A Cauldron Full of Hot Strong Clues
Sometimes you really know you’ve stumbled far down the rabbit hole.
In the online world of Harry Potter it’s easy to end up twelve pages deep on some obscure wizarding-world sub-wiki, staring at information you definitely don’t remember being canon. As a self-proclaimed Potter archaeologist, this happens to me a lot.
On this particular dig, I was nosing around various fan wikis and wizarding archives, eyeing Celestina Warbeck with suspicion—as one does—when I landed on the page for Mrs. Weasley’s favorite song, Cauldron Full of Hot Strong Love.
There, I found one of the strangest, most oddly specific lore fragments I’d ever seen. It’s not every day you get handed a piece of post–Battle of Hogwarts canon. Even a trivial one.
“In 2003, a Muggle dog-walker was accidentally transported via Portkey to one of Warbeck's concerts, where the singer invited him on-stage to perform a duet of this song. His memory was modified by a Ministry of Magic official, but the charm did not fully take and the man went on to pen a popular Muggle song which bore an uncanny resemblance to this tune. Warbeck was not amused.”
Oh boy. This feels like a puzzle designed specifically for me. The moment I read it, I could feel that this was solvable. So let’s treat it like a real puzzle and lay out the constraints.
We know Warbeck’s song is old. It was popular back in Mr. and Mrs. Weasley’s Hogwarts days. But that’s not the relevant variable. The key detail is the inception point: 2003, when the dog-walker had his accidental, magical little meet-cute with Celestina. The unnamed “popular Muggle song” must have been written after 2003.
Let’s zoom out to the authorial layer for a moment. I’m going to treat that Muggle song as the creative seed for the Warbeck lyrics as they appear in Half-Blood Prince, which was released in July 2005.
This leaves us with a neat and tidy two-year window, one mysterious male lyricist, and a very irritated Celestina Warbeck.
And ladies and gentlemen… I think I found a winner.
