SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT


All future episodes of Quantum Harry, audio, video and essay, will be posted on successive TUESDAYS, rather than Mondays. The Episode guide will also be updated to reflect this change.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Essay: The Wand Chooses the Wizard

Image
In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , Voldemort’s and Harry’s wands refuse to fight each other because they have the same core: a phoenix feather from Fawkes. This was the third wand revelation that JK Rowling gave her readers, the first two being that the wand chooses the wizard and that a damaged wand (like Ron’s wand in Chamber of Secrets ) can backfire on the user or otherwise behave unpredictably. Once we learn more rules of the Wand Game in Deathly Hallows it is clear that Ron’s broken wand is responding as if the he is no longer its master ; the wand/owner covenant is broken. I have written in previous essays about the metaphorical quantum entanglement between Harry and Voldemort, but this is not the only type of metaphorical entanglement in the Harry Potter series. Wizards and their wands are also entangled. After it breaks, Ron and his wand are no longer entangled—if they ever truly were, since Rowling reveals early on that he is using Charlie’s old wand. It is un...
Read more

Essay: JK Rowling's Own Private Tarot Game

Image
JK Rowling never tells her readers about Harry Potter learning about Tarot, nor is it ever mentioned during his Divination lessons. Despite this, Professor Trelawney abruptly reappears in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , even though she is no longer Harry’s teacher by the time he’s in his sixth year. In just about every appearance she makes in the sixth book she is raving about the Tower , also called The Tower of Destruction , or La Maison Dieu ( The House of God ) in French, the sixteenth card in the Tarot Major Arcana. Trelawney ranting about this card is the first overt mention of Tarot in the seven books, and it is a virtual throwaway. It is not, however, the first mention of the name of a Tarot card in the series . In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , Rowling calls the Little Hangleton pub frequented by Frank Bryce, the caretaker at the Riddle House, The Hanged Man. This is the name of the twelfth card in the Tarot Major Arcana. JK Rowling has also invente...
Read more

Essay: The Alchemy of Games

Image
Near the beginning of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , before Harry goes to the Quidditch World Cup, he wakes on Privet Drive, having “seen” Voldemort kill an old man in what may or may not have been a dream. Dreams—like fairy tales, toys, and games—are disregarded and considered unimportant by many characters in the Harry Potter series, as well as in our world. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table .) Harry recalls that before he fell asleep the night before, he had been reading Flying with the Cannons, a book about the Chudley Cannons Quidditch team. Even when the war scene comes first, JK Rowling tells us that Harry was reading about metaphorical war right before that. After witnessing Frank Bryce’s murder, he is again drawn to this book. Another early reference to games and violence in the fourth Harry Potter book is when Harry writes a letter to Sirius, telling his godfather that Dudley’s diet isn’t going well so his parents have threatened to ...
Read more