Chapter 11: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Narnia. What's the difference?

Today we had our quiz over Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. And after studying everything from major plot points down to what the Gryffindor common room password was, I quickly realized that I have over prepared. For our “quiz” today we were asked to do two things. Draw our favorite scene from the book, and add a caption so that Dr. Poe could actually tell what it was…

I started drawing a very bad picture of Harry slaying the Basilisk, but Dr. Poe stopped us before I made it any worse than it already was. We'll see what kind of grade I get on that quiz...

- V. B.

What do we see when we think of Harry Potter?

Some novelists spend two or three pages describing a blade of grass. Rowling doesn’t do that. As far as the landscape is concerned or what Hogwarts looks like, Rowling doesn’t really give a concrete description of things. This is a clever trick because the reader has to participate in the story to fill in those mental images. The reader must imagine what these look like. How many windows does the great hall have? Does it have oaken beams? Some of the greatest writers employ this technique. Rowling puts her emphasis on the internal issues and describes the characters through their actions; however, she doesn’t give you all the details on how it looks. She gives you some things, but then your mind takes over. This is where the movie kicks in; we carry over images from the movies to the descriptions she gives. If you go back and reread the books, there’s so much in the later stories that’s left out of the movies.

Almost the entire first book made it into the movies. By the time we get to the fourth book, they really had to hack away from scenes due to the book’s length. The scenes that make it to the movie may influence our imaginations, but there’s still so much we have to paint for ourselves.    

Transportation

We’ve seen magical trains, flying cars, and a lot of different ways to get back and forth, but in this book we get the Flue Network. But who invented the Flue Network? St. Nicholas! Santa is the first person to travel through fireplaces and chimneys to deliver presents to good boys and girls.


Harry gets to Diagon Alley, and he lands in Knockturn Alley at Borgin & Burkes.
- Tom Riddle worked there, and that’s were other vanishing cabinent resides.
- We see the vanishing cabinet twice in the Chamber of Secrets, and we see it later in the Half Blood Prince. Peeves does a lot of damage to the vanishing cabinet at Hogwarts, and Harry hides in the one at Borgin & Burkes. This is how Rowling set up the way for Dumbledore to be murdered.
-The cursed opal necklace was on display in the shop; Draco purchased it to curse Dumbledore, but it wound up hurting Katie Bell instead.

- The Hand of Glory was for sale, which we see later in the series.    

Fawkes

The pheniox has an “unearthly song” which is another way to say “heavenly”. The feature of the phoenix’s tears is healing powers; there’s a metaphor in Hark the Herald Angels Sing about the rising of a phoenix (describing the resurrection of Christ).

C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love (his first scholarly work) is about the development of medieval, allegorical, courtly love poetry. For 500 years, this was the main show in town. It is also the predecessor of the modern day chick flick. Romantic love was invented in the eleventh century, and it was viewed by culture as a bad thing. Women were business deals, not lifelong partners. 
How in the world did Christian literature begin writing about the gods? We find it all the way through the medieval period to the modern period, and it’s full of references to the Greek and Roman god and goddesses. Believers weren’t the only ones to write Christian literature, but it was also written by priests, monks, etc. Lewis believed that gods and goddesses are written about because no one believes in them any more.
When they talked about Mars, god of war, he became the representation of the emotion of rage. He was always raging, violent, and conflictual. In the old stories, he had a whole range of emotions.

 We can event see this in Paul’s Mars Hill encounter with the statue to the unknown god. Once no one truly believed in them, they simply became metaphors and symbols.
Bacchus was the god of wine, and in the allegories, he’s always drunk. He becomes the personification of this state, but in the old stories, he had a full range of emotions and qualities.
As the culture ceased to believe in the gods, they became a literary ornament or device. When they no longer believed, they were no longer a theological issue, and they became a metaphor/simile for whatever was being discussed.
Thus, the phoenix can be appropriated as a symbol of the Resurrection.    

The same is true of Rowling’s Harry Potter. The Christian community didn’t react to The Wizard of Oz, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, the way they reacted to Harry Potter because no one believed in magic back then. But by the end of 20^th century paganism had a resurgence than C. S. Lewis thought would never happen. It was a product of New Age philosophies. Because of this, Harry Potter got a reaction that older books and stories never had to face.


The interesting thing about the kind of magic Rowling uses isn’t taken from paganism, druidism, or voodooism, but she takes it from the Bible. When she has other kinds of magic, it’s things like flying brooms, and she can have that because no one believes in them. However, when she arrives at the kind of magic forbidden by Scripture, such as Divination, her device is to have it ridiculed in a way much stronger than a legal prohibition; she has the figures we trust the most not accept it or really stand behind it. The power of ridicule is a powerful device she uses to discredit these things being practiced. The Bible never says divination is fake, it tells us not to do it. Demons are real, and they’re not to be consulted with because you can’t control them. 

Magical Creatures

Hagrid takes care of Fluffy, Aragog, Norbert, the unicorns, and all sorts of creatures.

• The unicorns were important creatures in the medieval period.
• Fluffy, a three-headed dog, has a background as Cerberus. He guards the gates of Hell for Hades in Greek mythology, just as he guards the trapdoor in Sorcerer’s Stone.
• The Basilisk, a beast of antiquity, and the ancient serpent are present in most cultures.
• The centaurs were also in Greek mythology.
• The dragons were present in the cultures of China, and the Leviathan was in the Old Testament.

Ployjuice Potion

Hermione has a plan to discover if Draco is the Heir or knows who the Heir is.

She makes the polyjuice potion, and they have to steal from Snape’s personal stores to gain the necessary ingredients.

We now know that Snape is a legilimens, and he knows when Harry is lying. Hermione, however, is the one stealing this time.

Moaning Myrtle is a ghost that haunts a girls’ bathroom. This bathroom, also the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, is where they brew the polyjuice potion. This bathroom also reoccurs in later books.

• The plan: Harry and Ron must incapacitate Crabbe and Goyle, get specimens from them, rendezvous with Draco, and discuss the subject of the Heir of Slytherin. Hermione mistakenly turns into a cat.
• Rowling is recognizing that she has a problem with her plot, which is stepping outside the bounds of probability with its many contingencies. She uses this device in a number of stories (ex.: how to get in to the Ministry of Magic.) She has the characters say that this is a problem, one of them asks if they have a better plan, and when they say "no" we just follow along from there. She draws our attention to the problem, and by pointing it out, we ignore it, and we go along with it. It helps draw us into the story. She deals with this very cleverly.
• As we go into the Slytherin common room, we notice Ron’s growing uncertainty with his relationship with Hermione. We also see it when he rushes to Hermione’s defense when she’s called a mudblood. Malfoy is talking about the Heir killing mudbloods, and he predicts she’ll be the first to go. This is where Harry and Ron almost lose their cover. We have this growing, suspicion of a love interest.

When is Harry Potter happening?

She never gives us a straightforward time of action.

What year did Harry celebrate his eleventh birthday?

She does give us clues to know when things happen. Dumbledore dueled Grindelwald in 1945, when Hitler’s Germany was defeated. She has these background events to associate with that sometimes have nothing to do with the action, then she gives us these relative dates.

Tom’s diary purchased fifty years ago during the war; we know how old Riddle was when he used the diary and when he opened the Chamber.

By the time we get to the end, we know when things happened.    

Expelliarmus!

Harry’s standard spell is expelliarmus. When we get to the Deathly Hallows, they can identify Harry by this spell. Lupin warns him against letting people realize he uses this one fallback spell. When Harry tried to teach Dumbledore’s Army this spell, they didn’t think it would  hold up against Voldemort, but Harry used it to save his own life.
Harry got the spell from Snape. Snape uses it to disarm Professor Lockhart in the dueling club. Snape also uses it a lot in order to disarm but not harm his enemies. 

Godry Lockheart

The man with the most charming smile. 
Gilderoy Lockhart’s favorite trivia is his award winning smile. It’s “the most charming.”
Charms is taught by Professor Flitwick; it’s a branch of magic that’s associated with romance.
Tom Riddle said he was always able to charm the people he needed. It’s a bit related to flattery; you suck people in with falseness.