The HP Lexicon Podcast

This is an encore episode from February 10, 2018.

Chastity, Credence, and Modesty may have seemed like strange names to viewers of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but they are rooted in the Barebone family’s Puritan past. Not only is the Barebones’s church named for Salem, Massachusetts, but also the family seems to be descended from Bartholomew Barebone, an anti-magic no-maj with roots in early Puritan colonists in North America.  Rowling writes about this in her “History of Magic in North America” on Pottermore.

Overtly-pious sounding names like Verity and Abstinence were common among Puritans. One plentiful source of peculiar Puritan names was a real-life family with the surname Barebone. A particularly notable member of this family was the Puritan Preacher and Member of Parliament Praise-God Barebone, who lent his name to the Barebone Parliament – which immediately preceded the beginning of Britain’s time as a Puritan-run Protectorate.

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This is an encore presentation of an episode from February of 2018.

Why do we assume that Ottery St Mary, an actual town in south Devon, is the same village as the one called Ottery St Catchpole in the books? There are a couple of good reasons for this. For one thing, the name “Ottery” means that the town is located along the River Otter, a small river in south Devon. If Ottery St Catchpole isn’t Ottery St Mary, it has to be located very, very near to it.

Another clue is the fact that quite a few places in the stories are found in that immediate area. Rowling attended university in Exeter, which is located there. She set a significant part of the stories in that corner of Britain and borrowed a lot of names. If you look at the map, you’ll find Buddleigh Salterton near Exeter, which lends its name to Budleigh Babberton, where Slughorn had been hiding out in a Muggle house. You’ll also find Chudleigh, the home of the Chudley Cannons — spelled differently so it’s not quite the same name but very close, just like Ottery St Catchpole. It does make sense that Ron would be a fan of the local Quiddtich team. You’ll also find the town of Dawlish there, whose name Rowling borrowed for the Auror, John Dawlish.

The most important clue is also the coolest, I think. If you drive a mile or so south of Ottery St Mary, exactly where the books say you’d find the Weasley homestead, you’ll find a farm called The Burrow Hill Farm. No kidding. I visited that very farm while researching my book In Search of Harry Potter. Weird thing is, my GPS quit on my just as I drove down the little lane that led to the farm.

I can’t help but suspect that Rowling used that name intentionally. As I said, she spent several years here going to university, so it is certainly possible that she saw that name — Burrow — and saw it as the perfect name for the home of the Weasley family, even describing it as being in the exact same place just south of the village … whose name she also borrowed.

The post Encore Episode: Why Ottery St Mary? appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

This is an encore broadcast of an episode if the Harry Potter Lexicon Minute from November 2018.

Today I’d like to talk to you about how, in the end, Bane didn’t need to get mad.

When Bane gets mad at Firenze for saving Harry, he says “…we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?” Bane thinks that Harry should have died at the hands of Voldemort in “The Forbidden Forest.” This is the title of chapter fifteen in which this incident happened.

Harry even suspects that Bane felt that way. “Bane thinks Firenze should have let Voldemort kill me… I suppose that’s written in the stars as well.”

During the Battle of Hogwarts, when Harry decides to sacrifice himself, he goes to “The Forest Again” – chapter 34 of The Deathly Hallows. And even if he didn’t really die because of his mother’s powerful love, everyone thought he was dead for a little while.

So Bane reacted too quickly. What he read in the stars did, in fact, play out – just six years later instead of that night in First Year when Harry and the others served their detentions.

The post Encore Episode: Bane was Right All Along appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

In chapter nine of Order of the Phoenix, Rowling does a lot of really poignant foreshadowing for the coming war against Voldemort. In re-reading it, I found new meaning in Harry’s confused anger after Moody shows him the photograph of the original members of the Order. This interaction is so closely followed by Mrs. Weasley’s distressing boggart that I had not previously given it substantial thought, but here are Harry’s thoughts from his brief respite between shocks:

He did not know why he had received such a shock; he had seen his parents’ pictures before, after all, and he had met Wormtail… but to have them sprung on him like that, when he was least expecting it… No one would like that, he thought angrily….

And then, to see them surrounded by all those other happy faces… Benjy Fenwick, who had been found in bits, and Gideon Prewett, who had died like a hero, and the Longbottoms, who had been tortured into madness… all waving happily out of the photograph forevermore, not knowing that they were doomed…. Well, Moody might find that interesting… he, Harry, found it disturbing….

It’s no secret that Harry spends much of Order of the Phoenix responding to the chaos surrounding him with bursts of rage, which are often misdirected. The photograph Moody shows him is a clear visual representation of how quickly war can destroy lives. Harry knows he is in the calm before the storm, and he is terrified that one day soon, everyone who was celebrating Ron’s and Hermione’s new prefect status moments before could meet tragic ends. But Harry cannot deal with that kind of anxiety, so he redirects it into anger toward Moody, whose paranoia probably prevented him from correctly anticipating Harry’s feelings. Moody is described as being “evidently… under the impression he had just given Harry a bit of a treat,” but the photo just reaffirms Harry’s worst fears and reminds him of what he has already lost.

Moments later, Harry happens upon Mrs. Weasley, whose boggart is shifting between the lifeless forms of Ron, Bill, Mr. Weasley, Fred and George, Percy, and Harry, in turn. It’s clear that Mrs. Weasley has also been dwelling on the losses she may face during the war. But what struck me most upon re-reading this scene is Sirius’ reaction:

Sirius was staring at the patch of carpet where the boggart, pretending to be Harry’s body, had lain.

Certainly, this would upset Sirius. It might even be the same form his own boggart would take–although dementors would not be a bad guess either. I think in seeing the boggart of Harry’s dead body, Sirius’ resolve to protect Harry at all costs is fortified, and that foreshadows his own death at the end of the book.

On a final note, I want to say that I think Sirius’ death is what snaps Harry out of his anxiety-fueled rage. In Half-Blood Prince, he is charming and charismatic, if a bit melancholy at times. His fear has become reality, and rather than “shut [himself] away or…crack up,” as he tells Dumbledore Sirius wouldn’t have wanted him to do, he pushes through it with acceptance and resolve.

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This is an encore broadcast of the first Harry Potter Lexicon Podcast from June of 2011. 

Welcome to the Harry Potter Lexicon Podcast, in this first episode:

Links:

The post Encore Episode: Did Dumbledore Walk Around With It in His Pocket? appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

This is an encore podcast episode originally aired in January of 2018.

Did you know that one of Harry’s classmates apparently vanished between first and fifth year?

I don’t mean “vanished” in the same way that Montague disappeared into a Vanishing Cabinet only to reappear a few weeks later. I mean that she was listed as an incoming First Year in book one but was missing five years later.

Her name is Sally-Anne Perks. She appears on Rowling’s draft of the original forty students — and if you don’t know what that draft is, search on the Lexicon for The Class List. That list isn’t totally canon, since quite a bit of the information on it changed before making it into the books. Sally-Anne didn’t change, however. She was sorted just before Harry in chapter seven of Philosopher’s Stone. Unlike the films, the kids in the book are sorted in alphabetical order.

We don’t hear anything about Ms. Perks again. She never appears in the books. That wouldn’t mean anything, since there are a number of names which show up only once. However, there is another time that the students in Harry’s year are called off in alphabetical order, and that’s in book five. Flitwick calls groups of students to take their practical Charms exam. For example, he calls Hermione along with Anthony Goldstein, Gregory Goyle, and Daphne Greengrass.

When he gets to Harry, the book says:

Ten minutes later, Professor Flitwick called, “Parkinson, Pansy – Patil, Padma – Patil, Parvati – Potter, Harry.” — OP31

He misses Sally-Anne entirely. She should have been called just after Parvati. For some reason, Ms. Perks is no longer part of Harry’s year.

The post Encore Episode: Whatever Happened to Sally-Anne? appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

In my last canon thoughts podcast, I talked about the amazing third book in the Potter series, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Now we move on the book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

I’m always a bit surprised by how many people consider this to be their favorite Harry Potter book. It’s a bit of an oddball, stuck in the middle between the whimsical first three books and the darker, more mature last three. It starts with a murder in a creepy old house, meanders through a mishmash of revelations of the wider magical world, and ends with a horrific, disturbing graveyard scene and the fracturing of the Wizarding World between Dumbledore and his followers, and the Ministry and the wider magical population. Running through the whole book is a mystery for which the solution is similar to but nowhere near as clever as the mistaken identity mystery of book three.

I think that most people who call this book their favorite are actually thinking of the film version, which certainly is exciting and visually stunning. Watching the whole story race by in two and a half hours makes it easy to ignore the silliness of the plot because it’s just so much fun.

What silliness? Well, let’s think about it. The Triwizard Tournament has hard and fast rules, rules which cannot be broken on pain of death. One of the rules is that one champion is chosen from each of the three schools. So how can Harry be included when there already is a Hogwarts champion? If you say, well, the Goblet was fooled and rules broken by a sufficiently powerful wizard, then the rules could be UN-broken by a sufficiently powerful wizard, namely Dumbledore. Harry could easily be disqualified on a number of legalities: too young, no approved affiliated school, and so on. But still he’s forced to compete even though his name was put in illegally. That’s ridiculous.

And then there are the contests themselves. I mean, dragons are cool and exciting, that’s true. But staring at a lake for an hour with no clue what’s happening down below is not. Neither is staring at a maze. These contests are, not to put too fine a point on it, very boring. Why does everyone get all excited about the Tournament? And for that they gave up Quidditch for the whole year?

But the most glaring plot hole is this that Voldemort’s grand scheme for staging his resurrection is ridiculously over-complicated. Planting Barty Crouch Jr. at Hogwarts was clever, it’s true. Once that’s done, however, why wait until the final task of the Triwizard Tournament almost a year later to spring the trap? It would have been a very simple matter for Crouch to turn something of Harry’s into a Portkey (there is a spell for that, as we learn in book five) and have the boy transported to Little Hangleton. Harry’s broomstick would be an obvious choice, since he would be holding it out of the Quidditch pitch, outside the protections placed on Hogwarts. How do we know that the pitch is not protected? Because that’s where the maze was set up and the Triwizard Cup portkey worked just fine. Such a simple portkey could have been done within the first few weeks of school. No need for Crouch to maintain the elaborate charade of impersonating Moody for a whole school year. No need to delay Voldemort’s return.

So book four has massive plot problems. Why is it a fan favorite? I think it’s because we readers are immersed for almost eight hundred pages in the wonderful, glorious wizarding world. Along with Harry, our horizons are expanding and we are learning more and more. We get to experience the Quidditch World Cup. We meet a fascinating variety of people from Ministry employees to foreign witches and wizards. We learn about other wizarding schools and experience the heartbreaks and silliness of young romance. Rowling continues to draw is into her created world and never lets us down. More than ever, we want to live at Hogwarts and experience all of this for ourselves. As for the plot problems? Whatever. They’re easily ignored in the sheer delight of the Wizarding World.

So book four is far from perfect. After the detailed and intricate plotting of book three, it comes as a bit of a letdown. But let’s face it. Most of us never even noticed the plot holes until about the fifth read through, and even then we just didn’t care. Goblet of Fire is a fun, exciting book, one which takes us deep into the world of witches and wizards and leaves us all set up for darker things to come.

The post Canon Thoughts: Goblet of Fire appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

There comes a point as a Harry Potter fan when you think you have found or heard about all the connections between the series and the world of literature and mythology. And then, out of nowhere, another one smacks you in the face.

I have just finished reading Paulo Coelho’s bestselling book The Alchemist, which I was reading for the first time. Now there’s the obvious fact that alchemists are concerned with finding and making the philosopher’s stone, but that is not the connection I’m talking about. In The Alchemist, the protagonist, a shepherd boy, is on a dream-inspired quest to find his treasure. Along the way he meets an alchemist in the Egyptian desert who tells him, “wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” Those words were instantly familiar to me and transported me away from the sand dunes of the Sahara and to the snow-covered graveyard of Godric’s Hollow. There, on Kendra Dumbledore’s gravestone, were the words, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

I’ve been pondering what this connection might mean, or even if it means anything at all. Does the reversal change the meaning? The essence is the same after all, that your treasure and your heart are intertwined, and where you find one, you’ll find the other. For the shepherd boy, he follows his heart, which takes him on a wondrous journey, eventually leading him full circle back to where he started his quest, where he finds literal treasure. But his real treasure may be the transformation he has undergone, which is, after all, the true purpose of alchemy. I see some parallels here with Dumbledore, who was so enamoured of his own treasure hunt for the Hallows, only to realise, too late, that the real treasure was at home; his family. Presumably it was Dumbledore who chose these words.

Further research revealed that the words on Kendra’s gravestone also appear in the Bible, so perhaps that was the original source for both authors and the similarity is just a coincidence. However, I do think it’s quite likely that J.K. Rowling was familiar with The Alchemist.

The book was initially published in Portuguese, the language of Paulo Coelho’s native Brazil. Between 1991 and 1993 when J.K. Rowling was living in Portugal, The Alchemist was one of the biggest-selling Portuguese language books of all time. It’s quite likely that she came across it. Especially with a title like that, and with the Harry Potter story incubating in her mind at the same time. In her earliest drafts, alchemy was a class at Hogwarts, in place of Potions, so it’s clear that J.K. Rowling had a fascination for the subject. I wonder if those words stuck with her and found their way into the story seven books later.

What do you think? Am I seeing connections where there are none, or are there other parallels we can draw between these two stories of magical quests? What do you think these words mean?

The post Hearts & Treasures appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

Lexicon editor Eileen Jones chats with her friend Angela about interesting characters from Gryffindor House, focusing on on Ginny and Dean.

The post Fan Conversations: Gryffindor Characters appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

Pottermore is no more. I guess having the name “Potter” in the title was too limiting, since now the website is called “Wizarding World” and encompasses the “Fantastic Beasts” films as well as the Potter books and films. My reaction? Whatever.

I loved Pottermore for Rowling’s writing. I loved the story artwork from the Potter series, since those illustrations actually matched descriptions in the books and were reported to be verified by Rowling herself. For me, Pottermore was a worthy successor to Rowling’s very creative original website which felt like the author was personally communicating with us fans.

When Pottermore changed to become just another fan site, I was very disappointed. The content was trite and uninteresting to anyone over the age of 18. Often the writers demonstrated less understanding of Rowling’s created world than we normal fans did, even with their supposed connection to the author. Quite frankly, I stopped visiting the site.

Now it’s the Wizarding World. I’ve spend some time poking around and I am just as unimpressed as I was with the second iteration of Pottermore. The site seems to have even less content than it used to, and a lot of things are either broken — when I click the button to “join” the new fan club, I’m just taken to my profile — or listed as “coming soon,” which is very bad website design. If it wasn’t ready you shouldn’t have switched it on for public viewing.

So again. Whatever.

But about the fan club. I do want to join, if for no other reason than I’ve been a massive Potter fan since 1998 and I figure if anyone should be in a Harry Potter fan club, it’s me. Maybe I’m already signed up, since I do have the Wizarding World app installed on my phone. I have yet to discover any of the “spellbinding new content” which was promised, however. I did find some short bits of writing which rehash facts and content which any fan will already know. I also saw a film clip or two, but those are hardly new content.

Still stuck with … whatever.

That is, until I saw this whole subscription thing. It’s called Wizarding World Gold and I will say, I’m intrigued. I don’t know if I’m sold — I could get two Wizarding World Loot Crates for about the same price and those have a lot cooler stuff in them. But the Gold subscription does offer some interesting things. Just not for me.

You see, I don’t collect much Potter memorabilia myself, so I’m not going to be particularly interested in the pins. I already have all the ebooks so I don’t get added value from access to the series through the club. The special events won’t be happening anywhere near me here in Texas and I don’t expect to be flying to New York or San Francisco to see Cursed Child anytime soon, special access or discounts on tickets for those things don’t do me any good. As I said, I don’t collect Potter memorabilia so discounts at the Wizarding World shops won’t do me much good either.

So what has me intrigued?

FIrst of all, the video series called Wizarding World Originals. I’ve been on the set of the films and I was blown away by the craft of filmmaking at the vast scale of a Potter film. I love learning more about that process. I am pretty sure I would enjoy that video series.

But most of all, I want that journal. It’s called “Keys and Curios” and oh, just look at that cover, designed by none other than MinaLima. I love cool journals and this one looks awesome. That’s one bit of memorabilia I would love to own.

However, is it worth seventy-five bucks? Well, not for me, no. But I’m a 60-year-old teacher and theatre director, and I’ve been the editor in chief of the ultimate source for Potter world facts for the past twenty years. No matter how much I love that journal and want to watch that video series, I have to admit that I’m just not the person they’re trying to appeal to. If I had seventy-five dollars to spend on Potter stuff, I’d get two Loot Crates.

But I can easily imagine that this will be a great purchase for a lot of fans. The quality looks really good — did I mention the cover of the journal? — and if I still lived in Britain or regularly shopped for Potter merchandise, I would definitely get good value out of it.

And who knows? They do promise that there’s more to come. I think the best thing they could do is to take a page from Loot Crate’s playbook and include some collectibles as imaginative as the things you’ll find there. Shirts and bookends and keychains and props and scarfs and pendants and stuffed animals? Then even I would be tempted!

But as for the Wizarding World website itself, I expect I’ll visit it as often as I visited the second iteration of Pottermore. Which is never.

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