The story ends — its very last words — with “twin swans,” a return to the beginning as evident bracketing:
Head bowed against the rain, [Robin] had no attention left to spare for the magnificent mansion past which she was walking, its rain specked windows facing the great river, its front doors engraved with twin swans. (p 647)
Brad Bellows told us, in a comment attached to Evan Willis’ post on the hermetic and mythological meaning of Lethal White, that “the paired swans Robin fails to notice in the final line, actually exist, on Swan House, built in 1876 by R.N. Shaw, overlooking the Thames.” Mr Willis in that post had suggested this might be Jonny Rokeby’s home in keeping with his theory that, per Leda and the Swan/Zeus mythology, that Strike’s mysterious paternity, the pairing of his super-groupie mother with the other-worldly rock-star, explains why Rokeby remains off-stage but ever-present. The myth holds that Leda has twins, two sets of twins actually, with two fathers for each set; Castor and Pollux are the off-spring of Leda with the swan who is Zeus and with the king of Sparta, her husband. Robin and Cormoran, great driver and former boxer, are the novel’s stand-in for Castor the horseman and Pollux the pugilist. [See the discussions of this mythology and the Strike mysteries in the Gray/Granger and Willis posts on the subject.]
While the predominant symbolism of the story is white horses, which occur so frequently that Strike remarks on it and Billy Knight laughs about it (pp 394, 496), white swans occur often enough, not only as the story’s framing brackets but in references to individual birds on signs (see Robin’s noting and overlooking the Swan pub sign on pp 56 and 166), that we are obliged to consider their meaning beyond markers of Leda mythology in which the books are set. Swans, as you might expect in a Rowling novel, have an alchemical meaning as well, one that we will explore after the jump.
It may seem irrelevant to revisit the first movie now that we have Crimes of Grindelwald but Fantastic Beasts 1: Newt Goes to New York will almost certainly be reflected in the third film and the finale, Beasts 5. As we’ve seen in Harry Potter and the Cormoran Strike mysteries, Rowling writes her series in rings, a structure that features an axis bisecting the story circle that connects first-middle-and-final parts (for a five film package, that means 1-3-5).
Text-discovery was my focus but there was a lot more going on, from the MuggleNet Academia and Reading, Writing, Rowling podcasts to discussion of the movie’s ring structure and Christian content, not to mention the posts by Beatrice Groves, Wayne Stauffer, and HogwartsProfessor faculty Louise Freeman and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy. You can find it — close to forty posts! — all neatly organized just after the jump.
Gustave Dore, the 19th Century French artist, is a personal favorite. I own the Dover Book editions of his illustrations for the Bible, The Divine Comedy, and for Rime of the Ancient Mariner (and look forward to seeing one day his pictures for Shakespeare’s Tempest and for Paradise Lost). My favorite collection of Dore drawings, though, is for Ludovico Ariosto’s 
Orlando is the Christian knight known in French (and subsequently English) as Roland. The story takes place against the background of the war between Charlemagne’s Christian paladins and the Saracen army that has invaded Europe and is attempting to overthrow the Christian empire. The poem is about war and love and the romantic ideal of chivalry. It mixes realism and fantasy, humor and tragedy. The stage is the entire world, plus a trip to the moon. The large cast of characters features Christians and Saracens, soldiers and sorcerers, and fantastic creatures including a gigantic sea monster called the orc and a flying horse called the 
I have known and admired Linda McCabe since the dawn of Potter Punditry, which, if we have to have a date of its beginning would have to be the virtual reality of the ‘Harry Potter for Grown-Ups’ website or the Nimbus 2003 conference at Disney World in Orlando that year organized by the same group. She was active in both, and, though we disagreed mightily about the direction of the Hogwarts Saga, our conflicts were cordial and bound by mutual respect. We have been correspondents ever since.
I learned when we finally met at the 2009 HPEF Azkatraz Conference in San Francisco that Linda by day is a clinical laboratory scientist (medical technologist, 
I write about it in 2018’s closing days because the long awaited sequel, 
There is
One of the things I dislike about the Kindle is I don’t know how to organize the novels, plays, and works of non-fiction on the device so I don’t have to scroll through every eBook I ‘own’ to find the one I want. No doubt there is a way to catalog or sort the books into virtual shelves or folders but I don’t know it (and cannot find an illustration of how to do it easily, say, via a John-proof YouTube video). I rarely use the Kindle, consequently, even when I travel and it would be a great convenience.
Which just doesn’t happen. The average first time guest at this site is here only for seconds. Requiring attention for hours for that reader to find the relevant posts he or she wants to find and read means quite simply that they will not be found and may as well, frankly, not have been written and posted. There are nigh on 2,000 posts on HogwartsProfessor. Without an easily accessed file system on the home page, a system cued to essential subjects, only 1 in 10,000 visitors will be able to find the posts they want for academic research into what has already been published or for personal benefit.
Last week I began the process of sorting and filing HogwartsProfessor articles into what Yaro Starak calls ‘Pillar Posts’ with 
Today’s entry in the Pillar Post Project is Crimes of Grindelwald. Believe it or not, there are already fifty HogwartsProfessor posts on the second Fantastic Beasts film. After the jump, you’ll find them all in one place and sorted into nine categories. There will soon be a sidebar on the left hand side of the page where the twenty Pillars will be prominently displayed.
The story begins — its first words — at the Cunliffe wedding reception with a photographer trying to get a picture of the newlyweds that includes two swans in the pond behind them. The swans stubbornly refuse to come together, but, as soon as Robin rises to separate herself from Matt (with the intention of looking for Cormoran), they swim side by side. The clueless father of the groom observes, “You’d think the buggers were doing it on purpose” (p 3).