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There are two Harry Potter conferences for serious readers that Potter Pundits are obliged to be aware of and to attend at least once. The one you may know already — maybe we met there? — is the ‘Harry Potter Academic Conference’ thrown annually at Chestnut Hill College. It is three days of solid presentations, keynote and short talks, from fans of all ages, academics, and independent scholars. Other Potter festivals with serious reader components, I think immediately of those in Roanoke and Staunton, Virginia, are excellent but, at least at present, lack Chestnut Hill’s history, depth, and breadth.

The second Potter annual meeting every Potter Pundit should know about is the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference held every February in Albuquerque, NM. This year the gathering is 20-23 February, Wednesday to Saturday, in the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center. You can register for it at reduced rates at this SWPACA webpage if you sign on before 5 January.

Before you do, though, you need to know that SWPACA is nothing like Chestnut Hill (or Staunton or Roanoke) excepting, of course, that if you go you will hear “professional academics” talk about the Hogwarts Saga. Here, after the jump, are the seven differences you should be aware of and a list of the talks you can hear if you do go. Enjoy! [Read more…]

Surprise and delight your friends and loved ones this Christmas with the #HarryPotter Stamp Collection. https://t.co/seXBOKwrdT pic.twitter.com/rCq7JcPhQM

— Royal Mail Stamps (@RoyalMailStamps) December 15, 2018

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 Furioso.

My guess is that you’re much more familiar with Christian scripture, Dante, Coleridge, Shakespeare, and Milton than you are with Ariosto. I confess to never having heard the name until I started tracking down mythological creatures in Harry Potter; the hippogriff is the preferred means of travel in Orlando Furioso. The book itself is an epic poem, actually the completion of or sequel to Boiardo’s Orlando Innamarato, and it plays an outsized influence, not only on J. K. Rowling, but in Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Calvino, Borges, and Rushdie as well. The plot goes something like this:

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 hippogriff. Many themes are interwoven in its complicated episodic structure, but the most important are the paladin Orlando’s unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica, which drives him mad; the love between the female Christian warrior Bradamante and the Saracen Ruggiero, who are supposed to be the ancestors of Ariosto’s patrons, the d’Este family of Ferrara; and the war between Christian and Infidel.

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.

And what does this have to do with Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso? 

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, ‘lab rat’); at night, though, and on her vacations, she has, since 2005, devoted herself to transforming the largely impenetrable-for-moderns poetry of Boiardo and Ariosto into novels for people-like-us. Her first book, Quest of the Warrior Maiden, about Bradamante and Ruggiero was published in 2011. I asked her to tell HogwartsProfessor readers all about it then and she did: ‘Hippogriffs, Epic Fantasy, and Warrior Maidens’ is a short history of Linda’s life in Potter fandom and her quest to bring Ariosto and his unforgettable story to a larger audience.

It’s really good; as I wrote in a blurb at the time, Quest is “a grand and engaging re-telling of the original ‘star crossed lovers’ epic with everything Orlando – chivalry, romance, fights to the death, hippogriffs, madness, and beauty! As engaging a story as I have read this year, I couldn’t put it down and I urge you to pick it up today.” It won Best Historic Fantasy by the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) and received an Honorable Mention for Genre-Based fiction by the Hollywood Book Festival.

I write about it in 2018’s closing days because the long awaited sequel, Fate of the Saracen Knight, again with Ruggerio and Bradamante, is finally available. If you read the archives of Linda’s weblog, you will learn about her trips to Europe to research everything Medieval, about the adventures she had and discoveries she made that have delayed the sequel more than a few years, and made it even better than the original. Linda is offering a deep discount on both books in the first month of Fate of the Saracen Knight‘s publication.

If you’ve read the first, you probably have already stopped reading this to buy the second. If you’re new to Ariosto and Orlando, I hope you will give Quest of the Warrior Maidena try. You won’t regret it.

After the jump, a letter from Linda to me about Orlando and the new book — and an interview she gave Professor Nokes aka “Dr Awesome.” Enjoy!

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Last month’s new Twitter Header was a puzzler — and HogPro All Pros Joanne Gray and Nick Jeffery not only found out in record time what it was (St John’s Gate in Cherkenwell) but Mr Jeffery also nailed in short order the origin of the illustration (Illustrated News of the World, 1859).

This month’s entry is not even a head scratcher; it’s from London’s largest Christmas lights display on Regents Street. You can find more pictures and the story of the Illumined Angels here and here. With Rowling’s super re-touched red-head cameo, this goes on the Top Ten list for most attractive headers she has put up to date.

My safe bet is that, like the demon mask header in October, this month’s picture is a seasonal item for the weeks before Nativity.

A more adventurous guess is that she is writing about the death of a major character in one of the books and screenplays she is writing  –  or about the influence of the dead-who-never-leave-us on events in those stories, potustoronnost in Nabokovian language, and something of a theme in Rowling’s work.

Your thoughts?