15 underappreciated ladies of Harry Potter

Sybill Trelawney

Professor Sybill Trelawney gets a bad rep. She teaches Divination, which is basically the junk science of magic. The class is an elective, but several of the students who sign up to take it still end up mocking her. What gives?

Trelawey’s outlandish personality; thickly-scented, smoky classroom; and propensity for the dramatic all work against her in the books and the movies. She has a hard time being taken seriously; no one understands why such a revered wizard as Dumbledore would keep her on the staff.

However, in spite of constant opposition from the staff and students at Hogwarts, Trelawney keeps teaching. She keeps doing her thing. And when she gives Harry a real prophecy in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — her second ever, the first being the one about Harry and Lord Voldemort — he’s stunned. Later, he finds out from Dumbledore that Trelawney comes from a long line of seers. Dumbledore is also quick to point out that just because Trelawney seems kooky or overdramatic, doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be taken less seriously.

It also doesn’t mean she should be degraded or mocked. In many ways, Trelawney represents all the things that we love about Luna Lovegood. Both are a bit strange, and both see things beyond the obvious. But Luna is a child when we meet her, and Trelawney is a full-grown adult.

There’s a misconception that growing old means you have to grow up and stop caring about your passions or behaving in certain ways. That’s not true at all. Trelawney certainly embodies that, and her presence in the Potter-verse is important insofar as it suggests tolerance from the people we may think are “beyond logic.”