Yesterday, Rowling tweeted the new trailer for the HBO+ Bronte Studios adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television. She included a heart emoji, an owl, and a lightning bolt as her only commentary. Nick Jeffery will be sharing his thoughts about the new Hogwarts coat of arms and four House heraldry recently posted (lots of alchemy, I’m told) at the HogwartsProfessor Substack site tomorrow.
I just wanted to put up this brief comment today that the heart can mean Rowling is pleased with the trailer, the owl can just be a reference to Hedwig or that this is an important message for you straight from the Hogwarts owlery, and the flash of lightning could just be a signature of The Boy Who Lived, whose facial scar is in the shape of a jagged line.
I think they’re all those things, but, as with ‘Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweek,’ there’s a lot beneath what Rowling offers as throw-aways that you can see by taking a second longer look.
The Heart to Rowling is a lot more than a token of sentiment. It is a Golden Thread in her work that the Heart is a pulsing symbol of the human spiritual capacity. Only the Eye does as much heavy freight of meaning lifting in her work and I think the Heart surpasses the Eye ultimately in importance except insomuch as she elides their meaning. Read The Heart is Not About Emotions and Affection but the Human Spiritual Center for discussion of the symbolism and the Golden Thread.
The Owl, too, is an ancient and dynamic symbol, the reason frankly there is a Hedwig rather than Hedwig being the meaning of the token. Rowling clearly draws on her experience of owls in Greek mythology (and reading of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad drawing on the same source) in making the owl the vessel of communication and supernatural perception in her Wizarding World. None of the letters written by her witches and wizards need to be addressed because an owl is so attuned to everyone and everything that it is able effortlessly to understand where it needs to go, God’s own GPS. What is usually described as a symbol of Wisdom is clearly much more a revelation of a mind able to grasp the great interconnectedness of things which in turns takes us back to the Eye and the Heart — and what Rowling is trying to bring to readers in her transformative literature. (Contrast this Greek mythology symbolism with what owls represent in Christian scripture; quite the gulf between Athens and Jerusalem there!)
And the Lightning Bolt? The forehead scar, the mark of Orestes, the Greek hero who avenged his father’s betrayal and murder, is another polyvalent and profoundly spiritual cipher as a lightning bolt. In it simultaneously the reader experiences simultaneously as we do in a thunder storm albeit imaginatively (1) sudden illumination or enlightenment, (2) from above, the heavens, the super-conscious realm, and, most important, (3) a reorientating shock, a cathartic shaking, the jolting moment that jars us out of our psychological rut and cage to see the world afresh with our ‘eye of the heart.’
Rowling’s three emojis on her tweet about the fun trailer below can be read as fan servicing variations on the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘hand-clapping’ using tokens associated with the books. No doubt about that reading.
I think it as important to note, however, the possibility that Mrs Murray is signaling to the HBO+ audience as well as the international of readers that this adaptation is about trying to reproduce as much as is possible in an iconoclastic medium some replica of the imaginative and transformative experience to be had in the books. The Heart, the Owl, and the Lightning Bolt all point to that experience and depth of meaning.
Cheers!
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