More About Hermione

Musings on Hermione’s Time Turner


In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione Granger decides to step up her class work, just a little. Okay, it wasn’t just a little, it was a lot. She literally doubled, possibly even tripled, her class work for that year.

At one point in the book, Harry and Ron are looking at her class schedule and they notice that she has three classes scheduled for the nine o’clock hour. At the time, Hermione brushes their wonderment off, but later in the book we discover that Hermione has been allowed to make use of a very dangerous artifact called a Time Turner.

The name Time Turner must have come from the fact that you literally turn the hourglass inside the necklace in order to go back in time. A single turn of the hourglass on the Time Turner necklace will send you 1 hour back in time. Two turns will send you two hours back and so on.

Because a turn of a the hourglass will only send you back a mere hour, one can understand that the Time Turner necklace, while dangerous, is not as dangerous as it could be. Let’s face it, if you wanted to go back a simple 1 year in time you would need to turn the hourglass 8760 times. That’s a lot of turning. Conceivable, certainly, but the more time you want to go back, the less likely someone would be able to do it.

We do know that a time turner is something that the Ministry of Magic finds to be worthy of being controlled. Hermione states that Professor McGonagall had to write several letters in order for Hermione to be allowed to use one. But in light of the fact that Hermione was 14 or 15 years old at the time would indicate that it is no more dangerous than our Muggle society would view a car. Dangerous if abused but somewhat common if a young teenager would be allowed to keep it without direct supervision.

What I find more interesting is the idea that Professor McGonagall allowed Hermione Granger to have one at all. Granted, while the overall effects would not be deemed too dangerous, the emotional effects of such a device on a girl like Hermione would have been self-evident to a woman like Professor McGonagall.

Hermione is a driven and frantic young woman. She is constantly in fear of failure and in order to make up for this she sets goals for which anyone is almost certain to fail at. Hermione does achieve these goals mostly but only by learning that a person cannot master everything. When Hermione storms out of Professor Trelawney’s class, we realize that Hermione Granger has learned that there are some things worth spending time on, and there are others that are just a waste of time, no matter how much time you are given.

In the end, Hermione also learns that using a Time Turner is just not the answer to her problem. Having more time to get things done is not the solution. The solution is earning what is important enough to get done in the time you have. Even with additional time, you are still faced with the emotional damage that comes with doing “too much”.

Could it be, that Professor McGonagall, in her more aged experience knew that the only way Hermione would learn this lesson was through the school of Hard Knocks? By the end of the semester, Hermione Granger is an emotional wreck and learns her lesson. Had she not gone through that eye-opening experience, she probably would not have believed anything that she was told. Hermione, for all of her commendable traits, is a stubborn know-it-all. Sometimes the solution for this type of flaw is a good old fashion fall on your face experience.

Yes, I know. You could just say that Hermione’s use of the Time Turner to attend extra classes was just a plot device used by J.K. Rowling to achieve the end result of the book, but I like to think that certain lessons and ideas, whether called upon by the author or not, tend to leak out in a writer’s work.

Perhaps J.K. Rowling either suffers from or sees frequently in other women this same issue. In trying to balance far too many things (work, home, kids, social life) and wishing that we had more time to handle it all when in fact we must come to terms with the fact that we need less things to worry about, not more time in which to worry about them. A Time Turner is not the solution.