The Hog's Head

Beedle the Bard: The Wizard and the Hopping Pot

Travis Prinzi — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:13:32 +0000

There’s always more to a fairy tale that its simply being a “simple and heartwarming fable.” And if you don’t realize that, you risk being called a “nincompoop” by Albus Dumbledore (p. 11, Standard Edition).

“The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” is a tale of a “kindly old wizard” wizard who uses his magic to help his Muggle neighbors with their maladies (while pretending that the remedies came out of his cooking pot). When he dies, his son does not take up his cause, shutting the door on Muggle after Muggle, believing Muggles to be evil and weak. But his father had enchanted his pot, so that every sickness the son refused to heal showed up in or on the pot, which made so much noise and became such a vat of sickness that the son was driven to begin helping Muggles.

What makes this more than a “heartwarming fable” is the fact that Beedle wrote it while wizards and witches were experiencing severe persecution from the Muggle world, Dumbledore notes. This is a story of “love thy neighbor.” It goes completely against our every inclination; you do not help people who are persecuting you. Beedle thought differently. He did not think Wizards should respond to Muggle persecution by fighting back or by hating them, but with kindness and love. This falls in line, I think, with my reflections on how social change happens. One must be a loving person - even loving one’s own enemies - in order to create lasting change. In other words - “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality” (Plutarch).

Dumbledore’s notes that the story was banned and burned are interesting in light of the history of the Harry Potter stories in our own world. The quick glimpse of Malfoys ancestors show that not much has changed over the years, and that the prejudices Beedle fought still exist today.

Rowling does get one great shot in at folks who sanitize fairy tales so that they don’t scare children. Dumbledore’s commentary hits a point of hilarious irony when he notes that Mrs. Bloxam’s re-written version of “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” - to exclude references to “bodily effusions” - produced “uncontrollable retching” in children who hear her version the story (p. 19). For more on this issue of sanitizing fairy tales, see chapter three of my book, Harry Potter & Imagination (Shipping soon!).

Beedle the Bard: Rowling’s Introduction

Travis Prinzi — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:33:48 +0000

The thesis can wait. These stories are great.

I’ve read Rowling’s introduction, the first tale, and Dumbledore’s commentary on that tale so far. I’ll put up threads with initial thoughts for each story and commentary, but we’ll start with the intro.

Several things of note:

Rowling addressed head-on the question of how magic would work in fairy tales in an already magical world (as I expected she would). She notes that in Muggle fairy tales, magic is very often the source of evil - the poisoned apple, the 100-year sleep, the prince-turned beast. But in the Wizarding tales, Beedle attempted to show that magic can’t solve anyone’s problems either. “Magic causes as much trouble as it cures” (p. viii, Standard Edition).
This leads to a conclusion in my mind: In analyzing these stories, we’ll have to distinguish between what’s traditionally called a “fairy tale” and Tolkien’s description of the “certain mood and power” of Faerie, or the Perilous Realm. There are lots of stories that traditionally we would call “fairy tales” that Tolkien would not call “fairy-stories,” because they do not contain the “certain mood and power” of the Perilous Realm.
The social commentary is going to be very evident, and probably the heart of these stories. Beedle was a Muggle-lover long before that was accepted - indeed, in the midst of serious persecution (more on that in the commentary for the first tale, “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot”). He was also a feminist. Beedle wrote the kind of fairy tales I intend to tell my daughter - ones where the female character does not wait for the prince to come save her.
Rowling notes that we’ll be able to tell, upon reading Dumbledore’s commentary on “The Tale of the Three Brothers” that, in typical Dumbledore fashion, he’s telling us less than he really knows. An interesting twist! There will be room for speculation when we get to the final tale - the one we’ve already read.
Rowling notes that these tales are a “new translation” by Hermione Granger.

Looking forward to the thoughts of the pub patrons. Fire away!

Beedle the Bard Approaches

Travis Prinzi — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:35:03 +0000

The minstrel of the dawn is here, to make you laugh and bend your ear. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

In not many hours, we’ll begin reading the fairy tales of the Wizarding World. Both the tales themselves and Dumbledore’s commentary should be fascinating reads, and I’m looking forward to a new experience of Rowling’s artistry. A few bullet-point thoughts, hopes and expectations:

I’m as interested in Dumbledore’s commentary as I am about the content of the Tales themselves. Will we learn more about Dumbledore? Will/should what we read here shape our experience of Dumbledore in the 7-novel canon?
What will we learn from Dumbledore about the power of story and of imagination? After all, Dumbledore believed that Voldemort’s lack of knowledge of the power of children’s stories was part of his downfall!
I expect many people to miss the deeper/anagogical meaning of the stories and stick to the “morality tale” meaning. But I do expect deeper levels of meaning that just fairy-tales-as-moral-lessons. I think the role of “The Tale of the Three Brothers” demonstrates this well enough.
Interesting question: If Muggles imagine magical worlds in their fairy tales, what do magical people imagine? We might get some insight into the creative process here.
I also expect the moral lessons to be along the lines of the social justice themes in her book, with gradualism married to the themes of love’s victory over death and the importance of free will choices.

What are your hopes and expectations?

Thursday is Beedle Day!

Travis Prinzi — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:42:44 +0000

We’ll be talking Beedle the Bard starting Thursday and in the days to follow. Thursday is very quickly changing from “The Day Travis Will Read and Comment on the Entire Book” to “The Day Travis Needs to Finish His Second Master’s Thesis.” At the very least, I’ll put up open-discussion posts on the 5 Beedle stories so you can all get started on the conversation. I plan to pick up the book in the morning and return to it throughout the day as I need breaks from my thesis.

So be here on Thursday for the best Beedle discussion anywhere! (I’ll also be stopping frequently at Hogwarts Professor to see what excellent insights Mr. Granger has on the Tales.)

[My thesis, by the way, is on Harry Potter in the classroom. If I can't find a good publication avenue for it in a few months, I might post it in its entirety here. It'll add some fuel to the fire of our education discussion, to be sure.]

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And the winner is…

Travis Prinzi — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:44:35 +0000

The winner of the free copy of Harry Potter & Imagination is Arka!

Well done, Arka. It definitely paid to submit the link to so many different sources. Send me an E-Owl and I’ll make sure you get your autographed copy when it’s available.

Everyone else: Stay tuned. Another opportunity approaches.

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Around the Common Room

Travis Prinzi — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:40:09 +0000

Greg and Penny interviewed me for Episode #94 of HP Progs, and it’s up!
For anyone interested, folks from the Boar’s Head Tavern (including myself) blog through the Advent season each year, and we’re starting it again today.
Be here at The Hog’s Head on Thursday. I’ve taken the day off so I can read and write about Beedle all day.
Don’t forget to enter the contest to win a free copy of my book!
If you’ve pre-ordered my book (or you do so now!), your copy will be autographed. If you’d like it personalized, please send me an E-owl.
An exciting new title is shipping from Zossima Press: The Cat on the Catamaran: A Christmas Tale, by John Martin.

Harry Potter and Convergence Culture

Dave the Longwinded — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:09:22 +0000

My coursework at Old Dominion has led me through a lot of writing and reading for last few months — hence, my absence from the site! One of the books I’ve been reading has pushed the back of my mind in some new directions with Harry Potter. In 2006, Henry Jenkins (head of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT) released a book I had wanted to read for some time: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. And, as most regular readers know, I’ve always harbored an interest in HP as a story told across multiple media forms. Well, Jenkins provides a couple of terms that apply to this interest, and to us here at The Hog’s Head. Here are the terms and some definitions provided by Jenkins’ Introduction:

Convergence: “[C]onsumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. [...] Convergence occurs within the brains of the individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.” (pgs. 3-4)
Participatory Culture: This is a much broader term, accounting for different forms of audience interaction with stories and cultural products. Most notably, Jenkins sees participation as a feature that blurs, more and more, the distinctions between “media producers and consumers”: “we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (pg. 3).

Both terms encompass a lot of features within the media flow to which we’ve grown accustomed, though no one movie, book, game, or website need use all of those features. What Jenkins is worried about here is how stories are now told in a media environment that more and more encourages audience participation. He addresses the voting process on American Idol and the online fan communities surrounding Surviror. Both chapters involve some intriguing ideas for us here, but the chapters 3, 4, and 5 are most important, I think. Chapter 3 discusses “transmedia storytelling”, which I’ll discuss below; chapter 4 chronicles the sometimes troubled intersection between fan communities and the corporations that own the intellectual properties they love; and chapter 5 directly addresses different avenues in the culture wars surrounding Harry Potter, and discusses the books as an example calling for a new form of literacy.

For now, the point to take away is embedded within the definition of convergence, that it takes place “within the brains of individual consumers”. A large, perhaps even crucial, portion of our experience with a story occurs within our heads. In other words, if we’re stuck trying to understand the relationships between the films and the books, then we’re not alone. Personally, I saw the first three films before ever reading a word of the books. As a result, it is sometimes difficult for me to see the characters’ physical appearances and mannerisms outside of their celluloid framework. More than a few people here have lamented this, especially given our problems with some of the films portrayals. The general consensus has been that Gambon in no way emboddies Dumbledore (Travis, RedRocker, and revgeorge are your best sources on this). And some have expressed reservations that Alan Rickman is too old for Snape, while Emma Watson isn’t everyone’s ideal Hermione.

Yet, in an interesting twist, while I sometimes cannot see characters outside of their film counterparts, I can accept the films as wholly different stories from the books. And I am constantly wondering why this is the case.

The books/films/games are not perfectly representative examples of “transmedia storytelling”, a narrative mode whereby a universe’s story unfolds across multiple media channels:

[E]ach medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. (pg. 98)

Jenkins’ primary example here is The Matrix. Many fans complained that something was lost from the first film to the last two. But, the Wachowski brothers were pursuing a storytelling strategy that saw them develop key moments of the universe’s narrative in other media channels, through anime short films (of which I have only seen bits and pieces) and in a videogame (which, I admit, I have not played). As Jenkins states, “For people who see only the movie, the sources of [some] information remain unclear”, but for anyone who has sought the transmedia experience, they will have picked up on minor details that convey the plot (pg. 104). In other words, the Wachowskis sought to weave all these media into one large, coherent narrative saga — if only a loose one.

One result does apply to us, and is called “collective intelligence”, or the need to combine with multiple people into an interpretive community to weave all the information together to make some kind of analysis possible. Fans, then, start to take over some portion of the narrative world because it “is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise — since fan speculations and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of directions” (pg. 116). This should sound familiar: I think it perfectly describes us, and our online comrades. During my time here, I’ve noticed that we form a radically diverse collective of ideas and abilities brought to bear on the HP world. Some of us have expertise in literature as a formal endeavor, others bring with them expertise in religion and theology, and I have seen hints of expertise in fields as diverse as psychology, library science, and early childhood education. Likely, none of us would have found each other’s expertise outsideTHH, Hogwarts Professor, or HPProgs, and many of us may not have sought out such expertise on our own. THH allows this to happen because we are not merely readers and interpreters; we participate in the text’s construction not only by reading the books, but by dragging together our various interests. In other words, Rowling isn’t the only author of the experience of HP, but my interpretations are shaped by Travis’s comments — he (and so many others) shapes my experience with HP, too. It’s difficult for me now to watch or read the stories without thinking of some detailes we discuss here.

Since this process happens primarily in the audience’s minds, there is a fundamental choice here — at least up to a point. For instance, anyone is perfectly free to choose one form of the story over another. We tend to give the books primacy, but many audiences choose the movies. I’ve played some of the games, while most of my posts on those tend to get very little reaction. Yet, by interacting here, some part of the process is beyond our control, too. Our debates over Snape, his allegiances, and his portrayal in Deathly Hallows serve a perfect example. Some of us had created a sense of Snape, driven by both the books and our discussions, that were not necessarily met by DH. Jenkins discusses this phenomena relative to Star Wars:

Adding too much information, however, carries its own risks: fans had long debated whether Boba Fett could actually be a woman underneath the helmet, since we never actually got to see the character’s face or hear its voice. But as Lucas fleshed out the character, he also closed down those possibilities, preempting important lines of fan speculation even as he added information that might sustain new fantasies. (pg. 117)

While Boba Fett is not a perfect analogy to Snape, I think what Jenkins describes here is a very good analysis of why many of us reacted to Snape’s development/demise in DH. Our lines of speculation pursued a character that was already fascinating. We knew that Rowling had to do something with him in DH. But she had set him up as a central character in the story’s scheme, and then carried out his character’s resolution in the background. She was perfectly free to do this, but it is easy to see how some fans (admittedly, myself included) were disappointed by this. Part of the issue, too? Our “lines of speculation” were closed off — witness the drop in online fan participation in the months after Deathly Hallows was released.

Notice that I’ve used the word experience a few times? I think there are different ways to consider my idea here, but I’ve come to two variations on the term:

Experience is the task of entertainment, when we don’t really look for a coherent storyline, anymore. We simply want to be transported to something beyond our everyday realities. I’ve seen my fair share of movies lately that have no coherent plot, but are full of spectacular visuals. What’s the point? Why do we want such a thing? “Escapism” is the traditional term, but I think experience is a different matter because it takes place in the audience, not the text.
Another, more interesting version is something I think takes place for many of us with respect to the films. We know the source material so well (and give it such primacy), that we treat the movies as just an extension of that universe. This doesn’t mean that we forgive the films their transgressions and ommissions. But, Order of the Phoenix represented a curious moment for me: I liked the film in many ways, but I felt that anyone who hadn’t read the book would be lost about a few plot details — particularly the section taken from “Snape’s Worst Memory”. I’ve had some students say the same thing about the Twilight adaptation, as well. Much about the new James Bond film, Quantam of Solace, would make no sense to anyone who doesn’t remember much about Casino Royale. This isn’t purely a matter of serialization. I think more and more storytellers are relying on audiences to supply elements of the story within their participatory reactions.

These definitions obviously aren’t perfect, and I’m still thinking my way through them — any help from you super smart readers here at THH would be fantastic!

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Black Friday Giveaway #4: Harry Potter & Imagination

Travis Prinzi — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:59:11 +0000

Well, you had to know it was coming. This one’s going to be more involved than the first three, and it’s going to stay open for a couple of days. The winner of this contest will receive a free, autographed copy of my book, Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds.

Here’s how you enter. Publicize the post, “Pre-order Harry Potter & Imagination.” Any mode of publicity will do, but here are some suggestions:

At the bottom of the post, there is a “Share/Save” button. Several of these links are ways to share content: Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. Any of these will do. Most require you to have an account with them, but setting one up is usually really easy.
Email your friends.
Share the post on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, MySpace, or anywhere else you can think of.
Get a megaphone and shout the URL around your neighborhood.
Get primo tickets for a football game this weekend, and bring a big sign that will end up on TV.
Harry Potter fansite forums and blog comments sections.
Any other creative way you can think of.

Once you’ve shared the post, come back here and tell us you did so, and which method you chose, in the comments. Here’s the fun part: Your name gets entered each time you share the post in one way or another. To add even more incentive, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Facebook all count for 2 shares (your name gets put in twice).

Feel free to ask questions in the comments or by E-owl.

Deadline for entry is midnight EST on Monday, December 1. Winner will be announced Tuesday.

Note: Please be sure you’re sharing the right post. It’s the one linked here, not the present post that you are reading. But tell us you shared it in the comments for this post. Confused? Me too. Good luck.

Black Friday Giveaway #3: Beedle the Bard, Take Two!

Travis Prinzi — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:02:40 +0000

And the winner is: Jim Beeghley! Jim, send an E-owl, and I’ll get your copy pre-ordered right away! The Final Black Friday Giveaway, coming right up!

Yes, it’s your second chance to win the Tales! Black Friday giveaway #3 here at The Hog’s Head is a free copy of the standard edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Entering is easy. This time, simply tell us in the comments what you’re currently reading, and give us some info about it. Enter by 7pm, EST today. The winner will be announced then, along with the final Black Friday giveaway!

Don’t forget to do your shopping today at Amazon.com, either through the Hog’s Head Bookstore, or by clicking here for Black Friday deals!

Black Friday Giveaway #2: Five Harry Potter Movies

Travis Prinzi — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:08:49 +0000

And the winner, by random drawing is: Shane Deal. Shane, send an E-owl, and I’ll get these shipped straight you! Giveaway #3 coming right up!

You, like all other Potter fans, are probably disappointed that you’re not currently on your 3rd or 4th viewing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was originally slated for release last week.

You can ease the pain a little by owning all five Harry Potter movies. (Note: these are pre-viewed, not brand new copies; special thanks to Matthew for the contribution).

To enter: Contribute to the discussion in the comments on this post by answering this question: Which actor or actress from the Harry Potter movies most resembles how you imagined the character they play when you read the books. Be sure to enter by 4pm EST. After that, the winner - and a new giveaway - will be announced.

The Hog's Head

Beedle the Bard: The Wizard and the Hopping Pot

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Beedle the Bard: Rowling’s Introduction

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Beedle the Bard Approaches

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Thursday is Beedle Day!

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And the winner is…

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Around the Common Room

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Harry Potter and Convergence Culture

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Black Friday Giveaway #4: Harry Potter & Imagination

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Black Friday Giveaway #3: Beedle the Bard, Take Two!

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Black Friday Giveaway #2: Five Harry Potter Movies

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