Lately, I’ve caught myself wondering a lot about which Hogwarts house I would actually be in. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s really impossible to know, and all the computer generated results I get from quizzes designed to answer this question are bogus. Also, if the element of choice is a factor, as Harry’s ending up in Gryffindor seems to indicate, how does it matter which house’s traits suit my eleven year old self’s personality? I would just choose to go where my friends were.
But there was a time in the not so distant past when I seriously thought that, of all the Houses, I would be in Ravenclaw. This House has always sort of fascinated me, for a number of reasons. I’m going to discuss those reasons here.
The Sorting System: As we know, the Sorting Hat divides students into four groups, based on a dominant personality trait. Gryffindor gets the ‘brave’ kids, or those who value courage and daring above everything else; Slytherins are the ‘ambitious’ (or more likely, unscrupulous) ones; Hufflepuffs are hardworking and loyal and the Ravenclaws are ‘intelligent’.
None of these traits is mutually exclusive. There’s nothing that keeps a person from being intelligent, unscrupulous, hardworking and daring—in fact, Harry himself displays all four during his quest to bring down Voldemort. What the Sorting really does is assign children places to sleep for seven years and binds them into cliques and teams; it puts kids with like-minded individuals and then lets feuds and friendships foster.
Slytherin versus Gryffindor: The main players in Hogwarts during Harry’s years all seem to come from these two houses, which are posited as the big two, with Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff functioning as bystanders who support one or the other, usually Gryffindor. The reasons for this are fairly simple: a) Harry and company, the main characters of the series, are all in Gryffindor and their antagonists are in Slytherin, so of course we see more of 
these houses than any other and b) the personality traits of openness and courage and daring seem naturally opposed to the twisted ambition and cunning and deviousness that Slytherin students typically exemplify. Rowling also lays out an interesting rich vs. poor, entitled vs. hard-working conflict through their encounters, so you have Slytherin Malfoy, who can literally buy his way onto a Quidditch team, and the Weasleys, all of whom get onto the team through sheer talent and have medium-grade brooms.
Gryffindor and Hufflepuff: Since ‘hard working’ is one of the traits that Gryffindor students claim over Slytherins in this dynamic, perhaps it’s only expected that Hufflepuff be the first house to naturally ally with them (in Chamber of Secrets, Justin Finch-Fletchley and his fellow Hufflepuffs are the first students we meet who are neither Slytherin nor Gryffindor). In Deathly Hallows, the Hufflepuffs field the second largest number of students who choose to stay behind and fight against Voldemort. In fact, it’s a Hufflepuff, Ernie Macmillan, who suggests staying behind to fight at all:
..as Harry skirted the walls, scanning the Gryffindor table for Ron and Hermione, Ernie Macmillan stood up at the Hufflepuff table and shouted, ‘And what if we want to stay and fight?’
These two houses are natural allies, both housing the more ‘earthy’, friendly sorts of people, those who focus on getting the ‘right’ thing done.
So that means…: Technically, if the world were fair and split along equal lines, the Ravenclaws would ally with the Slytherins. Both houses privilege something which is, to be completely honest, much more easily verifiable than ‘courage’ and ‘loyalty’. You can check a person’s genealogy to ascertain their wizarding ancestry; you can set an exam and see who scores the highest to verify a certain brand of academic intelligence. Both are equally narrow in their choice of students, and cater to elites of different kinds: the preppy kids and the nerds, or, the blue bloods and the Gifted and Talented.
But that definition of ‘Gifted and Talented’ is broad and obscure enough to include both Terry Boot, who recognizes and appreciates a Protean Charm and Luna Lovegood, who is quite brilliant in a slightly less-than-conventionally-academic way.
Suitably airy: The only Ravenclaw student with any substantial role in the books is Luna Lovegood, who is a bit of an oddity in her own house. She doesn’t seem to have any other close Ravenclaw friends, and her housemates bully her by hiding her things every year. Because she’s such a loner in her own house, we don’t get a good glimpse of how dynamics play out within groups of Ravenclaws, something we are privileged enough to witness with all the other houses.
A better phrase: The Sorting Hat says that Ravenclaw is the place where ‘those of wit and learning/Will always find their kind’. These are the kids who ‘have a ready mind’, who at the tender age of 11 are scouted out as smarter, more academically inclined than their peers. What that really means, I think, is that these kids are more likely to view a problem in a rational, logical manner and find a creative solution, rather than go at it with swords raised (Gryffindors), sneak around it (Slytherins) or bulldoze their way through no matter how long it may take (Hufflepuffs). The Ravenclaws value the ability to think calmly through a crisis—evidenced by the fact that their password is a riddle. No matter what your emergency, you have to answer the question, not just memorise a random word, to get through.
Curiouser and curiouser: For some reason, when I think of Ravenclaw I think of Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Maybe it’s because Luna vaguely resembles her, but I think it’s also that curious sense of detachment that the house as a whole seems to
give off. The Ravenclaws are supposed to honour logic and reason above all else, to make cold calculations that will lead them to the best means, or most ‘intelligent’ means to achieve an objective. For this, you have to have an open mind, and no sort of personal bias against the different means available. For the ideal Ravenclaw, there should be no question of ‘evil’ and ‘good’—things must look either rational or irrational, and then be worked towards accordingly. Nothing can be accepted or refuted without an effort to prove it.
This makes them, to me, a very safe, neutral sort of house. It seems as though the kids here are the only ones who can really choose who they want to be, or who they want to side with. I wouldn’t be surprised if this with the one house whose alum were split down the middle when it came to Voldemort’s policies, indeed, it seems to me the one house where these policies could have been debated at all.
The traditional Ravenclaw colours of blue and bronze only bolster this idea. Blue, traditionally the colour associated with calm, peace, reason. Bronze, the metal used to forge the scales used by all the students in Hogwarts. Scales for measuring, weighing, balancing.
I think Ravenclaw’s curiously fleeting role in the Harry Potter series is fitting. This is a House whose students are not determined by where they’re from, where they are right now, or what they do in Hogwarts. This is a house whose students think outside of it and beyond it, where they are not slapped with obvious loyalties and allegiances the moment they walk away from the Hat. They’re not all ‘bad’,they’re not all ‘heroes’ and they’re certainly not all expected to be utterly loyal to one another above everything else.
It would be nice to be a Ravenclaw, I think. Unfortunately, given my tendency to let emotions cloud my judgment and to privilege reckless daring and ambition over logic, the probability of my ending up in that beautiful, circular common room is pretty darn low. It’s under the lake or up in the other tower for me.
Where the Dog Star rages 