Essay: Expecto Quidditch

While games—mock battles—segueing into genuine battles is a theme throughout the seven-book Harry Potter series, Harry’s third year in school is set apart as the only one in which he plays a complete Quidditch season. Harry grows to see Quidditch—his chief metaphorical war—and learning to conjure a Patronus—something he needs to fight a genuine war—as essentially interchangeable. One contributes to success in the other in an infinite magical feedback loop.

After Christmas, Oliver Wood talks to Harry about whether he will be fit to play Quidditch, since Harry fell to Dementors in the previous match. Harry assures him that Lupin is teaching him to ward off Dementors, reinforcing the idea that Harry is training for battle. He specifically frames the anti-Dementor lessons as something to succeed at Quidditch, metaphorical war.

During these lessons, Harry must use a happy memory to conjure a Patronus, no mean feat for someone with his history. Lupin tells him that he fears fear itself, but it isn’t quite so simple. A dementor is a divisive entity and so is fear, making it diametrically opposed to the unified and integrated Harry. Lupin tells Harry that he understands if he wants to stop and Harry frames the situation in terms of Quidditch again:

 “What if the dementors turn up at our match against Ravenclaw? I can’t afford to fall off again.  If we lose this game we’ve lost the Quidditch Cup!”

When it really counts, Harry doesn’t conjure a Patronus in a mock-war but in a real battle against an army of dementors. Then, after Harry is “armed” for the next match by being able to conjure a Patronus, in case dementors again appear, he is rearmed physically: he gets his new broom back. Following this, Harry and Ron witness Neville in a disagreement with Sir Cadogan over losing the passwords for Gryffindor tower. Neville’s lack of success at this game, which represents a serious part of war—keeping the enemy out of your camp—will soon lead to another security breach.

As if foreshadowing the next breach, “Scabbers” forces a draw in the cat-and-rat game in which he’s been an unwilling participant: he fakes his death, effectively mocking death, something very serious, by treating it as a game, as he did years earlier when he also faked his death, framed Sirius, and sent an innocent man to prison. Ron believes that Hermione’s cat has murdered his rat. Despite Ron not being overly fond of Scabbers, this looks like the end of his and Hermione’s friendship. Peter’s treachery again divides friends and creates a misleading picture of what really happened.

The first Quidditch match pitted Harry against Cedric Diggory, but once he gets his broom/weapon/masculinity back (his broom is unmistakably phallic here) Harry plays against the Ravenclaw Seeker, Cho Chang, whose prettiness makes Harry sit up and take notice. This almost costs him the match when she tries to draw his attention to false dementors who are really Draco Malfoy and his friends in disguise. In other words, the matches in Harry’s third year don’t just involve war but also love. Harry has a negative impression of Cedric at first, before learning that Cedric was the only one who didn’t think the match Harry lost was fair (because of the dementors). In the next book, Cedric becomes his romantic rival, but also a comrade in the Tournament, while Cho Chang becomes his romantic goal but eventually loses her appeal for Harry in Order of the Phoenix due to her friendship with Marietta-the-spy (spying being another part of war).

Harry has the same “rank” as Cedric and Cho: Seeker. Oliver Wood is concerned that she’s distracting Harry so he tells him it’s no time to be a “gentleman”. Harry focuses on his job, closing in on the Snitch as the false dementors come onto the pitch. He conjures a Patronus, his pre-battle training with Lupin having been a success, followed by Harry catching the Snitch. McGonagall calls the Slytherins’ actions “sabotage”, which is another war term. As he did earlier with Buckbeak, Draco has again treated something serious cavalierly: dementors. Ironically, Draco’s father will go to Azkaban and find out how much of a laughing matter dementors are not.

On the heels of this victory is a perceived genuine attack: Ron awakes in the night to find Sirius Black standing over his bed with a knife. Crookshanks was able to steal a parchment with the passwords from Neville’s bedside table but is unable to communicate adequately to Sirius that Scabbers is no longer with Ron. There’s been another breach, a breakdown in the password game. The metaphorical war has again segued into a literal one.

The next game Harry plays is another “stolen” Hogsmeade trip. This isn’t more successful than the first, but instead of learning disturbing news (Sirius betraying James & Lily) Harry battles Draco Malfoy near the Shrieking Shack, playing dirty by abusing his Invisibility Cloak. He and Ron find the game hilarious until the cloak slips and Draco sees Harry.

Snape, however, knows about some of Harry’s father’s “toys”, such as the Invisibility Cloak, and compares Harry to James when he summons him to his office, specifically mentioning James’ “small amount of talent on the Quidditch pitch” as a reason that he had a big head. This again refers to a mock-war. Snape says to him:

 “Strutting around the place with his friends and admirers... the resemblance between you is uncanny.”

“My dad didn’t strut,” said Harry, before he could stop himself. “And neither do I.”

“Your father didn’t set much store by rules, either,” Snape went on, pressing his advantage, his thin face full of malice. “Rules were for lesser mortals, not Quidditch Cup winners.”

This could foreshadow Harry winning the Cup later, but Snape might as well refer to James as a war hero. Harry tells him his father was a real hero for saving Snape’s life, which Snape calls a “joke” that James and his friends played on him that could have killed him if James “hadn’t got cold feet at the last moment.”

Snape finds a blank parchment in Harry’s pockets: the Marauder’s Map. He doesn’t have the best sense of humor but Snape does not discount things he thinks may be jokes, toys or games. He’s highly suspicious of them, since he knows that they can prove dangerous or deceptive. (He only seems to regard them as weapons for war.) Assuming that there’s something going on with the parchment, he attempts to ferret out what it is but ends up being insulted by it. They aren’t physically present, but the Marauders are still able to have a joke at Snape’s expense.

Snape seems to recognize one or more of the Marauders’ nicknames and takes the parchment to Lupin, implying that Harry received it from him, while Lupin dismisses the idea that it’s dangerous and “full of Dark Magic.” He calls it “childish, but surely not dangerous?” Once Lupin and Harry are alone he tells Harry that he doesn’t believe that it’s not dangerous and equates Harry having the map with “the last time a student left information about the castle lying around”—which was when Neville lost his list of passwords to Gryffindor tower. Lupin knows perfectly well what the parchment is and that Sirius would also know, if he were to find it. Remus Lupin knows it’s not a toy, though it was used this way by Lupin and his friends and this is also how Harry uses it.

As the Quidditch final approaches, Hermione learns that the war to save Buckbeak the Hippogriff is lost, a war that grew out of a “game” Draco Malfoy played that turned out badly because he treated it as a game and shouldn’t have. This ends another war: Ron offers to help with Buckbeak’s appeal and after Hermione flings her arms around him she apologizes for Scabbers and Ron accepts her apology.

The night before the Quidditch final Harry has a dream in which he misses the game and Wood demands, “Where were you?  We had to use Neville instead!” This could refer to Neville’s inability to hold onto his Remembrall, which got Harry onto the team, making Neville an anti-Seeker. Harry also uses Neville’s name as his alias on the Knight Bus, and either Harry or Neville could have fulfilled Trelawney’s first prophecy, which we learn about in Order of the Phoenix, in which Neville fails to keep a grip on the small Snitch-like orb in the Department of Mysteries that holds the prophecy.

Following this Quidditch dream Harry looks out a window and sees Crookshanks near the stationary Whomping Willow. With Crookshanks is the large black dog that Harry saw before. Right after dreaming about metaphorical war Harry witnesses Sirius and Crookshanks together, allies in the real war against Peter Pettigrew.

Like the earlier matches that Harry plays, JK Rowling gives the Quidditch final its own chapter, reinforcing that Prisoner of Azkaban is built around metaphorical war. The time leading up to the Quidditch final is busy. Harry must “fit in his homework around Quidditch practice every day” and Wood engages in “endless discussion of tactics”. The match is a postponed confrontation between Harry and Draco so the game is nothing short of all-out war, players smashing into each other, grabbing heads, and committing numerous fouls that make it seem like “the dirtiest game Harry had ever played in”.

 Harry is finally victorious. Rowling writes, “The tiny golden ball was held tight in his fist, beating its wings hopelessly against his fingers,” which foreshadows Harry holding a similarly-struggling Snitch in the fifth book, when Umbridge bans him from playing for life.

After the victory Rowling writes: “Harry felt like he could have produced the world’s best Patronus.” He works on conjuring a Patronus for the metaphorical war, Quidditch, but now feels that the euphoria from winning that metaphorical war may in turn help him to conjure a Patronus, which he’ll soon need to do. Rowling doesn’t have him use this thought later to create a Patronus, but goes out of her way here to again link Quidditch and this weapon.

Following the match, the students engage in the more serious activity of final exams. Ron and Harry still consider Divination a joke and cheating on homework like a game. At Harry’s Divination final he sees nothing in his crystal ball so he makes up something: a Hippogriff flying safely away, which becomes true. Then Trelawney goes “rigid in her armchair” as she intones:

“The Dark Lord lies alone and friendless, abandoned by his followers. His servant has been chained these twelve years. Tonight, before midnight, the servant will break free and set out to rejoin his master. The Dark Lord will rise again with his servant’s aid, greater and more terrible than ever before. Tonight... before midnight... the servant... will set out... to rejoin his master...”

The Ministry Executioner for Buckbeak comes to Hogwarts with Fudge and another enemy: Lucius Malfoy, whose influence probably led to Buckbeak’s appeal being lost (and the case being pressed in the first place). Soon another enemy reappears: Peter Pettigrew, as Scabbers, who’s been hiding in Hagrid’s hut “playing dead”.

Peter-as-Scabbers, now back in Ron’s possession, plays the cat-and-rat game again. This becomes a dangerous battle for Harry, Ron and Hermione when Sirius appears in his dog form and drags Ron, still holding Peter/Scabbers, under the Whomping Willow, forcing Harry and Hermione to battle the tree in order to follow him.

In the Shrieking Shack, Harry, Ron and Hermione together disarm Snape, knocking him out, thereby preventing him from hearing that Peter, the real Secret Keeper, is the one who betrayed James and Lily Potter. It’s no coincidence that Snape finds them in the Shack through two things that Harry uses as toys: the Marauder’s Map, which he found on Lupin’s desk, and the Invisibility Cloak, which Harry dropped near the tunnel’s entrance while battling the Whomping Willow.

Snape and Fudge later disregard the children’s story about what occurred, ruling that they are “Confunded”. Snape calls their version “a fairy tale”, though he knew that the parchment that insulted him wasn’t a “toy” and he nearly lost his life to a “joke” when he was in school. Unlike Fudge, Dumbledore finds “fairy tales” instructive. He tells Harry and Hermione that there’s nothing they can say to change Fudge’s mind and that they need more time. Hermione gets the hint and finally uses the Time-Turner “toy” as a weapon. Nearly all of the toy-like objects in this book, from broomsticks to the map to the Sneak-o-Scope to the Invisibility Cloak are in a battle at some point. The Time-Turner is no different.

While time-traveling Harry finally realizes that he conjured the Patronus that he thought his father had created and he successfully drives off the dementors. What begins as a Quidditch strategy evolves into a life-saving, unifying skill, completing the book’s story arc, from metaphorical war to genuine war, from the cold despair and divisiveness of the dementors to the unifying power of a Patronus.

As I’ve written in previous essays, each of the seven obstacles to the Philosopher’s Stone in the first book of the series aligns with one of the books. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 11: Wargames and Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.) The third obstacle, which aligns with the third book, is the only one resembling a Quidditch match, or rather, the part that Harry plays as Seeker. The third book is also the only one built around a complete Quidditch season at Hogwarts. This is why this obstacle involves flying on a broom to catch a key. As much as Rowling seemed to love creating one variation after another on Quidditch throughout the seventh book, which otherwise lacks literal Quidditch, this obstacle is the only one resembling the most popular game in the wizarding world. In the only book in which Harry plays a full Quidditch season and whose structure is built around Quidditch, Harry learns an important life-skill—conjuring a Patronus—in order to succeed at Quidditch—and the third obstacle to the Philosopher’s Stone involves using his Seeker skills to catch a flying, Snitch-like object.

In addition to the parallel between a Quidditch-oriented book and Quidditch-like obstacle, Harry catches a key to move closer to the Philosopher’s Stone, which is related to this book’s title: The Prisoner of Azkaban. With this key/Snitch Harry unlocks a door and moves closer to the Philosopher’s Stone, while in the third book a skill he learns for Quidditch (conjuring a Patronus) helps him to unlock Sirius’s “cell”.

Harry plays two matches in the first book of the series, against Slytherin and Hufflepuff. The only house Harry doesn’t get to play literal Quidditch against is Ravenclaw—but this obstacle, provided by the head of Ravenclaw, Professor Flitwick, is his way of playing a virtual match against that house, and, this being Harry, of course he wins and catches the key.

The flying key obstacle provided by Flitwick creates another love-connection to the wargames that Harry plays to reach the Philosopher’s Stone, since it’s in the third book that Harry notices Cho Chang, the Ravenclaw Seeker, while playing a Quidditch match. Time and again, love and war are partners in Rowling’s books, and the third obstacle to the Stone illustrates this once more.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 16: The Seeker, Copyright 2017-2018 by Quantum Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.

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