Harry Potter Lexicon Minute

Everything turns a bit darker in Book Five. Lord Voldemort has returned. Dementors show up in unexpected places. And Harry is unhappy, even when he has re-joined his friends before the end of the summer.
Ready to find out why? Let’s go!
Podcasts:
Encore Presentation: OP 1: Drought by Steve VanderArk
OP 2: Kneazles by Steve VanderArk
OP 3: Why Not Side-Along Apparition? by Steve VanderArk
OP 4: Discovering Grimmauld Place by Steve VanderArk
OP 5: I Don’t Think I Like This Book by Steve VanderArk
OP 6: Drawing Room Delights by Steve VanderArk
OP 7: The Ministry of Magic by Steve VanderArk
OP 8: Sweet Victory Forshadowed by Steve VanderArk
OP 9: What is a “Flint?” by Steve VanderArk
OP 9: Lucius? I Remember Him by Steve VanderArk
The Twins’ O.W.L.s by hpboy13
Number Twelve by Selena Gallagher
Portraits by Eileen Jones
The Photograph and the Boggart by Abby Koop
Seeing is Believing by Eileen Jones
Episode 3: “There’s an Elf Head Hanging Outside the Window” by Steve VanderArk
Episode 10: “This Gap Is Where It All Changed” by Steve VanderArk
Reader’s Guides:
These guides were originally written in March of 2002. Since that time, a few edits were made here and there but basically the text remained the same. To get ready for this Canon Celebration, our editors have been revising each one. We’ve added fan artwork to the Guide which illustrates the text. At the bottom in the Commentary section we’ve added a gallery of additional artwork. So even if you’ve read our guides before, please give them another look. And if you’re doing a re-read of the first book, have the Guide to each chapter open as you go! I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information you didn’t know.
Reader’s Guide to C...

Welcome to the third book in the series, The Prisoner of Azkaban! Many fans consider this to be their favorite Harry Potter novel. Harry is another year older, another face-off with Voldemort under his belt. What could be in store for him and his friends this year?
Let’s crack the new adventure open and find out!
Podcasts:
Canon Thoughts: Book Three by Steve VanderArk
Chocolate by Selena Gallagher
Pets at Hogwarts by Ashmita Shanthakumar
Reader’s Guides:

These guides were originally written in March of 2002. Since that time, a few edits were made here and there but basically the text remained the same. To get ready for this Canon Celebration, our editors have been revising each one. We’ve added fan artwork to the Guide which illustrates the text. At the bottom in the Commentary section we’ve added a gallery of additional artwork. So even if you’ve read our guides before, please give them another look. And if you’re doing a re-read of the first book, have the Guide to each chapter open as you go! I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information you didn’t know.
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 1
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 2
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 3
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 4
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 5
Calendars
Fitting the books into the real-life calendars isn’t easy! In fact, it’s impossible. But that didn’t stop us:
Day by day calendar of events in the book
Essays
Where Does the Name “Knight Bus” Come From? by Morag Traynor and Susan
Harry’s Things by Morag Traynor
Interesting Artwork
We have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of fan artwork in our collection. Some subjects get a lot of depictions — Diagon Alley is a favorite topic, for example, and, well, of course it is! But there are a few pieces which illustrate more unusual moments in the text. Here are some examples:

Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be
caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises. (PA1)

Harry had never met a vampire, but he had seen pictures of them
in his Defence Against the Dark Arts classes, and Black, with his waxy white skin, looked just like one. (PA3)

Percy pompously greeting Harry – and Fred & George going over the top imitating him (PA4)
Artwork Challenge

Welcome to the fifth installment of our celebration series!
We’ve been warned not to return to Hogwarts, met some new allies and foes, and accidentally broken one of the most fundamental rules of wizarding society. What a way to start the school year!
Ready to have some fun exploring what’s next? Here we go!
Podcasts:
CS 6: Howlers, Mandrakes, and Muggleborns by Eileen Jones
CS 7: Mudbloods and Murmurs by Eileen Jones
CS 8: Ghosts by Eileen Jones
CS 9: Filch by Eileen Jones
CS 10: Harry, Draco and Quidditch by Eileen Jones
CS 11: Loyalty by Eileen Jones
CS 12: In Dumbledore’s Office by Eileen Jones
Reader’s Guides:
These guides were originally written in March of 2002. Since that time, a few edits were made here and there but basically the text remained the same. To get ready for this Canon Celebration, our editors have been revising each one. We’ve added fan artwork to the Guide which illustrates the text. At the bottom in the Commentary section we’ve added a gallery of additional artwork. So even if you’ve read our guides before, please give them another look. And if you’re doing a re-read of the first book, have the Guide to each chapter open as you go! I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information you didn’t know.
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 6
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 7
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 8
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 9
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 10
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 11
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 12
Calendars
Fitting the first book into the real-life calendars isn’t easy! In fact, it’s impossible. But that didn’t stop us:
Day by day calendar of events in the book
Essays
Troubles with Time by Steve VanderArk
Hogwarts Ghosts by Mike Gray
How Do Duels Work? by Hugo Costa Paes
Interesting Artwork
We have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of fan artwork in our collection. Some subjects get a lot of depictions — Diagon Alley is a favorite topic, for example, and, well, of course it is!

In my last podcast, I talked about the first of two magic duels in chapter 36 of Order of the Phoenix, the one between Harry and Bellatrix. Now it’s time to move on to the main event, the massive duel between Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort.
There is no other magical battle in the entire series to equal this one. The roller-coaster flow of spells and counterspells is wild and breathtaking. This is certainly one of the most exciting, most cinematic magical battles in the entire saga.
This mighty duel is the centerpiece of the entire seven-book tale. We are most of the way through the middle book of the series. It’s the watershed moment, when the forces of good and evil collide and the fate of the wizarding world is at stake. But neither side wins, not yet. So what is the actual point?
The most important aspect of this duel is to show how powerful truly high-level wizards are, and how powerless Harry is in this situation. Remember, up to this point Harry has seen himself as what I call “super-hero Harry.” He has begun to count on his abilities and his “special-ness” to be able to face Voldemort one day. And of course he does! Any of us would. If we have to fight a supervillain, we had better find our inner superhero or we’re toast.
And toast it is. Harry gets a first hand look at just how powerful he will need to be in order to go toe to toe — or wand to wand — with Voldemort. He sees magic way beyond that which he has experienced, way beyond what he even thought possible. His abilities, while impressive for a fifteen year old wizard, are nowhere near strong enough for a flat out battle.
Of course, we’re seeing it too. We’ve been wondering how this is all going to end and assuming there will be a huge showdown at some point. We have imagined Harry and Voldemort in a duel, something like that Priori Incantatem faceoff in the graveyard, and figuring that maybe, just maybe the twin wand cores would be the secret to Harry winning the day. But in this duel, there is little wand-against-wand spellcasting. The truly epic combat consists of all environmental effects and transfiguration. The most jaw-dropping spells completely bypass the kind of “spells meeting in midair” situation that allowed Harry to escape the graveyard battle. Instead we see the water from the fountain whipped into a liquid prison and streams of fire morphing into a serpent. We see Voldemort teleport from place to place and then completely dematerialize to take on spirit form and to possess Harry.
Even Dumbledore has no defense against this last tactic, and Harry feels Voldemort take over, enveloping and consuming him. And then we get the first inkling of the kind of power which CAN defeat the Dark Lord. Harry’s heart is filled not with hate and aggression but with love for Sirius. And that power is what drives Voldemort away. Here’s how it’s described:
He was gone from the hall, he was locked in the coils of a creature with red eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended and the creature’s began: they were fused together, bound by pain, and there was no escape
And when the creature spoke, it used Harry’s mouth, so that in his agony he felt his jaw move
`Kill me now, Dumbledore…’
Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release, Harry felt the creature use him again…
`If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy…’
Let the pain stop, thought Harry… let him kill us… end it, Dumbledore… death is nothing compared to this…
And I’ll see Sirius again…

In this podcast we’re going to take a look at the incredible magical duels in chapter 36 of the Order of the Phoenix.
Before we get to the main duel in the chapter, however, that between Voldemort and Dumbledore, we learn a bit about the Unforgivable Curses when Harry and Bellatrix have their own duel in the Atrium before Voldemort appears.
After killing Sirius, Bellatrix runs away through the Department of Mysteries and into the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic headquarters. Harry chases after her, consumed by righteous anger. Once he catches up to her, he fires off the Cruciatus curse in her direction, knocking her off her feet. But she isn’t affected the way he would have expected. He has cast the spell incorrectly.
Here we see something very interesting. The spell clearly involves more than the words and the wandwork. In some ways it mirrors the Patronus Charm, which requires happy thoughts. In this case, Harry’s anger, fierce though it is, doesn’t provide the needed “energy,” if you will. Here’s how the book describes it:
Hatred rose in Harry such as he had never known before; he flung himself out from behind the fountain and bellowed, “Crucio!”
Bellatrix screamed: the spell had knocked her off her feet, but she did not writhe and shriek with pain as Neville had – she was already back on her feet, breathless, no longer laughing. Harry dodged behind the golden fountain again. Her counter-spell hit the head of the handsome wizard, which was blown off and landed twenty feet away, gouging long scratches into the wooden floor.
“Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy?” she yelled. She had abandoned her baby voice now. “You need to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain – to enjoy it – righteous anger won’t hurt me for long – I’ll show you how it is done, shall I? I’ll give you a lesson -”
The intention must be there, not just the emotion of hatred, but an actual desire to cause pain. Perhaps this is why the Curses are considered as evil as they are: they are specifically caused by evil emotions.
Rowling actually has another larger reason for this exchange, a reason which comes into play at the very end of the series in the confrontation between Harry and Voldemort in chapter 36 of Deathly Hallows. You see, the key to that confrontation and indeed, the key to the overarching plot of the entire series, is Harry’s intentions in that moment. He is facing Voldemort, the cause of all the pain and suffering and sadness in not only his life but that of so many others in the Wizarding World. He has every reason to be filled with hate and anger. He has every reason to want to make Voldemort suffer and die with dramatic vengeance. In other words, he has every reason to want and be able to use the Unforgivable Curses on Voldemort.
And here, in chapter 36 of Order of the Phoenix, we see that he has learned how to use one of them, the Cruciatus Curse, from a true mistress of inflicting pain, Bellatrix Lestrange. He has learned his lesson well. He has clearly mastered the Imperius Curse, as we see when he uses it to control

Season Three is Here!
Hello, everyone. Back in January, 2018, I created a new short-form podcast called The Harry Potter Lexicon Minute. I had planned on a shorter title — The Harry Potter Minute — but discovered that there was already a podcast with that name, so I added the Lexicon’s name. The podcast ran for over 160 episodes, through November of 2019. I added a few more episodes in the summer of 2020 during our 25th anniversary Canon Celebration. 
And now I’d like to welcome you all to a new season of the Harry Potter Lexicon Minute podcast. This time around I’ll be finishing up my series on Order of the Phoenix, which stopped at chapter 35 back in September of 2019. I’ll add to my Canon Thoughts series, and maybe investigate a lingering Potter mystery or two. Some of our other editors have been working on scripts as well. I’m aiming for one or two episodes a week for at least the rest of the summer. So make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you won’t miss a single one. I and the rest of the Lexicon team are really looking forward to sharing our enthusiasm for the Wizarding World with you. Thanks for listening!

We now start Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a book with several exciting events for Harry and his friends to experience. We go back to the Weasleys and attend an international event where a disaster takes place. What more can happen?
If you’re ready to find out – on we go!
Podcasts:
Canon Thoughts: Goblet of Fire by Steve VanderArk
Fifty Years Ago by Steve VanderArk
The Weasleys and Ottery St Catchpole by Steve VanderArk
GF 1: Mysteries and Surprises by Susan
GF 2: Looking Cool by Susan
GF 3: Writing by Hand by Susan
GF 4: A Lot of Long Sentences by Susan
GF 5: Looking Back and Forward by Susan
GF 6: Foreshadowing – Lovegoods and Apparition by Susan
Wizard Currency by Selena Gallagher
The Changing Quidditch World Cup Schedule by Nick Moline
Everything you’ve wanted to know about Socks by Morag Traynor
Reader’s Guides:
These guides were originally written in March of 2002. Since that time, a few edits were made here and there but basically the text remained the same. To get ready for this Canon Celebration, our editors have been revising each one. We’ve added fan artwork to the Guide which illustrates the text. At the bottom in the Commentary section we’ve added a gallery of additional artwork. So even if you’ve read our guides before, please give them another look. And if you’re doing a re-read of the first book, have the Guide to each chapter open as you go! I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information you didn’t know.
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 1
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 2
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 3
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 4
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 5
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 6
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 7...

In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fans debated the possible range of dates for the saga. Small clues like the reference to a PlayStation in book four were discussed in detail. — Since the PlayStation wasn’t available until December 1994 in Japan and September 1995 in Europe, some argued that the events of Goblet of Fire couldn’t have happened until after that time. Some toyed with the idea that Uncle Vernon might have gotten his hands on a Japanese version while on a business trip, but that would still make book four have to happen no earlier than 1995. Others argued that Rowling’s world doesn’t have to match the real world — and clearly doesn’t in a lot of other ways — so the date of the PlayStation shouldn’t be a determining factor when dating events in the Potter universe. And the debate raged. You can find some of the essays written during that time here on the Lexicon. 
Far more compelling was the fact that Nearly Headless Nick celebrated his 500th Deathday in October of the second book. The cake at the party listed the date of his actual death as being the 31st of October in 1492, which would date the first half of the second book to 1992. I held that opinion, especially since that would mean that the first books take place during the actual years Rowling was writing them in the early 1990s.
The debate went on for years and it wasn’t until the release of the Black Family Tree in 2006 that Rowling finally stated in canon that the year of Draco’s birth, and therefore also Harry’s, was 1980. This settled the arguments once and for all. Harry’s school years therefore were from 1991 through 1998. This was verified in the novels themselves, which many fans consider to be the highest form of canon, when the dates on the gravestone for Lily and James Potter were revealed in the seventh book. 
Before then, Rowling had been particularly cagey about coming right out and giving specific years for things. Even when it would have been easy to slip in a date, she chose not to do so. In Order of the Phoenix, for example, the prophecy that Neville, Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Luna discovered in the Department of Mysteries was labeled with the date when it was spoken by Trelawney. However, instead of stating it outright, Rowling describes it this way: “In spidery writing was written a date of some sixteen years previously…” (OP34).
By the time that fifth book was published in 2003, the Lexicon had already included a very detailed timeline of the Wizarding World. I had compiled it over the course of two years, from 2001 to 2003. The amount of information available to be included was enormous, but most of it wasn’t from the Harry Potter novels. Oh no, there were several other amazingly detailed sources of historical information available back then, all written by Rowling herself. 
Back in 2001, Rowling published two little books for charity which we now refer to as the Schoolbooks. They were Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. These two books were filled with Rowling’s quirky humor. They were also filled with historical information about the Wizarding World. 
In 2003, Electronic Arts released a video game based on Chamber of Secrets which featured a series of Famous Wizard cards which players could find and collect. Rowling wrote the information for those cards and once again, the text was loaded with puns on the names and clever humor in the descriptions. And, like the Schoolbooks, the cards were chock-full of historical information about the Wizarding World. 
When the Schoolbooks were published, I immediately began taking notes and making lists. My notes evolved quickly into a detailed timeline, starting in ancient times and running to the present. This timeline caught the eye of Warner Bros who borrowed it as the official timeline to be included as part of the Extras on the DVD of Ch...

Now we’re into the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Plenty of connections can be made between this book and book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In fact, book two was originally going to be called Half-Blood Prince! Here’s what Rowling had to say about that:
I have been engulfed by an avalanche of questions on the subject of ‘Prince’ having once been a title of ‘Chamber’. I am therefore attempting to answer most of them under this heading, which I think just about covers all the answerable variations (the unanswerable ones include questions such as ‘who’s the Half-Blood Prince?’ ‘what happens in the Half-Blood Prince?’ and ‘what does Half-Blood Prince mean?’)
The plot of ‘Prince’ bears no resemblance whatsoever to the plot of ‘Chamber’, nor is it an off-cut of ‘Chamber’. The story of ‘Prince’ takes off where ‘Phoenix’ ended and does not hark back to four years previously. True, mention is made to events that happened in ‘Chamber,’ but of course, mention is also made of events that happened in ‘Stone’, ‘Azkaban’, ‘Goblet’ and ‘Phoenix’.
‘The Half-Blood Prince’ might be described as a strand of the overall plot. That strand could be used in a whole variety of ways and back in 1997 I considered weaving it into the story of ‘Chamber’. It really didn’t fit there, though; it was not part of the story of the basilisk and Riddle’s diary, and before long I accepted that it would be better to do it justice in book six. I clung to the title for a while, even though all trace of the ‘Prince’ storyline had disappeared, because I liked it so much (yes, I really like this title!). I re-christened book two ‘Chamber of Secrets’ when I started the second draft.
The link I mentioned between books two and six does not, in fact, relate to the ‘Half-Blood Prince’ (because there is no trace left of the HBP storyline in ‘Chamber’.) Rather, it relates to a discovery Harry made in ‘Chamber’ that foreshadows something that he finds out in ‘Prince’. (JKR: FAQ)
There may be, as Rowling states, “no trace left of the HBP storyline in ‘Chamber’,” but there certainly are a lot of connections and similarities between the two books! Many fans have commented on the fact that the first and seventh books mirror each other as do the second and sixth. Check out our list of similarities toward the bottom of this page.
And now, let’s go canon diving!
Podcasts:
CS 1: Birthdays by Eileen Jones
CS 2: Dobby’s Warning … and other musings by Eileen Jones
CS 3: The Weasley Twins by Eileen Jones
CS 4: Privet Drive vs. The Burrow by Eileen Jones
CS 5: Or Worse, Expelled by Eileen Jones
Canon Thoughts: Book Two by Steve VanderArk
The Weasleys and Ottery St. Catchpole by Steve VanderArk
Is Dobby Really Necessary? by Eileen Jones

Ready to have some fun exploring? Here we go!
Podcasts:
Trunks by Selena Gallagher
Platform Nine and 3/4 by Steve VanderArk
How Many Students Are There at Hogwarts? by Steve VanderArk
Whatever Happened to Sally-Ann? by Steve VanderArk
The Significance of Hallowe’en by Rosie Payne
Free Will, Divination and Time Travel Part 1 by Abby Koop
Reader’s Guides:
These guides were originally written in March of 2002. Since that time, a few edits were made here and there but basically the text remained the same. To get ready for this Canon Celebration, our editors have been revising each one. We’ve added fan artwork to the Guide which illustrates the text. At the bottom in the Commentary section we’ve added a gallery of additional artwork. So even if you’ve read our guides before, please give them another look. And if you’re doing a re-read of the first book, have the Guide to each chapter open as you go! I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information you didn’t know.
Harry’s Life at School “Pre-Hermione”
Reader’s Guide to chapter 6
Reader’s Guide to chapter 7
Reader’s Guide to chapter 8
Reader’s Guide to chapter 9
Reader’s Guide to chapter 10

The Duo becomes a Trio and Investigates
Reader’s Guide to chapter 11
Reader’s Guide to chapter 12
Reader’s Guide to chapter 13
Reader’s Guide to chapter 14
Reader’s Guide to chapter 15

The Showdown Under the School
Reader’s Guide to chapter 16  
Reader’s Guide to chapter 17
Calendars
Fitting the first book into the real-life calendars isn’t easy! In fact, it’s impossible. But that didn’t stop us:
Day by day calendar of events in the book
Essays
The Riddle of the Potions by Prefect Marcus
Nicholas Flamel and the Philosopher’s Stone by Brian Dor...

When Harry finally gets his Hogwarts letter from Hagrid, it contains a list of required school supplies, but makes no mention of how he’s expected to pack it all. Nevertheless, on the 1st September, it’s all safely packed in a ‘huge, heavy trunk.’ This is fortuitous as it appears that the trunk is indeed the luggage of choice for Hogwarts students. Was it just a fluke that Harry happened to come by this archaic style of luggage? Where did Harry get this trunk? And why does the wizarding world favour this most inconvenient form of packing container?
In answer to the last question we could probably deduce that it’s for the same reason wizards use quills and parchment. Tradition. Or perhaps an element of being stuck in the past. Trunks, as we know them today, mostly date from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, when they began to give way to the more convenient and lightweight suitcase. They conjure up images of long ocean voyages and definitely have a sense of nostalgia about them. They would undoubtedly be able to fit all manner of bulky objects required by Hogwarts students, such as cauldrons and scales – although broomsticks are another matter – as well as a year’s supply of clothes. However, they are hardly the most convenient item for an 11 year old to be lugging about. When Vernon Dursley drops Harry off at the station and walks away, Harry notes that he is ‘stranded in the middle of a station with a trunk he could hardly lift.’ Later, it was only with the help of the Weasley twins that he was able to get it on the train, as he could hardly raise one end of it by himself. I know this is a mundane concern but I can’t help wondering how on earth they ever manage to get those things up on the luggage racks!
Once at Hogwarts of course, they serve double duty as a piece of furniture. The students use them to store their things in throughout the year, so once in place, they serve their purpose quite well. It’s just that they’re not very portable. Struggling with the trunk seems to be an intrinsic part of Harry’s journey almost every year, until Deathly Hallows of course, when they finally resort to more practical rucksacks and the wonderfully portable beaded bag.
For an adult witch or wizard, a heavy, bulky trunk does not present too much of a problem. They can always use a levitating charm or something similar. However, for a lone underage witch or wizard, or even a Muggle-born with no magical parents on hand to take care of the luggage, these trunks must be a huge inconvenience. What would Hogwarts make of someone showing up with a nice light Samsonite on swivel wheels? Arthur Weasley at least would probably chuckle about Muggle inventiveness.
So where did Harry’s trunk come from? He didn’t buy it in Diagon Alley, and the Dursley’s wouldn’t have bought it for him, so it must have been something they already owned. Perhaps it was just the oldest piece of luggage in the house, and they weren’t about to send Harry off with a new suitcase, such as they might have bought for Dudley to go off to Smeltings. Is it possible that the trunk once belonged to Lily, that it was in fact Harry’s mother’s old school trunk? Perhaps the trunk was left with Lily’s parents and on their deaths it was passed to Petunia, where it had sat ever since, gathering dust in the attic. Well no, not gathering dust. I’m sure even Petunia’s attic is spotless. But if so, was this an uncharacteristic act of kindness on Petunia’s part, ensuring that Harry went off to school, not only with luggage that would allow him to fit in with everyone else, but also with something of his mother’s? That seems unlikely… but you never know.

Welcome to the first of twenty-six blog posts in our Canon Celebration! This time around we’re exploring the first five chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Why am I not saying “Sorcerer’s Stone”? Because that’s not the original name of the book, as you probably know. That’s the title that the editors at Scholastic came up with because they thought that kids in the US wouldn’t want to read a book with the word “philosopher” in the title. Here’s what Rowling said about that:
They wanted to call it something different and I said well how about Sorcerer’s Stone as a compromise. In retrospect I wish I hadn’t changed but to be honest with you I was so grateful that anyone wanted to buy my book at all that I was maybe a bit too compliant about that (HPM).
Ready to have some fun exploring? Here we go!
Podcasts
Canon Thoughts: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Wizard Currency
Magic Brains
Reader’s Guides
These guides were originally written in March of 2002. Since that time, a few edits were made here and there but basically the text remained the same. To get ready for this Canon Celebration, our editors have been revising each one. We’ve added fan artwork to the Guide which illustrates the text. At the bottom in the Commentary section we’ve added a gallery of additional artwork. So even if you’ve read our guides before, please give them another look. And if you’re doing a re-read of the first book, have the Guide to each chapter open as you go! I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information you didn’t know. Here are the Reader’s Guides for each of the first five chapters:
Reader’s Guide to Chapter 1

Reader’s Guide to Chapter 2

Reader’s Guide to Chapter 3

Reader’s Guide to Chapter 4

Reader’s Guide to Chapter 5

Calendars
Fitting the first book into the real-life calendars isn’t easy! In fact, it’s impossible. But that didn’t stop us:
Day by day calendar of events in the book
Text Changes of the Editions and the Years
The text of the first book didn’t stay the same after first being published. The first US edition had quite a few changes in order to make it understandable for American children, who the editors apparently considered to be pretty dim. Here’s the list of differences between the two versions:
Differences between the B...

Twenty-one years ago, I created a small website to collect and organize information about the Harry Potter novels. I was part of an online discussion group called Harry Potter for Grown Ups, which is just what it sounds like, and we all needed a quick way to find details from the books as we discussed the clues and hints that we found as we read the novels. I wanted to call this website The Harry Potter Encyclopedia, but at the time there was already a website called The Encyclopedia Potterica, so I had to come up with something else. Since at that time the site was essentially just a list of the cool names of things in the books, I decided to call it The Harry Potter Lexicon. The first version went online in 1999, but I didn’t really share it with anyone outside of some folks in the Harry Potter for Grownups group. When I was ready for other fans to see it, I made it public in July of 2000.
Over the next two decades, the Lexicon changed and grew a lot. There have been four versions of the site over the years. The original version was completely created with text. Any design elements came from using different text colors and sizes. Since everyone was on slow dial-up at the time, it was important that the site would load fast. I wanted users to be able to follow links and smoothly move from one page to another. There was no artwork at all. 

That “text only” idea didn’t last long. Within a few months of starting the site, I contacted Warner Bros and got permission to use the chapter artwork from the books on the Lexicon — yes, at that point Warner Bros was the gatekeeper on all visualizations of the Potter novels. That was a bit of a turning point because it marked the first appearance of artwork on the site. At that point I redesigned the Lexicon to include that artwork as well as created headers and things to dress up the pages. The overall look of the home page was that of a bunch of Diagon Alley signboards. I also created the Bestiary and the Atlas and started creating maps and charts.

As internet speeds increased, the site began to include more artwork. We started to feature the work of some prolific Potter artists of that time. And the site became very popular. It was, and still is, considered to be the best reference to the world Rowling was creating in the books. Scholastic and Warner Bros used it as their reference while editing the books and creating the films. Rowling herself said she occasionally looked up facts on the Lexicon while in the process of writing. 
The Lexicon underwent another revision in 2007, with all the content being completely reorganized and new navigation being put in place. The redesign was the work of Lisa Bunker, who created the amazing Accio Quote website and also wrote most of our original character descriptions.
 

Just a few years ago, the entire site was once again redesigned, this time to take advantage of technology which hadn’t been available back in 1999 when the site started. All the content was painstakingly copied over from a lot of static HTML pages into a modern content management system, created and programmed by Nick Moline, and displayed with a new, exciting page design created by Patrico Tarantino. That’s the Lexicon site you see today. 
The Lexicon has been the gold standard reference for Wizarding World canon facts for twenty years now. And to celebrate our 20th anniversary in a very “Lexicony” way, starting in July we’re going to hold a Celebration of Canon.

This is an encore presentation of an episode from February 2018.
You may notice on the homepage of the Lexicon that it always shows the current exchange rate between a galleon and a range of different worldwide currencies. But did you ever wonder how J.K. Rowling came up with this seemingly confusing system of wizard money? Hagrid explains how it works in the first book, telling Harry that there are 29 knuts to a sickle, 17 sickles to a galleon, and that “it’s easy enough” to work out. (PS5)
There are a couple of possibilities. J.K. Rowling has confessed many times that math is not a strength of hers (TLC, JKR). If Muggle math is confusing to her, perhaps she developed this confusing system of wizard currency to illustrate that feeling of being confused by something other people seem to find ‘easy enough.’ However, Jo has also said that keeping the Imperial system in the book was a deliberate decision, even though the editor wanted to change all the weights and measures to metric (DL), and that was because she found the old Imperial system to be much more picturesque and quirky and therefore more appropriate for the society she was creating. So it’s likely that she was influenced by the old English system of money where there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound.
Still, 12 and 20 are friendlier numbers to work with than 17 and 29, which you’ll probably recognise are both prime numbers. Prime numbers are thought to have mystical properties, making them an appropriate choice for the wizarding currency, and other prime numbers pop up throughout the books too. More on those in a future episode. So perhaps J.K. Rowling is mathematically challenged in some areas, but she’s certainly no stranger to the magical properties of numbers.

This is an encore presentation of an episode from March, 2018.
Mister Tibbles? Mrs Norris? Why do the animals owned by Squibs seem to have similar names? And particularly human-sounding names at that?
In chapter two of Order of the Phoenix, we meet Mrs Figg properly for the first time. She’d turned up in book one as the seemingly insignificant neighbor lady who minded Harry when the Dursleys were out. She was mentioned again in Goblet of Fire, although readers at the time weren’t sure it was the same person. Dumbledore asks Sirius to alert folks he refers to as “the old crowd” and includes someone named Arabella Figg in the list. Fans spent a lot of time speculating whether Arabella Figg could possibly be the same person as the batty old babysitter of Philosopher’s Stone. Which of course she was.
In book one we learn that Mrs Figg is a cat-lover. She forces Harry to look at photos of all the cats she’d ever owned, which included Tibbles, Snowy, Mr. Paws, and Tufty. That’s MISTER Tibbles, as we learn in Order of the Phoenix.
According to Rowling, these animals are not simply cats. She said on her old website that Mrs Figg’s cats are actually cat-Kneazle cross breeds. In other words, they’re magical animals. Rowling makes clear that they function as support animals for Squibs, rather like service dogs do for us Muggles. She wrote:
Filch has carved himself a niche at Hogwarts and Arabella Figg operates as Dumbledore’s liaison between the magical and Muggle worlds. Neither of these characters can perform magic (Filch’s Kwikspell course never worked), but they still function within the wizarding world because they have access to certain magical objects and creatures that can help them (Arabella Figg does a roaring trade in cross-bred cats and Kneazles …). — JKR
These magical helpers do a lot more than just slink around and cuddle. Mrs Norris is described this way in book one:
She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she’d whisk off for Filch, who’d appear, wheezing, two seconds later. — PS8
Mister Tibbles was also capable of reporting to Mrs Figg. He related to her what had happened with Mundungus Fletcher. Clever creatures indeed! Here in chapter two of Order of the Phoenix, one of those clever creatures sets in motion a hilarious sequence where we and Harry discover that his old babysitter was part of the Wizarding world all along.

This is an encore presentation of an episode from March, 2018.
Today we’re spending a little bit of time with chapter one of Order of the Phoenix.
From the very beginning, we’re introduced to the theme of drought. Rowling writes:
Cars that were usually gleaming stood dusty in their drives and lawns that were once emerald green lay parched and yellowing — for the use of hosepipes had been banned due to drought.
This chapter takes place on the second of August, 1995. And Rowling is spot on with the whole drought thing. In fact, in the summer of 1995 there actually was a pretty severe drought in England and hosepipe bans were a very real thing.
In story terms, the drought mirrors the complete lack of contact Harry has with the Wizarding World at that time. He is experiencing an emotional “drought,” if you will, which sets the tone for the entire book.
And why did Rowling inflict this emotional starvation on her main character? Because at the end of book four, Harry feels like he’s at the top of his game. He’s a champion, a hero. He’s defeated a dragon, proving his worth among students much older than he is. He has learned about his wonderful family — his father the Quidditch champion and his mother who was so loved by everyone. He’s a Quidditch sensation himself. He has even faced off against Voldemort and survived. Harry sees himself as becoming what I like to call “Superhero Harry,” capable of anything. Maybe capable of defeating the Dark Lord once and for all.
In book five, we’re going to see all of that stripped away. No matter how powerful Superhero Harry might become, he would never be able to stand against Voldemort. He needs to become a new type of hero, one who relies on something other than fighting prowess and his “saving people thing,” as Hermione calls it.
That transformation is what Book Five is all about.

This is an encore episode from February 10, 2018.
Chastity, Credence, and Modesty may have seemed like strange names to viewers of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but they are rooted in the Barebone family’s Puritan past. Not only is the Barebones’s church named for Salem, Massachusetts, but also the family seems to be descended from Bartholomew Barebone, an anti-magic no-maj with roots in early Puritan colonists in North America.  Rowling writes about this in her “History of Magic in North America” on Pottermore.
Overtly-pious sounding names like Verity and Abstinence were common among Puritans. One plentiful source of peculiar Puritan names was a real-life family with the surname Barebone. A particularly notable member of this family was the Puritan Preacher and Member of Parliament Praise-God Barebone, who lent his name to the Barebone Parliament – which immediately preceded the beginning of Britain’s time as a Puritan-run Protectorate.

This is an encore presentation of an episode from February of 2018.
Why do we assume that Ottery St Mary, an actual town in south Devon, is the same village as the one called Ottery St Catchpole in the books? There are a couple of good reasons for this. For one thing, the name “Ottery” means that the town is located along the River Otter, a small river in south Devon. If Ottery St Catchpole isn’t Ottery St Mary, it has to be located very, very near to it.
Another clue is the fact that quite a few places in the stories are found in that immediate area. Rowling attended university in Exeter, which is located there. She set a significant part of the stories in that corner of Britain and borrowed a lot of names. If you look at the map, you’ll find Buddleigh Salterton near Exeter, which lends its name to Budleigh Babberton, where Slughorn had been hiding out in a Muggle house. You’ll also find Chudleigh, the home of the Chudley Cannons — spelled differently so it’s not quite the same name but very close, just like Ottery St Catchpole. It does make sense that Ron would be a fan of the local Quiddtich team. You’ll also find the town of Dawlish there, whose name Rowling borrowed for the Auror, John Dawlish.
The most important clue is also the coolest, I think. If you drive a mile or so south of Ottery St Mary, exactly where the books say you’d find the Weasley homestead, you’ll find a farm called The Burrow Hill Farm. No kidding. I visited that very farm while researching my bookIn Search of Harry Potter. Weird thing is, my GPS quit on my just as I drove down the little lane that led to the farm.
I can’t help but suspect that Rowling used that name intentionally. As I said, she spent several years here going to university, so it is certainly possible that she saw that name — Burrow — and saw it as the perfect name for the home of the Weasley family, even describing it as being in the exact same place just south of the village … whose name she also borrowed.

This is an encore broadcast of an episode if the Harry Potter Lexicon Minute from November 2018.
Today I’d like to talk to you about how, in the end, Bane didn’t need to get mad.
When Bane gets mad at Firenze for saving Harry, he says “…we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?” Bane thinks that Harry should have died at the hands of Voldemort in “The Forbidden Forest.” This is the title of chapter fifteen in which this incident happened.
Harry even suspects that Bane felt that way. “Bane thinks Firenze should have let Voldemort kill me… I suppose that’s written in the stars as well.”
During the Battle of Hogwarts, when Harry decides to sacrifice himself, he goes to “The Forest Again” – chapter 34 of The Deathly Hallows. And even if he didn’t really die because of his mother’s powerful love, everyone thought he was dead for a little while.
So Bane reacted too quickly. What he read in the stars did, in fact, play out – just six years later instead of that night in First Year when Harry and the others served their detentions.

In chapter nine of Order of the Phoenix, Rowling does a lot of really poignant foreshadowing for the coming war against Voldemort. In re-reading it, I found new meaning in Harry’s confused anger after Moody shows him the photograph of the original members of the Order. This interaction is so closely followed by Mrs. Weasley’s distressing boggart that I had not previously given it substantial thought, but here are Harry’s thoughts from his brief respite between shocks:
He did not know why he had received such a shock; he had seen his parents’ pictures before, after all, and he had met Wormtail… but to have them sprung on him like that, when he was least expecting it… No one would like that, he thought angrily….
And then, to see them surrounded by all those other happy faces… Benjy Fenwick, who had been found in bits, and Gideon Prewett, who had died like a hero, and the Longbottoms, who had been tortured into madness… all waving happily out of the photograph forevermore, not knowing that they were doomed…. Well, Moody might find that interesting… he, Harry, found it disturbing….
It’s no secret that Harry spends much of Order of the Phoenix responding to the chaos surrounding him with bursts of rage, which are often misdirected. The photograph Moody shows him is a clear visual representation of how quickly war can destroy lives. Harry knows he is in the calm before the storm, and he is terrified that one day soon, everyone who was celebrating Ron’s and Hermione’s new prefect status moments before could meet tragic ends. But Harry cannot deal with that kind of anxiety, so he redirects it into anger toward Moody, whose paranoia probably prevented him from correctly anticipating Harry’s feelings. Moody is described as being “evidently… under the impression he had just given Harry a bit of a treat,” but the photo just reaffirms Harry’s worst fears and reminds him of what he has already lost.
Moments later, Harry happens upon Mrs. Weasley, whose boggart is shifting between the lifeless forms of Ron, Bill, Mr. Weasley, Fred and George, Percy, and Harry, in turn. It’s clear that Mrs. Weasley has also been dwelling on the losses she may face during the war. But what struck me most upon re-reading this scene is Sirius’ reaction:
Sirius was staring at the patch of carpet where the boggart, pretending to be Harry’s body, had lain.
Certainly, this would upset Sirius. It might even be the same form his own boggart would take–although dementors would not be a bad guess either. I think in seeing the boggart of Harry’s dead body, Sirius’ resolve to protect Harry at all costs is fortified, and that foreshadows his own death at the end of the book.
On a final note, I want to say that I think Sirius’ death is what snaps Harry out of his anxiety-fueled rage. In Half-Blood Prince, he is charming and charismatic, if a bit melancholy at times. His fear has become reality, and rather than “shut [himself] away or…crack up,” as he tells Dumbledore Sirius wouldn’t have wanted him to do, he pushes through it with acceptance and resolve.

This is an encore podcast episode originally aired in January of 2018.
Did you know that one of Harry’s classmates apparently vanished between first and fifth year?
I don’t mean “vanished” in the same way that Montague disappeared into a Vanishing Cabinet only to reappear a few weeks later. I mean that she was listed as an incoming First Year in book one but was missing five years later.
Her name is Sally-Anne Perks. She appears on Rowling’s draft of the original forty students — and if you don’t know what that draft is, search on the Lexicon for The Class List. That list isn’t totally canon, since quite a bit of the information on it changed before making it into the books. Sally-Anne didn’t change, however. She was sorted just before Harry in chapter seven of Philosopher’s Stone. Unlike the films, the kids in the book are sorted in alphabetical order.
We don’t hear anything about Ms. Perks again. She never appears in the books. That wouldn’t mean anything, since there are a number of names which show up only once. However, there is another time that the students in Harry’s year are called off in alphabetical order, and that’s in book five. Flitwick calls groups of students to take their practical Charms exam. For example, he calls Hermione along with Anthony Goldstein, Gregory Goyle, and Daphne Greengrass.
When he gets to Harry, the book says:
Ten minutes later, Professor Flitwick called, “Parkinson, Pansy – Patil, Padma – Patil, Parvati – Potter, Harry.” — OP31
He misses Sally-Anne entirely. She should have been called just after Parvati. For some reason, Ms. Perks is no longer part of Harry’s year.

In my last canon thoughts podcast, I talked about the amazing third book in the Potter series, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Now we move on the book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
I’m always a bit surprised by how many people consider this to be their favorite Harry Potter book. It’s a bit of an oddball, stuck in the middle between the whimsical first three books and the darker, more mature last three. It starts with a murder in a creepy old house, meanders through a mishmash of revelations of the wider magical world, and ends with a horrific, disturbing graveyard scene and the fracturing of the Wizarding World between Dumbledore and his followers, and the Ministry and the wider magical population. Running through the whole book is a mystery for which the solution is similar to but nowhere near as clever as the mistaken identity mystery of book three.
I think that most people who call this book their favorite are actually thinking of the film version, which certainly is exciting and visually stunning. Watching the whole story race by in two and a half hours makes it easy to ignore the silliness of the plot because it’s just so much fun.
What silliness? Well, let’s think about it. The Triwizard Tournament has hard and fast rules, rules which cannot be broken on pain of death. One of the rules is that one champion is chosen from each of the three schools. So how can Harry be included when there already is a Hogwarts champion? If you say, well, the Goblet was fooled and rules broken by a sufficiently powerful wizard, then the rules could be UN-broken by a sufficiently powerful wizard, namely Dumbledore. Harry could easily be disqualified on a number of legalities: too young, no approved affiliated school, and so on. But still he’s forced to compete even though his name was put in illegally. That’s ridiculous.
And then there are the contests themselves. I mean, dragons are cool and exciting, that’s true. But staring at a lake for an hour with no clue what’s happening down below is not. Neither is staring at a maze. These contests are, not to put too fine a point on it, very boring. Why does everyone get all excited about the Tournament? And for that they gave up Quidditch for the whole year?
But the most glaring plot hole is this that Voldemort’s grand scheme for staging his resurrection is ridiculously over-complicated. Planting Barty Crouch Jr. at Hogwarts was clever, it’s true. Once that’s done, however, why wait until the final task of the Triwizard Tournament almost a year later to spring the trap? It would have been a very simple matter for Crouch to turn something of Harry’s into a Portkey (there is a spell for that, as we learn in book five) and have the boy transported to Little Hangleton. Harry’s broomstick would be an obvious choice, since he would be holding it out of the Quidditch pitch, outside the protections placed on Hogwarts. How do we know that the pitch is not protected? Because that’s where the maze was set up and the Triwizard Cup portkey worked just fine.

There comes a point as a Harry Potter fan when you think you have found or heard about all the connections between the series and the world of literature and mythology. And then, out of nowhere, another one smacks you in the face.
I have just finished reading Paulo Coelho’s bestselling book The Alchemist, which I was reading for the first time. Now there’s the obvious fact that alchemists are concerned with finding and making the philosopher’s stone, but that is not the connection I’m talking about. In The Alchemist, the protagonist, a shepherd boy, is on a dream-inspired quest to find his treasure. Along the way he meets an alchemist in the Egyptian desert who tells him, “wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” Those words were instantly familiar to me and transported me away from the sand dunes of the Sahara and to the snow-covered graveyard of Godric’s Hollow. There, on Kendra Dumbledore’s gravestone, were the words, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
I’ve been pondering what this connection might mean, or even if it means anything at all. Does the reversal change the meaning? The essence is the same after all, that your treasure and your heart are intertwined, and where you find one, you’ll find the other. For the shepherd boy, he follows his heart, which takes him on a wondrous journey, eventually leading him full circle back to where he started his quest, where he finds literal treasure. But his real treasure may be the transformation he has undergone, which is, after all, the true purpose of alchemy. I see some parallels here with Dumbledore, who was so enamoured of his own treasure hunt for the Hallows, only to realise, too late, that the real treasure was at home; his family. Presumably it was Dumbledore who chose these words.
Further research revealed that the words on Kendra’s gravestone also appear in the Bible, so perhaps that was the original source for both authors and the similarity is just a coincidence. However, I do think it’s quite likely that J.K. Rowling was familiar with The Alchemist.
The book was initially published in Portuguese, the language of Paulo Coelho’s native Brazil. Between 1991 and 1993 when J.K. Rowling was living in Portugal, The Alchemist was one of the biggest-selling Portuguese language books of all time. It’s quite likely that she came across it. Especially with a title like that, and with the Harry Potter story incubating in her mind at the same time. In her earliest drafts, alchemy was a class at Hogwarts, in place of Potions, so it’s clear that J.K. Rowling had a fascination for the subject. I wonder if those words stuck with her and found their way into the story seven books later.
What do you think? Am I seeing connections where there are none, or are there other parallels we can draw between these two stories of magical quests? What do you think these words mean?

Lexicon editor Eileen Jones chats with her friend Angela about interesting characters from Gryffindor House, focusing on on Ginny and Dean.

Pottermore is no more. I guess having the name “Potter” in the title was too limiting, since now the website is called “Wizarding World” and encompasses the “Fantastic Beasts” films as well as the Potter books and films. My reaction? Whatever.
I loved Pottermore for Rowling’s writing. I loved the story artwork from the Potter series, since those illustrations actually matched descriptions in the books and were reported to be verified by Rowling herself. For me, Pottermore was a worthy successor to Rowling’s very creative original website which felt like the author was personally communicating with us fans.
When Pottermore changed to become just another fan site, I was very disappointed. The content was trite and uninteresting to anyone over the age of 18. Often the writers demonstrated less understanding of Rowling’s created world than we normal fans did, even with their supposed connection to the author. Quite frankly, I stopped visiting the site.
Now it’s the Wizarding World. I’ve spend some time poking around and I am just as unimpressed as I was with the second iteration of Pottermore. The site seems to have even less content than it used to, and a lot of things are either broken — when I click the button to “join” the new fan club, I’m just taken to my profile — or listed as “coming soon,” which is very bad website design. If it wasn’t ready you shouldn’t have switched it on for public viewing.
So again. Whatever.
But about the fan club. I do want to join, if for no other reason than I’ve been a massive Potter fan since 1998 and I figure if anyone should be in a Harry Potter fan club, it’s me. Maybe I’m already signed up, since I do have the Wizarding World app installed on my phone. I have yet to discover any of the “spellbinding new content” which was promised, however. I did find some short bits of writing which rehash facts and content which any fan will already know. I also saw a film clip or two, but those are hardly new content.
Still stuck with … whatever.
That is, until I saw this whole subscription thing. It’s called Wizarding World Gold and I will say, I’m intrigued. I don’t know if I’m sold — I could get two Wizarding World Loot Crates for about the same price and those have a lot cooler stuff in them. But the Gold subscription does offer some interesting things. Just not for me.
You see, I don’t collect much Potter memorabilia myself, so I’m not going to be particularly interested in the pins. I already have all the ebooks so I don’t get added value from access to the series through the club. The special events won’t be happening anywhere near me here in Texas and I don’t expect to be flying to New York or San Francisco to see Cursed Child anytime soon, special access or discounts on tickets for those things don’t do me any good. As I said, I don’t collect Potter memorabilia so discounts at the Wizarding World shops won’t do me much good either.
So what has me intrigued?
FIrst of all, the video series called Wizarding World Originals. I’ve been on the set of the films and I was blown away by the craft of filmmaking at the vast scale of a Potter film. I love learning more about that process. I am pretty sure I would enjoy that video series.
But most of all, I want that journal.

Lexicon editor Eileen Jones continues her conversation with her friend Angela about characters each of them feels a connection to. Angela talks about Filius Flitwick which Eileen discusses Cho Chang.

In this Harry Potter Lexicon Minute I will discuss the sixth chapter of Goblet of Fire: The Portkey.
When I discovered the Harry Potter Lexicon years ago, one of the things I loved most about the website were the chapter discussions. From each book, the Lexicon has descriptions per chapter of what happens. These include favorite lines, the date on which events take place, interesting facts with additional notes from Steve VanderArk and other fans, and links to things and people mentioned in other books. I still highly recommend the chapter discussions, as you can read them within five minutes each. They provided me with one problem, however: it is hard to know what is left to discuss from this chapter on this Harry Potter Lexicon Minute!
One surprising element of this chapter is the mention of the Lovegoods going to the Quidditch World Cup. According to Amos Diggory, they went a week earlier. So I guess they had cheaper tickets, like Arthur Weasley explains. We do not actually meet Luna or Xenophilius Lovegood at the World Cup, but at least Luna seems to have some love for the game. Remember the lion hat she wears for the matches against Slytherin, in Order of the Phoenix and Half Blood Prince? However, it seems paying attention to the details of the match is not really her forte… I still love her “Loser’s Lurgy”! But for those who wondered where they had heard the name Lovegood before, when reading the Order of the Phoenix: this is the chapter!
Also, when Arthur explained Apparition to Harry in this chapter, it says: “Harry had a sudden vision of a pair of legs and an eyeball lying abandoned on the pavement of Privet Drive.” Upon re-reading the book, I thought that was a nice bit of foreshadowing to the leg and eyeball that would be separated from their fake host in chapter 35!

Lexicon Editor Eileen Jones chats with her friend Angela about their favorite Hufflepuff characters. Angela starts out by choosing probably the best-known Hufflepuff of Harry’s time, Cedric Diggory. Eileen discusses Ernie Macmillan.

Eleven years ago, after the publication of the last Harry Potter novel and, as far as we knew, the end of canon, I wrote a piece for the Lexicon entitled “Puzzles, Mysteries, and Loose Ends” in which I discussed the things we still didn’t know and the questions which had never been answered. A few years ago, when I brought that essay over into the new Lexicon website, I updated it and removed a few things, since quite a bit of new canon had appeared since it had first been published and some questions had been answered. But a lot of mysteries still remain to this day.
This episode is the first in a series of podcasts in which I’ll talk about some of those enduring mysteries of the Wizarding World, the things we still wonder about even after all seven books, the things which have never been explained or which we can’t quite make sense of, despite twenty years of research.
This episode I’m going to talk about Scabbers, Ron’s pet rat.
Yes, of course we all know that Scabbers is far more than just a pet rat, but that’s not the mystery here. No, what I’m talking about is just exactly how and why Peter Pettigrew, transfigured into a rat, managed to insinuate himself into the Weasley household.
Let’s look at the timeline. Sirius Black confronted Peter Pettigrew on the first of November, 1981, shortly after the attack on the Potters on Hallowe’en night. To escape, Pettigrew blasted the street beneath his feet, killing a number of Muggles in the process, then transformed into a rat and ran off into the sewers which had been exposed by the explosion. So that was November of 1981. But what happened next?
At that time, Percy was five years old. Did he acquire a pet rat at that point? Or did a few years go by before Scabbers became an honorary Weasly? We just don’t know what happened from Pettigrew’s escape from Sirius in November 1981 until he is bequeathed to Ron in August of 1991.
Did Peter stay a rat right from the attack and escape? Did he immediately try to find a wizarding family to latch onto? Presumably it was no accident that he became part of the Weasley family. So how well did he know the Weasleys? Pettigrew was part of the original Order of the Phoenix along with Molly Weasley’s two brothers, but neither Molly nor Arthur were members of the Order during that first rise of Voldemort in the 1970s. Did Peter decide that a family like the Weasleys would be the safest place to keep tabs on the magical world of which he was no longer was a part?
What little we do know about Scabbers’ history with the Weasley family is revealed in Ron’s conversation with the proprietor of the Magical Menagerie in Diagon Alley. Ron is worried about Scabbers’ thin and haggard appearance since the Weaselys returned from Egypt. The witch in the Magical Menagerie was surprised by Scabbers’ long life but didn’t detect that he was actually a wizard in Animagus form. Here’s how that passage goes:
“Bang him on the counter,” said the witch, pulling a pair of heavy black spectacles out of her pocket.
Ron lifted Scabbers out of his inside pocket and placed him next to the cage of his fellow rats, who stopped their skipping tricks and scuffled to the wire for a better took....

As any Muggle knows, chocolate is a truly magical substance. We see it in many forms throughout the Harry Potter novels – the birthday cake that Hagrid brings for Harry’s 11th birthday is a chocolate cake, chocolate eclairs and chocolate gateau are regularly served in Hogwarts’ feasts, and of course Chocolate Frogs are featured regularly. The tempting taste of chocolate seems to be especially good for disguising illicit substances, as both Hermione and Romilda Vane found, with chocolate cakes spiked with a sleeping draught for Crabbe and Goyle, and a box of chocolate cauldrons filled with love potion intended for Harry.
However, perhaps the most interesting appearance of chocolate in the Harry Potter books is as a remedy for the effects of dementors. Professor Lupin gives some to Harry on the train after the first dementor encounter, and Madam Pomfrey signifies her approval of this treatment and later supplies her own chocolate to Harry following other dementor attacks. We hear often that chocolate is the appropriate remedy for dealing with the after-effects of being in the presence of dementors – that hopeless feeling that you’ll never be happy again.
In interviews, J.K. Rowling has confirmed that the dementors are a metaphor for depression, with their ability to suck all the happiness out of a person. In the Muggle world, chocolate has long been associated with having mood enhancing properties, and science has shown us that chocolate contains a number of psychoactive properties that can induce a sense of euphoria and help to regulate mood. Dark chocolate has also been found to be higher in flavonoids, an antioxidant that has been linked with improved inflammatory profiles, which in turn is associated with the onset of depression. A recent study found that adults who ate dark chocolate had 70% lower odds of reporting clinically relevant depressive symptoms than those who ate no chocolate at all.
So it seems that the magical and Muggle worlds can agree on this and Madam Pomfrey is right. Eating chocolate is good for you. And since dementors are invisible to Muggles, you never know when one might be around, so the safest thing to do is to keep some chocolate close by at all times!

Today I want to talk about objects that can think for themselves. When Ginny emerges from the Chamber of Secrets, Mr. Weasley scolds her, “Haven’t I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain” (CS18). I’ve been thinking about that quote and wondering what other sorts of objects Mr. Weasley has in mind. He comes across a lot of Muggle-baiting objects–that is, Muggle objects that have been enchanted, often for the purpose of harming or embarrassing Muggles–in his job for the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office. But a regurgitating toilet isn’t really a toilet that thinks for itself… or is it? No let’s not go there.
The first magical object that really strikes me as sentient, after the diary of Tom Riddle, is the Marauder’s Map. It’s interesting to see that this had fallen into the hands of the Weasley twins–who were presumably taught, just as Ginny was, to be wary of sentient magical objects. I wish I could see the moment when the twins stumbled across the Marauder’s Map in Filch’s office. Which passwords did they try before they successfully activated it–and did the Marauder’s insult them, or were they pleased? Did they, perhaps sensing kindred spirits, guide the twins to the correct password? Were the twins appropriately cautious in interacting with the map? A little birdie (possibly Pigwidgeon) tells me they probably weren’t.
It’s also interesting to think about the more “ordinary” magical objects that seem able to think for themselves. Many portraitsand some mirrors can communicate verbally. While portraits are an imprint of a witch or wizard, capable of at least mimicking the characteristics of those they represent, mirrors in the magical world simply seem, at times, to have personalities of their own. When the one in the Burrow shouts at Harry, “Tuck your shirt in, scruffy!” it comes as no surprise to anyone else in the house. Has it simply been bewitched to scold members of the household whose appearances would meet the disapproval of Mrs. Weasley? Or does the mirror itself have opinions and feelings regarding unkempt appearances? I would guess the former, but I don’t think we can be sure, based on current information. It would be difficult, I think, to grow up in a house like the Burrow, with seemingly sentient items kind of haphazardly strewn about, and then remember to beware of them outside of the home.

Here at the Lexicon, we do our best to organize the information that has been presented to us by or with the express approval of J.K. Rowling. It’s an important job, because this fictional world of hers is an escape for many people, and in order to escape to that world, we need it to feel grounded in consistent ideas. Occasionally, because the world is actually fictional and no one is perfect, we do see some inconsistencies crop up, and in a fandom like Harry Potter, the popular fan choices are to complain or speculate. The wonderful thing about the Wizarding World is that, as it contains magic and is fictional, there aren’t many inconsistencies that can’t be manipulated into consistencies with a little creativity. Whether that creativity cheapens the story or enriches it is kind of up to the individual fan.
My larger point here, though, is to say that canon is not meant to be an assessment of value. Fans often produce highly compelling “head canons,” and no one has the power to take those away–not even the creator. Fan fiction is not truly less real than the fiction of the original author–both are equally fictional. But in order to share in and escape to the fictional world that the original author created, it is valuable to track these timelines and concepts.
Children who are growing up right now don’t have the experience that many of us had–of waiting years for the next installment and spending those years speculating and crafting theories, reading and writing fanfiction, and creating and interacting with other forms of fan art. For them, Harry’s Hogwarts years are pretty much set in stone. True, there are periods of time that are skipped, often brushed over with a scenic seasonal transition sentence, and we seldom see anyone use the bathroom except to brew illicit potions or listen to mermaid sounds, but we are supposed to believe as fans that the important details have been provided to us.
And that can be a little upsetting. When a character dies, and that’s not in our headcanon, we feel bereft on multiple levels–for the character and for the plotlines they can’t have anymore.
But the beauty of a fictional magical world is that we can all imagine how things would be if they went differently. We don’t have to abandon our headcanons. They can exist in a parallel fictional universe. We can share them together, as long as we acknowledge that Jo’s ideas and characters belong to her. Back in 2015, Jo tweeted, “All these people saying they never got their Hogwarts letter: you got the letter. You went to Hogwarts. We were all there together.”
We were and we weren’t, but it feels like we were, right? We all know what happened, and we know how it felt. We will always share that, and I will always be grateful for that world.

An idea came to me during a re-read of Deathly Hallows. I believe that there is evidence of a magical force in the Wizarding World that I am calling “convergence.” It’s a plot device, I know, but if we think within the story, it seems that there is something in the ancient/deep magic that affects items and humans in a particular way. It draws certain items together and pushes other items away. And it dramatically affects the behavior of the humans involved.
Take, for example, the extraordinary coincidences which set up the central conflicts of book two and especially three.
In book two, the Diary is actually left behind at the Burrow when the family is running very late and is rushing to get to King’s Cross by eleven. What ever possesses Arthur to turn around to go get it when they could have just as easily sent it by owl the next day? It’s as if the Diary refused to be left behind, refused to be ignored. And in book three, just think about the string of highly unlikely events which lead Sirius to escape from Azkaban. Arthur wins a 700 Galleon prize. The family travels to Egypt and happens to get their picture taken in Egypt for the Daily Prophet. The picture happens to include Scabbers. Scabbers happens to be positioned so that his missing toe was visible. Fudge happens to visit Azkaban carrying that particular out-of-date issue of the Prophet. Sirius Black happens to ask for it and subsequently sees the picture. The picture is what motivates him to escape.
It’s almost as if some secret power was working to make sure things happened the way they needed to. That’s what I mean by convergence. Things converge, often against logic, to nudge events toward a certain end. Maybe we’re seeing evidence of the kinds of movements in the stars so valued by the Centaurs. I think Dumbledore understood this concept a lot better than almost anyone else and used it to pull together all the bits and pieces of his master plan: the Horcruxes, the Hallows, wands, and humans.
I think the most elegant example of this convergence at work is the situation with the sword in the pool under the ice in Deathly Hallows. We have a lot of elements: Snape behind a tree, his Patronus, his love for Lily, his desire not to be known for who he was. We have Harry, who didn’t take off the Horcrux, even though he went out of his way to take off the Mokeskin pouch…what made him forget the Horcrux? We have Ron, who was drawn back to this moment in time, returning to the Horcrux and the people who loved him when they said his name … which they did for the first time in ages at just the right moment. The Horcrux recognized the danger that the sword posed. It tricked Harry leaving the deadly, dangerous, murderous thing around his neck. And then the sword presented itself to Ron, not Harry, because Harry was the “sacrifice”, the thing to be rescued for the sword to present itself to the true Gryffindor. The locket and the sword, the evil and the good, struggling against each other to force events their way.
All of these factors converging on that one moment of time.
Like the Diary. Like the Daily Prophet photo. All part of the deep underlying magic of the Wizarding World.

In the 34th chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, we get to explore the wondrous Department of Mysteries. Anyone reading the books for the first time will tell you that by the time we get to this chapter, our curiosity is definitely piqued. Between Harry’s dreams and the odd references back in book four, we’ve definitely built up our curiosity about this part of the Ministry.
When the book first came out, fans theorized that Rowling probably wrote this chapter with the movies in mind, almost challenging them to recreate on film her wild and vivid descriptions. We were all a little disappointed when only the Hall of Prophecies and the Death Chamber made it into the film version. We wanted to see the Brain Room, the Planet Room, and particularly the Time Chamber with its huge bell jar where the Death Eater’s head was transfigured into that of a baby. The Department of Mysteries is a wild, weird, wonderful, oversized magical carnival fun house.
What I’d like to focus on in this discussion, however, is something a lot more subtle. I’d like to zero in on the reaction we get from Hermione to the archway and veil in the Death Chamber.
As always, we’re seeing this moment through the eyes of Harry. His reaction is actually mirrored by Luna. He is intrigued by the archway and then drawn to it. He’s not just curious, the way he is about everything else in the Department of Mysteries. Nothing else he’s seen can draw his focus away from the desperate mission at hand, rescuing Sirius from Voldemort. The archway and its gently moving veil is different. He is mesmerized by it. He forgets his mission and moves closer, listening.
Here’s how Rowling describes Harry’s reaction:
He had the strangest feeling that there was someone standing right behind the veil on the other side of the archway. Gripping his wand very tightly, he edged around the dais, but there was nobody there; all that could be seen was the other side of the tattered black veil.
We learned way back in Prisoner of Azkaban that Harry has the almost supernatural ability to sense the presence of someone even if they can’t be seen. This is from chapter 3:
Harry opened his trunk again and pushed the contents aside, looking for the Invisibility Cloak – but before he had found it, he straightened up suddenly, looking around him once more.
A funny prickling on the back of his neck had made Harry feel he was being watched, but the street appeared to be deserted, and no lights shone from any of the large square houses.
He bent over his trunk again, but almost immediately stood up once more, his hand clenched on his wand. He had sensed rather than heard it: someone or something was standing in the narrow gap between the garage and the fence behind him. Harry squinted at the black alleyway. If only it would move, then he’d know whether it was just a stray cat or — something else.
In Goblet of Fire chapter nine it happens again.

In the new Wizards Unite game by Niantic, the mysterious Calamity is threatening the Statute of Secrecy. It’s stealing magical people, creatures, and items of significance from different periods of time and leaving them randomly scattered around the world with the protection of various magical beings.  The cause of the Calamity is under investigation by the Ministry, with the help of players of the game, who are recruits to the Statute of Secrecy Task Force. 
In the Back To Hogwarts event that ran from August 27 to September 3, Professor McGonagall alerted players that the Sorting Hat had been taken from Hogwarts, and in her concern, she moves on to some dark speculation: “For years after the Battle of Hogwarts, virtually all of our students could see the Thestrals. It was a constant reminder of the cost of that horrible fight. I just hope that the Calamity doesn’t eventually condemn another generation of students to the same fate.”
Naturally, this led me to some dark speculation of my own. Could the Calamity truly pose such a threat to the Wizarding World?
The Calamity is, as yet, a poorly understood phenomenon. The Ministry doesn’t know why it’s stealing these magical traces and leaving them where Muggles could find them. However, we know from the “Fantastic Beasts” movies and a bit of background in Deathly Hallows that Grindelwald wanted to expose the magical world to wizards in order to force Muggles into a kind of subservience. We also know from the “Fantastic Beasts” movies that, at least in North American Wizarding culture, there was significant anti-wizard sentiment during Grindelwald’s time, which allowed Grindelwald to prey on those who feared persecution.
In the Harry Potter books, breaches of the Statute of Secrecy are always treated as serious offenses, but the examples we see tend to be frivolous. From Dedalus Diggle‘s magical fireworks after Voldemort fails to kill baby Harry to Archie Aymslowe‘s refusal to change out of his flowery nightgown at the Quidditch World Cup, the Wizarding public seems to regard the Statute of Secrecy as an inconvenience. They’ve been lulled into a sense of security, and they’re tired of hiding–but the Ministry insists that history will repeat itself if they aren’t careful. So they carry on with their muggle-repelling charms and obliviation squads, and they rarely need a Thunderbird to create rain infused with the venom of swooping evil to erase the stressful memories of the townspeople. 
The Calamity events seem to mirror our timeline–the Sorting Hat was stolen before the new first-years could be sorted on September 1, 2019. That’s close to a century after Frank the Thunderbird saved Jacob Kowalski from being obliviated–and right in the middle of Albus Severus’ and Scorpius Malfoy’s time at Hogwarts. This is a bit sticky, timeline-wise, but it would seem that Professor McGonagall was around to see the drama unfold with Grindelwald and the anti-Wizard sentiment from Muggles.

We know that prophecies exist in Harry’s world. All of the prophecies that affect Harry in some way eventually come to pass. The wording is always ambiguous enough to cause anxiety, though. “The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord” meets these particular characteristics and will either kill Voldemort or die trying… or kind of both. Voldemort’s “servant has been chained these twelve years” and will soon rejoin his master, but—plot twist—the servant isn’t the prisoner for whom the book is named. “When unseen children murder their fathers, then will the Dark Lord return”—but maybe not, erm, permanently.
If Firenze is to be believed, occupants of the Wizarding World have some free will—but the “great tides of evil or change” will come and go more or less as the heavens foretell. The ambiguity of the Prophecies we encounter in the series seems to act as a catalyst for these “great tides of evil or change.” It seems to me that the anxiety provoked by these prophecies usually favors the non-evil. Voldemort tries to kill Harry and is put out of commission for 13 years as a result of hearing part of the prophecy. Harry seeks and destroys Voldemort’s horcruxes as a result of his call to responsibility. Harry doesn’t really have time to respond to the “servant and master” prophecy before it comes true, but it adds credibility to her earlier prophecy, which calls him “…the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord.” We don’t know exactly when or how Delphi stumbles upon the prophecy in Cursed Child, but we know that she and Scorpius argue about whether or not prophecies can be broken, and that finding the prophecy is what clues Harry and co. in on what is happening with Albus and Scorpius. We can safely assume that Delphi approaches Albus because she thinks he will lead her to a Time-Turner—Mr. Diggory suspected Harry had one. Once Scorpius convinces Delphi that prophecies can be broken, she takes them back in time to prevent “the big one”—the moment Voldemort marks Harry as his equal.
I wonder sometimes what the point of a prophecy is, if it is inevitable. I think Scorpius is putting his best Slytherin foot forward when he convinces Delphi that they can be broken—if she had continued on her quest to “spare the spare” and enable the new prophecy, it is hard to say what might have happened. I think the means by which a prophecy comes to pass is flexible—especially if there is a Time Turner lying around. But I think the prophecy itself may be some kind of gift to counteract evil forces. Perhaps that is why only some witches and wizards have “the Sight,” as Professor Trelawney would say. Maybe it’s like Dumbledore’s protection of the Sorcerer’s Stone—only those who wish to find it, but not use it, are able to get it. Perhaps the Sight is a gift for those who are essentially good at heart, but effectively pretty neutral. But I think all of that is a concept for another Minute, so I’ll wrap this one up.

I’ve been reading the Jim Kay-illustrated edition of Sorcerer’s Stone to my cat, because I feel like that version deserves to be read aloud, and Scraps is a pretty good audience. We just finished Chapter 15 – The Forbidden Forest, and it brought something to the front of my mind that I’ve been thinking about for a while: is there free will in the Wizarding World?
This is the chapter in which Harry meets the centaurs in the Forbidden Forest—Ronan, Bane, and Firenze. Bane is furious with Firenze for interacting with Harry and saving him from Voldemort. Firenze tells Harry, “The forest is not safe at this time—especially for you.” Later, he tells the furious Bane, “This is the Potter boy. The quicker he leaves this forest, the better.” Bane responds, “What have you been telling him? … Remember, Firenze, we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?”
Every other time I have read this scene, I have always assumed that this conversation revolved around the dangers Voldemort posed to forest-dwellers at the time. But perhaps the centaurs knew something else. Maybe they knew Harry was destined, one day, to die in the Forbidden Forest.
We don’t know much about the centaur brand of divination—we only see Firenze teach it during the latter half of Harry’s fifth year, since Harry gives up on the subject after his O.W.L. results come back. In their lessons with Firenze, we learn that centaurs “…watch the skies for the great tides of evil or change that are sometimes marked there,” that “…it may take years to be sure of what [they] are seeing,” and that “…even centaurs sometimes read [signs] wrongly.” Most important, perhaps, is Harry’s takeaway that, “[Firenze’s] priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even centaurs’ knowledge, was foolproof.”
In contrast to Professor Trelawney, who more often than not radiated confidence in her incorrect predictions, Firenze seems to represent a more grounded version of divination, which seems—in the Wizarding World—to be rooted in truth.

It’s the first of September and in the Wizarding world, children starting at age eleven will board the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross Station to travel north to Scotland, and the new school year will begin. I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about some of the interesting facts and canon questions about this whole ritual.
First off, the magical gateway into Platform Nine and Three Quarters is not hidden behind a brick wall. That looks really cool in the films, but that’s not accurate. According to Rowling, the magical platform is reached by walking through a metal barrier. Here’s what it says in Chamber of Secrets chapter 5:
He wheeled his trolley forward cautiously until it was right against the barrier and pushed with all his might. The metal remained solid. (CS5)
Here’s how it’s described in Prisoner of Azkaban:
Mr. Weasley strolled toward the barrier between platforms nine and ten, pushing Harry’s trolley and apparently very interested in the InterCity 125 that had just arrived at platform nine. With a meaningful look at Harry, he leaned casually against the barrier. Harry imitated him.
In a moment, they had fallen sideways through the solid metal onto platform nine and three-quarters and looked up to see the Hogwarts Express, a scarlet steam engine, puffing smoke over a platform packed with witches and wizards seeing their children onto the train.
The kind of barrier you’ll find blocking the space between two tracks in a British railway station like King’s Cross is not a wall but somewhat similar to a fence or a guardrail along a highway, but taller. If you stand at a barrier like that, you’re able to see the space between the tracks beyond, which is the space where Platform Nine and Three Quarters is magically hidden.
But wouldn’t people notice someone veering off to walk through a barrier like that? Maybe, but the barrier in question is right where a walkway from the main concourse opens onto the platforms, so someone walking through that walkway would actually walk straight ahead into that barrier rather than veer left or right, as the Muggles would have to do.
If you’ve been to King’s Cross and seen Platforms Nine and Ten, you might be saying “Wait a moment, that’s not how things are arranged.” That’s because when Rowling wrote the books, she wasn’t in London and was describing it from memory. Here’s what she said about it in “Harry Potter and Me”:
I wrote Platform 9 3/4 when I was living in Manchester, and I wrongly visualized the platforms, and I was actually thinking of Euston, so anyone who’s actually been to the real platforms 9 and 10 in King’s Cross will realize they don’t bear a great resemblance to the platforms 9 and 10 as described in the book. So that’s just me coming clean, there. I was in Manchester, I couldn’t check. (HPM)
When I was researching my book In Search of Harry Potter in which I discovered places in Britain which just could be the real places in the Potter books, I visited both King’s Cross and Euston stations and took pictures of the barriers between platforms nine and ten. As you can see from my photo on this page, Rowling’s description definitely fits Euston … but King’s Cross is a much more beautiful building — and the symbolism in the name of the station becomes clear toward the end of the last book when Harry talks with Dumbledore in chapter 35.
And that brings up one last fact before we start traveling n...

In my series called Canon Thoughts, I’ve given my comments about books one and two of the Harry Potter series as well as about some of the early interviews which Rowling gave back in 1999 and 2000. I’ve also given my take onCrimes of Grindelwald. Now it’s time to talk about Prisoner of Azkaban.
Ah, what do I say about book three?
Many fans call this their favorite book of the series. I would definitely list it in my top three. So what makes this book so special?
First of all, the book is the most tightly plotted of the series. Later books are plotted very well, certainly, but those books are also at least twice as long. There’s a lot more time in books four, five, and six for tangents and descriptions of day-to-day life at Hogwarts. Don’t get me wrong, I love that part of the stories. It’s one of the reasons why the Harry Potter books are so much more enticing than the Fantastic Beasts films. We all want to live at Hogwarts. We want to take classes and try out for the Quidditch team and struggle with homework and eat in the Great Hall. We don’t really feel that way about the world of Newt and Tina. In fact, I really don’t like the Wizarding World of those films very much at all. Hogwarts? Give me my letter!
Prisoner of Azkaban, like the two books before it, has a lot of the extra stuff is removed and what’s left all feels important to the building mystery. A look at the Day to Day calendar of the book on the Lexicon website is very revealing. Nothing much happens between February 12 and just before exams in May. The same can’t be said for the later books, where every month is filled with activities and in which the book’s mystery is clouded by so many extraneous but fascinating events. I don’t see this as a flaw in the later books at all; but strong editing is a definite plus to the plot of book three.
This is particularly great because it gives us a very clear idea of book three’s function in the overall saga, in the plot of the entire Potter series. The purpose of book three is to fill us in on what happened twenty years ago because we can’t understand the events of the present without a thorough understanding of what happened with the Marauders and Snape during the first rise of Voldemort. The book introduces us to James Potter, Lily Evans, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and a young Severus Snape.

In today’s minute I’m going to discuss Act 1 Scenes 6 and 7.
Both of these scenes share a similar characteristic: Harry takes a lot of heat from someone who is stuck in the past.
Delphi speaks a line in scene six, referring to Amos: “It’s tough to live with people stuck in the past, isn’t it?”
In scene six, Amos is the character stuck in the past. He was never able to find peace over Cedric’s death, and after hearing the rumors of the super powerful Time Turner he comes to Harry’s house to try to guilt Harry into using this new Time Turner to go into the past and save Cedric’s life. Harry already has plenty of guilty feelings, though, he doesn’t need Amos to make him feel that way. Regardless, he won’t break the rules of Wizarding Law to change the past. 
Amos brings up the phrase ‘Kill the spare’, it is so tragic that the only reason Cedric died is because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Kill the spare’ comes up later in the play, so this is probably a little bit of foreshadowing. 
In scene seven, it’s Albus who is stuck in the past, but not his own. He is stuck in his father’s past. Albus is so angry about all of the things Harry went through, all the things that created his legacy, what makes him famous. I’m not sure why Albus is holding all of this stuff against Harry, but it is getting in his way of seeing how hard Harry is trying in the present to be a good father. 
When trying to find something to talk about for the positive bit of each of these Minute’s I hit a snag. There isn’t really anything here that I really like, but there’s not any problems that I find either. These are both 2 scenes that move the narrative of this particular story forward in a pretty effective way. Amos’s request of Harry in scene six sets up Albus and Scorpius’s adventures later in the play. And the gifts given, and Albus’s disdain for them, in scene 7 is what sets up Albus and Scorpius being able to send a message from the past to their parents in the future.  

Today we’re going to talk Horcruxes. Specifically, how they’re made. I started thinking about this subject when I read a particularly interesting passage from Half-Blood Prince. Here’s what caught my eye:
Dumbledore says that Voldemort “seems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. … After an interval of some years, however, he used Nagini to kill an old Muggle man, and it might then have occurred to him to turn her into his last Horcrux.”  (HBP23)
The reason this struck me is that Dumbledore is actually wrong here. For the most part, Voldemort didn’t use important or significant deaths for making his Horcruxes. He may have intended to originally, but that certainly wasn’t how it worked out. 
Let’s take a look at all the murders he chose:
The first Horcrux he made was the ring, created with the murders of his father and grandparents. These victims were certainly important as they represented his Muggle blood. By murdering the Riddles he symbolically murdered his own Muggle identity. After that point he thought and spoke as if that part of his background didn’t exist. This happened in July or August of 1942. 
The next murder, a year later, was that of Myrtle Warren, the Mudblood student who died in the bathroom where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was located. Myrtle’s death doesn’t seem to have any huge importance, except maybe in the fact that she was a Mudblood. Perhaps Riddle saw this as emphasizing the destruction of his Muggle side, but I would argue that her death was almost accidental. She was a target of opportunity who just happened to be in the bathroom where the Basilisk would exit the pipes into the school. I may be wrong about that — perhaps Riddle stalked the girls’ bathroom with his Basilisk for hours, waiting for a suitable victim to come in, but that seems not only really creepy but also a huge waste of time. Myrtle was killed in June of 1943.
Either in his last year of school or shortly after leaving, Tom Riddle followed the directions of Helena Ravenclaw to find the hiding place of Ravenclaw’s diadem in Albania. According to Rowling, he used the murder of an Albanian peasant to turn the diadem into his third Horcrux. This would have happened in 1945 or 1946.
Tom Riddle created his next Horcrux using Hufflepuff’s Cup after he murdered Hepzibah Smith. The date for this event is not known, but canon suggests that it was no earlier than the mid-1950s. Hepzibah claims that her family is distantly related to Helga Hufflepuff.

At the end of the last chapter, Hermione launched an impromptu plan to free herself and Harry from Umbridge, who had caught them using her office fireplace to talk to someone. Hermione’s plan was to pretend that they were talking to Dumbledore, telling him that the powerful secret weapon he’d created was ready to use. Hermione pretended to break down and say that she was willing to lead Umbridge to it. Umbridge fell for the ruse and forced her and Harry to lead her to the weapon, which Hermione told her was secreted away in the Forbidden Forest. 
In this chapter, the plan works. Well, sort of works. Okay, the only reason it works is because of the fortuitous arrival of Grawp. If the giant hadn’t shown up, things would have worked out very badly indeed for Harry and Hermione. 
What went wrong? More to the point, what exactly was Hermione’s plan? What was she thinking?
From the things she says to the Centaurs, it’s clear that her plan was to bring Umbridge into the Forest and let the Centaurs attack her. But why would she expect them to do that? Hermione has had very limited experience with Centaurs. She first encountered them in her first year when she, Harry, Neville, and Draco were brought into the Forest in the middle of the night by Hagrid as a detention. In that encounter, the Centaurs seemed a bit aggressive but not hostile. The fact that Hagrid was present, however, made that encounter far from typical. Hermione would certainly have understood the unusual nature of that meeting.
Hermione’s second encounter with Centaurs would be second hand at best. Since she gave up taking Divination, she wouldn’t have had Firenze for a teacher. However, she would certainly have heard the other girls in her dorm talking about him and how he was rejected by his herd for fraternizing with humans. Would this have led her to believe that the Centaurs in the Forest would be hostile to witches and wizards?
Perhaps so, but she wouldn’t have had any reason to expect the Centaurs to treat her and Harry with any less hostility. In fact, as far as she knew she was leading all three of them into a very dangerous situation, not just Umbridge. And neither Hermione nor Harry was carrying a wand. 
It would have made a lot more sense for her or Harry to have overpowered Umbridge once they entered the Forest. At one point, Umbridge trips and falls over a sapling, a perfect opportunity to pretend to help her up but instead grab her wand. It hardly seems that Umbridge would have been much of a match for two healthy, determined teenagers. Alternatively, Harry and Hermione could have simply run away, splitting up and dodging between trees. Umbridge might have managed to Stun one of them — possibly. I don’t imagine that she’s all that powerful of a witch, a fact strongly suggested by the shortness of her wand, which is revealed in this passage from chapter 12:
Many of the class exchanged gloomy looks; the order ‘wands away’ had never yet been followed by a lesson they had found interesting. Harry shoved his wand back inside his bag and pulled out quill, ink and parchment. Professor Umbridge opened her handbag, extracted her own wand, which was an unusually short one, and tapped the blackboard sharply with it; words appeared on the board at once:
Defence Against the Dark Arts A Return to Basic Principles (OP12)
According to Mr Ollivander, a short wand does indicate something lacking in the character or ability of the witch or wizard possessing it. He writes:
However, abnormally short wands usually select those in whose character something is lacking, rather than because they are physically undersized (many...

New historicism is an approach to literature which regards a work of literature as a product of the historical moment in which it was created and as embedded in the ideas and ideologies present in that time. For example, a new historicist might be interested in what Elizabethan beliefs about gender roles can tell us about Shakespeare’s plays and vice-versa. New historicist criticism can become more challenging when we think about works of literature that are nearer to our own time and belief systems, but it can provide us with interesting tools for thinking about Harry Potter, recent history, and the way we think about both.
It is a commonplace to compare Voldemort and the Death Eaters to Hitler and the Nazis, but new historicism prompts us to connect these similarities to the way the world was in the early 1990s when Rowling conceived of Harry’s story. As writers commenting on the abundance of television shows about Nazi Germany in the 1990s, such as Mark Schone, for example, have pointed out, the early 90s were characterized by an acute awareness that it had been a half century since the horrors of World War II. That important chapter in world history continues to haunt and disturb us today, of course, but perhaps the special significance it held in the culture of the early 90s helps to explain why the forces of evil in Harry Potter are represented as they are.
In more recent years, the Fantastic Beasts movies have actually dramatized events leading up to the 1930s and 40s, but film critics are often quick to make connections between these films and our contemporary political climate. What, exactly, makes Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a product of 1997, and what makes The Crimes of Grindelwald a product of 2018? And how might the Harry Potter books be different if they were written today? New historicism prompts us to ask these questions and gives us tools to start working on answers for them.
 
New Historicism Resources from the Web:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/new-historicism
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/new_historicism_cultural_studies.html
https://bowiestate.libguides.com/c.php?g=442217&p=3014973

 

This is a short scene, but it’s a huge scene when it comes to important information. We get a glimpse of the time-turner that causes all of the timeline disasters in this play. We finally get a mention of Hugo! We get the official titles of Harry and Hermione’s position in the Ministry. And we get a good bit of foreshadowing hidden in Harry’s paperwork.
It would be really easy to make this minute about Hermione being Minister for Magic. But, I feel that I can’t really add anything to any existing discussion about this, so all I’ll say is that it really took me by surprise, I didn’t think it fit her, at first. Rereading the main series again made me change my mind, specifically how passionate Hermione got with S.P.E.W., this is what made me think that she could one day become Minister for Magic.
What I’d really like to discuss in this minute is the information found in Harry’s paperwork. A casual viewer of this play, (and by that I mean someone who came to watch it because they are a fan of Broadway plays, not necessarily because they are a Harry Potter fan), they probably don’t know that the things Hermione mentions reading in the mess on Harry’s desk are classic ingredients to Harry Potter stories. These hints are what Potter fans look for to help figure out the mystery within the story.
Upon this reread I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the information about the trolls, graphorns, giants and werewolves and the information that Dumbledore puts forward as evidence that Voldemort had returned (the disappearance/deaths of Bertha Jorkins, Frank Bryce, and Barty Crouch). Also, all of the memories that he compiled to learn more about Tom Riddle and his Horcruxes. The act of looking for clues in the mundane details that may seem harmless on their own, but when strung together reveal a larger picture is what Dumbledore did best and tried to pass on to Harry. 
On that note, I wanted to discuss the fact that Harry not being the one to pay attention to these details, but had to hear them from Hermione is the most accurate scene so far as far as canon of the original series goes. Harry was not an outstanding student, by any means. Hermione was usually the one to reveal information needed.
On to the positive bit from this scene: I like that Harry uses this way to get in and out of the Ministry. The visitor entrance. Here’s my second piece of Cursed Child headcanon: I’m choosing to believe this was an intended choice of Harry’s once he became a Ministry official, rather than it being another breach of canon. This was the way he first entered the ministry, and this is the way he prefers to come and go now as an adult. 

Hermione says something very important in chapter 32 of Order of the Phoenix, something which helps define the overarching plot of the entire seven-book series.
When Harry is frantically describing the vision he had of Sirius captured and tortured by Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries, Hermione tries to reason with him.
‘OK,’ she said, looking frightened yet determined, ‘I’ve just got to say this -‘
‘What?’
‘You… this isn’t a criticism, Harry! But you do… sort of… I mean – don’t you think you’ve got a bit of a – a – saving-people thing!’ she said.
He glared at her.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean, a “saving-people thing”?’ (OP32)
It’s true. Harry does have a “saving-people thing.” It’s an integral part of who he is, how he views his place in the world. This aspect of his nature has been developing over almost five years of time at Hogwarts. He risked his life to save Hermione in book one when the troll was loose in the school. In the second book he again risked his life to enter the Chamber of Secrets and save Ginny’s life. Sirius and Buckbeak were the recipients of his selfless “saving-people thing” in book three. And, as Hermione points out, he went above and beyond to save Gabrielle Delacour in book four.
Harry has developed a sense that it’s all up to him. He’s also discovered that selflessly charging in and using his nascent skills to fight against the enemy, be it a basilisk or a hoard of dementors, wins the day. His “saving-people thing” works.
But Hermione senses something else, something dangerous about this heroic streak. She knows that all of Harry’s daring and skill isn’t nearly powerful enough to battle the truly legendary power of a wizard like Voldemort. She knows that charging in and fighting can also be a death sentence. And as Harry himself pointed out in the Hog’s Head, his successes have been due as much to luck and the help of others as to his own prowess. As he says, “I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be modest or anything, but… I had a lot of help with all that stuff…”
So yes, he has a “saving-people thing,” and yes, he’s trying to enlist help again now to go rescue Sirius. Hermione is understandably cautious, knowing that the rescue mission Harry is proposing might be a bit more than they can handle. So she asks him to think about things logically before letting his “saving-people thing” kick in.
But Hermione’s statement is actually more profound than even she realizes. What becomes obvious over the next few hours is that Harry’s “saving-people thing” is not only a strength. It’s also a weakness which Voldemort is exploiting. And the hubris that goes along with it is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of all. Harry is starting to believe that he’s the hero who can defeat Voldemort. Harry sees himself as becoming what I call “Superhero Harry.” He’s competed with the older students in the Triwizard Tournament and outflown a dragon. He’s driven off a hoard of Dementors. He’s killed a basilisk. He’s a Quidditch hero. And if that weren’t enough, he is also the son of the revered James Potter.