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In case you don’t follow the Hogwarts Professor “recent comments” sidebar (it’s on your right), there has been some activity on the HogPro thread of a few months ago about Michael Gambon, the actor who plays Albus Dumbledore in the Warner Brothers movies, and his disclosure that he doesn’t read the books because he doesn’t need to in order to get the part right. I argued that his push-and-shove Dumbledore, mirabile dictu, post Deathly Hallows doesn’t seem that far off the mark after all. It may ruin how the story is supposed to work but the Deathly Hallows Machiavellian Dumby is all Gambon.

The news item that revived that lively conversation was the revelation that Julie Walters, the actress who plays Molly Weasley in the movies, is very much of the same school of thought as Mr. Gambon. She said: Read the rest of this entry »

I confess to being clueless as to what scenes in Half-Blood Prince or Deathly Hallows these sets could be for. Please share your thoughts if your speculative-gifts are crying out for exercise a year after the speculative-marathon of last May and June.

In late February of this year I traveled to New Haven to sit in as a guest expert of sorts in Prof. Danielle Tumminio’s “Christian Theology and Harry Potter” course (CSBR 352b). It was a Hogwarts Professor dream date, as you might imagine. Picture a neo-gothic seminar room with a diverse group of very thoughtful and well-read young adults who meet to discuss topics like sacramental theology in the context of their reading of the Harry Potter epic. And my book was part of the reading for the course.

The course description said that it was an “exploration of ways that the Harry Potter novels espouse a Christian theological worldview” with “readings from theological texts as well as the novel series.” Prof. Tumminio, Read the rest of this entry »

Stop the clocks! Jim Dale’s recorded book version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally became available for my children to check out from the local library. They put their name on the waiting list when we moved here last June and the three CD copies went into circulation early last August, so, do the math. A Nine Months Wait!

These books may have fallen from the New York Times bestsellers list, but it’s Deathly Hallows Day again at my house. I have read the book aloud to the younger trio, of course, and one of them has read it herself - but, when they came home from the library yesterday, you would have thought Santa had come early to Allentown this year. They ran into my office saying “Dad, look what we’ve got!” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a different take on the spiritual understanding and underpinnings of Harry Potter from Israel. It turns out Harry is not a Christ figure, which makes sense in a way; but who would have thought that Jesus would be cast as He-Who-Must-Not-Be Named? Talk about variance in Reader Response… Read the rest of this entry »

And to be part of the A-Level Exams, no less. Read about it here and here.

However appropriate or inappropriate this selection may be, it certainly challenges the assumption that there will be a significant time lag between Ms. Rowling’s popular success and her acceptance by the Academy. The Brits have made our favorite boy wizard hero no small part of their secondary school English curriculum.

Perhaps this means there will soon be an endowed chair in Hogwarts Studies at Eton for which I can apply… Read the rest of this entry »

No, I still don’t want to discuss the merits of Ms. Rowling’s law suit against the publishers of Mr. Vander Ark’s Lexicon. That is a subject for the judge trying the case — and everyone who thinks they know how it will turn out and what that ruling will mean in the long term is kidding themselves and, frankly, wasting their time in an especially unedifying way.

On the other hand, on a site for serious readers, I am obliged to note trends in criticism of Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Linda McCabe sent me a link this morning to an article by a notable writer about Ms. Rowling and her lawsuit that suggests that a backlash against Ms. Rowling is building and that this will affect understanding of her books for years to come.

That — and how much our beliefs about an author color our understanding of his or work — are subjects worth talking about. Do we love or loath Harry largely as a function of how we feel about Ms. Rowling? Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, Wizard Rock is a blast but it’s time to put Potter-mania and Fandom aside and get back to the books and some serious thinking, folks. Here are three notes on Umberto Eco and how to think about the narrative of the Harry Potter stories, especially about why it resonates so universally.

The first is a delightful introduction to the man himself in I Invented Dan Brown, a Jerusalem Post interview with Italian novelist and semiotics professor Umberto Eco: Read the rest of this entry »

A Guest post — with photos — from HogPro stringer (and real-life Spokesman-Review freelance correspondent in Spokane, WA), Arabella Figg! Thank you, Arabella, for this HogwartsProfessor.com Exclusive:

A Rockumentary That’s Wizard!

By Arabella Figg (Deborah Chan, Muggle Alias)—April 18, 2008

“Arabella, please send us a full report!”—John Granger

When John Granger announced at Hogwarts Professor that young twin sisters and filmmakers Megan and Mallory Schuyler had made a documentary feature film on Harry Potter wizard rock and the world premiere was in my hometown of Spokane, WA I was floored.

Wizard rock? Enough of it for a documentary? Made by Spokanites? I could attend a unique Harry Potter event? Wow!

My fan participation has been limited to HogPro. I knew nothing of the wizard rock subculture and was eager to have my Harry Potter horizons broadened.

The Filmmakers

“I feel we’ve grown up through this project.”—Megan Schuyler
“It’s our contribution.”—Mallory Schuyler

(Mallory, Deborah, and Megan: photo by Richard Chan)

The Schuylers (Griffinclaw Productions) traveled cross-country for two years to document wizard rock and its musicians of all ages, styles and creativity. It was Mallory who coined the term “rocking and rowling.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hard as it may be to believe, we have live footage.

Your thoughts?

I’ve heard the saying “life imitating art” before — but “nature echoing art” is a first for me. Any precedence for this sort of thing in your experience?

Or should we be thinking that as a child Ms. Rowling saw an albino stag in the Forest of Dean? It would certainly have made seeing the St. Godric icon with white stag or reading about the Narnian albino a different experience than most of us had.