Carol Eshleman sent me these notes before her paper on ‘Literary Alchemy in the Canterbury Tales‘ that I posted last week. This short essay, though it includes some of the same material, speaks to the Potter-Chaucer parallels more explicitly Enjoy!

The Potter and the Pilgrim: Alchemical Parallelism by Chaucer and Rowling

Since becoming a resident of the Potterverse and engrossing myself in John’s books on the series, I’ve become a ridiculous fan of literary alchemy. Therefore, when my Medieval Literature professor told us we could do our term paper on any aspect of Middle English writings, I immediately yelled, “Alchemy!” in a fashion that would’ve made either of my favorite Grangers proud. In an equally unsurprising manner, the research that I was doing on Chaucer seemed to resonate with my own thoughts on Harry Potter. When uncovering the alchemical parallels that are used in the Canterbury Tales, I discovered literary devices strikingly similar to the ones that Rowling uses in the Hogwarts Saga.

In analyzing Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous work, it is important to keep in mind that although the pilgrims are telling separate tales, these stories are not told in isolation. Chaucer’s characters tell stories that comment on, extend, and often mock other tales that have been told previously in the larger narrative. The Miller’s Tale is extremely funny to read on its own, but it becomes more meaningful when seen as a mockery of the Reeve and of the Knyght’s Tale. A lifetime could be spent deciphering parallels between the various tales. The complexity of this endeavor is heightened by the state of the work as a whole. Chaucer never finished writing the Canterbury Tales, and the tales that are completed exist in fragments containing only several stories apiece. Luckily, this can be used to our advantage. Tales within the same fragment tend to have the greatest amount of connections. [Read more…]