Hogwarts Professor

Cory Faniel wrote me last week about some Potter fandom inside-baseball in France that I was unaware of. He wrote lest I (continue to) embarass myself by not doing the right thing. It was a polite and very friendly letter and he won me over about the issue in question, about which, being no Franco-phone or -phile (Grangers are Normans, not French), I had not the slightest idea.

He reminded me that we had met at the St Andrews Harry Potter Conference years ago and shared, after I asked for more information, the following paragraphs about the French Harry Potter fan site with a twist. Not only is it in French (duh) and about current interpretations and insights as well as the fake stuff out of Rowling, Inc., but it is written as a French ‘Daily Prophet,’ that is, as if wizards and witches were reporting on events in the magical community.

I asked him to explain:

La Gazette du Sorcier is the oldest Harry Potter French fansite still active. The name comes from the official French translation of “The Daily Prophet”, an appropriation that is tolerated by the French editing house, Gallimard Jeunesse. It was created in July 2000 and its editorial line, at start, was to report informations about the Harry Potter franchise from a wizarding world point of view. Therefore, the books were called “biographies” and the movies were “biopics”; Rowling was “the biograph”, etc… This has slowly been abandoned for a more traditional style of reporting, more suited to contemporary readership; however we still publish “wizarding news“, made up articles with a “wizard twist”, sometimes based on a real situation (for example, this article on “wand restrictions” in the wizarding world, inspired by the debate on guns restrictions in the US; or the Purple Robes protesting on Paris Hidden Place, during the “Gilet Jaune” movement) sometimes entirely baseless and fun. It also used to be linked to the biggest French HP forum, but the evolution of the internet has led to most conversations migrating to Facebook and the forum emptying slowly but surely.

I joined the editorial team in 2011 and was made Chief Editor soon after. Since then, I have handed that title to another editor, but remain Head of Publication. I’ve built a new team, a new editorial approach, developed relationships with international websites, press contacts, etc… and built with my friends a team that now also branches out to offering  animations in small festivals in France, but also presenting conferences and in various conventions (for example on HP Translations, Illustrations, or the parallel between quididtch and the Deathly Hallows at LeakyCon).

I began the discussion of Rowling’s use of tarot card imagery in her Harry Potter novels and post-Hogwarts efforts with posts about her interview and twitter comments through the years about correspondences between the Four Houses, the Four Humors, and the four playing card suits (‘Rowling: Elements, Houses, Card Suits‘). That conversation continued with an exploration of the likelihood that Rowling embedded a comic image of herself, the quirky, all-seeing author with a taste for the occult and divinatory arts, inside Harry’s adventures as Professor Sybill Trelawney (‘Is Sybill Trelawney Really J. K. Rowling? The Case for an Embedded Author‘). Both these posts were inspired by what Eglantine Pillet found in a Rowling biography aside, namely, that The Presence as a Comprehensive School student used to entertain her friends by doing tarot card readings.

Today I’d like to invite serious readers of the Hogwarts Saga and the Cormoran Strike books to consider one tarot card image in particular, the Major Arcana card called ‘The Hanged Man,’ and its possible importance in understanding Rowling’s work, its artistry and meaning.

I’m going to do this in three parts: first, a listing of ‘Hanged Man’ appearances in Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike, second, a survey of cartomancer opinions about the meaning of the card in itself and in card spreads, and, third and last, some speculation about how and why Rowling has chosen to make this card such a prominent image in her writing.

‘The Hanged Man’ as a tarot card is not named explicitly by Trelawney as is ‘The Tower’ (“The Lightning Struck Tower”). It does, however, appear both in name and as an image in Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, and Half-Blood Prince and most recently in the fourth Cormoran Strike novel, Lethal White. Join me after the jump for a review of the places in text we encounter the image or name of ‘The Hanged Man.’ [Read more…]

Mystery Mile is a Margery Allingham thriller featuring Albert Campion in his first leading role. If you want the plot, the whole story really, there is a servicable telling of the tale on the book’s Wikipedia page. There is a reason, however, that Rowling has said Allingham was her favorite writer of the so-called Four Queens of Crime — Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh were the others — and reading her work, as we’ve seen before with The Tiger in the Smoke, as often as not gives you a name or two that Rowling lifts (Johnny Cash!), a plot point or twist, or something as important as the psychopathology of Lord Voldemort.

Without spoiling the story of Mystery Mile, I think I can say now ‘where’ and ‘from whom’ Rowling found a model for her Tales of Beedle the Bard embedded text in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The Mile story turns on the secret identity of the leader of Simister (that’s not a typo), an international criminal organization, a gangster extraordinaire reputed to be more than one hundred years old. A retired judge learns a clue to the mafioso’s name is hidden in a children’s book but even the best cryptographers of the FBI and of Scotland Yard cannot break the code.

Albert Campion, of course, solves the puzzle in the text after a quick look at the Table of Contents.

How many stories do you know that feature a kid’s book with an embedded text, the book being embedded in the text as a mirror of our own attempts to figure out who the bad guy is from the clues we’ve been given? Me, too. Just one.

This is early Allingham and not one of my favorites. I hope you’ll give it a read even so and let me know what you make of the children’s book key that unlocks this mystery and how it compares to Beedle‘s role inside Deathly Hallows.