Essay: Mock-wars and Anti-Warriors

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling uses Quidditch players, who are metaphorical soldiers, as couriers carrying messages of war. In the sixth book, Draco also comes to resemble Harry, a fellow anti-soldier, particularly in his choice of spell when he finally confronts Dumbledore.

The similarities between the two of them go back to Harry and Draco both embodying the archetype of the Youth, the ruling archetype for the sixth book in the series (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth).  Draco is the character who best embodies this archetype in the sixth book, such that Harry steps into his shoes and, at times, the two of them swap places, each of them echoing or predicting the others’ actions.

Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom aren’t considered the coolest kids by most people at Hogwarts, including Harry, at the beginning of Order of the Phoenix, when he reluctantly shares a train compartment with the two of them, plus Ginny, and is sprayed by slimy green gunk from Neville’s new plant. This is immediately followed by Cho Chang, the girl he fancies, stopping by their train compartment to say hello. However, Harry is glad to see them on the school train at the beginning of the sixth book and he gives their having fought by his side at the Ministry as the reason. They’re all comrades in arms now, fellow soldiers.

Neville and his Remembrall got Harry onto the Quidditch team in his first year, and Neville assisted Harry in the game of Catch-the-Prophecy-Ball at the Ministry, though he didn’t manage to keep hold of the Prophecy Ball, marking Neville again as an anti-Seeker.

Later, in a Herbology lesson, Hermione no sooner mentions the members of the Slug Club meeting Gwenog Jones, captain of the Holyhead Harpies, an all-female Quidditch team, than we get a description of a battle-scarred Neville, who’s been fighting with some rather dangerous plants. This could be foreshadowing for his role in the war in the seventh book. For the previous five years, school lessons have always been metaphorical battles, especially in Herbology, which seems to feature a different dangerous plant each time they go to a lesson. When Neville, Ginny and Luna take up the mantle of Dumbledore’s Army the following year, school for them morphs from being a metaphorical war (though it was also a real war many times in the fifth book) to a literal war.

Luna Lovegood is a Quidditch commentator in the sixth book, giving her a more direct link with the most prominent metaphorical war in Harry’s world than just wearing a large lion hat to Gryffindor Quidditch matches. However, like Harry, the anti-soldier, she’s an anti-commentator, noticing just about everything going on around her except for the match. At one point, McGonagall grabs the megaphone from her and shouts game commentary into it herself. Luna is also Harry’s “date” to Slughorn’s Christmas party, though they are both clear that they’re going “as friends”. Nonetheless, the friend he chooses is a comrade-in-arms who now also has a Quidditch link.

Harry is first invited to join the Slug Club on the school train. This is a group of students hand-picked by Professor Slughorn as his social companions because he believes they are destined to be movers-and-shakers in the wizarding world. Though many of the members already have connections that Slughorn appreciates, like relatives in influential Ministry positions, he asks Ginny Weasley to join after he witnesses her hexing Zacharias Smith with the Bat-Bogey Hex, which could be considered her signature move.

Smith is consistently presented chiefly as a Quidditch player and an enemy combatant, despite nominally being Harry’s ally. He is in Dumbledore’s Army but he isn’t the one who betrays them to Umbridge—Marietta Edgecombe does that, which everyone knows because Hermione’s spell on the DA register causes spots to erupt on Marietta’s face spelling out the word SNEAK.

Slughorn thinks that the way Ginny handled herself shows that she has the potential to be a “person to know”. Her prowess in this battle makes him want to “collect” her, as Dumbledore describes this activity, the same word he uses to describe Voldemort’s “collecting”—both the items young Tom Riddle stole from fellow orphans and the items Voldemort collected to turn into Horcruxes.

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince JK Rowling always has someone connected to Quidditch—a metaphorical war—give Harry the messages about private lessons with Dumbledore. He gets news of the first lesson from Jack Sloper, identified as “one of the Beaters on last year’s Gryffindor Quidditch team”, just in case the reader forgot who he was. This is similar to Rowling going out of her way to remind readers that Montague, a Slytherin who put his name in the Goblet of Fire, was also a Quidditch player. Ginny, now a Gryffindor Chaser, brings Harry news of another lesson.

When he returns to Hogwarts after Christmas, Harry’s first encounter with Hermione involves the Password Game, to enter the Gryffindor common room. She then gives Harry a note about another session with Dumbledore, which is the only time this comes from someone without a clear Quidditch connection, though Hermione was just playing a game—the Password Game—and she’s been in real battles with Harry, which makes her his comrade-in-arms, not just a virtual soldier in the mock-war of Quidditch. She does also have Quidditch connections through Viktor Krum, Ron and Cormac McLaggen, and from playing Quidditch during the summer, when Harry played opposite Ron and Ginny, and Hermione was the other player on his “team”.

There’s a long lapse between the private lessons with Dumbledore. The one Hermione gave him the note about was just after the Christmas holiday, and the next one isn’t until after Ron and Harry are both released from the hospital wing, more than two months later, after Ron recovers from nearly being poisoned and Harry recovers from being hit by a Bludger. The long lapse is in part because Harry still hasn’t managed to extract the real version of a memory from Slughorn when Dumbledore thinks Slughorn was discussing Horcruxes with young Tom Riddle.

After being released from the hospital wing, Harry receives the next message from Luna Lovegood, who commentated on the previous Quidditch match. As though there were a danger of the reader forgetting this, after Luna gives Harry the parchment from Dumbledore, Ron compliments her on her Quidditch commentary, something Rowling seems to include because Luna doesn’t play for Ravenclaw. She does, however, metaphorically play on Harry’s team due to the lion hat she wore in the previous book and being one of the DA members to answer Hermione’s call for help at the end of this book, plus fighting by Harry’s side with the other members of the Trio and Counter-Trio in the Department of Mysteries.

The last message Harry receives from Dumbledore about the private lessons comes from Jimmy Peakes, another new Gryffindor Quidditch player. He is specifically identified as such by Rowling, again lest the reader forget about this association. She has no intention of risking anyone assuming that she chose random students; they all have some sort of connection to metaphorical war.

During his fifth year in school, Harry had private Occlumency lessons with Professor Snape. In Harry’s sixth year, he and Snape are involved in a war with each other, and as usual, Harry is convinced that they are opponents, not allies. In addition to Dumbledore’s private lessons, Rowling also has Quidditch players give Harry the messages about his detentions. Demelza Robins is identified as a new Chaser for Gryffindor when she brings Harry a message about the terms of one of his detentions with Snape. This implies that Rowling is equating Harry’s detentions with the private lessons with Dumbledore.

In addition to the people who give Harry notes about detentions with Snape and lessons with Dumbledore having a metaphorical war link, Quidditch, Draco’s victims also share this link. They aren’t just any old Quidditch players, though. They are Harry’s teammates: Katie Bell and Ron Weasley.

Katie touches the necklace Madam Rosmerta gives her at the Three Broomsticks, a business named for the chief weapon in Quidditch. Ron, Harry’s comrade through many battles and Keeper on his house team, drinks poisoned mead after being cured of the effects of a love potion. Rowling could have chosen anyone for collateral damage, anyone to be the victim of the opal necklace, and it could have been handed to Katie anywhere in the village or at the castle, not in a pub named for Quidditch equipment.

Also, if Slughorn had drunk the mead intended for Dumbledore then the victim would have had no connection to games or battles for love. However, Rowling chose Quidditch players and a pub named for brooms, and she had Ron and Harry come to Slughorn for an antidote for a love potion that was in sweets, in chocolates, maintaining her consistent pattern of linking toys, games and sweets to the war.

Harry speculates that Ginny and Dean are “cozily closeted in Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop, that haunt of happy couples” prior to Katie being “attacked”. Harry goes from feeling that he’s losing the war of love, which is kind of a real war and kind of a metaphorical war, though he hasn’t consciously articulated how he feels about Ginny, to a genuine life-and-death battle, as he attempts to help Katie, his comrade. Because of this there is yet another overlap of love and war, since Dean, his rival for Ginny, is the next-best person who tried out for Chaser. With Katie out of commission, Dean is invited onto the team and he links love and mock-war when he declares that he “can’t wait to tell Ginny!”

Ron has been Harry’s comrade-in-arms since the first book and a Quidditch player since the fifth, but he is already obsessed with the game when Harry meets him on the train in their first year. Harry’s gifts to Ron often have a Quidditch link, stressing the metaphorical warrior aspect of Ron’s character. Ron’s seventeenth birthday present is no different: Harry gives him Keeper’s gloves. 

Though he is technically on Harry’s side, Cormac McLaggen loses no time in assuring Harry that he can play in Ron’s place after Ron’s brush with death. McLaggen quickly gets on Harry’s last nerve by trying to out-captain the captain. Harry doesn’t consider McLaggen to be an ally because of this, especially when McLaggen knocks him out of the second game with a Bludger.

Near the beginning of Half-Blood Prince Harry experiences side-along Apparition with Dumbledore, and he says, “I think I might prefer brooms.” Brooms continue to be both Harry’s weapon of choice and transportation of choice, which is emblematic of his being the youngest Seeker in a hundred years and now the Gryffindor Captain, which, in addition to being the traditional title for the leader of a sports team who is also a player (as opposed to a coach, which none of the Hogwarts house teams have), it is also a military term.

In Goblet of Fire, Rita Skeeter interviews Harry in a broom cupboard, a stockpile of weapons, a metaphorical armory. In the sixth book, Dumbledore speaks to Harry in the Weasleys’ broom shed, another armory, where he broaches the idea of Harry’s private lessons, his final war-training.

When they go to Diagon Alley to shop for their new school supplies, Harry gets to go to Fred and George’s new shop, which he helped finance. It was appropriate for the twins to battle Umbridge with fireworks in Order of the Phoenix, which is JK Rowling’s version of the Gunpowder Plot. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 20: The Order of the Rebel, Episode 21: Remember, Remember, and Episode 22: The Phoenix Games.) In keeping with this, the windows of their shop “hit the eye like a firework display” when Harry visits their establishment. The overall impression he has is that their products are very amusing, though Hermione is not amused by a black eye she gets from a product Fred and George leave at the Burrow.

Their “joke shop” business isn’t all fun and games. The darkening powder they sell is used by Death Eaters as a weapon at the end of the sixth book, and the Ministry rightfully recognizes the usefulness of Shield Hats to protect their employees, prompting Fred and George to expand this line of products with Shield Gloves. Hermione also suspects that Fred and George probably sold Romilda Vane the love-potion-laced chocolates that Harry received and Ron ate—a weapon in the war for love.

While in the twins’ shop Harry spots Draco Malfoy outside, and he, Ron and Hermione follow him to Knockturn Alley, to the dodgy shop Harry landed in during his first Floo trip in the second book: Borgin and Burkes. Rowling could have had Harry notice Draco from the bookshop or from the apothecary but it was while Harry was in a virtual armory. (Quality Quidditch Supplies would also have been appropriate, but Harry doesn’t need to purchase a new broom at this time.) The three of them cannot hear Draco and the shopkeeper so Ron uses a Fred-and-George toy/weapon: Extendable Ears.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is rife with people abusing power. Before the first Quidditch match Harry pulls a stunt worthy of the Half-Blood Prince himself: he pretends to give Ron Felix Felices potion to boost his confidence. Hermione criticizes this before she knows the truth and after she learns that Ron’s performance was due to a placebo effect, despite having abused power herself to get Ron onto the team. Harry is the one who abuses power here, but not by giving Ron the potion; instead he uses the power of Ron’s own mind, correctly judging that if Ron thinks he cannot be unlucky, after taking what he thinks is lucky potion, he won’t be.

In response to Zacharias Smith abusing power as a match commentator, Ginny uses the handiest weapon—her broom—to punish Smith, sharing power with Harry and Ron, who would probably get detention if they had done the same thing. What she does is similar to when Harry shares his power with Neville by flying after the Remembrall. Smith is again in the role of an enemy—remember, Sirius said that the world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters—and Smith has a Quidditch connection specifically. Ginny fights him with the chief weapon in Quidditch: a broom.

On Ron’s birthday he is the victim of two sweet things—chocolates and mead—that are used as weapons, one for love (the chocolate) and one for war (the poisoned mead). In both cases the target is not Ron. Because Katie, a Quidditch player, was previously injured, Hagrid suspects that someone is targeting the Gryffindor team, a metaphorical army. Hermione thinks the same person was supposed to receive both the necklace and the mead—there is no mystery about the love potion’s target—and the alarming aspect of this is that the would-be murderer seems to be completely unconcerned about hurting people who are not the intended target.

Harry uses the Room of Requirement for DA training in the fifth book and Draco uses it for his war in the sixth book. Like many of the Weasley twins’ products, the room’s power is morally neutral; the use to which it is put is what’s important. Harry discovers the Junk Room version of it, where Draco has been working on repairing the Vanishing Cabinet, when he needs to hide the Half-Blood Prince’s potions text from Snape. This is also where Voldemort hid a Horcrux specifically because it is full of disregarded and discarded items, where he is confident that no one will look for anything important or valuable. Voldemort clearly believes that everyone thinks like he does.

The book’s climax is real, not metaphorical war, but there are game-like elements and remnants of childhood that come up both when Harry and Dumbledore are pursuing one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes and in the battle later on at Hogwarts.

Harry and Dumbledore go to a cave that is a place from Tom Riddle’s childhood and a place of war, where he traumatized other orphans. They encounter a number of game-like obstacles in the cave, but with a more sinister bent than the defenses for the Philosopher’s Stone. Dumbledore breaks down each defense as if playing an obscure game for advanced wizards, deeply disappointed in “Tom’s” lack of imagination when a blood sacrifice is needed to enter the cave.

Harry and Dumbledore return to Hogsmeade after leaving the cave. They wish to reach the castle quickly, having seen the Dark Mark over the school from the village. They summon brooms, Harry’s usual weapon, from the Three Broomsticks, which really is an armory now, rather than just being a virtual armory, due to its name. They fly to the battle, in which Draco disarms Dumbledore, Harry’s signature move, but he does not kill him. Dumbledore offers Draco mercy.

Draco is no more a murderer than Harry is, though they have both threatened other people’s lives. The cursed opal necklace and poisoned mead could have killed Katie or Ron, and Harry could have killed Draco with the Sectumsempra spell. Both of them play games with others’ lives despite not being killers at heart. JK Rowling leaves each of their souls intact. Neither kills, intentionally or not. Harry maintains this in the seventh book, when he refuses to stun Stan Shunpike while Stan is on a broom, which would surely kill him. Draco also refuses to definitively identify Harry as Harry when Snatchers bring him, Ron and Hermione to Malfoy Manor.

Rowling cleverly uses Draco disarming his “enemy”—who isn’t really his enemy—to set up Harry disarming Voldemort at the end of the seventh book. Draco’s spell leads to victory for Harry, since this is how Draco becomes master of the Elder Wand, enabling Harry to become its master when he disarms Draco at Malfoy Manor, in the next book. We don’t know all of the rules of the Wand Game yet but Draco kicks off the game that plays out throughout the next book, and which is as important to Harry’s victory as the Horcrux Hunt. In the end Draco chooses not to play at being Voldemort’s soldier but is an anti-soldier, like Harry, disarming, not killing. This is foreshadowed by his refusal to fight in the metaphorical war of Quidditch in this book. This leads to victory for the whole wizarding world. Because Draco refuses to play the game, everyone wins.

In earlier essays, I have written about the seven game-like obstacles to the Philosopher’s Stone in the first book of the Harry Potter series aligning with each of the seven books.

The first obstacle was Fluffy, the three-headed dog that is like another famous threshold-guardian, Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the underworld in Greek mythology. Fluffy is provided by Hagrid, a threshold-guardian himself, and this aligns with the first book of the series because Harry crosses the threshold into the wizarding world by becoming a Hogwarts student.

The second obstacle is the snaky Devil’s Snare plant, provided by the Herbology Teacher, Professor Sprout. This obstacle aligns with the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In addition to Professor Sprout being the one to grow the Mandrakes that awaken the Petrifaction victims in the second book, the Devil’s Snare is overcome in the same way that Harry overcomes the Basilisk in the Chamber. (See QuantumHarry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.) Harry makes his statement of faith in Dumbledore, bringing Fawkes, who, as a phoenix is closely linked to the sun, and Fawkes comes to him in the chamber with the Sword of Gryffindor. In the first book, Hermione overcomes the Devil’s Snare with a spell that approximates sunlight, causing the plant to release them from its clutches.

The third obstacle is the flying keys, provided by Professor Flitwick, head of Ravenclaw. This is aligned with the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the only book in which Harry plays a full Quidditch season and a book that is built around Quidditch. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 15: Prisoner of Quidditch, and Episode16: The Seeker.) This is the only obstacle that resembles a Quidditch match, and it is aligned with the book in which Harry plays a full Quidditch season and wins the Quidditch Cup.

The fourth obstacle is the life-sized chess game, provided by Professor McGonagall, a female character embodying the Father archetype. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 5: Our Father.) This obstacle aligns with Goblet of Fire, which is ruled by the Father archetype and which is about a life-sized board game, the Triwizard Tournament. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 17: The Goblet of Games, Episode 18: The Wide World, and Episode 19: Not Playing to Win.) The chess game includes a sacrifice from Ron that is echoed by Viktor Krum’s sacrifice in the Quidditch World Cup at the beginning of the fourth book.

The fifth obstacle to the Philosopher’s Stone was the troll Quirrell provided to Dumbledore, which he caused to run around loose in the castle on Halloween, when Harry, Ron and Hermione fought it in a girl’s bathroom. This is linked to the fifth book in the series, in which Dolores Umbridge sends another kind of magical creature after Harry: dementors. However, just as Harry and Ron turn the troll’s own club against it to knock it out, in the fifth book, JK Rowling’s version of the Gunpowder Plot, the means that the British government uses to celebrate the defeat of Guy Fawkes, gunpowder and fireworks, is turned against Umbridge by Fred and George Weasley, in a rebellion that succeeds, instead of being squashed. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 20: The Order of the Rebel, Episode 21: Remember, Remember, and Episode 22: The Phoenix Games.)

The sixth obstacle to the Philosopher’s Stone is the potions challenge, which aligns with the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It is not only the obstacle concocted by Severus Snape, the Half-Blood Prince himself, but the fact that Hermione goes back while Harry goes forward after they each drink potions that allow them to do this is echoed by the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore in Half-Blood Prince: at the end of the book, Harry must go forward without Dumbledore to hunt for the Horcruxes, Voldemort’s path to immortality, which the Philosopher’s Stone might have been if Quirrell had succeeded in his mission.

In both the cave where Harry and Dumbledore are looking for the locket Horcrux and the sixth obstacle to the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry and a companion must go “through” potion in order to get what they seek: in the first book it is a means of leaving the chamber, and in the sixth they are trying to reach the locket Horcrux, since Dumbledore must drink a potion for Harry to get the locket out of a potion-filled bowl.

In both situations Harry and his companion must also go through fire. Harry and Hermione walk through magical flames to leave the chamber with the potions riddle, which they can only do if they have each drunk the correct potion. Harry and Dumbledore must use fire to fight Inferi in the cave. At the moment that Harry leaves the room with the potions challenge his attitude toward Snape is the same as it is at the end of the sixth book: he is completely convinced that Severus Snape is his enemy and Voldemort’s loyal servant. He won’t learn until nearly the end of the Deathly Hallows how very much Snape has worked to protect him, and why.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 24: Disarmed and Ready, 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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