Hogwarts Professor

Happy Birthday, Mrs. Murray!

As a birthday gift of sorts, Nick and John close off their month-long celebration of the woman writing under the pseudonyms J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith’s life and work with a follow-up look at yesterday’s review of the ‘Lost Child’ Golden Thread that runs through her stories.

After cataloging the almost forty ‘for instances’ taken from the opera omnia in the penultimate entry in this series, Nick and John ask, “So What?” How does the possibility that Rowling had an induced abortion and is sufficiently unsettled by it that it inspires many even most of her books at least in part make any difference in understanding their artistry and meaning?

John’s answer is that, if read through the induced abortion lens, one can see shades of character reflecting Rowling’s thought on this subject.

More importantly, each Harry Potter novel can be read as a defense of induced abortion, i.e., that each features something evil within a person having to be exteriorized and eliminated, a process that readers celebrate as a ‘win.’

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

Almost there!

For the day before Rowling’s 60th birthday, Nick and John tackle by reader request the never before discussed subject of the Lost Child theme in the author’s more than twenty published works.

They re-introduce the Golden Threads idea — see their Pregnancy Trap podcast or the two Kanreki conversations on this subject (here and here) — then they do a deep dive into the crowded waters of Lost Children in her work, and then they go out out on a high-wire to speculate about what specific spring in her Lake subconscious mind is responsible for this recurrent inspiration.

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

In their antepenultimate Kanreki celebration conversation, Nick and John fulfill a reader request to discuss the book inside Deathly Hallows (one of three actually…), ‘Tales of Beedle the Bard,’ a text that Albus Dumbledore leaves Hermione in his will for her to read and apply to the Horcrux Hunt.

From the Lake side, Nick tells the story of Rowling’s creation of six hand-written copies as six-of-a-kind gifts for those who brought Harry Potter to life. John dives into the center story of the five tales, ‘The Hairy Heart,’ and tells the meaning of Harry’s heart to draw out what Rowling meant by describing Beedle as “the distillation” of the Hogwarts Saga.

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

Nick and John return to the books after Golden Threads and Rings at a reader’s suggestion in order to give a Lake and Shed reading of the original Newt Scamander textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Nick relays everything you need to know about the genesis of this work and John talks about Rowling’s comments to Stephen Fry in a 2022 interview about “archetypal” animals and the importance of understanding them because human beings are story-telling animals. Her discussion of the Lethifold and Niffler are especially challenging and illuminating.

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

John traveled to his backyard Mongolian ger, the archetypal circular architectural form, to deliver a firehose introduction to the four essentials of ring writing. He used slides to depict the structure of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as his brief ‘for instance’ of how Rowling chooses to organize her stories and he provided this list of links for further reading: