Friday, March 23, 2007

Ginny Weasley is a Vampire!

Look what I found in the Wikipedia entry for Romanian vampires:

Romanian tradition described a myriad of ways of bringing about a vampire. A person born with a caul, an extra nipple, a tail, or extra hair was doomed to become a vampire. The same fate applied to someone born too early, someone whose mother encountered black cat cross her path, and someone who was born out of wedlock. Others who became vampires were those who died an unnatural death or before baptism, the seventh child in any family (presuming all of his or her previous siblings were of the same sex), the child of a pregnant woman who avoided eating salt, and a person who was looked upon by a vampire or a witch. Moreover, being bitten by a vampire meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

Random Thoughts on Quidditch

Like everything else in the wizarding world, I think Quidditch came out of Harry. In particular, I think it was designed to showcase his strengths — his grit and determination, his courage, his ability to spot things other people don't. And I also think it's an embodiment of Jo's principles, that she thinks highly of Seekers who rise above the game and focus on the one slippery, elusive, subtle thing they know is out there but almost no one else can see.

Since Seeker is also the term for someone who's having their tarot cards read, it's also apt for Harry because it's his life unfolding in the books. That probably makes all of us the Readers (the ones reading and interpreting the tarot cards), but I think the best contrast is with Jo's Seer. Trelawney has overly magnified eyes and fails to see the occasional truth in her own predictions, which Harry does see, but only in the course of seeking out Voldemort. Basically, I think Jo has a lot more respect for people who relentlessly seek out the truth than for people who see things and take them at face value.

I've sometimes stumbled over ideas that seem too good to be true and felt like Harry the time he accidentally caught the snitch in his mouth.

And while this may not have anything to do with anything, I also like how the number of points the Seeker earns (150) is the same as Dumbledore's age, which Jo gave as 150 in both 2000 and 2005. It might just be her "big, important number" (like I think the "forests of Albania" are just her "Forbidden Forest for grown-ups").

One final thing on this subject: I just learned yesterday that the halo of light often show around the heads of saints in artwork is called a nimbus.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

I was thinking yesterday about the various types of life lessons Harry learns throughout the books, and how he learns them. Romance, or romantic love, for example. He never really gets a lesson all at once, his understanding is slowly built up through lots of different incidents — some he's involved in, others where he's more of a passive observer. And as I was trying to trace out various principles and how he comes to learn about them, guess what image popped in my head? A map of the London Underground. Which may or may not mean anything, but I thought it was kind of cool.

Also read a bit on the Lexicon (under Dumbledore's profile) about the connections of Dumbledore's names to the Beowulf epic. Beowulf slays the monster Grendel, which sounds an awful lot like Grindelwald. He then dives into a lake and gets Grendel's mum, which reminded me of Harry's second task in GoF. The name "Beowulf" has been translated by some as "bee-wulf"; the "wulf" part might have something to do with the Wulfing clan that shows up in the poem, and sounds like one of Dumbledore's middle names, Wulfric. And "Dumbledore" was an Old English word for "bumblebee." I followed up on bee mythology a bit, and the most significant thing that turned up was the name Merope, which means bee-eater, and somehow refers to an important archetypal character in various bee mythologies. All of which may still amount to nothing in terms of shedding light on the mysteries of Harry Potter, but seemed worth noting down for future reference nonetheless.

Finally, I read the story of Parzival, the Grail Knight, last week. Dumbledore's middle name Percival supposedly refers to this guy, and I have to say I was really struck by how similar the powers of the Holy Grail are to the Philosopher's Stone. Eternal life and riches, basically. I suspect — and I think JKR would cautiously agree — that they were just two different names and mythologies for the same thing. That same thing that I think the Potter series has been leading up to as well.