quidditch has taken an important role in the first six books, but Rowling has said in a recent interview that the last Quidditch match she would ever write was in the sixth book [1]. Template:TOCleft
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Rules
Main Article: Rules of Quidditch Image:Quidditch.jpg
Quidditch is played on a long oval field with three goal hoops on posts at each end. The team that scores the most points wins. There are seven players to a team: one Keeper, two Beaters, three Chasers, and a Seeker. They play with four balls.
The Quaffle is inert and the equivalent to the one ball used in many Muggle games, though it has a charm placed on it so that it slows as it falls and to make it easier to hold. Chasers handle it, trying to throw it through one of the hoops of the opposing team, which is worth ten points. The Keeper guards his or her goal hoops. Two heavy iron balls called Bludgers fly around the field on their own trying to hit players, and the Beaters use bats to defend their team or to hit the Bludgers at the opposing team. Finally, the tiny and winged Golden Snitch darts around at very high speeds and the Seeker attempts to catch it. Doing so scores 150 points and ends the game, generally winning it in the process.
Fictional history
Broom sports emerged as soon as broomsticks were sufficiently advanced to allow fliers to turn corners and vary their speed and height. Early wizarding paintings give an idea of early broomstick sports.
The celebrated annual broom race of Sweden dates back to the tenth century. Contestants race from Kopparberg to Arjeplog, a distance of slightly over three hundred miles. The race course runs straight through a dragon reservation, and the massive silver trophy is shaped like a Swedish Short-Snout. In present day, this is an international event.
The famous painting Günther der Gewalttätige ist der Gewinner ("Gunther the Violent Is the Winner"), dated from 1105, shows the ancient German game of Stitchstock. A twenty foot high pole was topped with an inflated dragon bladder. One player on a broom had the job of protecting this bladder. The bladder-guardian was tied to the pole by a rope around their waist, so that they could not fly more than ten feet away from it. The rest of the players would take turns flying at the bladder trying to puncture it with the specially sharpened ends of their brooms. The bladder-guardian was allowed to carry a wand to repel these attacks. The game ended when the bladder was successfully punctured, or the bladder-guardian had succeeded in hexing all opponents out of the running.
It has been suggested that the name "Quidditch" is derived from the names of the balls: Quaffle, Bludger and Snitch, though, in the story world, the game is named after Queerditch Marsh, where the earliest version of the game was played in the eleventh century and was quite similar to nowadaysTemplate:HPQ.
According to the book Quidditch began as a simple broom-based game, with players passing a leather ball, the quaffle, which they attempted to place in goals at either ends of the pitch. Soon after, the Bludgers were added as charmed rocks, possibly an influence from the high-risk Scottish game Creaothceann, in which players attempted to catch falling rocks in a cauldron attached to their heads.
Image:DanielRadcliffe as HarryPotter.jpg
The addition of the Golden Snitch also derived from an earlier wizarding sport, in which wizards attempted to catch a Golden Snidget, a fast-moving magical bird. In 1269, the Chief of the Wizards Council, Barberous Bragge, unleashed a Golden Snidget offering 150 galleons (equivalent to over a million Galleons today) to the player who caught the bird. A value of 150 points was later added to the bird as a tribute to this event, though in time the Golden Snidget was replaced with an enchanted ball as the bird became an endangered species. There are 700 ways to commit a foul in Quidditch, all of which were committed in the Worldcup game of 1473.
Quodpot, a variant of Quidditch, is popular in the USA and South America.
Harry Potter as Quidditch Player
Harry Potter was the first first-year in over a century to make a Hogwarts house team. As Seeker for Gryffindor, Potter won every game in which he played, except when he was injured or disabled. The Quidditch Cup was cancelled due to the Triwizard Tournament during Potter's fourth year. Following a post-match brawl with Draco Malfoy, Potter was banned by Hogwarts High Inquistitor Dolores Umbridge in his fifth year. The following year, he returned to the team as captain, and although he only managed to play one full game (in the second game his skull was broken and he was in detention for the third) he led Gryffindor to its third consecutive victory in the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup. This was due in large part to Harry's inspiring leadership and his uncanny ability to psyche up his players and to psyche out his opponents.
House Teams
Professional teams
Main article: British and Irish quidditch teams
- Appleby Arrows
- Ballycastle Bats
- Caerphilly Catapults
- Chudley Cannons
- Falmouth Falcons
- Holyhead Harpies
- Kenmare Kestrels
- Montrose Magpies
- Pride of Portree
- Puddlemere United
- Tutshill Tornados
- Wigtown Wanderers
- Wimbourne Wasps (Ludovic Bagman: Beater)
For disbanded and international teams, see List of quidditch teams.
Quidditch in the real world
Image:Quidditch Lane, Cambourne.jpg There have been computer games that simulate playing Quidditch. Major games include:
- Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup
- Dissendium's unofficial Quidditch 3D, available at Dissendium.com
- A underground, but impressive IRC-Based Quiddich Game can be found at TheOQL.org
There have been small-scale attempts to adapt Quidditch to the technology available in the real world, using bicycles and Unicycles instead of broomsticks.
A street in Lower Cambourne, Cambridgeshire, England was named Quidditch Lane after a nearby dry ditch called a quidditch (a term which existed long before JK Rowling created the game). Harry Potter fans flock to the area to take pictures.
A Quidditch match on foot was played in Salem, Massachusetts in October, 2005. The real-life professional teams include the Betas Anonymous Punctuation Pixies and the Effortless Edibles Phizzing Whizbees. Listen and see pictures of the game at WBUR's website.
Translations
| Language | Translation |
|---|---|
| Bulgarian | Куидич |
| Croatian | Metloboj |
| Czech | Famfrpál |
| Dutch | Zwerkbal |
| Estonian | Lendluudpall |
| Finnish | Huispaus |
| Greek | Κουίντιτς |
| Hungarian | Kviddics |
| Norwegian | Rumpeldunk |
| Portuguese | Quadribol |
| Romanian | Vâjthaţ |
| Russian | Квиддич |
| Slovak | Metlobal |
References
Template:HPQrefda:Quidditch de:Begriffe der Harry-Potter-Romane#Quidditch es:Quidditch fr:Quidditch gd:Quidditch it:Quidditch nl:Zwerkbal no:Rumpeldunk ja:クィディッチ pl:Quidditch pt:Quidditch sr:Квидич fi:Huispaus sv:Quidditch sk:metlobal ro:vajthat he:קווידיץ' fa:کوییدیچ Chinese(Same in China and Taiwan) 魁地奇