Hunting the White Hart in Harry Potter

February 7, 2018 by Leave a Comment

A Guest Post from Wayne Stauffer in Honor of the White Stag Sightings in Scotland: Enjoy!

I started this pursuit by noticing a visual similarity between Harry’s luminescent white stag patronus in Prisoner of Azkaban and my memory of references to the hunt for the white hart in my readings of medieval literature over the years.[1] So, I wanted to explore how far Rowling uses the image.

The Image

The White Hart is real and not simply a figurative or symbolic image.

Marcus Dunk in “How the magical white hart inspires legends (as well as the name of a thousand pubs),” UK Daily Mail, 14 February 2008, tells us that, biologically, the white hart is a result of a genetic mutation called leucism, which affects fur pigmentation. It is different from albinism in that leucism leaves the eye color natural while albinism turns the eye color red.

Real-life sightings of white stags occur in numerous places in Britain and Europe. An article in the UK Daily Mail, “Pictured: Mythical white stag found in the forests of Gloucestershire,” December 6, 2009, reports that British photographer Ken Grindle managed to photograph a white hart in the Forest of Dean in Gloustershire, UK, thought to be home to an array of unusual and wild creatures, including wild boar, big cats, and white stags. (Now, where have we heard of this place before? 😉 [Read more…]

Filed Under: Guest Posts

Beatrice Groves on ‘Cuckoo’ Allusions, Censorship, and Live at LondonMoot

February 6, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Four Notes for Beatrice Groves Fans out there! If you enjoyed Nagini Maledictus and ‘Fantastic Beasts,’ you’ll love these new posts —

(1) Oxford University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Renaissance Studies Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, has turned her significant learning and great love for Rowling’s work to the Galbraith murder mysteries. In two posts up now at MuggleNet.com, she explains the depths of the poems that bracket the action of The Cuckoo’s Calling, Rossetti’s A Dirge and Tennyson’s Ulysses.

In the first, ‘Literary Allusion in The Cuckoo’s Calling: Christina Rossetti’s A Dirge,’ Prof Groves opens up the mysterious and relatively obscure Rossetti poem that serves as epigraph to the first Strike novel and perhaps to the whole series. If you were left scratching your head about the ‘Cuckoo’ part of that book and its relationship to the poem, prepare your mind for illumination!

In the second, ‘Literary Allusion in The Cuckoo’s Calling: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses,‘ she parses the closing reading from memory the peg-legged private eye makes to that poem and the meaning of ‘I am Become a Name.’ More after the jump —

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Beatrice Groves, Cormoran Strike

Harry Potter Track at Southwest Popular and American Culture Association (SWPACA) Conference in Albuquerque

February 6, 2018 by 1 Comment

I am on my way this afternoon to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association conference (SWPACA) being held there this Wednesday to Saturday. I’d never heard of this annual gathering of Potter Pundits until this past year’s Chestnut Hill College Harry Potter Conference — and there is big news from them that we’ll be announcing later this week — where I met a gaggle of brilliant presenters that had taken part in SWPACA and heard more than once that it was a kind of west coast ‘sister conference’ to Chestnut Hill.

I really should have known about it, if only because the Harry Potter track of talks has been the source of several critical essay anthologies edited by Christopher E. Bell. I’m looking forward to listening to the talks, catching up with Chestnut Hill veterans (to include Patrick McCauley and Karen Wendling, CHC sponsors), and maybe even signing up a few guests for Katy McDaniel’s ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ podcast on MuggleNet.

Here is the program of speakers and talks for the SWPACA 2018 Harry Potter Track. If you’re coming, please say hello! If you’re not, please let me know what talks you’d love to hear more about.

I will be speaking about what a study of the writer Rowling says she “really loves,” Vladimir Nabokov, tells us about her work; in brief, that we have misunderstood her entirely insomuch as we think of her as a children’s book writer, a political partisan, or just the most successful of conventional story tellers. If you want to hear a recording of that, let me know in the boxes below!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Lethal White: What We Can Expect

February 5, 2018 by 2 Comments

J. K. Rowling’s Twitter feed last week was a veritable flood of tweets on the status of the fourth Cormoran Strike novel, how she plans her books (a bit more on that), and even the physical tools she uses to write. Sadly, no news on when we can expect to read Lethal White.

We’re overdue, though, for a review here of what we know already about the fourth book. [For a collection of every post here at HogwartsProfessor about the Strike mysteries, enjoy the 49 listed and linked here: Cormoran Strike HogwartsProfessor Posts]

We know quite a lot, I think, if the knowledge cannot be certain. Here is a survey for your comment, amendment, and correction! 

(1) The Office Chain of Command — We know, because Rowling posted it on her Robert Galbraith site, that she has sketched the story of an office drama in which Robin goes undercover as the Personal Assistant to the CEO of a company.


Is this Lethal White? It’s the best bet going, of course, but we don’t know much beyond the personalities involved. Even the crime Robin is investigating is not revealed. Or, for that matter, if she’s working for Strike still or on her own.

Perhaps she is a PA because she has left Strike to appease Matt and she was able to get the PA job she’d turned down in Calling? Keep your eye on that office manager, though. “Young, well-intentioned, unhappy” and circled in Galbraith’s notes.

For more on this chart and other Robert-Galbraith.com home-page hints and revelations, check this out. Note, too, the dog-eared magazine article on the subject of Barley Hall in York. Do we have a location predominantly outside London for the fourth mystery?

(2) The Timing — July, maybe August 2011

Rowling revealed in an interview post Career of Evil that we won’t be left wondering about what happened at the wedding after Robin says, “I do.” We know from the very helpful timelines posted at StrikeFans.com that the wedding was on 2 July 2011 and that the first three novels were about 1 month, 1 month, and 2 1/2 months, respectively, in duration.

Taking a look at news highlights in the UK for July and August, then, might give us an idea of the background noise likely to be heard in Lethal White. That may or may not be significant, but the Royal Wedding we kept hearing about certainly served as a perumbration of Robin and Matt’s nuptials in Career.

Three things jump out, frankly, as possibilities. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Guest Post: ‘Authentic’ Cormoran Strike

February 4, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Sleuthing for Truth in Albion: William Blake and Concerns with Authenticity in the Cormoran Strike Series

By ChrisC.

The solitary handful of souls who managed to tune in found a left-field surprise waiting for them in the BBC’s adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s The Cuckoo’s Calling.  Near the 20-minute mark of the second episode, rock musician Evan Duffield has dropped into the private consulting office of one, C.B. Strike.  The detective is not in at the moment, but his secretary is holding the fort.  With that in mind, Evan decides now is the perfect moment to demonstrate the mating rituals of the English “Right Prat” in his natural habitat.

What’s remarkable about this scene is how it tosses a curveball to its audience.  What we are given is an immature little boy in a man’s clothing trying to put the moves on Holiday Granger’s Robin, Strike’s resident Girl Friday.  We expect Evan to reveal himself as a complete fool, we don’t expect to him to use a Hermetic English poet to do it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Guest Posts