The sparkling salon that is Brian Clegg’s blog has exposed a veritable portmaneau of annelids concerning the current court battle between J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter and the Temple of Doom and other Booker-award-winning masterpieces, and Mr Steve Noah’s-Ark, whose publisher has, perhaps rashly, proposed to produce a print version of his online Potteresque resource. I shall say no more about that here, except that Mr Noah’s-Ark and Ms Rowling are probably at this moment quoting The Comedy of Errors at their respective legal teams
- Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advised?
I should say here that I’ve read and enjoyed the entire Potterama several times over, and am currently reading my younger daughter Harry Potter and the Geranium of Fear as a bedtime story. Or perhaps it’s Harry Potter and the Enchanted Trombone? After a while they tend to merge into one (though I’ll counsel her to save Harry Potter and the Call of Cthulhu until she’s older). But repeated readings of Harry Potter and the Decerebrated Armadillo have, for me, worn holes in the imagined universe inhabited by Potter and his pals.
Over the years, it’s become very difficult to imagine how the annual output of a few schools of Witchcraft and Wizardry, feeding into an admittedly very small community of magical people, can support
- an entire Ministry of Magic
- a diverse publishing industry
- a banking system with its own currency
- a major hospital
- entire leagues of Quidditch, including a world championship attended by tens of thousands of fans
- a thriving and diverse mercantile industry
and so on. There’s a demographic deficit here. Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons hardly produce enough output to populate a small village, and even if some wizards are home-educated, where do all those witches and wizards come from?
I like to think I’m a discerning reader of fiction, so such matters as the internal consistency of imagined universes is important to me. Writing in Nature’s Futures series, Dan Simmons speculated that fictional universes might become real, such that people might migrate there by quantum teleportation. The existence of a fiction-generated alternate universe (and the number of people such universes might support) would be dependent on the strength of the ‘entangled-pair consciousness wavefront’ with which the universe had been imagined.
For example, 21 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays generated viable universes capable of supporting between a few thousand (Measure for Measure) and more than a million people (King Lear). The works of Dickens had generated five alternate universes that people might colonise:
- Flaubert, it turned out, generated two complete universes — the so-called “Madame Bovary’s World” and that of Sentimental Education — whereas Alice Walker, it seems, to the frustration of American academics, had created none.
Simmons didn’t mention Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but given the detail of its contrivance, I expect that it might exist, somewhere in the continuum. But I suspect that the world of Hogwarts and Quidditch, Platform Nine And Three Quarters and Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, remains firmly imaginary.
Why should this be? How can such inconsistencies arise, given the wealth and detail of planning that Rowling lavished on the Potterverse over many years? I think I have an answer and, as you’ll have suspected, it’s informed by Tolkien.
When I wrote The Science of Middle-earth my biggest problem was explaining all the properties of Bilbo’s magic ring (stop sniggering, Grant, I can hear you from here) in one self-consistent theory. The ring contains something of the personality of its creator, and its weight can vary without apparent cause – so much is explicable by finagling around with various exotic ideas about quantum gravity (though as one of my colleagues remarked, when we were discussing this – “isn’t physics bollocks fun?”).
The big problem is explaining, in physical terms, how a magic ring could make its wearer invisible along with all his clothes and anything he is carrying. This makes no sense at all. I finessed this problem by noting that the ring’s property of invisibility – and no others – was invented in The Hobbit, intended as a children’s fairy tale, and in which the audience would not be expected to ask difficult questions of the consistency of the world in which they are asked to inhabit (this despite Tolkien’s views to the contrary in his essay On Fairy Stories, in which he set out the necessary condition of the Suspension of Disbelief). The ring is (by Tolkien’s admission) the link between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which is, in contrast, a fairy-tale for grown-ups – and that’s where the problems arise. In The Hobbit, the ring is just a macguffin of the kind that one finds in fairy stories more generally. But in The Lord of the Rings, one is implicitly invited to ask questions about how such things come to be.
So much is clear from the Potterverse. The first book, Harry Potter and the Unicycling Girrafe, is plainly a ripping yarn for kids. Most of the action happens at Hogwarts school, so we are not invited to ask questions about the consistency of the universe in which the story takes place. The sense of confusion, followed by disorientation and then wonder, when confronted by a world that is exotic, fresh and new – which we experience through Harry’s eyes – blinds one to any internal problems.
But slowly, as Harry and his pals get older, the increasingly familiar world they inhabit expands until, in the final instalment, Harry Potter and the Facts in the Case of Monsieur Voldemort, when Harry is an adult, it is coextensive with the outside, ‘Muggle’ world, and Hogwarts appears only at the end. Now, this final instalment is as well-crafted an adventure as all the others (even the unintentionally anarchic Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Noise), and the craftsmanship carries the story. But the Potterverse itself has become, in my view, as evanescent as the silver fog of a failed patronus.
Over the years, it’s become very difficult to imagine how the annual output of a few schools of Witchcraft and Wizardry, feeding into an admittedly very small community of magical people, can support… an entire Ministry of Magic
Doesn’t the annual output of about three schools provide the manpower (if not the womanpower) for the vast majority of the parliamentary Conservative party?
Well, possibly, and discounting the fact that Xernophilius Lovegood obviously belongs to the Monster Raving Loony party – but where would they get their constituents?
If someone can give me the data on the frequencies of surnames in the UK, I have a cunning plan to estimate the number of wizards in the UK. I asked the ONS for help, but strangely they ignored me.
And don’t the wizardfolk enjoy much longer lifespans than we muggles? So presumably they work well into their 90s or beyond.
And don’t the wizardfolk enjoy much longer lifespans than we muggles. I’ve no idea. Dumbledore is fairly old, but I don’t think Rowling ever explicitly says that wizards have longer lives. The numbers of young witches and wizards tends to speak against this. But perhaps all the really old ones have retired and live in Sheringham.
Do they pay taxes?
Taxes aren’t mentioned, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t. The Ministry of Magic has to be supported somehow, I guess. One of the problems of the Potterverse is that people can conjure things out of thin air apparently without cost. I haven’t read Highfield’s Science of Harry Potter to see what the sage says on that subject. However, I have a feeling that Rowling solved that one with a last-minute kludge in Harry Potter and the Man of La Mancha about exceptions to Somebody-or-Other’s Law of Transmogrification or some such.
The problem here is that you’re projecting the economics of our own utterly-unsustainable fantasy economic model of fractional reserve banking upon the Potter universe, when clearly their economy is based on the exchange of actual gold currency, which is even better than paper currency backed by gold. Such an economy, based on the physical value of the currency rather than how much paper and ink can be magically pumped into or removed from the economy, can support many more people at sustainable levels because the goblins aren’t siphoning off the natural profit of the economy to service fantasy debt owned by Lord Voldemort. (And let’s be honest, if he really wanted to rule, he went about it the wrong way. He should have just taken over Gringotts and started printing money and paying interest on savings.) Wizards and witches earn their bread by the sweat of their wand hands. Their money doesn’t earn them more money – it is merely stored and guarded for, I imagine, a fat fee. Their savings aren’t loaned out in speculative ventures like tulips, websites that sell dog food, and sub-prime mortgages for the Dursley’s summer home in Provence. Thus a wand today costs pretty much what it cost five hundred years ago. Thus the economy is sustainable no matter how many wizards or witches there are.
As for the number of schools, the three you mention are just the best ones. There are probably loads of second and third tier schools cranking out a steady stream of undereducated graduates to fill out the middle levels of government.
Not to mention that death by magical mishap and dueling probably culls the herd a bit, keeping the population in check.
Works for me, Jeff. But I have to work in an office with Henry, and he is rather large (not to mention his feet), so I am keeping quiet on this one.
What have you got against my feet, all of a sudden?
All of a sudden? We have had previous exchanges on this very network, about your feet! (Hobbits were involved.)
Ah, so your campaign against my feet is more one of trench-foot- warfare rather than occasional skirmishes? They are very nice feet, I’ll have you know. And to think, I come ‘ere all the way from Great Portland Street.
Henry, you are such a spoilsport. Until now I had been sure that if I tried hard enough, I still had a chance of getting into Hogwarts. Now I’ll just have to stay here with the muggles and squibs.
@Cath: My younger daughter (aged nearly 8) is a total Pottermane. She is convinced that, one day, she’ll get that letter. My elder daughter (aged 10), who I’m convinced was only trying to be helpful, wrote her sister a letter purporting to come from Dumbledore, informing her that Hagrid would be arriving at 4 p.m. the following Sunday to take her for an exclusive tour of the school. I braced myself for tears and tantrums when Sunday teatime rolled around … but thankfully my children had been diverted by other matters.
Perhaps we need to introduce the idea that the potterverse exists in a quantum mechanical context much as Stanislaw Lem postulated virtual or probabilistic gragons in the Cyberiad?
Argh – the curse of the keyboard – dragons of course
Gragons sound cool, too. Maybe a cross between a dragon and a gorgon, with breath that turns its victims to stone.
I intend to one day write a story about gragons now, so nobody can write it before me without violating my… futureright on the work?
Better get in there quick, Jeff, in case JKR says she invented a mythical creature called a gragon that was to feature in Harry Potter and the Curse of the Black Pearl Crystal Amulet – it’s all there, the the Bloomsbury Style Manual, don’t you know? – but never made it to the final edit. Hagrid had one and called it ‘Cuddles’.
Henry, such venom! From you?
Yeah, it’s not like JKR ever borrowed anything from Tolkien or (gasp) D&D, like, oh, I don’t know, the basilisk whose petrification gaze weapon extends into the ethereal plane, thus turning ghosts to ethereal stone, or anything like that, you know. Which, of course, made it possible for the basilisk’s tooth to stab into the ethereal plane as well, thus being able to kill the ethereal Tom Riddle.
And speaking of Horcruxes, it’s not like the original horcrux wasn’t the One Ring, into which Sauron poured the greater part of his power, ensuring his ability to resurrect were his physical body ever to be destroyed. Never mind the D&D version of the clone spell, or the D&D concept of a lich’s phylactery. But then again, Tolkien never called it a horcrux, diddee? And neither did JK call a horcrux a phylactery.
So it’s all good, as long as the trademarks are protected.
Once you begin tossing folks out the window, it’s hard to stop.
It’s like eating chips, or crisps, or whatever you blokes call them. You can’t toss just one.
Quite right too, Jeff. You reminded me that I really must write a blog on the nature of authorship. No author exists in a vacuum. Inevitably, they borrow from a diverse range of sources (and, yes, stories about schools for witches and wizards existed before Rowling). After all, even the words we use have been used elsewhere, borrowed from other peoples’ works. A truly original book would have to be written in a brand new language, invented by the author, that could be shown to be unrelated to any other language living or extinct.
The entire time I was reading the Harry Potter books, I couldn’t help thinking she had read and re-read the core Dragonlance novels.
I even flattered myself that she had read my first published Dragonlance story, The Restoration, published in 1998. In that story, I have what is essentially a horcrux of the dead mage Fistandantalus, in the form of a lost spellbook, found in a ruined library.
Probably not. There is nothing new under the sun. As has often been true in science, two people can get the same idea at the same time. I can’t count how many times I’ve come up with a good story idea only to see something very similar appear as a book or movie. In fact, it just happened with the novel I’m currently writing. Luckily, my story is different enough from the movie, but when I saw the first commercial, I was ready to scream.
I have what is essentially a horcrux of the dead mage Fistandantalus, in the form of a lost spellbook, found in a ruined library.
The Dewey Decimal System would have catalogued it next to the abhorred Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Al-Hazred.
When I first heard about the Harry Potter books, I thought they were going to be a blatant rip-off of the Worst Witch. But while that may possibly have given JKR the idea, she took it much further than the original author. I loved the Worst Witch books when I was a kid, but they’ve got nothing on Harry!
Even gragon.
Sorry, Borges has already written about that book. :-(
A mistype of gragon and suddenly we find web pages of the stuff. Aha, morphic resonance!