J. K. Rowling Saved Western Civilization — Amy Hamm’s ‘National Post’ Essay

Amy Hamm has written an essay (or “op-ed” in Newspeak) for Canada’s National Post with the daring title, ‘J. K. Rowling Saved Western Civilization.’

She makes an excellent argument; her review of the collective insanity crisis that threatened to overtake the West in support of the gender confused, the asylum inmates calling the tune, is comprehensive and compelling and her presentation of Rowling as the most important single voice, largely because of her unique position but due as much to her personal courage and determination to follow through the endless character assassinations and threats of violence is a cogent case.

If you haven’t got the five minutes to read the whole piece, here is a taste from Hamm’s conclusion:

That’s Rowling. She possesses a defiance that is both legendary and critical for our times. She did not need to do any of this. It would have been far easier had she not. In fact, in her essay on sex and gender, she admits that being hounded by gender extremists is “endlessly unpleasant.” She’s human, after all. “I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health,” wrote Rowling.

Her wealth and fame ensure that when she speaks, people listen — but they do nothing to insulate or make her immune from the vicious hatred she gets in return. And yet, she doesn’t let up.

A civilization that institutionalizes and enforces the telling of absurd lies — including the lie that humans can change their sex — is in decline. Likewise, for a civilization that not only does not protect women and children from male violence — but enables and excuses it to occur in the service of upholding the states’ mandated lies. Again, the same can be said of a western culture that normalizes the chemical — followed by surgical — castration of its own children, as we see with the medical scandal that is pediatric “gender affirming care.” The West is very sick right now.

We have been living under forced subservience to the foolish and dangerous notion that nothing is more important than “identity” — including self-declared and patently false ones — and that we must upend our culture, institutions, and even our safety and lives in a demonstration of fealty.

I do not wish to imagine where we would be, in 2024, had Rowling not done what she has done — for women and children, for freedom, and for the West. Do not mistake my praise for celebrity worship, either: this is about character, bravery, and virtue in the context of the power conferred by Rowling’s celebrity and reach. If any single person is to one day receive credit for saving western civilization, it is Rowling.

The fight is not over, but she has shown us the way.

Read the whole thing.

It is catnip, of course, for those of us who have agreed with Rowling’s conclusion from the start, though our reasoning to arrive there might have been and certainly remains for me quite different. I hope that those who disagreed back then, who participated in the transphobe-slander game, and those who still think that there are gendered souls, that “transgender women are women” or that “transgender children” exist, will read Hamm’s essay.

It’s an excellent packaging and vivid presentation of how close the West came to accepting nonsense as “science,” ignorant bullying posturing as empathy, and how significant Rowling’s role has been in reversing the tide. Who knows? Maybe one or two people might finally get how mistaken they have been and reach out to apologize to those whom they insulted or, worse really, those friends on whom they turned their backs.

Tomorrow, back to the hottest subject in Rowling Studies today, ‘Pregnancy Traps’ as a ‘golden thread’ throughout JKR’s work, beginning to most recent, and what it means from a ‘Lake and Shed’ perspective. Check out the latest Hogwarts Professor podcast which is an in-depth and entertaining conversation on just that topic. Cheers!

 

Rowling Tweets about Asian Rape Gangs

In September of last year, I wrote a post in which I listed the three topical subjects and controversies that Rowling never discusses; ‘Is J. K. Rowling a Coward? Three Topics About Which She Will Not Speak.’ Number one on my short list was being called an Islamophobe in which point I named explicitly her never mentioning ‘Asian,’ which is to say ‘Muslim,’ “grooming gangs.”

(1) She is Afraid of Being Labelled an Islamophobe

Rowling tweets regularly about Islamicist crimes against women in Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. These are usually re-tweets of reports from those countries by brave women reporting the abuses.

She never comments on or retweets reports about  Islamicist crimes against women and children in the United Kingdom, cf., ‘Asian’ grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford, and “honor killings.”

Why not? The most obvious and therefore likely answer is because she fears being grouped with “Far Right Extremists” or being accused of fostering “Hate Crimes” against innocent Muslim believers and agnostic ‘Asians’ in the UK.

Her only statement about the riots throughout the UK this summer by nativist gangs against immigrant crimes and the blind-eye of government to these crimes was a retweet about the injustice of attacks on housing for immigrants.

This is an issue about which Rowling chooses prudently or out of cowardice not to express her opinion. Islamicist crimes, per her twixter feed, only occur outside the UK. No crimes against Christians, by the state or by Islamicists, in the UK or elsewhere, are ever mentioned; they simply do not exist in Rowling-world.

On New Year’s Day, Rowling at last tweeted about what she calls “rape gangs” no doubt in response to public outrage of the last few weeks:

She posts this as a breaking story (“The details emerging…”) and does not mention that the rapists are almost exclusively Muslim males and the victims white English girls. (See this twitter thread for the sordid history of “institutional cowardice” and the recent reports that made it “breaking news.”) She re-tweets several pieces posted by others about a heroic feminist journalist in which she implicitly acknowledges that this story “broke” twenty years ago (see here, here, here, and here). Rowling also reposted a piece in which the author claimed the rape gangs were “a problem neither of immigration or a particular religious or racial group,” a bit of side-stepping for which she was immediately called out: [Read more…]

Best Hogwarts Professor Posts of 2024

As we approach the conventional calendar’s end and the beginning of the ‘New Year,’ it’s an edifying custom to look back at the twelve months behind us as well as to look forward with hope in anticipation. I have spent the better part of the day in the review part of that effort; I’ve collected many of the more interesting of the 165 posts at Hogwarts Professor in 2024 into nine categories, from ‘Most Popular’ to ‘Most Important,’ and written a brief introduction to each of those pigeon-holes.

My conclusion after a day of sifting, sorting, smiling, and wincing? It’s been a very good year in the Rowling Studies niche of literary criticism and Hogwarts Professor has continued to be a leader in that nook of serious reading. I am very grateful for the thousands of readers who join us here on a daily basis and I am especially thankful to those on our staff who contribute posts and to those in our audience who comment regularly.

Let’s start our end of year review with the posts that generated the most comments in 2024.

Greatest Reader Response

Posts at Hogwarts Professor do not generate a lot of feedback, curiously enough. Much of what we do get is the written equivalent of a “crank call” on the telephone; last week, for example, I was accused of being an “oligarch” dedicated to crushing the Oppressed. As a rule, I do not approve those comments.

Two posts this year, though, caused a flurry of responses and I pretty much left the floodgates open despite there being a decent amount of name-calling in the feedback. Both of these posts were about the rumor that Paapa Essiedu had been cast to play Severus Snape in Bronte Studios/HBO+ adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television. This not-yet-confirmed choice was controversial because Essiedu is a black man.

I explained in these posts why I thought this was a good idea, even brilliant given the obstacles the new shows must clear to be successful, and how the choice of  Essiedu differed from John Tiffany’s decision to cast a ‘Black Hermione’ in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. With one exception, our readers disagreed and were disappointed in me for not condemning the Woke tokenism of this casting. De Gustibus.

Best Series of Posts: Pregnancy Traps

I decided in early October to write a series of posts about the Pregnancy Traps and other instances of “coercive” love that appear as plot points in Rowling’s work. I expected it would take me a week or two to write up the ten I counted in my ‘How Many?’ introductory post.

Nick Jeffery and I just finished recording a ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast on this subject that I think will be sent out to Substack subscribers later this week. The survey has taken me a lot longer to complete than I thought and the series does not yet have a proper written conclusion, in which I hope to explain how important this is for understanding Rowling’s work.

The obvious point in this regard is the quantity and the quality or centrality of Pregnancy Traps in her stories. With respect to their importance, in Rowling’s ‘Big Four’ works — Harry Potter, Casual Vacancy, Cursed Child, and the Cormoran Strike mysteries — “coercive” love in the form of a Pregnancy Trap are either the point of story-origin or the climactic event to which all the story-elements lead and at which they converge.

And the number of them! I listed ten in my ‘How Many?’ post. After reviewing the Cormoran Strike series in two posts (‘Four Strikes’ and ‘The Last Strikes’), I’d found fourteen and Nick brought up one I’d missed during our podcast. Check ’em out:

  1. Charlotte Campbell’s pregnancy trap for Strike, her fiancée?
  2. Marlene Higson’s trap to win Josiah Agyeman
  3. Fenella Waldegrave’s affair with Michael Fancourt?
  4. Mrs Laing’s pregnancy trap for “One of the Local Policemen”
  5. Jeff Whittaker’s pregnancy trap for Leda Strike
  6. Ornella Serafin’s pregnancy trap for Jasper Chiswell
  7. Raphael Chiswell’s trap for Kinvara Chiswell
  8. Lucca Ricci traps Gloria Conti via pregnancy
  9. Sarah Shadlock’s Trapping Matt Cunliffe
  10. Janice Beattie’s Failed Trap of Her Son’s Father
  11. Jago Ross’ Coercive Love for Charlotte Campbell
  12. Mazu Wace’s Pregnancy Trap for Alex Graves (and Jonathan Wace?)
  13. Belinda (Bijou) Watkins’ Pregnancy Trap for Andrew Honbold QC (or Strike?)
  14. Ryan Murphy’s Pregnancy Trap of Robin Ellacott, her fiancée?

There’s a lot to unpack in there — for instance, I’m intrigued by the possibility that Murphy will convince Robin to get married and try to seal the deal with a pregnancy during their engagement in parallel with what Charlotte did to Cormoran at the start of Cuckoo’s Calling (though, yes, I think Robin may be sterile) — but the sheer volume of these examples and their importance in the story-lines of each book is astonishing.

Which points to the unexplored ‘Lake’ aspect of this prevalent plot point; why does it have such a prominent place in her fiction? Nick and I discuss this in the Rowling Studies podcast coming out soon and it will be a touchstone of conversations, I think, in 2025.

Rowling Studies Podcasts

For more than twenty years, I’ve wanted to have a dedicated Hogwarts Professor podcast but it never happened. I did years in yoke to Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet shows (all of which was very pleasant, FYI) and hoped that it would be something we could do here, on our terms. Nick Jeffery has made that possible with our ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast and each of the five shows we have done in 2024 (the missing link there is the Pregnancy Trap piece about to be published) has our signature Fourth Generation focus on both Rowling’s Lake and Shed.

Speaking of which, how about the best biographically focused or ‘Lake’ posts and those more about her artistry and literary allusion, her ‘Shed’?

Rowling Biography: Lake Notes

Two of the points of emphasis that distinguish the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies from the first three are an insistence on an opera omnia or everything-she’s-written focus (rather than just Wizarding World Stories or one book, usually the latest, or the novel in queue for publication) and discussion of the connection, if any, between Rowling’s life events and core beliefs and the stories she writes. The posts above are about Rowling personally and about the connection between her life and work, the “pain to brain” aspoect of her inspiration, as she put it to Lev Grossman in 2005.

I also wrote posts about Rowling’s more open statements of what she believes and thinks. It was a year of triumph, frankly, for Rowling in her battle against Trans Rights Activists (TRAs) to protect children and adolescents from surgical mutilation and chemical castration (“Gender affirming care”) and to protect women by keeping women’s safe spaces for women only. See The Daily Wire‘s review of her take-down tweets throughout 2024: J. K. Rowling Says What Everyone is Thinking – A Year in Review. I covered a lot of that, but in the three posts above this paragraph I tried to highlight more important statements Rowling made in long form, albeit on social media.

Rowling Bibliography: Shed Notes

That being said about Hogwarts Professor’s commitment to Lake or biographical matters, we haven’t given up on her Shed artistry and its elevation of her work’s meaning from the individual exteriorization of psychological issues to the universal agonies of human existence and relationships. The four posts above confirm this weblog’s place as the online locus for conversation of Rowling’s deliberate craft choices and the effects each has on her readers, e.g., literary alchemy, ring composition, psychomachia, etc., as well as her literary and artistic influences.

I write most of the posts here at Hogwarts Professor; last year I wrote more than 150 of the 167 that went ‘up.’ Before I get to the posts that are I think are the most important of the year, the ‘take-aways’ or the answer to the question “if you could only read one 2024 HogPro post, what would it be?,” I want to highlight two other writers that contribute regularly at Hogwarts Professor.

Beatrice Groves

Dr Groves has her online archive of posts she has written and podcasts on which she has spoken, the ‘Beatrice Grove Pillar Post,‘ at Hogwarts Professor, a collection updated regularly by Nick Jeffery. She writes for a variety of Potter and Strike fandom sites in addition to this weblog but I think she shares her most challenging and interesting work, usually speculation about the next work in the Strike series in light of new twixter headers, for our page. I love the alchemical exegesis and Strike fandom loves everything she shares here.

Nick Jeffery

Nick Jeffery is the host of our Rowling Studies podcast and the Invisible Man behind many of our posts that don’t sport his name in the byline. A post I wrote up about the difference between Black Snape and Black Hermione, for example, all derived from a throw-away observation Mr Jeffery made about an interview John Tiffany made about Cursed Child‘s “Hermione-gate” in a 2017 interview.

More to the point, Nick’s area of expertise in reading J. K. Rowling is in her biography, the Lake aspects of her inspiration. He’s perfectly situated for that topic as he lives in relatively proximity to Church Cottage and his awareness of Rowling’s class concerns and perspective springs from his self-reflection on his own upbringing and place in the UK caste system, not as atrophied as many imagine. The push at Hogwarts Professor towards an integrated appreciation of Lake inspiration and Shed artistry leans largely on the insights about Rowling the person he provides (as well as his sobriety in what is necessarily a speculative field) that no one in the subject area — and I know most if not all of the better ones — can claim or have demonstrated.

Before I reveal my pick of the Most Important Hogwarts Professor Posts of 2024, I want to note that we have been posting every day since 5 August this year, Beatrice Groves’ ‘Golden Journey‘ piece. I scrolled thirty four pages of posts with five posts on average per page and noted that every three or four days in the four weeks of September into early October I’d written something substantial. It was far and away the best month of the year. For what it’s worth!

Autumn Blitz

Best in Show

The most popular posts we have here, oddly enough, are those about films or television shows. I say that this is odd because the focus of the weblog is on interpretation of Rowling’s works’ artistry and meaning, her written texts, not the adaptations for large and small screens. A lot of our readers (and those prompted by news aggregators for Rowling stories), it seems, stop by on days of important film or teevee news to see what we have to say. Fair enough.

I think the important work we are doing here, as I’ve said how many times above? I’ve lost count, is the push into the Fourth Generation of Rowling studies, in which we talk about her work in the context of all her writing and integrating at the author’s repeated insistenceinto that interpretation the probable biographical sources of inspiration.

It’s no surprise, then, that my choice for best post and best podcast of 2024 are each simultaneously introductions to and moving-the-ball-forward efforts in Fourth Generation work. The post identifies what I think is Rowling’s signature point of Genius (or ‘G-Spot’) as an artist and the podcast with host Nick Jeffery discusses a Q&A Rowling made called ‘On Writing.’ Both integrate Lake and Shed knowledge and perspective on Rowling’s work and challenge the reader or podcast listener to break out of the one series or next work pre-occupation.

Thank you for joining me on this End of Year Review, and, in advance, for sharing your favorites from Hogwarts Professor in 2024. The HogPro faculty and I thank you for your attentive reading and for the comments you share on what we have written!

 

 

 

Boxing Day Special: Hilarious Harry Potter Film Franchise Pitch Meeting

Happy Boxing Day, Rowling Readers, Potter-philes, and Serious Strikers!

It’s too lazy a day for heavy lifting and up-close reading, so let’s keep it light with another Ryan George ‘Pitch Meeting’ video, this one about the Hogwarts Saga film franchise.

For the individual Warner Brothers adaptations Pitch Meetings of each of the Potter novels’ eight films, see Harry Potter Movie Pitch Meetings: Warner Brothers Bought ‘Em All.

For the three Fantastic Beasts films, check out Every ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Pitch Meeting.

Tomorrow back to Pregnancy Traps and the hard core looks at Rowling-Galbraith work — or just an announcement about the Hallmarked Man publication date? I think you can find the rumored answer to match up with a note expressed here recently — but that would be telling. Stay tuned!

Rowling’s Hallmarked Man: Is There a Way to Guess How Long It Will Be?

Nick Jeffery yesterday posted his best guess of Hallmarked Man’s publication date, 25 July 2025, a hypothesis extrapolated from previous publication dates’ distance from the announcement that Rowling had submitted her final draft.

Inspired by that logic, I wondered if we could guess how many pages Strike 8 will be.

There is simply no way to know, of course, but if one were forced to guess, what clues about Hallmarked Man and information about previous Strike-Ellacott books do we have that could be used a la the date of publication guesstimate to come up with an as-likely-as-not page count?

We have a Rowling tweet about the number of chapters in Hallmarked Man from late September.

She had tweeted while on her birthday cruise in July around Greenland that she was working on (and nearly finished with?) Strike 8, so it might reasonably be assumed that by September she was putting final touches on the novel.

The epigraph to Part Nine is telling, perhaps:

That passage from A Maid of the Silver Sea has a note of finality to it and Running Grave only had nine chapter sets, Rowling’s ‘Parts,’ so we hoped at the time this meant that she was nearing the finish line.

If we shamelessly and carelessly neglect all logical procedure, though, and assume that chapter 119 is an epilogue piece (in which Cormoran Strike finally meets his estranged biological father?) that Rowling found especially “satisfying” in part because it was the end of her first draft labors, then we can hazard a guess about the final page number for Hallmarked Man.

The calculation will require knowing the average number of pages per chapter in the Strike-Ellacott series and then multiplying that number times 119. Here is your data set for that effort:

  • Cuckoo’s Calling:  46 chapters, 455 pages (Prologue, Epilogue)
  • The Silkworm: 50 chapters, 455 pages
  • Career of Evil:  62 chapters, 489 pages
  • Lethal White:  71 chapters, 647 pages (Prologue, Epilogue)
  • Troubled Blood:  73 chapters,  927 pages
  • Ink Black Heart:  107 chapters, 1012 pages
  • Running Grave:  137 chapters,  945 pages (Prologue, Epilogue)*

Total Pages/Total Chapters = 4,930/546/4,930 = ~9 = Average pages per chapter in Strike-Ellacott series

The average pages per chapter in the series, then, being 9, multiplied by our closest approximation of the number of Hallmarked Man chapters we have been given, 119, yields 1,071 as a ‘Good Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’

A quick glance at the earlier books in the series, however, shows that those books averaged well over 9 pages per chapter and more recent books significantly less. Running Grave‘s pages per chapter count, for example is almost 7, a 22% difference with the series average.

If we use the average pages per chapter of the most recent book and multiply it by our best number for Hallmarked Man chapters, we get 7 x 119, or 833 pages, perhaps a ‘Better Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’

As we have thrown all concern for significant figures and calculation sobriety to the winds, how about using an ‘Average of Averages,’ either using the two page number guesses and dividing them by two or just multiplying 119 times 8, the midpoint between 7 and 9? Both those methods give us ‘952 pages‘ as our potentially ‘Best Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’

I offer this effort to you — and if you have read this far, you are a Serious Striker indeed — as a ‘for instance’ of how not to be reading Rowling-Galbraith. While I helped pioneer back in the years of Potter Mania the speculative madness about all aspects of what the next Hogwarts book would include (e.g., the temperature and weather on Privet Drive in the opening chapter per alchemical formula), it’s past time we give up on such folly and free labor for Mulholland’s marketing team.

Who cares after all how many pages the next book will be, when it will be published, or the cover picture to be used, all subjects and facts that will soon be forgotten after we have the book and can discuss it? We have entered the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies, in which we are moving towards a consistently broader view of Rowling’s work than a border line obsessive fixation on her most recent codex and the book-in-queue.

But it was fun to come up with a Best Guess of 952 pages for Hallmarked Man, the folly of which calculation we will all appreciate even more on the day of publication (which I confess to hoping will come on Rowling’s sixtieth birthday, 31 July 2025, rather than Nick’s guesstimate of 25 July). Thanks for sharing your best guesses in the comment boxes about page or date, or, better, for submitting the plot point Golden Threads you hope the HogwartsProfessor team will take up after we’re done with Pregnancy Traps. Cheers!