The HP Lexicon Podcast

In the new Wizards Unite game by Niantic, the mysterious Calamity is threatening the Statute of Secrecy. It’s stealing magical people, creatures, and items of significance from different periods of time and leaving them randomly scattered around the world with the protection of various magical beings.  The cause of the Calamity is under investigation by the Ministry, with the help of players of the game, who are recruits to the Statute of Secrecy Task Force. 

In the Back To Hogwarts event that ran from August 27 to September 3, Professor McGonagall alerted players that the Sorting Hat had been taken from Hogwarts, and in her concern, she moves on to some dark speculation: “For years after the Battle of Hogwarts, virtually all of our students could see the Thestrals. It was a constant reminder of the cost of that horrible fight. I just hope that the Calamity doesn’t eventually condemn another generation of students to the same fate.”

Naturally, this led me to some dark speculation of my own. Could the Calamity truly pose such a threat to the Wizarding World?

The Calamity is, as yet, a poorly understood phenomenon. The Ministry doesn’t know why it’s stealing these magical traces and leaving them where Muggles could find them. However, we know from the “Fantastic Beasts” movies and a bit of background in Deathly Hallows that Grindelwald wanted to expose the magical world to wizards in order to force Muggles into a kind of subservience. We also know from the “Fantastic Beasts” movies that, at least in North American Wizarding culture, there was significant anti-wizard sentiment during Grindelwald’s time, which allowed Grindelwald to prey on those who feared persecution.

In the Harry Potter books, breaches of the Statute of Secrecy are always treated as serious offenses, but the examples we see tend to be frivolous. From Dedalus Diggle‘s magical fireworks after Voldemort fails to kill baby Harry to Archie Aymslowe‘s refusal to change out of his flowery nightgown at the Quidditch World Cup, the Wizarding public seems to regard the Statute of Secrecy as an inconvenience. They’ve been lulled into a sense of security, and they’re tired of hiding–but the Ministry insists that history will repeat itself if they aren’t careful. So they carry on with their muggle-repelling charms and obliviation squads, and they rarely need a Thunderbird to create rain infused with the venom of swooping evil to erase the stressful memories of the townspeople. 

The Calamity events seem to mirror our timeline–the Sorting Hat was stolen before the new first-years could be sorted on September 1, 2019. That’s close to a century after Frank the Thunderbird saved Jacob Kowalski from being obliviated–and right in the middle of Albus Severus’ and Scorpius Malfoy’s time at Hogwarts. This is a bit sticky, timeline-wise, but it would seem that Professor McGonagall was around to see the drama unfold with Grindelwald and the anti-Wizard sentiment from Muggles. She believes the Statute of Secrecy keeps everyone safe, and that if the Wizarding World is exposed, it can lead only to catastrophe. 

It seems that the force behind the Calamity has a different outlook. Maybe this force believes, like Grindelwald, that Muggle subservience is for the “greater good,” in which case Professor McGonagall is quite right to be deeply concerned. But maybe it’s possible that it believes, instead, that Muggles and Wizards are ready to co-exist harmoniously, and that separating the worlds and silencing the truth weakens both communities. 

Only time will tell! In the meantime, if you want to be my friend on Wizards Unite, my code is 0722 3581 2200. 

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We know that prophecies exist in Harry’s world. All of the prophecies that affect Harry in some way eventually come to pass. The wording is always ambiguous enough to cause anxiety, though. “The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord” meets these particular characteristics and will either kill Voldemort or die trying… or kind of both. Voldemort’s “servant has been chained these twelve years” and will soon rejoin his master, but—plot twist—the servant isn’t the prisoner for whom the book is named. “When unseen children murder their fathers, then will the Dark Lord return”—but maybe not, erm, permanently.

If Firenze is to be believed, occupants of the Wizarding World have some free will—but the “great tides of evil or change” will come and go more or less as the heavens foretell. The ambiguity of the Prophecies we encounter in the series seems to act as a catalyst for these “great tides of evil or change.” It seems to me that the anxiety provoked by these prophecies usually favors the non-evil. Voldemort tries to kill Harry and is put out of commission for 13 years as a result of hearing part of the prophecy. Harry seeks and destroys Voldemort’s horcruxes as a result of his call to responsibility. Harry doesn’t really have time to respond to the “servant and master” prophecy before it comes true, but it adds credibility to her earlier prophecy, which calls him “…the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord.” We don’t know exactly when or how Delphi stumbles upon the prophecy in Cursed Child, but we know that she and Scorpius argue about whether or not prophecies can be broken, and that finding the prophecy is what clues Harry and co. in on what is happening with Albus and Scorpius. We can safely assume that Delphi approaches Albus because she thinks he will lead her to a Time-Turner—Mr. Diggory suspected Harry had one. Once Scorpius convinces Delphi that prophecies can be broken, she takes them back in time to prevent “the big one”—the moment Voldemort marks Harry as his equal.

I wonder sometimes what the point of a prophecy is, if it is inevitable. I think Scorpius is putting his best Slytherin foot forward when he convinces Delphi that they can be broken—if she had continued on her quest to “spare the spare” and enable the new prophecy, it is hard to say what might have happened. I think the means by which a prophecy comes to pass is flexible—especially if there is a Time Turner lying around. But I think the prophecy itself may be some kind of gift to counteract evil forces. Perhaps that is why only some witches and wizards have “the Sight,” as Professor Trelawney would say. Maybe it’s like Dumbledore’s protection of the Sorcerer’s Stone—only those who wish to find it, but not use it, are able to get it. Perhaps the Sight is a gift for those who are essentially good at heart, but effectively pretty neutral. But I think all of that is a concept for another Minute, so I’ll wrap this one up.

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I’ve been reading the Jim Kay-illustrated edition of Sorcerer’s Stone to my cat, because I feel like that version deserves to be read aloud, and Scraps is a pretty good audience. We just finished Chapter 15 – The Forbidden Forest, and it brought something to the front of my mind that I’ve been thinking about for a while: is there free will in the Wizarding World?

This is the chapter in which Harry meets the centaurs in the Forbidden Forest—Ronan, Bane, and Firenze. Bane is furious with Firenze for interacting with Harry and saving him from Voldemort. Firenze tells Harry, “The forest is not safe at this time—especially for you.” Later, he tells the furious Bane, “This is the Potter boy. The quicker he leaves this forest, the better.” Bane responds, “What have you been telling him? … Remember, Firenze, we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?”

Every other time I have read this scene, I have always assumed that this conversation revolved around the dangers Voldemort posed to forest-dwellers at the time. But perhaps the centaurs knew something else. Maybe they knew Harry was destined, one day, to die in the Forbidden Forest.

We don’t know much about the centaur brand of divination—we only see Firenze teach it during the latter half of Harry’s fifth year, since Harry gives up on the subject after his O.W.L. results come back. In their lessons with Firenze, we learn that centaurs “…watch the skies for the great tides of evil or change that are sometimes marked there,” that “…it may take years to be sure of what [they] are seeing,” and that “…even centaurs sometimes read [signs] wrongly.” Most important, perhaps, is Harry’s takeaway that, “[Firenze’s] priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even centaurs’ knowledge, was foolproof.”

In contrast to Professor Trelawney, who more often than not radiated confidence in her incorrect predictions, Firenze seems to represent a more grounded version of divination, which seems—in the Wizarding World—to be rooted in truth.

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It’s the first of September and in the Wizarding world, children starting at age eleven will board the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross Station to travel north to Scotland, and the new school year will begin. I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about some of the interesting facts and canon questions about this whole ritual.

First off, the magical gateway into Platform Nine and Three Quarters is not hidden behind a brick wall. That looks really cool in the films, but that’s not accurate. According to Rowling, the magical platform is reached by walking through a metal barrier. Here’s what it says in Chamber of Secrets chapter 5:

He wheeled his trolley forward cautiously until it was right against the barrier and pushed with all his might. The metal remained solid. (CS5)

Here’s how it’s described in Prisoner of Azkaban:

Mr. Weasley strolled toward the barrier between platforms nine and ten, pushing Harry’s trolley and apparently very interested in the InterCity 125 that had just arrived at platform nine. With a meaningful look at Harry, he leaned casually against the barrier. Harry imitated him.

In a moment, they had fallen sideways through the solid metal onto platform nine and three-quarters and looked up to see the Hogwarts Express, a scarlet steam engine, puffing smoke over a platform packed with witches and wizards seeing their children onto the train.

The kind of barrier you’ll find blocking the space between two tracks in a British railway station like King’s Cross is not a wall but somewhat similar to a fence or a guardrail along a highway, but taller. If you stand at a barrier like that, you’re able to see the space between the tracks beyond, which is the space where Platform Nine and Three Quarters is magically hidden.

But wouldn’t people notice someone veering off to walk through a barrier like that? Maybe, but the barrier in question is right where a walkway from the main concourse opens onto the platforms, so someone walking through that walkway would actually walk straight ahead into that barrier rather than veer left or right, as the Muggles would have to do.

If you’ve been to King’s Cross and seen Platforms Nine and Ten, you might be saying “Wait a moment, that’s not how things are arranged.” That’s because when Rowling wrote the books, she wasn’t in London and was describing it from memory. Here’s what she said about it in “Harry Potter and Me”:

I wrote Platform 9 3/4 when I was living in Manchester, and I wrongly visualized the platforms, and I was actually thinking of Euston, so anyone who’s actually been to the real platforms 9 and 10 in King’s Cross will realize they don’t bear a great resemblance to the platforms 9 and 10 as described in the book. So that’s just me coming clean, there. I was in Manchester, I couldn’t check. (HPM)

When I was researching my book In Search of Harry Potter in which I discovered places in Britain which just could be the real places in the Potter books, I visited both King’s Cross and Euston stations and took pictures of the barriers between platforms nine and ten. As you can see from my photo on this page, Rowling’s description definitely fits Euston … but King’s Cross is a much more beautiful building — and the symbolism in the name of the station becomes clear toward the end of the last book when Harry talks with Dumbledore in chapter 35.

And that brings up one last fact before we start traveling north: the station interiors seen in the films are King’s Cross, although that lovely pedestrian bridge has now been removed. However, the red and white confection of a station seen in the exterior shots of the flying car soaring into the sky is actually St Pancras, the station next door.

The post About Platform Nine and Three-Quarters appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

In my series called Canon Thoughts, I’ve given my comments about books one and two of the Harry Potter series as well as about some of the early interviews which Rowling gave back in 1999 and 2000. I’ve also given my take on Crimes of Grindelwald. Now it’s time to talk about Prisoner of Azkaban.

Ah, what do I say about book three?

Many fans call this their favorite book of the series. I would definitely list it in my top three. So what makes this book so special?

First of all, the book is the most tightly plotted of the series. Later books are plotted very well, certainly, but those books are also at least twice as long. There’s a lot more time in books four, five, and six for tangents and descriptions of day-to-day life at Hogwarts. Don’t get me wrong, I love that part of the stories. It’s one of the reasons why the Harry Potter books are so much more enticing than the Fantastic Beasts films. We all want to live at Hogwarts. We want to take classes and try out for the Quidditch team and struggle with homework and eat in the Great Hall. We don’t really feel that way about the world of Newt and Tina. In fact, I really don’t like the Wizarding World of those films very much at all. Hogwarts? Give me my letter!

Prisoner of Azkaban, like the two books before it, has a lot of the extra stuff is removed and what’s left all feels important to the building mystery. A look at the Day to Day calendar of the book on the Lexicon website is very revealing. Nothing much happens between February 12 and just before exams in May. The same can’t be said for the later books, where every month is filled with activities and in which the book’s mystery is clouded by so many extraneous but fascinating events. I don’t see this as a flaw in the later books at all; but strong editing is a definite plus to the plot of book three.

This is particularly great because it gives us a very clear idea of book three’s function in the overall saga, in the plot of the entire Potter series. The purpose of book three is to fill us in on what happened twenty years ago because we can’t understand the events of the present without a thorough understanding of what happened with the Marauders and Snape during the first rise of Voldemort. The book introduces us to James Potter, Lily Evans, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and a young Severus Snape. We learn of their escapades in school and of the true story of what happened in Godric’s Hollow (although of course we won’t learn every detail of the story until the end of the series.) Back in 1999, when we were reading the books in sequence, we found ourselves suddenly realizing that the Harry Potter books are much more complex and deep than we thought, and we find ourselves wanting immediately to go back into the two previous books and read them over looking for all the many clues and foreshadowings that we missed the first time around.

The third book is where we all realized that we are in love with these books. And when Scabbers the rat transformed into a wizard, we were smacked upside the head with the revelation that Rowling is a lot more clever than we thought.

Book three was the last book to be released with no particular fanfare. I remember just noticing the book on a display in a department store as I happened to be passing and grabbing my copy. The first release parties didn’t start until book four was published.

It was after Prisoner of Azkaban that fandom became a thing, when MuggleNet and Leaky Cauldron and the Lexicon came into existence, when a new communications medium called the Internet appeared and allowed fans from all over the world to talk and share fanfiction and spin theories about where the story would go next. Potter fans at that time pretty much invented online fandom.

Fandom was built on conversations about Snape and Remus and James and Sirius at least as much if not more than about Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Draco. And it was all thanks to the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban. That was when the world opened up and we were completely hooked.

Sadly, the filmed version of the book, while fantastic in its own right, missed the entire point of Prisoner of Azkaban in the series. Pretty much all the backstory, so essential to the overall plot of the Harry Potter books, was ignored. It was with the third movie that most fans realized that the films would never live up to the beauty and depth of the actual books. We absolutely love the films — we loved being along for the ride, we loved going to the midnight premier showings with fellow fans, we loved the world made real before our eyes. But we were also deep-down disappointed and knew that people who only saw the films would forever miss the richness of Rowling’s creation. As the film series progressed, we never looked at them quite the same. They were wonderful and beautiful, but just a shadow of the real thing.

The real thing that was revealed to us for the first time when we read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The post Canon Thoughts: Prisoner of Azkaban appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

In today’s minute I’m going to discuss Act 1 Scenes 6 and 7.

Both of these scenes share a similar characteristic: Harry takes a lot of heat from someone who is stuck in the past.

Delphi speaks a line in scene six, referring to Amos: “It’s tough to live with people stuck in the past, isn’t it?”

In scene six, Amos is the character stuck in the past. He was never able to find peace over Cedric’s death, and after hearing the rumors of the super powerful Time Turner he comes to Harry’s house to try to guilt Harry into using this new Time Turner to go into the past and save Cedric’s life. Harry already has plenty of guilty feelings, though, he doesn’t need Amos to make him feel that way. Regardless, he won’t break the rules of Wizarding Law to change the past. 

Amos brings up the phrase ‘Kill the spare’, it is so tragic that the only reason Cedric died is because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Kill the spare’ comes up later in the play, so this is probably a little bit of foreshadowing. 

In scene seven, it’s Albus who is stuck in the past, but not his own. He is stuck in his father’s past. Albus is so angry about all of the things Harry went through, all the things that created his legacy, what makes him famous. I’m not sure why Albus is holding all of this stuff against Harry, but it is getting in his way of seeing how hard Harry is trying in the present to be a good father. 

When trying to find something to talk about for the positive bit of each of these Minute’s I hit a snag. There isn’t really anything here that I really like, but there’s not any problems that I find either. These are both 2 scenes that move the narrative of this particular story forward in a pretty effective way. Amos’s request of Harry in scene six sets up Albus and Scorpius’s adventures later in the play. And the gifts given, and Albus’s disdain for them, in scene 7 is what sets up Albus and Scorpius being able to send a message from the past to their parents in the future.  

The post CC5: Act 1 Scenes 6-7: Living in the Past appeared first on Harry Potter Lexicon.

Today we’re going to talk Horcruxes. Specifically, how they’re made. I started thinking about this subject when I read a particularly interesting passage from Half-Blood Prince. Here’s what caught my eye:

Dumbledore says that Voldemort “seems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. … After an interval of some years, however, he used Nagini to kill an old Muggle man, and it might then have occurred to him to turn her into his last Horcrux.”  (HBP23)

The reason this struck me is that Dumbledore is actually wrong here. For the most part, Voldemort didn’t use important or significant deaths for making his Horcruxes. He may have intended to originally, but that certainly wasn’t how it worked out. 

Let’s take a look at all the murders he chose:

The first Horcrux he made was the ring, created with the murders of his father and grandparents. These victims were certainly important as they represented his Muggle blood. By murdering the Riddles he symbolically murdered his own Muggle identity. After that point he thought and spoke as if that part of his background didn’t exist. This happened in July or August of 1942. 

The next murder, a year later, was that of Myrtle Warren, the Mudblood student who died in the bathroom where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was located. Myrtle’s death doesn’t seem to have any huge importance, except maybe in the fact that she was a Mudblood. Perhaps Riddle saw this as emphasizing the destruction of his Muggle side, but I would argue that her death was almost accidental. She was a target of opportunity who just happened to be in the bathroom where the Basilisk would exit the pipes into the school. I may be wrong about that — perhaps Riddle stalked the girls’ bathroom with his Basilisk for hours, waiting for a suitable victim to come in, but that seems not only really creepy but also a huge waste of time. Myrtle was killed in June of 1943.

Either in his last year of school or shortly after leaving, Tom Riddle followed the directions of Helena Ravenclaw to find the hiding place of Ravenclaw’s diadem in Albania. According to Rowling, he used the murder of an Albanian peasant to turn the diadem into his third Horcrux. This would have happened in 1945 or 1946.

Tom Riddle created his next Horcrux using Hufflepuff’s Cup after he murdered Hepzibah Smith. The date for this event is not known, but canon suggests that it was no earlier than the mid-1950s. Hepzibah claims that her family is distantly related to Helga Hufflepuff. If so, murdering her may have represented to Riddle his Slytherin superiority over another of the Hogwarts Houses. 

After this, Riddle wanted to create a Horcrux using the even more significant magical object in his possession, Slytherin’s locket. He would have felt that this object rightfully belonged to him and that Borgin stole it from his mother. It represented his connection with the powerfully magical side of his heritage, his connection to Salazar Slytherin himself. To create the Horcrux, Riddle murdered a Muggle tramp — hardly a significant death to match the importance of the object, but it would seem he had to use a target of opportunity, so to speak. 

That makes a total of five Horcruxes created before Voldemort’s first rise to power in the 1970s. When he was unexpectedly defeated in his attempt to kill one-year-old Harry Potter, those five Horcruxes sustained him and he fled to Albania. All five were securely hidden away. The cup was in the Lestrange vault. The diadem was in the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts and the Ring was hidden in the remains of Gaunt shack near Little Hangelton. The Diary was in the secret hiding place under the dining room floor in Malfoy Manor. And the locket, the most important Horcrux of all, representing Riddle’s connection to Salazar Slytherin, was magically protected on an island in the middle of a lake filled with Inferi located in an almost inaccessible sea cave along the coast. 

When Voldemort was found and brought back to limited health by Wormtail, he wanted to create the sixth Horcrux he had always wanted, which would mean that his soul would be split into seven pieces. He found this opportunity with the capture and eventual murder of Bertha Jorkins. He used her death to create one more Horcrux, this time using the magical snake Nagini, whose venom then became crucial to creating the potion which could sustain him for the journey back to Britain. 

As you can see, only two of these deaths, that of Hepzibah Smith and his parents, could be considered to be significant. It was more the objects themselves which were important to Riddle’s life and heritage: the locket and ring of Slytherin, the diadem of Ravenclaw, the cup of Hufflepuff, and his old diary from when he was at Hogwarts. Unless we learn more in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts films, Nagini doesn’t seem to have any particular significance to the history and ancestry of Lord Voldemort. 

So Dumbledore was wrong, and on more than one detail. He suggested incorrectly that Voldemort used the killing of a Muggle, presumably Frank Bryce, to create the Nagini Horcrux when it was actually the murder of the unfortunate Bertha Jorkins according to Rowling after book seven came out. 

This list of Horcux creation holds another controversy. Some fans would dispute the dates I’ve listed here. All I can say is that this timeline is based on a careful and literal reading of canon and therefore should be considered correct. That is, until Rowling decides to say or write something to mess it all up! 

McGongall in “Crimes of Grindelwald” anyone?

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At the end of the last chapter, Hermione launched an impromptu plan to free herself and Harry from Umbridge, who had caught them using her office fireplace to talk to someone. Hermione’s plan was to pretend that they were talking to Dumbledore, telling him that the powerful secret weapon he’d created was ready to use. Hermione pretended to break down and say that she was willing to lead Umbridge to it. Umbridge fell for the ruse and forced her and Harry to lead her to the weapon, which Hermione told her was secreted away in the Forbidden Forest. 

In this chapter, the plan works. Well, sort of works. Okay, the only reason it works is because of the fortuitous arrival of Grawp. If the giant hadn’t shown up, things would have worked out very badly indeed for Harry and Hermione. 

What went wrong? More to the point, what exactly was Hermione’s plan? What was she thinking?

From the things she says to the Centaurs, it’s clear that her plan was to bring Umbridge into the Forest and let the Centaurs attack her. But why would she expect them to do that? Hermione has had very limited experience with Centaurs. She first encountered them in her first year when she, Harry, Neville, and Draco were brought into the Forest in the middle of the night by Hagrid as a detention. In that encounter, the Centaurs seemed a bit aggressive but not hostile. The fact that Hagrid was present, however, made that encounter far from typical. Hermione would certainly have understood the unusual nature of that meeting.

Hermione’s second encounter with Centaurs would be second hand at best. Since she gave up taking Divination, she wouldn’t have had Firenze for a teacher. However, she would certainly have heard the other girls in her dorm talking about him and how he was rejected by his herd for fraternizing with humans. Would this have led her to believe that the Centaurs in the Forest would be hostile to witches and wizards?

Perhaps so, but she wouldn’t have had any reason to expect the Centaurs to treat her and Harry with any less hostility. In fact, as far as she knew she was leading all three of them into a very dangerous situation, not just Umbridge. And neither Hermione nor Harry was carrying a wand. 

It would have made a lot more sense for her or Harry to have overpowered Umbridge once they entered the Forest. At one point, Umbridge trips and falls over a sapling, a perfect opportunity to pretend to help her up but instead grab her wand. It hardly seems that Umbridge would have been much of a match for two healthy, determined teenagers. Alternatively, Harry and Hermione could have simply run away, splitting up and dodging between trees. Umbridge might have managed to Stun one of them — possibly. I don’t imagine that she’s all that powerful of a witch, a fact strongly suggested by the shortness of her wand, which is revealed in this passage from chapter 12:

Many of the class exchanged gloomy looks; the order ‘wands away’ had never yet been followed by a lesson they had found interesting. Harry shoved his wand back inside his bag and pulled out quill, ink and parchment. Professor Umbridge opened her handbag, extracted her own wand, which was an unusually short one, and tapped the blackboard sharply with it; words appeared on the board at once:

Defence Against the Dark Arts A Return to Basic Principles (OP12)

According to Mr Ollivander, a short wand does indicate something lacking in the character or ability of the witch or wizard possessing it. He writes:

However, abnormally short wands usually select those in whose character something is lacking, rather than because they are physically undersized (many small witches and wizards are chosen by longer wands) (Pm:Wands)

Before I go on, let me just put in a disclaimer here. As you know, the Minute podcast was on hiatus for a few months this spring. During that time, I stopped reading Order of the Pheonix and didn’t pick it up again until I was working on the new series. Because of that break in reading, I completely forgot about another much more recent encounter between Hermione and the Centaurs, an encounter which explains her actions a lot better. 

Hermione encountered the Centaurs only a few weeks before this event. She and Harry followed Hagrid into the Forest where they met Grawp. On the way back from that meeting, the three were accosted by a large group of Centaurs. And this time, the Centaurs were definitely hostile. Here’s part of that exchange from chapter 30:

‘Now, yeh listen ter me,’ said Hagrid angrily. ‘I’ll have less of the “our” Forest, if it’s all the same ter yeh. It’s not up ter yeh who comes an’ goes in here -‘

‘No more is it up to you, Hagrid,’ said Magorian smoothly. ‘I shall let you pass today because you are accompanied by your young —’

‘They’re not his!’ interrupted Bane contemptuously. ‘Students, Magorian, from up at the school! They have probably already profited from the traitor Firenze’s teachings.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Magorian calmly, ‘the slaughter of foals is a terrible crime – we do not touch the innocent. Today, Hagrid, you pass. Henceforth, stay away from this place. You forfeited the friendship of the centaurs when you helped the traitor Firenze escape us.’ (OP30)

Ah, now it makes sense. Magorian’s statement that they “do not touch the innocent” must be where Hermione got the idea that they could bring Umbridge into the Forest and be safe themselves. It’s still a reckless, dangerous plan. And when Hermione, Harry, and Umbridge do meet the Centaurs, it becomes clear that Hermione has seriously misunderstood the psychology of the Centaurs. The plan is well on its way to complete failure. 

By sheer luck, however, the plan does work out. Grawp turns up in the nick of time, the Centaurs are driven off, and the rest of the DA turns up in the Forest a few moments later, ready to do battle. And with that, we’re off into the next chapter. 

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New historicism is an approach to literature which regards a work of literature as a product of the historical moment in which it was created and as embedded in the ideas and ideologies present in that time. For example, a new historicist might be interested in what Elizabethan beliefs about gender roles can tell us about Shakespeare’s plays and vice-versa. New historicist criticism can become more challenging when we think about works of literature that are nearer to our own time and belief systems, but it can provide us with interesting tools for thinking about Harry Potter, recent history, and the way we think about both.

It is a commonplace to compare Voldemort and the Death Eaters to Hitler and the Nazis, but new historicism prompts us to connect these similarities to the way the world was in the early 1990s when Rowling conceived of Harry’s story. As writers commenting on the abundance of television shows about Nazi Germany in the 1990s, such as Mark Schone, for example, have pointed out, the early 90s were characterized by an acute awareness that it had been a half century since the horrors of World War II. That important chapter in world history continues to haunt and disturb us today, of course, but perhaps the special significance it held in the culture of the early 90s helps to explain why the forces of evil in Harry Potter are represented as they are.

In more recent years, the Fantastic Beasts movies have actually dramatized events leading up to the 1930s and 40s, but film critics are often quick to make connections between these films and our contemporary political climate. What, exactly, makes Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a product of 1997, and what makes The Crimes of Grindelwald a product of 2018? And how might the Harry Potter books be different if they were written today? New historicism prompts us to ask these questions and gives us tools to start working on answers for them.

New Historicism Resources from the Web:

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This is a short scene, but it’s a huge scene when it comes to important information. We get a glimpse of the time-turner that causes all of the timeline disasters in this play. We finally get a mention of Hugo! We get the official titles of Harry and Hermione’s position in the Ministry. And we get a good bit of foreshadowing hidden in Harry’s paperwork.

It would be really easy to make this minute about Hermione being Minister for Magic. But, I feel that I can’t really add anything to any existing discussion about this, so all I’ll say is that it really took me by surprise, I didn’t think it fit her, at first. Rereading the main series again made me change my mind, specifically how passionate Hermione got with S.P.E.W., this is what made me think that she could one day become Minister for Magic.

What I’d really like to discuss in this minute is the information found in Harry’s paperwork. A casual viewer of this play, (and by that I mean someone who came to watch it because they are a fan of Broadway plays, not necessarily because they are a Harry Potter fan), they probably don’t know that the things Hermione mentions reading in the mess on Harry’s desk are classic ingredients to Harry Potter stories. These hints are what Potter fans look for to help figure out the mystery within the story.

Upon this reread I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the information about the trolls, graphorns, giants and werewolves and the information that Dumbledore puts forward as evidence that Voldemort had returned (the disappearance/deaths of Bertha Jorkins, Frank Bryce, and Barty Crouch). Also, all of the memories that he compiled to learn more about Tom Riddle and his Horcruxes. The act of looking for clues in the mundane details that may seem harmless on their own, but when strung together reveal a larger picture is what Dumbledore did best and tried to pass on to Harry. 

On that note, I wanted to discuss the fact that Harry not being the one to pay attention to these details, but had to hear them from Hermione is the most accurate scene so far as far as canon of the original series goes. Harry was not an outstanding student, by any means. Hermione was usually the one to reveal information needed.

On to the positive bit from this scene: I like that Harry uses this way to get in and out of the Ministry. The visitor entrance. Here’s my second piece of Cursed Child headcanon: I’m choosing to believe this was an intended choice of Harry’s once he became a Ministry official, rather than it being another breach of canon. This was the way he first entered the ministry, and this is the way he prefers to come and go now as an adult. 

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