True, JKR’s style is not the pure poetic/prose we find in the Classics, but penny-dreadful? Has Prof. Jacobs looked at any news clips of JKR’s bank account lately?

“The particular target of their disapproval was the boy’s adventure story—the kind of cheap short novel, full of exotic locations and narrow escapes from mortal peril and false friends and unexpected acts of heroism, that had come to be known as the “penny dreadful.”

The Harry Potter series totals over 4,100 pages!!! How does that figure fit Jacobs description of JKR’s work? Not even close in my view.

revgeorge, I agree that Prof. Jacobs missed it on the Christ figure point as well. While I personally hesitate to point to anyone as a “Christ figure”, but I look to Harry’s walk in the Forest as being “Christ-like”, yes Harry is standing in for Christ in the Forest, in the element of self-sacrifice and love to “save” his friends and the Wizarding World.

The only thing I can think of when Jacobs states that Christ was abandoned in His agony, was at the moment of His arrest by the temple guards at the Garden of Gethsemane when the Apostles scattered to the four winds. Our Lord was not alone or abandoned along the Via Dolorosa or at the Cross.

John, I would like to see you present a post on “Hidden Keys” to contrast Jacobs lack of insight in this area.

And no hidden keys? Give me a break! Has this guy ever read Revelation? He raises a valid concern, of course, in that if one tries hard enough, you could read all sorts of meanings into things that don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. But the corrective to this is not to reject any deeper or hidden meanings. The unus sensus literalis approach brings up its own problems.

Ah well, like you all said, academia is a bore sometimes.

And yes, he did miss the Christ analogy. Not so much missed it, actually, as argued against it. Because Harry wasn’t special enough, and because he didn’t die alone. Not to be profane or anything, Mr. Jacobs, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

The real hoot of that piece, though, beside the patronizing “greatest penny dreadful” summary point, is that in it Prof. Jacobs, the leading voice is the “there is no ‘hidden key’ to Shakespeare, Harry Potter, anybody!” school, offers his secret reading of ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers.’ Allegorical and anagogical readings are only valid (or to be taken seriously) when they come from the credentialed guys in the Tower?

I should do a post about Jacobs’ thesis that ‘Hidden Key’ searches are inevitably poor scholarship and just laziness; Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia and, forgive me, my dilletante’s exploration of Potter-dom I think argue to the contrary. What does Jacob say to Ms. Rowling’s comments about her faith and 1998 statement about alchemy setting the “magical parameters” of her work?

I’m not being sarcastic; I love Dumbledore, I just don’t see him as at all humble. I can just imagine his glee as he leaves his secret message in plain view, a la Dupin’s Purloined Letter.

I’m not quite convinced about this Arthurian “fitness” ideal. As I wrote elsewhere, the whole point of the Hallows is that a pure man will not use the first two, because they are traps designed by Death to snare the unwary. So it’s not so much that only a good man can wield them, as that a good man will not wield them. And Harry, as far as I can remember, only uses the Elder wand to fix his own trusty holly-phoenix feather wand. He doesn’t zap anyone with it. And he only uses the Resurrection stone once he’s committed himself to dying. So in a way, he tricks death by reversing how people have traditionally used the first two Hallows.

In fact, you could construe all of DH as the story of how Harry, like the third brother, tricks death. I don’t think I’m the first to come up with that analogy, however.

As he says, the idea of the three invincible weapons that make the possessor ‘the master of death’, is in direct contradiction to the whole point of the tale itself. The point of the story is that – whether or not they exist – Hallows, like Horcruxes, are to be left alone. In the commentary in the stories preceding ‘the three brothers,’ Dumbledore quotes himself, saying “Human beings have a knack for desiring the things that are the worst for them.”

I thought his goal of denying the existence of the Hallows was a well-meaning attempt to keep others from the very temptation to power that he himself fell prey to, and, at the last, admits that he would find it easiest to give up the cloak of invisibility (which, of course, is true, since he gave it up to Harry). He never gave up the Deathstick like Harry did, and when confronted with the discovery of the resurrection stone he could not resist the temptation to use it, causing his own death.

All in all, a brilliant work worthy of the Potterverse and up there with the best of the series. I get chills every time I read the “Fountain of Fair Fortune,” and “The Hairy Heart” is just spectacular.