The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter (15 page)

Read The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter Online

Authors: Tere Stouffer

Just like Smaug, when Eustace turns into a dragon in C.S. Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
he finds himself sleeping on a bed of treasure—money, jewels, and gold. In Ursula Le Guin’s
The Wizard of Earthsea,
dragons sometimes attack people when searching for treasure. The literary link between dragons, goblins, and treasure is deep indeed.

Hobgoblins, another name for goblins, also appear far back in British folklore as short, hairy, ugly creatures who can be friendly and helpful, but can quickly turn mean and nasty. That folkloric tradition fits the wizarding world’s goblins to a “T.” Goblins and hobgoblins also appear in the
Spider-Man
comics, the Dungeons & Dragons game, and even in Shakespeare (Puck, in
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,
is a hobgoblin).

Receiving Mail

Technology is irrelevant to wizards—why use overnight delivery services, text-messaging, and e-mail when you can use magic? So a wizard’s first choice for contacting other wizards is not through high-tech means but through the mail service, which travels via owl.

The Role of Owls

Owls, not carrier pigeons or hawks, are the bird of choice for wizards. In fact, a local post office is little more than an owlery.

The rationale behind using owls is a little murky, but a connection between owls and magic is well established. Magic tends to be practiced under the cover of darkness; owls are nocturnal creatures. The consistent hooting of an owl has long been associated, right or wrong, with impending death, especially the death of a child. The Greeks and Romans believed that witches could turn themselves into owls, and then feast on babies. In fact, in many cultures, owls have been believed to act as messengers for wizards and witches, just as they do in the magical world of Harry Potter. And in T.H. White’s
The Once and Future King,
Merlin has an owl named Archimedes.

The advantage to using owls is that they work seven days a week, they can deliver messages just about anywhere in the world, and they can find the addressee even if no one is supposed to know where he or she is. The downside is that owls must be cared for, fed, and given treats, and they can be temperamental. In addition, cats, another highly magical creature, don’t tend to get on well with owls.

Howlers

One particular type of mail is a Howler. A Howler looks like it could be a letter in a red envelope, but when you open the envelope you get Howled at by the sender. Ignoring it only makes the screaming worse. When all the screaming is over, the envelope erupts in flames and burns. Howlers are sent mostly by parents to rebuke their children.

The Wizarding Wireless Network (WWN)

Nothing like the World Wide Web (WWW), the WWN is basically a wizarding radio station, playing mostly music. A wireless in the wizarding world is not a cell phone, Palm, or Blackberry, but a radio, as in the term used to denote radios in the early 1900s. “Wireless” was short for wireless telegraphy—the beauty of radio was that, unlike the telegraph, it was completely wireless, operating on radio frequency instead of using wires that crisscrossed the nation, as the telegraph did.

Wizard musicians aren’t any different from nonwizard musicians, except that the lyrics of songs relate to issues wizards can understand (“A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love” or “You Charmed the Heart Right Out of Me”). Celestina Warbeck (from
celestial,
meaning “heavenly,” and
warbler,
a bird known for its sweet songs) is one such wizard singer.

Perhaps the most famous wizard group is The Weird Sisters, a rock ’n’ roll band that sport long hair and torn black robes and might be loosely named after Twisted Sister, a heavy metal band popular in the 1980s. Just as likely is that they are a reference to the three witches in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
Although The Weird Sisters’ instruments include the usual drums and guitars, band members also play the lute, the cello, and the bagpipes, which are all traditional Celtic instruments.

Photos and Artwork

That the subjects in photographs and paintings change in the wizard world—that is, that they are not static—may not come as a huge surprise. After all, many horror stories are predicated on the notion that the “eyes” of paintings are watching you and following your every move. Egyptians painted images in tombs in the hopes that the images would come alive and assist and guide the soul of the deceased. F. Scott Fitzgerald used the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg in
The Great Gatsby
, up on a huge billboard, as a metaphor for God watching us. And perhaps the best-known changing picture is the one in Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The picture ages and displays the scars of a man who has lived a cruel life, while the subject of the painting, Dorian Gray himself, never ages a day.

But wizard paintings don’t just change subtly; they move about, sleep, talk, and even leave their paintings to visit other ones! They can, in fact, be most annoying. The characters in paintings are much like their original subjects—they have the same opinions, tendencies, and characteristics as they did while alive. The Fat Lady, the subject of a painting that guards the entrance to one of the Hogwarts houses, regularly gossips, takes naps while on duty, and is terrified when her painting is slashed. Photos, on the other hand, are like silent movies that replay every few seconds; photo subjects also tend not to talk or leave their frames, but they do wave and smile.

And in what is, perhaps, literature’s best imitation of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
one Sir Cadogan, formerly of a hanging picture, leaves his painting to go on a quest, yelling insults like “Stand and fight, you yellow-bellied mongrels!” A real Sir Alexander Cadogan was Great Britain’s representative to the United Nations just after World War II.

We see plenty of the opposite in literature and culture; that is, people stepping
into
paintings. C.S. Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
begins with the children falling into a painting. And much more recently, in the movie
What Dreams May Come,
Robin Williams goes into one of his wife’s oil paintings.

Eating and Drinking

British wizards eat and party like any Brit without wizard abilities, with some exceptions:

•

Butterbeer
is an entirely wizardly invention, and like any good magical concoction, it has powers beyond simply tasting good— it’s a nonalcoholic (except to house elves) soft drink that makes the drinker feel all warm and toasty inside. It’s butterscotchy, with a nice froth on top like root beer. So, it’s a butterscotch root beer (hence, “butterbeer”). The bottle caps can be strung together in a necklace, but none of the cool kids would do that.

•

Pumpkin juice
would be easy enough to make in the Muggle world, but only wizards have a taste for it. If you strained pumpkins, the juice would be incredibly thick, but watered down and with some added sugar, the juice would make a tasty—and healthy—beverage. The juice is usually served cold in a flagon, which is a container that has a handle, spout, and, sometimes, a lid. Pumpkins are prominent in the wizarding world, but that’s not surprising, given the prominence of pumpkins in Halloween celebrations.

MAGIC TALE

Do the British celebrate Halloween? Yeah—they invented it! Held every October 31, the tradition started as Samhain (pronounced SOW-an) Eve, the traditional end of summer for the Celts. It was believed that the dead, joined by other supernatural beings, came back to mess with the minds of the living for one night. The Catholic Church renamed the holiday All Saints’ Eve (the night before All Saints’ Day), or All Hallows’ Eve, which is how the current name, Halloween, originated. Sometimes called Mischief Night (a night of pranks and other mischief for which children weren’t punished), today’s British celebration looks just like the American version, including door-to-door trick-or-treating.

•

Dandelion juice
doesn’t sound nearly as appetizing as pumpkin juice, but the idea is the same: strain the juice from dandelion stems or flowers, add a bit of sugar, and create a tasty beverage. Dandelion, which means “lion’s tooth,” goes by many other names, including wild endive, swine snout, and cankerwort. Dandelion has traditionally been used to treat digestive complaints.

•

Firewhiskey
is, presumably, a whiskey with an extra kick. Although school children don’t usually partake, Chocolate Cauldrons, a popular treat, are chocolate confections with a touch of firewhiskey inside them. Whiskey was, of course, invented in the British Isles.

MAGIC TALE

Perhaps it’s too much of a stretch, but Ogdens Old Firewhiskey may have been named for Ogden, Utah. When most people think of Utah, they think of Mormons and temperance, not of whiskey. But Ogden, one of the only non-Mormon cities in Utah, was once a classic Old West town, with saloons, brothels, dance halls, and opium dens along the length of its famous 25th Street.

•