This month’s issue of The Rowling Library Magazine was once again worth the time it took to read every single article, each one with a surprise inside for the serious reader, fandom zealot, book collector, and video game player. You can download it here as a pdf or read it online for free — and, yes, you should subscribe to support this consistently excellent collection of international writing about all things ‘Rowling.’
The four articles I enjoyed in this month’s issue were:
Solve et Coagula, Part One — Though very difficult to read and without links or footnotes to follow up on, A. Dalla Palma’s piece about the Fantastic Beasts film franchise’s alchemical backdrop and esoteric content was a delightfully challenging introduction to the speculation happening among serious students of these movies. I dropped out of that effort after laboring to discern what was Rowling’s work from the Hollywood formula dross in the first Beasts entry, an impossible and frankly disheartening task, but I am pleased both by the hermetic quality of this article’s contents and by the idea implicit in it that Rowling was attempting to craft a remarkably sophisticated and challenging experience in this medium, something akin to the transformative experiences of her written work. That the ‘Two Davids’ succeeded in frustrating (which is to say “hijacking and destroying” that effort to dumb it all down to blockbuster pablum?) that effort brings me back to why I dropped out of reading the Beasts screenplays closely. I hope very much in Part Two of this series that the author will include references to his or her sources as well as explanations of alchemical terms that are crucial for a reader’s ability to understand the symbolism involved.
Who Will Watch It: Adults or Kids? — The first article was very much the sort of thing I enjoy reading, namely, an interpretation of Rowling’s work that goes well beneath the story surface to get at its symbolic depths, but I struggled with the prose, organization, and referencing in the piece. The feature article, in contrast, was about a subject I know very little about and care about less, the HBO Max adaptation of the Harry Potter series for television, but which captivated me by the clarity of its argument and by the information it shared. In a nutshell, the unnamed author put his or her finger on the chief challenge facing the teevee team (identifying its core audience), speculating intelligently from the players now involved and their previous work what their direction will be in this adaptation, and suggesting a likely course. This was, frankly, The Rowling Library Magazine at its best: a topic of no little importance (even I recognize that the HBO adaptation will be a landmark event and displace to some degree the unfortunate film adaptations of the stories) approached from a fresh perspective with significant insight in well crafted argument.
Hogwarts Castle in the Media — This piece by LukeGki (no spacing — are all the articles in The Rowling Library now written beneath pseudonyms?) of HogwartsInMedia.wordPress.com was another revelation to me. I would never have thought to compare and contrast, not to mention chart and map, the various descriptions of the Hogwarts Castle in Rowling’s work and depictions in her illustrations, the Warner Brothers film adaptations, and in the Hogwarts Legacy video game, but LukeGki has done just that and in comprehensive fashion. I suppose his conclusion should not be surprising — the films and games have little relation to the Codex Hogwarts, Rowling’s version, at the level of layout — but the effort expended in detailing the departures from and cataloging the additions to Rowling’s work is heroic.
Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions — This Rowling Library review of the latest video game was, frankly, a devastating take-down. Though wonderfully polite and objective, its description of the game’s arcade style Quidditch — one Beater rather than two, the Golden Snitch only being worth 30 points and capturing it not being the end of the game, etc. — its detailing its price point relative to its competitors in the market place, and, most startling, its failure to capture market share expressed in numbers of users was a complete take-down that concluded the ‘Quidditch Champions’ game did not have a promising future. Again, I couldn’t care less about this subject, but I was more than impressed by the quality of the research and of the writing here.
I think my take away from this issue was about the courage of the Rowling Library editorial team in simply sharing the truth as they see it in this issue. Other than the obligatory eulogy the late actress who played Minerva McGonagall and the Auctions endpaper, every article was critical of Rowling, Inc’s monetization exercises with respect to the Rowling originals each exploits. This was much less in play, I grant you, in the feature article about the adaptation for television, about the writer was carefully and thoughtfully optimistic, but the acceptance of the Wall Street Journal thesis in the Solve piece that there was a break between Rowling and Warner Brothers about the third Beasts film as its working premise, the detailed description of the infidelity of the movies to the Hogwarts in the books, and the delightfully objective and brutal review of the Quidditch Champions game all showed an admirable reserve towards those who profit from Rowling’s imagination and genius.
Which reserve and objectivity about the umbrella covering of fandom subjects that the Rowling Library Magazine makes it an invaluable resource to people like me who occupy one of the niches in the Rowling-verse and neglect all the rest. It is an enterprise that deserves your close reading, and, yes, your financial support. Hat’s off once again to our friends at the Rowling Library Magazine for another challenging and beautifully presented collection of articles!
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