Chapter 20: Saints, Sisters, and Slughorn

Now we are entering into the Half-Blood Prince! A very exciting book in which a great deal happens. Join us as we explore how Rowling has set up all the important events of this book throughout the previous ones, what happens when sisters don't get along, why Professor Slughorn is important, and what is the nature of true friendship.


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That is all I have to say for now, so enjoy the read!


-Victor Bennet


The Half-Blood Prince
In the Chamber of Secrets, Harry accidentally ends up in Knockturn Alley, where he winds up in Borgin & Burkes. While he is there, he encounters a few objects that don't seem to be very important at the time, but wind up playing a big role in the 6th book. 

• Vanishing Cabinet
• Cursed Opal Necklace
• Hand of Glory

This gives the reader all the clues; there are no sudden or hidden clues. (This is following one of Sayer's mystery story "rules" of giving the reader all the clues to the solution ahead of time, but Rowling breaks one of her "rules" by having more than two hidden passage ways in Hogwarts. But of course... in a magical castle, she can get away with it.)
Tom Riddle’s first job out of Hogwarts just so happens to be at Borgin & Burkes. This is important because he wouldn’t have been able to collect the objects he later made into his horcruxes without the opportunities he had at the shop.


Also in Half Blood Prince, Draco goes through a great deal of character development and Lupin finally figures out that he was purposefully bitten by Fenrir Greyback. 
Snape takes the post as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor; thus, owing to the supposedly cursed position, we know something will happen to him by the end of the book.
Ginny has always had a crush on Harry, and she finally gets her man. The books don’t reveal that Ginny still likes Harry over the course of the series, but the movies give it away from time to time.  

• Now let us take a break to have a small side note on films. All the different forms of storytelling have both advantages and disadvantages to them. Typically, movies are about 2 hours long. The Harry Potter films were longer than that, and the viewers STILL didn’t think that there was enough of the book in the movie. But we have to realize that books, movies, plays, poems, and such are all mediums. The thing about novels is you can put all the details in, and you can also collaborate with the reader. What does that mean? Well, it means that books can have a greater level of detail without getting extremely boring [readers of Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Similarion may wish to disagree with me on this point, and I wouldn't blame them, but I mean when compared to films.] "Collaboration with the reader" means that the reader must engage the work and use their imagination to build the world that they are reading about. In film, all the imaginative work has been done by the film makers and all the viewer has to do is watch someone else's interpretation of the book. So with film, you trade the ability of active imagination for the passive viewing of visualized ideas. End of bunny trail...)

In the first book, Quirrel has a part of Voldemort literally physically attached to him. This ties in with Voldemort's ability to possess people. But it also is mirrored later when we find out what a horcrux is and what it does. We also find out what the diary really is, and without that diary, Dumbledore never would’ve been put on Voldemort’s “horcrux” trail.
Aragog, who we meet in the second book, dies in the sixth book; this also plays a critical role in getting Slughorn’s memory and advancing the story.


St. Mungo's
Saint means "Holy One", and the holy ones are the followers of Christ Jesus. The use of that term is one of the little clues she lays out, and she’s showing her colors in a very discreet way. She’s very self-consciously creating a difference between the muggle and magic worlds, and names are a big part of her attempt. She takes great care and pride in the names and words she chooses.
The sound of the names (think of "Slytherin" and "Hufflepuff"), their etemology, it’s all a part of what she’s doing. Some words don’t mean anything anymore in context, but she keeps turning the tables on what is considered the norm of our culture.
You can almost contrast St. Mungo’s to St. Brutus’, which explicitly shows the Dursley’s brutality. In the muggle world, a saint's name is applied to dentention center, whereas in the magical world, the name is applied to a center of healing.


Angry Sisters
When the book opens, we find out that Fudge has been impeached from the Ministry; we then go to Spinner’s End where Bellatrix and Narcissa have gone to see Snape. Narcissa is showing storge love towards her son, Draco. Her sister is with her, yet she doesn’t tell Voldemort that she and Narcissa have gone to seen Snape. This means she is actually betraying the Dark Lord for her sister; even Bellatrix has this tiny little corner of storge for one of her sisters (none for Mrs. Tonks). For whatever reason, she’s protecting her sister’s treachery, and she doesn’t reveal their visit to Voldemort.
Part of this is the idea that there’s a little good in everyone. From a creation perspective, everyone is made in the image of God. Rowling is developing a doctrine of sin, and we see in every character the presence of sin. We all have sin, and we all do sin. However, there’s still the mark of creation, though we may befoul it. We cannot undo what God has done, and Bellatrix’s loyalty to her sister is a subtle theological statement.
We can compare those two sisters with Harry’s mother and Petunia Dursley, and with that, we go from Spinner’s End to Privet Drive.
Aunt Petunia knows about Azkaban from Snape. When we first read the book, she talks about “that boy” and later says, “that Potter boy”. Assuming she’s referring to the same individual, we believe this to be James Potter. After finishing the last volume and beginning again, we find out that “that boy” Petunia was referring to was Snape. This is very careful writing.
There’s this issue between Petunia and Lily, and it’s certainly not agape love. Why on earth would Petunia agree to take Harry in? Dumbledore sends her a howler telling her to remember the letter that had been left on her doorstep with Harry as a baby. It turns out, Petunia kept Harry to protect him. Here we have this corner of compassion with Petunia; we even see her put her foot down with Vernon in the fifth book. Petunia isn’t necessarily evil; there are scales of evil. Voldemort is completely evil, and everyone else is gradually less evil than him.


Professor Slughorn

He is very smart, but he has a lot of biases and plays favorites in order to help himself achieve his personal goals. Slughorn has good qualities but he very self-centered. “…whose god is their belly” Philipians 3:19 He’s not interested in power or fame but he still collects people. He objectifies people.

Fear is his primary motive. He is on the run all the time, he can’t even enjoy himself. And yet in the last book, he leaves but then comes back! And he is actually dueling Voldemort at the end.

There’s a lot in the books about being called upon to make choices. “Chose you this day whom you shall serve” Joshua 24:15 The same challenge is presented to Slughorn by Professor McGonogall when she says, “We fight to the death.” She knows the importance of what lies ahead, and she wants others to know it as well.
He has his little group called the Slug Club. Harry is a member (not really of his own free will), and he doesn’t want to be. Dumbledore requires the memory, so he tells Harry that he has to be a part of the "club." Harry, however, doesn’t do a very good job of attending the dinners. (C.S. Lewis wrote The Inner Ring on this subject, and he also put this at the heart of his book, That Hideous Strength. In his book, the driving desire of the young junior member of the faculty is to become a part of the "in" crowd.) There are lots and lots of inner rings scattered around (Death Eaters, Dumbledore's Army, etc...), and you’re either in or out. The question is, how do you feel about it? Do you want to be in? Are you thankful you’re not?
Ron wants to be invited to Slughorn’s parties, but Harry doesn’t. Draco also wants to be in the inner ring, but neither Neville nor Luna will be invited in. The way that Harry dislikes the Slug Club and invites Luna to the Christmas party "just as friends" really brings up the issue of what real friendship is.
To a certain extent, Dumbledore’s Army was a different way about thinking of an inner circle. There is a difference in how you get accepted into the Slug Club and how you get into the DA. It all depends on what value system you are using to value other people. The Death Eaters are an inner circle, as were the Marauders in their time.
Rowling also makes the case that not everyone who has a reputation or intense popularity are the kind of people who you need to hang out with.

• Cornelious Fudge knows how to get along and flatter people.
• Horace Slughorn sets up the Slug Club and objectifies people.
• Gilderoy Lockhart is a pathological narcissist. 
• Barty Crouch works very hard to keep his reputation, to the point of disowning his own son.
• Percy Weasley is a self-important flatterer.
• Ludo Bagman is very puffed up by his past position on a national quidditch team, and this is his continuing basis for operation.
• Cormac McLaggen will bore you to death talking about himself; he is an attention-seeker.
• Draco is this way in the first book onward. He brags about how wealthy his parents are, how much influence his father has, and it’s a skill he cultivates to his ruin.
• It’s clear that Rowling doesn't really like these sort of people.

Shield Charms

Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes have a wide assortment of shield charm items for sale. These articles shield you in different ways, and according to Dr. Poe this could allegorize the whole armor of God. This is the whole idea between the shield and the onslaught of evil it’s protecting you from.    

Jinxes in the Bible?

Mrs. Weasley threatens to jinx Ron at the Burrow. When a jinx comes upon us, we’re inhibited in some way. This is what happened to the father of John the Baptist; he was "jinxed" so that he couldn’t speak because his lack of faith in God. John the Baptist’s father was able to speak again once his son was born and named.

Dr. Poe quote of the day: (On the Harry Potter films) “Where there is a will, there is money to be made.”

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.

Chapter 7: Foreshadowing and the Sorcerer's Stone

This chapter requires a bit of explanation. Today we had our first 10 question quiz over Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. (I know I got a few wrong because I wasn't really sure what to expect on the quiz and I've read the next two books already, so the first book isn't that fresh in my memory now...) The last question on the quiz was, "What is your favorite instance of foreshadowing in the book?" ("Book" meaning the entire series, since it is all one story) When we were done with the quiz, Dr. Poe asked us what we put down for the last question. This then launched us into our discussion of the book.

Good News: We had a wonderful class talking about the book, foreshadowing, how it all tied in with Biblical truth.

Bad News: It is REALLY hard to take cohesive notes about a discussion and still be a part of the discussion. So... once again I don't really have much for you to read this time around. BUT...

Good News! I recorded the entire discussion! (with Dr. Poe's permission of course) I tried to edit out the parts where you couldn't hear the student talking or where there was a long pause, but this is pretty much the bulk of the class. I know that 45+ minutes of listening is a bit much, and it's a bit hard to hear at times, but I'm going to try this out and see how it works. Let me know what you think of it! 

You can send me feedback about the blog at this Facebook page.

And here is the recording for you.

In the meantime, I will continue to search for the best way to deliver recordings to you all.


- V. B. 

Foreshadowing is much like the fulfillment of prophecy.

While Rowling was writing these books while the Lord of the Rings and Narnia were in the process of being filmed. She intentionally writes about a substitutionary death in the midst of the controversy that was being made about these books and their Christian background.

Harry has a “saving people thing” that makes him a Messianic Figure (also known as Christ Figure, Jesus Figure). He is always looking out for and saving his friends.

Rowling makes a case for sin in a relativistic world. She shows that all have sinned, even the “good guys” have messed up in one way or another.

Rowling deals with the stages of adolescent development throughout the books.

Early adolescences: Issues are self-esteem, importance of parents (but Harry doesn’t have parents)

Middle adolescences: Independence, the beginning of separation from parents. Could take the form of rebellion or subversion. 

Late adolescences: Identity, “Who am I now that I’m no longer defined by my parents, siblings, school, etc?” Who are you in relationship with other people?