Hallmarked Man: Second Thoughts, Rowling’s Key Definitions and “Religious Faith” Doubts, Blitz Chess and Q&As

October 20, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Hogwarts Professor has been posting up a storm at its Substack home since the publication of The Hallmarked Man — see ‘Hallmarked Man: First Thoughts‘ for our September posts — though we’ve been relatively quiet here on the weblog.

Here is a quick guide to four more conversations we’ve been having ‘over there’ with links to those discussions at your fingertips! Every post comes with a video capture of John and Nick playing point-counterpoint with extensive footnotes and urls for Rowling Readers wanting to follow up on the ideas discussed. Be sure to read the comment threads beneath each for the insights of Serious Strikers around the world.

Enjoy!

The Hallmarked Man: A ‘Blitz Chess’ Lake and Shed Reading (with a few Golden Threads)

Nick Jeffery and John Granger, Team Lake and Team Shed respectively, do a back and forth review of Strike 8 in which each has to provide an example of a Shed tool or Lake Spring in Rowling’s latest (3 October)

Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s Tweets after the Shooting of Charlie Kirk

The Four Key Word Definitions Rowling posted after a Flood of Death Threats, the Fixed Beliefs She Says She has Given Up, Her Doubts about “Religious Faith” in God, and the Evisceration of Emma Watson (7 October)

Hallmarked Man Q&A with Nick Jeffery and John Granger (1)

Freemasonry and the Universal Humanitarian Church, Michael Ellacott a closeted Freemason, Strike 8 as a Welsh Novel, Hiram Abiff’s Murder as the Book’s Template, the Meaning of ‘Calvin Osgood,’ Carmen Ellacott, Baby Dirk, and Literary Allusion gone Wild, More! (15 October)

Hallmarked Man Q&A with Nick Jeffery and John Granger (2)

Oranda Goldfish, Frozen Peas, and Mise en Abyme; Flints in the Silver Vault Murder Mystery; Why Freemasons love Silver; Rowling’s Mysterious ‘Back-Door Man’ (Did She Hire Harry Bingham as a “Ghost-Writer”?; Gateshead, Pit Ponies, Council Flats; Robin’s “Cuddly Toy” Dream; the Death of Rowntree and the Meaning of ‘Betty;’ “I think, no, I know,” More!
Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Hallmarked Man: First Thoughts, Misdirection, and the Mythological Template of Psyche and Cupid

September 29, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Hogwarts Professor has been posting up a storm at its Substack home in the four weeks since the publication of The Hallmarked Man though we’ve been relatively quiet here on the weblog.

Here is a quick guide to the conversations we’ve been having ‘over there’ with links to those discussions at your fingertips! Every post except ‘Flood’ comes with a video capture of John and Nick playing point-counterpoint with extensive footnotes and urls for Rowling Readers wanting to follow up on the ideas discussed. Be sure to read the comment threads beneath each for the insights of Serious Strikers around the world.

Enjoy!

Three Cheers for The Hallmarked Man! Thoughts After the First Reading

Nick Jeffery and John Granger discuss Strike8, fandom disappointment, predictions review, three Rowling targets, the Core Text hidden in the epigraphs, and ‘What’s Next?’ for Serious Strikers (8 September 2025)

Hallmarked Man’s Three ‘Whose My Daddy?’ Set-Ups to Shock Readers in Strikes 9 and 10

Misdirection to cause Defamiliarization in the next Strike-Ellacott Mysteries: Incest, Paternity, Gorilla Murphy, and the Bad Dad-Big Brother who Killed His Little Sister (15 September 2025)

Hallmarked Man’s Flood of Names, Characters, and Plots

Rowling-Galbraith Inundates the Reader with Possible Victims, Murderers, and Sideline Observers; Three Explanations for the Tsunami of Plot Threads and New Faces (22 September 2025)

Psyche and Cupid: The Hallmarked Man’s Mythological Template

‘Cupid and Psyche’s importance for grasping the depths of Strike 8, from the “necessity” of the Silver Vault and the three men in Robin’s life, to spaghetti carbonara and ‘Maid of the Silver Sea’ (25 September 2025)
Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Strike 9 to Heads to Portsmouth!

September 18, 2025 by Leave a Comment

J. K. Rowling has changed her Twitter (X) header and updated her profile picture with dramatic turquoise pendant earrings. The image is of Tower Alley situated at the the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour on the south coast of England, the UK’s largest naval base. The tower in the background is Round Tower. Built on the orders of King Henry V in 1418, it originally housed a defensive chain that could be raised to protect the harbour from enemy shipping. I can’t find an exact match for this photograph online, so it is likely that this is her own creation, and she has physically scouted this location for the next Strike book.

Although most fans are still digesting the wonderfully complex plot of The Hallmarked Man, J. K. Rowling has recently reiterated that her headers are usually clues to future books, it is probably a good time to remind ourselves of the headers most likely to refer to Strike 9. With The Hallmarked Man carrying themes of pregnancy, childbirth and babies, the images of a tree-house and scattered dolls, might mean a childhood theme for the next in the series.

All of J. K. Rowling’s headers can be found here, but the Strike 9 headers are reproduced below:

25th January 2025 View from York city walls showing York Minster cathedral.

4th April 2025 A stock image of a tree house from here.

18th April 2025 This appears to be an AI generated image, judging from the distortion visible in the doll’s faces.

17th September 2025 Tower Alley in Portsmouth. Between the buildings can be seen the Round Tower, a 15th century fortification.

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Nick Jeffery, Twitter

A Few Shiny Thoughts on The Hallmarked Man

September 16, 2025 by 8 Comments

I’ve at last finished my first read through and started my targeted read-back through of the latest installment in J.K Rowling’s StrikeThe Hallmarked Man: A Cormoran Strike Novel - Audiobook by Robert Galbraith series. We’ll be doing some serious deep dives into this volume, of course,  but I wanted to go ahead and share some of my initial thoughts which may, for some of you, be similar to your own. Just in case you are reading this post before completing your own complete read of the twisting tale of silver, murder, and convoluted relationships galore, I am splitting my Top Ten Initial Thoughts into Spoiler Free and Spoiler-Rife, so if you prefer to solve the mysteries alongside our Denmark Street detectives, you’ll want to stop at number four!

  1. The first of ten thoughts—Ten!

I am always fascinated by number patterns, particularly in Rowling’s work, and not just because I have spent a great deal of time in Panem lately, a world Suzanne Collins meticulously lines with number symbolism. We are used to Rowling and her care with numbers from the Hogwarts adventures, and she has continued that attention to symbolic and literal numbering in the Strike books. In this installment, one of the first things I noticed with interest was the use of the number 10. Before the end of the first chapter, our first non-series character is introduced, Decima Mullins. Her name, with its Latin root of “ten,”  sets up the use of ten throughout. The book is broken in 10 segments of varying length, plus an epilogue. Other tens crop up as well. Since Rowling has made it clear that she plans for a ten-book series, the use of tens certainly reinforces that. Knowing that only two more books remain places added emphasis on the events of this one. It also reminds us of the ten-year age gap between Strike and Robin, which continues to cause him stress, but which we are hoping to see overcome by the time the series, like this book, counts to ten.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Elizabeth Baird Hardy Tagged With: ,

Rowling Points to Myth of Cupid and Psyche in order to Console Strike Fans Disappointed with Hallmarked Man

September 8, 2025 by 4 Comments

In a remarkable confirmation of the mythological analysis of the Strike-Ellacott series, J. K. Rowling has posted a “Public service announcement for Strike and Robin fans” frustrated by the “emotional trauma” created by The Hallmarked Man.

Image

This painting is L’Amour et Psyché by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, painted in 1889. This oil on canvas painting depicts a scene from classical mythology, specifically the story of Cupid (Amour) and Psyche.

John Granger has argued since April 2021 that the myth of Cupid, and Psyche holds a “Mythological Key” to understanding the series; his first post and 2022 follow-up after the publication of Ink Black Heart are well worth re-reading in light of Rowling’s apparent confirmation.

A Mythological Key to Cormoran Strike? The Myth of Eros, Psyche, and Venus

Ink Black Heart: Strike as Zeus to Robin’s Leda and as Cupid to Mads’ Psyche

Cupid and Psyche, as handed down to us, is included in Metamorphoses (also called The Golden Ass), written in the 2nd century AD by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (or Platonicus). As John explained in Mythological Key, Rowling’s study of mythology at her Comprehensive school as well as in her undergraduate course in ‘Classics’ at the University of Exeter, in addition to her core beliefs about the soul and her reading in psychology (cf., A Jungian Reading of Troubled Blood), explains her use of myth in Harry Potter (Orestes) and Fantastic Beasts (Theseus and Hippolyta). Through the exegetical efforts of Joanne Gray and Evan Willis, readers at HogwartsProfessor have been well aware of the mythological foundation of Cormoran Strike in the myths of Castor and Pollux as well as Leda and the Swan since 2017.

Rowling’s morning tweet does not cite any of this exegetical work; it only strongly suggests via the 19th century painting of Cupid’s raising Psyche to the heights of Mt Olympus, the climax of this myth, that Strike and Robin will be ‘together forever’ at the finish of Strike9. That she chose this image to convey that message to “Strike and Robin fans” experiencing “emotional trauma” at the ending of Hallmarked Man, of course, rather than any other story’s happily-ever-after ending, while stopping short of confirming out right John’s work, brings that work immediately to mind for most Serious Strikers.

In a remarkable case of Jungian synchronicity, a HogwartsProfessor Substack video-post that was sent out this morning an hour before Rowling’s Cupid and Psyche themed tweet, Three Cheers for The Hallmarked Man! Thoughts After the First Reading, discussed the subject of how to deal with the frustration that many readers have with the ending with respect to the Strike-Ellacott relation-Ship. John’s answer to what Rowling called “emotional trauma” in her readership was that if a Strike fan reads and enters into the partners’ romance as an allegory of soul and spirit, the archetypal choice each soul must make between life with the body and the greater life of the Heart, the conflict reflected in the mythological Cupid and Psyche, she won’t feel that frustration. Mythology, with Literary Alchemy, Psychomachia, Christian Symbolism, and Ring Composition among others, is one of the the seven ‘Shed Tools’ that John has argued since 2002 Rowling-Galbraith uses in everything she writes.

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Nick Jeffery, Psychomachia