I’ve been talking since January about “big changes” coming to HogwartsProfessor. The pop-up box you’ve seen today offering a free 50 page pdf (70 pages, actually, but it’s magazine formatted) means that at last these long anticipated changes are beginning to roll out.

The document, ‘The Top Twelve J. K. Rowling Story Sources Every Potter Needs to Read (and Re-Read),’ is a valuable, voluble guide to books that helped shape the Hogwarts Saga in light of how they ‘influenced’ the author. More important, the guide discusses how she significantly re-shaped or adapted these story sources to her ends. It’s nothing like a complete survey, of course, but ‘Top Twelve’ is a fun start — and one with some startling choices and revelations even for long time students of Rowling’s artistry and meaning. Please do check it out — and let me know what you think!

The goal in offering it via a downloadable document rather than twelve separate posts here at HogwartsProfessor, beyond the significant convenience to readers of owning them and greater punch of offering them all together, is to begin gathering email addresses for a new project. Later this week — tomorrow? — we’re launching a subscribers only website, PotterPundits.com, where I will be posting weekly videos (‘vlogs’) and offering free online classes.

Which online classroom possibility has been my hope and aim since 2002. That goal is something I’ve only shared with close friends through the years, so let me catch you up on the quest if you’re a little confused or even put-off by the pop-up box.

For fifteen years I’ve tried to answer two questions: “Why do readers love the Harry Potter stories the way we do?” and “What is the most effective way to communicate answers to the first question to the greatest number of people?”

Speaking frankly, I’ve been pretty successful in pushing the international discussion of the first question in unexpected and helpful directions. And I have tried almost every venue — live, published and recorded — to reach all the serious readers interested in the answers scholars and lay literary detectives have teased out of repeated readings of the Hogwarts Saga. Weblogs, podcasts, newspaper articles, television appearances, keynote conference talks, university lectures and classes, and books —

And it’s been a bust, truth be told, even if the ‘rolling credits’ of the last fifteen years have earned me the only slightly ironic title of ‘the Dean of Harry Potter Scholars.’

I have been looking for a truly effective, accessible, and affordable way to deliver an in-depth, coherent, and something approaching comprehensive study of Harry Potter and Rowling’s other work. Everything I’ve tried to date has been frustrating in being relatively scattershot, superficial, and impersonal. ‘Ineffective,’ in a word.

How I can offer the equivalent of a semester’s study of the Hogwarts Saga at a major university, something like Cornell and Colorado Colleges’ ‘Block Plan,’ that anyone, anywhere, can access and afford has been my semi-private quest since my first public offerings at Barnes and Noble University in 2002. I think at last I’ve put together the marriage of software, recording tools, and exciting new material that means at last that this intensive study will soon be possible.

‘Soon’ as in ‘beginning next month.’

To celebrate this sea-change, to begin gathering subscribers for the free PotterPundits video postings, and to reward those friends and readers who have been working with me for so long towards a satisfying answer to the “Whence Potter Mania?” mystery, consequently, I am giving away the equivalent of a short book reflecting some of the discoveries I’ve made this past year in the review of critical literature necessary for my PhD thesis. The ‘Top Twelve’ guide is free for the taking and you can unsubscribe anytime you like from my emails that will bring  to your inbox links to the PotterPundits video posts and online class offerings.

I hope of course you will join me next month for the first class there, the ‘Potter Pundits Summer School,’ three challenging lectures I’ll be giving with a webinar featuring a special guest and a live Q&A session on the talks. To say I am “excited” about this would be a comic understatement. It promises to be a mind-bending set of talks, the cutting-edge of Potter studies, and, the real hope, ‘Summer School’ is possibly the advent of a much better way to study Rowling’s work, one much more satisfying for both teachers and students.

Thanks in advance for joining me on this adventure to take Potter Studies a quantum leap upwards in accessibility, affordability, and effectiveness. And for sharing your thoughts on ‘Top Twelve Rowling Story Sources’ and questions about PotterPundits in the comment boxes below!

Can it really have taken us twenty years to track down the origin of the name and the essential meaning of J. K. Rowling’s pathological villain, Lord Voldemort?

I read a mystery novel yesterday, Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, that seems to have a passage that satisfies the several tests I’ve been able to come up with for verifying a true Voldemort source. Let me share those tests or metrics, the passages in question, as well as the several competitors for the title of ‘Original Dark Lord’ all of whom I think Tiger in the Smoke trumps.

First test: The Presence Herself has to have said she read (and enjoyed?) the book which is being cited as a possible source for Voldemort’s name.

The most frequently cited source for the name on the Internet is “Voldemortis,” a supposed wizard who battled Merlin. Sadly, this idea seems to have appeared out of thin air in 2004, the earliest source I found for it, and you can tell it has been cut and pasted in every names meaning list since because they all begin with “In another language, Voldermortist means “Lord of Evil” or “Dark Lord”. Legend has it that Voldermortist once tried to destroy Merlin…” I kid you not. MuggleNet, Korean Potter fan sites, the whole spectrum.

Rowling never mentions ‘Voldemortis’ or the Arthurian legends as a Dark Lord point of origin. I was a little disappointed that she hasn’t discussed The Master and Margarita, either, because the plot of that book — not to mention ‘Woland De Mort‘ (?) –is a great match for Lord Thingy, too.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “M. Valdemar“? This is the best name reference match-up, hands down, and the gruesome finish of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar corresponds with the Dark Lord’s (sort of). But we have no comments by the author about loving Poe…

Second Test: Lord Voldemort is a psychopath, full stop. The Original Can’t Be Mister Rogers.

He is “a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people’s suffering” (EW). “If you are writing about evil, which I am, and if you are writing about someone who’s, essentially, a psychopath – you have a duty to show the real evil of taking human life” (BBC Christmas). “If a psychologist were ever able to get Voldemort in a room, pin him down and take his wand away, I think he would be classified as a psychopath” (Radio City).

Third Test: The Name Itself — French, Fictional, ‘Invented’

Rowling has said publicly that the name ‘Voldemort’ is French (not Latin, Lexicon!); that she made it up, and that she pronounces it sans final ‘t:’  “Vol-de-mor.” And, no, “I didn’t base Voldemort on any real person!” (Though what about all the men named ‘Tom Riddle’?)

She is sometimes cited as the source of the translation from the French, “flight from death.” I could not find verification of this ‘internet-fact,’ i.e., a seeming-truth that is believed because it is repeated in thousands of places. It is not in the accio-quote.org index of Rowling quotations about Voldemort.

How does The Tiger in the Smoke stand up to these tests? Answers after the jump! [Read more…]

Hogwarts Professor Louise Freeman said in the ‘Reading Writing, Rowling’ premiere podcast in Roanoke, a discussion of the ‘Top Twenty Harry Potter Moments’ that “‘Dawlish is still in St. Mungo’s and Gran’s on the run’ is one of my top ten lines from the series.” It certainly reflects the nadir in the never especially bright life of Auror John Dawlish. Being toyed with by an escaping Dumbledore and then, one hopes under the Imperius Curse, being made the heavy for the Dark Side Ministry of Magic in Deathly Hallows, Dawlish never seems to catch a break. Professor Freeman told me that she thinks of him as “the Harry Potter equivalent to the red-shirted Star Trek security guard.“

I bring this up today because I think I have found the origin for Auror John Dawlish’s last name.

If you’re a Cryptonym Specialist, Harry Potter division, you may be scratching your head about this “discovery.” We already have two decent explanations for Dawlish’s last name and the author herself has explained Dawlish being named ‘John’ (the Leaky Cauldron’s John Noe is the most celebrated Dawlish fan and The Presence anointed her character ‘John’ in Noe’s honor). The two explanations for ‘Dawlish’ are that it is a city in Devon near Exeter where Rowling went to college (see The Harry Potter Lexicon on Dawlish for more on that) and, more importantly, it’s referenced in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby.

I wasn’t looking for an alternative to this rather mechanical explanation when I stumbled over it. Now that I have seen it, though, I much prefer it to the Sea Coast town with thin literary echoes having no connection to an Auror, even a can’t-win nebbish like Dawlish, the Wizarding World’s equivalent of an FBI Special Agent.

[Read more…]