Mailbag: Dumbledore a Manipulator?

May 11, 2019 by 4 Comments

I have spoken at an Augustana College retreat for students in Pastor Richard Priggie’s ‘Soul of Harry Potter’ class every Spring for the last nine years. Held at the remarkable Stronghold Castle in Oregon, Illinois, this retreat and my part in explaining the artistry and meaning of literary alchemy and ring composition there have been annual highlights for me and my family (especially my youngest sons).

I offer, in the Q&A session I do every year at the dinner after my last talk, help to the students with their end of term papers. The deal is, if they’ll write me their questions via email, I’ll send answers they can use, agree or disagree, in their arguments. I got this one last week:

Hello Mr. Granger, I am not sure if you remember me but I was on the Harry Potter retreat with Pastor Priggie. I am currently finishing up my final paper for the class and I have a topic I thought you might enjoy shedding some light on. The topic I picked for the paper is “Professor Dumbledore is a wise and compassionate mentor who guides Harry even from beyond the grave/ Professor Dumbledore is a flawed character who deceives and manipulates Harry in order to meet his own ends.” I decided to argue the side of Dumbledore being a manipulator as I feel Dumbledore used Harry for personal gain in much of the 5th and 6th books, as well as in Snape’s memory that Harry sees of Dumbledore in the Pensieve. So with that being said, I would love to know any opinions or examples you can give on the topic of Dumbledore being a manipulator. Thank you!

My off the top of my head answer — seven examples — was: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mailbag

London Production of Rosmersholm (2): Starring Tom Burke (Cormoran Strike)

May 10, 2019 by 1 Comment

Back in February I reported in London Production of Rosmersholm: Starring Tom Burke (Cormoran Strike) the beyond-possibility-of-coincidence of the star of the adapted for teevee Strike would be playing the lead role in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm the year he plays Cormoran in the Bronte Studio’s version of Lethal White. As I wrote then:

Every chapter-heading epigraph in Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White is taken from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. As we have discussed here, it would be hard to overlook the importance Galbraith/Rowling attaches to this play about the haunted lives of people living in the wake of a woman’s suicide for which they were responsible. That longish post and the conversation that followed with Joanne Gray in its comment thread — ‘Lethal White: Ibsen’s Rosmersholm‘ — offered five reasons beyond the ‘white horses’ for Serious Strikers to study the play.

Joanne Gray wrote me today to share the news that there will be a new production of the Ibsen classic in London this summer. Tom Burke, the star of the Strike novel adaptations for the BBC, will be playing the lead role of John Rosmer. As Professor Gray noted, he will be on stage with Rosmersholm just before he returns to filming Lethal White, the only Strike novel not yet transformed into little screen fare.

I am very hopeful that our Serious Strike Fellowship in London will be attending and reporting on this version of Rosmersholm, how it preserves and how it revises Ibsen’s classic (FYI, Social Justice crusaders do not come off well in the original), and how Burke chooses to play Rosmer, especially with respect to his responsibility for the suicide of his wife. Will it be a clue about Strike’s reflections on his culpability in his mother Leda’s supposed suicide and his denial of responsibility?

Daniella at SeatPlan.com in the UK wrote me after spotting my post (who else in the US is writing about this Ibsen revival and begging UK friends to attend?). She urges those looking to buy tickets to check out the Duke of York Theatre’s seating plan to be sure they get the best seat tickets for their money.

As well as information about the show, it is essential for your users to be able to get comprehensive details of the seating of the 2019 London production. We host an interactive seating plan with user reviews and view from seat photos for the theatre here: https://seatplan.com/london/duke-of-yorks-theatre/

It is a remarkable web site; you click on a seat in the theater the way you would for making an online airplane seat reservation and up pops a picture of the stage taken from that seat with a review-of-the-view written by someone who sat there! Highly recommended — I would certainly be clicking like mad on seats all over this page before buying my Rosmersholm tickets and I hope very much all HogPro readers and Serious Strikers who will be in London this summer will buy tickets, watch the show, and let us know what you think of the production.

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Now in Low Scots: The 80th Language Barrier is Broken

May 9, 2019 by 6 Comments

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has been translated into a multitude of languages, from Urdu and Arabic to Latin and Mandarin Chinese. For the longest time, the total number of acknowledged translations was stuck at 79 languages. I learned only last week, though, that the eightieth language threshold had been breached in 2017 when a Low Scots version of Stone was published, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane by Matthew Fitt, Itchy Koo Press.

Here’s a taste of what it’s like, courtesy of Brian Basore, the HogPro All-Pro who alerted me to the existence of this new version:

A little more after the jump. What do you think? How many of you plan to purchase a copy for reading aloud on the next long car trip you’re planning with a Potter-phile or Scots expatriot? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Mail Bag: Jordan Peterson talks about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

May 8, 2019 by Leave a Comment

A note from an old friend in Australia, Sharon Jackson:

Hi John,

I was listening to a podcast by highly popular psychologist, author and speaker Jordan B. Peterson today and was interested to hear him give an interpretation of Harry Potter (the second movie) identifying it as an archetypal Christian story, as you’ve been maintaining for years. I thought you might be interested.

Here’s the link: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/s2-e5-lecture-sacramento-june-27-2018/  (The speech was old but the podcast is recently released. He’s releasing recordings of his talks from his speaking tour in his podcasts at the moment). The relevant comments begin at 1:33:20 and go to 1:37:05.

Petersen also comments on the series as a whole as a retelling of the Christian story, the battle against evil; he identifies Voldemort as “Satan, for all intents and purposes” and says this “makes the whole fundamentalist Christian assault on Harry Potter pretty comical in my estimation.” “In order for Harry to finally defeat Voldemort he has to die and be reborn, that’s how the book ends … She’s telling a story that everyone knows. But no-one knows they know it.”

Sounds like something you’ve written, doesn’t it?

These comments fall within Petersen’s answer to a question about Petersen’s beliefs on the physical reality of Christ’s resurrection. This question and the rest of his answer begins at 1:26:05 and goes to 1:37:30. His summary, “I’m not going to answer it casually.”

Just thought you might be interested.

Oh, yeah! Peterson is a rock-star psychologist and he loves Harry Potter, especially the Chamber of Secrets mythology (Peterson is an unapologetic Jungian). Check out this riff:

Does it echo pretty much everything I wrote about Chamber in Hidden Key to Harry Potter in 2002 (now How Harry Cast His Spell), a chapter excerpted and available online since 2003? You bet it does, right down to the mistaken interpretation of Ginny’s name as ‘Virginia’ rather than ‘Ginevra/Guinevere,’ a name derivation that Rowling had not yet told us when I wrote Hidden Key.

I wish, given his popularity today that he’d given me a shout out, but the odds are very good that he came to this “Brilliant In-Depth Analysis” all on his own. Once you see the mythic and Christian allegorical elements, things a Jungian psychologist will surely pick up, you don’t need a Potter Pundit to guide you. Gail Grynbaum, another Jungian, wrote this stuff up years ago also without referencing me because this is the way a Jungian-steeped-in-mythos reads.

Fun, though, to see a celebrity saying what I’ve said for fifteen years as if it were a revelation!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Cormoran and Robin: Echoes of Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope (2) Joanne Gray

May 7, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Part 1 of this Guest Post from Joanne Gray can be read here: Cormoran and Robin: Echoes of Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope?

Part 2 Of Echoes In Homer’s Odyssey: Possible Echoes In Odyssey Books 17-24 to Strike Books 5, 6, 7

Anteros by Alfred Gilbert, 1893; from the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus. Mistakenly called the Statue of Eros. [1]

On the night that Robin and Matthew became engaged, (March 28, 2010) Matthew chose the Statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus as the right place to ask Robin to marry him. On the surface, the choice seemed very appropriate, but in reality he was actually proposing to her at the statue, not of Eros (Cupid), but of his lesser-known brother, Anteros.

The public has given the statue the name of Eros—the god of love—because we celebrate Eros/Cupid; the cherub who shoots the arrow that ignites the passion for love as the true symbol for lovers. It’s true that Eros is behind the myth of initiating the first wonderful sparks of infatuation. It is less well known that it is actually his brother Anteros who grows those sparks into a long-lasting reciprocal flame of shared love: actual real love which lies beyond the chaotic and highly charged emotions set-off by Eros.

The irony is that Anteros was the god that Matthew and Robin really needed since it was the couple’s inability to grow their initial early infatuation into a more mature and lasting love that doomed their relationship.

The lack of this reciprocal love between them (and also between Cormoran and Charlotte) doomed both their relationships. Both Matthew and Charlotte’s need for Robin and Cormoran to give up their own essential autonomy in order to conform their desires to fit Matthew and Charlotte’s needs (if there was ever to be any peace between them) ultimately doomed both of their relationships.

The Strike series has set Cormoran and Robin up as a couple who would very much reach the Anteros level of true love—having love reciprocated… and returned in full to their partner.

Homer includes two famous couples in The Odyssey Book 3, Helen and Menelaus; Agamemnon and Clytemnestra—2 Spartan brothers married to 2 Spartan sisters. Both couples portray unfaithful marriages and Homer used them as counterweights to the faithful relationship and marriage of Odysseus and Penelope.

It isn’t possible at this point to know how the upcoming books of the Strike series—especially Book 5, Book 6 and Book 7—might contain echoes from Homer’s Odyssey, but with Robin’s upcoming divorce from Matthew, it seems we will at least have a real possibility of seeing some echoes to a very important part of the final Odyssey Books (17-23) regarding Penelope’s suitors. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Guest Posts