It’s Beedle the Bard Day at last! Please share your praise, criticism, first thoughts, and second thoughts about these long awaited Tales from Ms. Rowling.
Here are twelve questions for to guide your reflections:
(1) How was the run-up to Beedle’s release different than previous Potter publications? Was it more like a movie or schoolbook party than a book event? What did your bookstore do to make the event memorable, if anything?
(2) Having read the synopses on Amazon, what was your motivation to buy this book? To complete your collection of all-things-Rowling? A charitable contribution? To participate in online discussions? To read Dumbledore’s notes?
(3) Your favorite tale? Why?
(4) What tale sent a confused message or a tired one?
(5) Which tale confirmed a suspicion you had about a Potter theme that was suggested in books or interviews but not fully developed in canon?
(6) Are these stories morality tales as Ron and Hermione say in Deathly Hallows at the Lovegood zigguraut? Or are there allegorical and symbolic layers of meaning as well? Give an example and your interpretation, please!
(7) The value-added portion of this edition are Ms. Rowling’s illustrations and Dumbledore’s editorial notes. What are your thoughts about the illustrations? Could she have illustrated her own books do you think? What do we learn about the stories from her pictures?
(8) Dumbledore’s notes: are they faux academic, teasing egghead footnote scholarship that misses the forest for the trees of obscure citation trivia of editions and marginalia? Or does he make substantial comments about what the tales mean and how to interpret them? What was his best joke?
(9) Did anyone out there buy the Deluxe $100 edition from Amazon? Are you feeling buyer’s remorse, delight in being the only one on the block to own one, fascination with its feel and text? Let us know what it’s like, please.
(10) Biggest surprise of your purchase? Delight? Disappointment?
(11) How do the Tales expand your appreciation of the canonical seven novels? Was there something in the presentation of or notes to ‘The Tale of Three Brothers’ that helped you understand what the Trio experienced in hearing the story at the Lovegood’s place?
(12) What questions do you want to discuss? Were there any references to Fandom controversies between-the-lines? Harry as gateway to the occult? Gay Dumbledore? Snape as Vampire? ‘Shipping? Memerson?
I will be away from the computer all day to be at church for the Feast but I leave you in very good hands (I’ll let my ever capable stand-in introduce himself). Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts, questions, and answers to the questions above; please remember to note which question(s) you are answering before diving in.
See you Friday!
[JAB] And it now being past midnight in Greenwich, England and therefore officially the 4th of December in the homeland of the Potterverse, I shall let the cat out of the bag.
The Professor, despite his faultless wisdom, has (perhaps due to occasionally faulty judgment) chosen, in absentia, to once again inflict you with none other than–Moi–JohnABaptist as editorial surrogate-for-a-day!
Posts and comments that I leave while logged in with the Professor’s id will be marked at their beginning with the initials [JAB]. Hopefully this will serve as fair warning that the Sorcerer is out and has left his Apprentice in charge…now where did I leave that fool wand?
PS: To Arabella and other lovers of felines, all bagged cats mentioned in this post were metaphorical in substance and hence unharmed, physically or mentally by the experience.
As for question (1): I had ordered a deluxe edition from Amazon.co.uk. But they have not been able to deliver on date to my address in Norway. So I went into a city bookshop in Bergen, asking for the Norwegian translation (which had also been advertised to be on date). But the lady could only offer the English Bloomsbury edition. She hadn’t even discovered that there had been a promise of a Norwegian translation on the same date. So my conclusion is that this seems to be a not so big event, really.
As for content: I have much left to read. But I loved the last sentence by Dumbledore: «..- clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else.»
Yours Odd
(Bergen. Norway)
So, apparently John & other Potter pundits weren’t slammed?
Some answers:
3) Favorite tale: The Fountain of Fair Fortune. I love the moral: that you can get your heart’s desire but it’s not going to happen the way you think. Or perhaps the moral is: life is what happens while you’re busy making plans.
4) Confused/tired message:none. Even though we’ve heard some of these morals before, the stories provide new ways of getting the morals across.
5) Wouldn’t say any particular tale conveyed this message, rather it was JKR herself, in the intro, who tells us that those who perform magic find it just as hard to soolve hteir problems as we do, i.e. that magic is not a “magical” cure.
6) I’ll wait for the books which are bound to be written on this
7) She shouldn’t leave her day job
8) Dumbledore’s comments provide many things: making the moral explicit, and then analyzing it at greater depth; some historical background to the tales, including the invaluable comments about historical revisionism of the Hopping Pot; and also some personal reflections. His reflections on the tale of the Three Brothers are so personal and so linked to the canon that I can see them easily included in DH. I wonder, in fact, if JKR first wrote that as part of DH and later removed it for her own reasons.
9) I’ve got the blue/grey covered version. It’s beautiful to look at and to touch.
10) Biggest delight: that Dumbledore keeps lying about the Hallows all the way to the end.
And the funniest part, for me, was Dumbledore’s repeated footnotes acknowledging himself as a brilliant and knowledgable wizard. But I also laughed at wizarding tell-all books: Hairy Snout, Human Heart, a heart rending account of one man’s struggle with lycanthropy Also liked the faux-academic tone.
I will add a different perspective – are any of the other All-Pros simply not interested in the book? For whatever reason, I haven’t even considered buying it, and have not thought it’s something I need to read. Maybe I should.
I’ll toss out the question – should those of us who are “Five Keys”-type devotees of the HP series necessarily consider this new book an important appendix?
Nicholas
(John – Sprasnikum!)
No, Potter pundits were not slammed. The only people who got slammed were the people who want to edit and re-write and sanitize fairy tales and make them “appropriate for children.”
Well, the pure blood racists didn’t fare too well either. 🙂
1) It was a non-event at my book store. In fact, I was apparently the first person to request reserving the book whenever it was announced – the clerk had to check with the manager about it. They did have a table displaying copies but that was in the back near the children’s section of the store. But no midnight release, no party, and no lines.
(2) The only reason I read the synopses was because I thought I’d never have the book. I was happy to learn that I could read it for myself – and yes, I wanted it partly because it completes my Rowling collection, but mostly because I wanted to read more of her stories, contribute to the charity and read Dumbledore’s notes. I also wanted her own art work, as well as the new cover by GrandPre.
(3) Your favorite tale? Why?
On first reading (and I haven’t really read Babbity Rabbit yet) is “The Fountain of Fair Fortune”. For the reasons that Red Rocker gave and also for the example of what happens when people help each other, putting their own needs last.
(4) I didn’t find any confusing or tired – rather they were typical of Rowling’s ability to take something familiar and give it a fresh feeling.
(5) Which tale confirmed a suspicion you had about a Potter theme that was suggested in books or interviews but not fully developed in canon?
Hmmm, I have to think about this some more – no answer as yet.
(6) Are these stories morality tales as Ron and Hermione say in Deathly Hallows at the Lovegood zigguraut? Or are there allegorical and symbolic layers of meaning as well? Give an example and your interpretation, please!
Probably they could be seen as all of the above, but mostly I read them as morality tales. Each one had a point to make and got there quite nicely in the end.
(7) The value-added portion of this edition are Ms. Rowling’s illustrations and Dumbledore’s editorial notes. What are your thoughts about the illustrations? Could she have illustrated her own books do you think? What do we learn about the stories from her pictures?
I love her illustrations and would have loved having them in the HP books. I quite like the ones done by GrandPre, but there is something of whimsy about Rowling’s style and I like it.
(8) Dumbledore’s notes:
Dumbledore’s notes were great. There is always a risk, I think, in explaining what we’ve read, especially in a fairy tale/morality tale. It’s like explaining the joke that was really funny but then some people look confused after the punch line. If you have to explain it, then it just seems to fall flat.
However, Dumbledore’s notes added so much depth to each story and also gave insights into who he was, how he thought about things. So I really liked that part.
(9) No deluxe edition for me, though I wouldn’t be disappointed if I receive one as a Christmas gift. (Not holding my breath on that one.)
(10) Biggest surprise of your purchase? Delight? Disappointment?
No real surprises. But I did really like the intro by Rowling and the comments by Dumbledore. I knew they (Dumbledore’s comments) were included, but thought they would be like Hary’s and Ron’s comments in the margin of the previous text books. So finding pages of them was great. And I wasn’t disappointed at all.
(11) How do the Tales expand your appreciation of the canonical seven novels? Was there something in the presentation of or notes to ‘The Tale of Three Brothers’ that helped you understand what the Trio experienced in hearing the story at the Lovegood’s place?
I need to re-read it to answer this one. I haven’t thought much about it since I’d already read the Three Brothers quite a few times in Deathly Hallows.
(12) What questions do you want to discuss? Were there any references to Fandom controversies between-the-lines? Harry as gateway to the occult? Gay Dumbledore? Snape as Vampire? ‘Shipping? Memerson?
The main controversy I saw addressed was the book banning, and there was nothing new there. Rowling has made it clear in canon and in interviews that she thinks that kind of restriction is never acceptable.
I didn’t see anything of gay Dumbledore, or Snape as a vampire (sorry, John), or Memerson. The only thing about Harry as a gateway to the occult, I think, was in the intro by Rowling.
Pat