The JKR 60th Birthday Party Kanreki Celebration Index: Links and Blurb summaries of the 31 Lake and Shed Conversations of Rowling’s Life and Work in July 2025

August 5, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Last month, Nick Jeffery and I logged a marathon of Kanreki ‘Lake and Shed’ posts at our Substack site in celebration of Rowling’s life and work at her 60th birthday. Nick has been re-posting links to that work here at the weblog and now I have assembled below an easy-to-access-and-reference single place for readers to find any part of this fun series. Enjoy!

Introduction to the Kanreki Project

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, celebrated her 60th birthday. This specific celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, 還暦, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, read through Rowling’s more than twenty published works and reviewed them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ she said in 2019 and 2024 is the source of her inspiration and the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age.

Join us after the jump for the complete compendium of the Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, Fantastic Beast, ‘Stand Alone’ stories, and Golden Thread posts! [Read more…]

Filed Under: C. S. Lewis, Casual Vacancy, Christmas Pig, Cormoran Strike, Cursed Child, Fourth Generation, Golden Threads, Literary Alchemy, Narrative Misdirection, Plot Points, Pregnancy Trap, Psychomachia, Ring Composition, Substack Post, The Ickabog

The HogPro Kanreki Project – Lake and Shed Readings Prince to Vacancy

July 24, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Dr John Granger and I continue with our Lake and Shed reviews of the twenty-one stories written at least in part by J. K. Rowling. Join us for our celebration of Mrs Murray’s 60th birthday, and her Kanreki, 還暦, or calendar re-birth.

Nick reveals the real life model for Severus Snape, Rowling’s Chemistry teacher at Wydean Comprehensive, and his remarkable story and melancholy end. John reviews Rowling’s version of the so-called ‘Hero’s Journey,’ how she re-makes it into a life-after-death ‘Harry’s Journey’ ten step dance we see in every book — except for Half-Blood Prince with its two chapters before we begin at Privet Drive and its ending without a Dumbledore Denouement or trip to King’s Cross.

John and Nick discuss the ‘Deathly Hallows’ symbol, a triangulated and vertically bisected circle, from both its biographical point of inspiration to its anagogical or sublime depths. Nick reveals Rowling’s story about how she was watching the 1975 John Huston film ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ the night her mother died and that believes the “Masonic tag” of the story-line was her sub-conscious source for the Deathly Hallows ‘“triangular eye.” John thinks Rowling is really reaching here, akin to her claim that the name ‘Hogwarts’ came from a trip to a public garden rather than the Molesworth books. He reviews the five eyes of Deathly Hallows and explains how Rowling embeds both a key to the four-level interpretation of symbols in how characters respond to that image and a model of how we are to interpret and understand her ‘transformed vision’ mission as a writer.

Nick explains all the projects we now know she was working on between 2007 and 2012, the dates of Deathly Hallows and Casual Vacancy’s respective publication dates, as well as the degree to which readers can assume that the novel’s Simon Price is a fictional portrait of her father, Peter Rowling. John describes the three Gospel parables embedded in Casual Vacancy and why he thinks the book was a project the author was working on before the Hogwarts Saga as well as why it reflects a religious crisis akin to Harry’s ‘struggle to believe’ in Deathly Hallows.

Filed Under: Casual Vacancy, Fourth Generation, Nick Jeffery, Substack Post

Pregnancy Traps in Every Rowling Story: The Golden Thread of Coercive Love

January 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Dr. John Granger and Nick Jeffery explore the theme of pregnancy traps and coercive love, as a golden thread running through all the published works of J. K. Rowling. The new episode can be downloaded over on the Hogwarts Professor Substack.

After a long delay, Rowling studies returns with a discussion of a theme that is found throughout Rowling’s work. The Hogwarts Professor posts that John and Nick reference can be found here:

Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt

Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Casual Vacancy’s Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Bellatrix Lestrange and the Cursed Child Delphini

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Leda Strike

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Four Strikes

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Last Strikes

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Fantastic Beasts, The Ickabog, The Christmas Pig

Filed Under: Casual Vacancy, Christmas Pig, Cormoran Strike, Nick Jeffery, Pregnancy Trap, The Ickabog

Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Casual Vacancy’s Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden

October 17, 2024 by Leave a Comment

This is the second in a series of posts that detail the various Pregnancy Trap plot points that run through the work of J. K. Rowling from Harry Potter to Cormoran Strike. For the ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ context of this series, see the introduction to the first post in it, ‘Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt.‘

In brief, each post in this series will explain the importance of the specific Pregnancy Trap being explored to the specific title in which it appears or to the series in question, will detail its textual appearance and what if anything Rowling has said about in her interviews, and will compare and contrast the Trap with others Rowling has used, i.e., what makes it a typical one and what makes it unique. At the conclusion of the series, I will be sending my summary and conclusions from it to HogwartsProfessor Substack subscribers.

Merope Gaunt’s nightmare relationship with her abusive father and brother and her decision to trap Muggle charmster Thomas Riddle were the foundation crime and point of origin respectively for the Harry Potter novels. Rowling’s first post Potter piece was the stand-alone novel Casual Vacancy in which two women characters try to win a man by sexual favors, one of whom deploys a Pregnancy Trap intentionally and with tragic results. A third woman traps her husband with a child he does not want albeit through adoption not pregnancy and the trap is post nuptials not prior. Join me after the jump for all that! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Casual Vacancy, Pregnancy Trap

Rowling’s Messaging about Elections: Fictional Ministers and Mugwumps

November 9, 2022 by 2 Comments

It’s the day after Election Day in the United States, so it’s appropriate to make at least a nod of the head to the subject as treated in the fiction of J. K. Rowling.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, with two exceptions, none of Rowling’s novels or screenplays turn on the subject of electoral democracy and its workings. What Rowling has written about how the Ministers of Magic are elected in her Wizarding World has been in a piece originally written for PotterMore, 2015’s ‘Ministers for Magic,’ and it shares nothing at all about canvassing for votes or the procedures for casting and counting votes. The Strike detective mysteries, too, though Lethal White turns on the murder of a Minister and the sausage-making in Parliament, has next to nothing about elections in it.

The two exceptions, Casual Vacancy and the screenplay for Secrets of Dumbledore (written by Steve Kloves we have to assume according to Rowling’s original plan), are as silent about the actual mechanics of democracy. They do, however, share one message about elections, a note sounded in all of Rowling’s work because it is her core belief, that I’ll discuss after the jump. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Casual Vacancy, Fantastic Beasts