Essay: It's All Fun and Games

There is no literal Quidditch in the seventh book of the Harry Potter series. However, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, every time Harry is obtaining a Horcrux, he is playing a virtual game of Quidditch. This is what JK Rowling has been leading up to: first she took each Quidditch match or another game—like the Triwizard Tournament—from a mock war or virtual-war to a literal war, then, partway through the fourth book—the midpoint of the series—she flipped the script and from then on, each battle Harry fought took on game-like overtones, requiring the combatants to be consummate game-players in order to win the battle, which had become a virtual game.

In what would have been Harry’s seventh year in school, when he would normally have played three Quidditch matches against Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, he instead plays virtual Quidditch matches to get Slytherin’s locket from Dolores Umbridge, Hufflepuff’s cup from the Lestrange bank vault, and to get and destroy Ravenclaw’s diadem in the Room of Requirement.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows includes many dangerous toys and games. While cleaning out his school trunk, Harry finds a broken “toy”: a fragment of an enchanted mirror Sirius gave him. James and Sirius used twin mirrors to communicate while in separate detentions, which must have happened a lot for them to create these toys. The mirrors are kindred spirits to the Mirror of Erised, in which Harry sees his family. When he finds it, he has no reason to think of it as anything but a keepsake to remember Sirius. He assumes its partner was thrown out or is at Grimmauld Place.

When he’s later imprisoned at the Malfoys’, the mirror fragment falls out of the pouch Harry carries it in, and he sees a blue eye in it remarkably like Dumbledore’s. He thinks of it as Dumbledore and calls for help. It is “a” Dumbledore. Like his brother, Aberforth Dumbledore understands games; he sends Dobby—a disregarded, childlike house-elf—to help Harry. Kreacher was able to return home when he followed an order from a master; the same power lets Dobby take Ollivander, Luna and Dean, who are prisoners with Harry, Ron and Hermione, to Shell Cottage. Once again, elves moving around in ways that wizards cannot isn’t taken into account by those who dismiss elves—who are often the same people who dismiss games, toys, fairy tales, and children.

The Order attempts to move Harry out of Privet Drive in the first winner-take-all game in Deathly Hallows, which is analogous to an even-more-dangerous-than-usual Quidditch match. Rather than seven players, Harry’s side has fourteen, six impersonating him. At least four times that number are on Voldemort’s side. Each pair on Harry’s side is a unit: a Harry and a partner. Mundungus Fletcher’s cowardice leads to Alastor Moody’s death, though Moody was put with him specifically because he was considered unreliable. Instead of two teams with two Seekers both pursuing a Snitch, Death Eaters are trying to catch Harry and the Order is trying to keep him. Many times earlier in the series, Harry is a metaphorical Snitch. Now the metaphor becomes literal; in a battle very similar to a Quidditch match, Harry is the Snitch, and if Death Eaters catch him, they win.

Harry is known for flying so the plan does not call for him to use a broom, his usual Quidditch weapon and preferred transportation. He loses his Firebolt almost as soon as they are set upon. It’s the start of Harry being stripped of his usual defenses and weapons in the book’s first half, culminating in his wand breaking.

When Ron helps Harry to acquire the Sword of Gryffindor from the pond in the Forest of Dean, this accompanies another “baptism” for Harry because Ron pulls him from the water and saves him from being strangled by the locket Horcrux. Ron now morphs from an ordinary archetypal Wise Old Man to the Godfather variant of the Wise Old Man. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 2: This Old Man.) The metaphorically reborn Harry—baptism is a symbolic rebirth—now begins to rebuild, restoring one missing piece of himself after another to become whole and complete again, until Voldemort kills him.

In addition to his broom, another part of Harry that he loses during the flight from Privet Drive is his snowy owl, Hedwig. The reason for Fawkes’s name wasn’t completely clear until the fifth book, 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.) Before this, his name just seemed like an amusing joke. Hedwig’s name also takes on greater significance in Deathly Hallows, chiefly because of the sequence in which she dies.

St. Hedwig of Silesia, by Marcello Bacciarelli (1731–1818), 

oil on tin plate (between 1768 and 1771)

It certainly seemed poetic that Harry’s owl, whose name he found in a magic book, had the same name as the patron saint of orphans, St. Hedwig of Silesia. She married Henry I of Silesia and eventually had four sons and three daughters, including Henry II, who was called Henry the Pious. In England those christened Henry are usually called “Harry”; this is why Prince William’s brother is not called Prince Henry, his given name, but Prince Harry. There are also exactly three female decoys flying with Harry: Fleur, Hermione and Tonks. It is as if St. Hedwig’s seven children—three daughters and four sons, one of whom was called Henry, AKA Harry—are all flying from Privet Drive. A reversal of St. Hedwig witnessing her son Henry’s death occurs when Harry witnesses his owl Hedwig’s death.

It would have been far more secure to move Harry with the Dursleys, before his birthday, to a safe house whose location was unknown to Death Eaters. The blood protection provided by Petunia would have followed him as it did when the Dursleys and Harry fled from the Hogwarts letters. Harry could have remained at the safe house and the Dursleys, in disguise or transfigured, could have moved elsewhere. But it never seems to cross Rowling’s mind to do this in a way that is not a nightmarish version of a Quidditch match. Even in a book with no literal Quidditch she maintains this pattern.

Throughout the series JK Rowling equates Harry and Snitches. She has written twice about Ginny catching a Snitch from “under Cho’s nose”, implying that she will catch Harry. Ginny and Harry’s celebratory kiss in the Gryffindor common room comes after she again catches the Snitch before Cho in Half-Blood Prince. In Deathly Hallows, the description of Ginny’s bedroom prominently includes a poster for the wizarding band The Weird Sisters, from the “Unexpected Task”, the Yule Ball, the task that was more about love than war. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 18: The Wide World.) Next is a poster of Gwenog Jones, Captain of the all-witch Quidditch team, the Holyhead Harpies, for whom Ginny will play when she is older. Rowling consistently links Ginny and Quidditch, and links her with other games, such as the chess game between Harry and Ron at the end of Order of the Phoenix that foreshadowed Harry and Ginny getting together. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 19: Not Playing to Win.) Viktor Krum even wonders, at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, what the point is “…of being an international Quidditch player if all the good-looking girls are taken?” Viktor also thinks success in Quidditch should, for him, mean success in love.

Soon after the description of Ginny’s room, focused on posters related to games, she is kissing Harry “as she had never kissed him before”. Harry, however, is going off to the world’s most complicated scavenger hunt, a winner-take-all game, and cannot enjoy “blissful oblivion” right now. She has twice caught Harry-the-Snitch before his ex, and Ginny will play professional Quidditch (highlighting her warrior status and marking her as Harry’s equal), but he must finish his games before he can catch her.

When Harry and Hermione are about to go to Godric’s Hollow, JK Rowling tips off her readers again that this will involve a battle because Hermione reads this passage from A History of Magic:

Most celebrated of these half-magical dwelling places is, perhaps, Godric’s Hollow, the West Country village where the great wizard Godric Gryffindor was born, and where Bowman Wright, Wizarding smith, forged the first Golden Snitch.

This detail seems to exist solely to link the mock-war of Quidditch to Godric’s Hollow. Again Harry is equated with Snitches; the village that is the birthplace of all Snitches is also his birthplace.

Harry and Hermione find “Grindelwald’s sign” (really the symbol of the Deathly Hallows) on Ignotus Peverell’s grave in Godric’s Hollow. They also discover a photo of young Grindelwald, who stole the Elder Wand, in Bathilda Bagshot’s house, where they battle Nagini and Voldemort, barely escaping with their lives. All of this is immediately prefaced by a reference to Godric’s Hollow being home to the creator of the Golden Snitch, and Harry is the metaphorical Snitch that Voldemort is “Seeking”. This makes Voldemort another opponent with the same “battle-rank” as Harry, another similarity between Harry and his mortal enemy.

When he returns to Harry and Hermione, Ron brings a Wizarding Wireless radio so they can hear “Potterwatch”, an underground radio program hosted by Lee Jordan, who used to commentate Quidditch matches. Rowling has people linked to Quidditch bring Harry messages about lessons with Dumbledore or detention with Snape in the sixth book (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 24: Disarmed and Ready), so it is fitting that the voice of the Resistance has a Quidditch link. Lee goes from commentating on a mock war to a real one.

Later, the “Battle of Hogwarts” itself is like an elaborate Quidditch game; everyone must keep Voldemort and the Death Eaters away until Harry finds the Ravenclaw Horcrux, Rowena Ravenclaw’s missing diadem. There are scores of metaphorical Chasers, Beaters and Keepers, instead of the Chasers and Beaters and Keepers who are metaphorical soldiers in the mock-war of Quidditch. These “players” try to occupy the other side’s “players” while the Seeker, Harry, tries to catch the Snitch (the diadem). They must also prevent the other team’s Seeker (Voldemort) from catching the Snitch he wants first (in this case, Harry). Draco, another Seeker, also tries to catch the Harry-Snitch; he is thwarted by the Slytherin Beaters, Crabbe and Goyle, to whom everything, as always, resembles a Bludger: something to hit.

Harry searches for the diadem in the Room of Requirement, described as a “labyrinth”, like the Lestrange Gringotts vault and the maze from the Triwizard Tournament. He engages in a battle with overtones of a game in a setting for mock-wars, since this was where the DA trained. This time Harry catches a different Snitch: Draco himself. So they’re both Seekers here and are both equated with Snitches. By catching him, Harry saves Draco from the Fiendfyre that destroys the diadem and kills Crabbe, the one who cast the spell.

Crabbe is the second of three enemies whose own weapons are turned against them in the final leg of the book. First is Carrow, Voldemort’s choice for Dark Arts teacher, who tortures children and makes them torture each other; he suffers the Cruciatus Curse at Harry’s hand. This is again Harry sharing power with the powerless, the only acceptable way for him to use this Curse, which is why he couldn’t perform it before. Crabbe casts the Fiendfyre spell and dies from it. And finally, Voldemort’s own curse backfires and kills him.

When Harry turns seventeen the Ministry can no longer penalize him for using magic outside of school. This immediately tempts him to treat magic as a game: he summons his glasses, poking himself in the eye, and his shoelaces end up in knots. Ron is amused by his problems with day-to-day magic, which Harry never tried at school, though he could have. It is significant that he tries to use magic for things that are easily done without it. Part of learning the “magic game” rules involves being selective about it.

Harry’s birthday presents include a Sneakoscope from Hermione, a useful “toy” that they use as a weapon to keep themselves safe while camping. He also receives “an enormous box of the latest Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes merchandise from Fred and George”, which is useful for laughs or battles. Ron’s present is a book about attracting witches, for a different kind of battle: for love; Ron self-consciously follows the book’s advice. However, Hermione is most taken with him when he shows concern for others. After they return from the Ministry with the locket Horcrux they stole from Umbridge during another mock-Quidditch game in an arena-like setting, Rowling writes:

Harry looked over at Hermione and the question he had been about to ask…died in his throat. Hermione was watching Ron fret over the fate of the Cattermoles, and there was such tenderness in her expression that Harry felt almost as if he had surprised her in the act of kissing him.

A game that both Hermione and Harry play badly is the Voldemort Name Game. In earlier books, those hearing Harry or Dumbledore say Voldemort’s name marveled at their bravery. Dumbledore repeatedly tried to impress on others that not saying the name gives it power it wouldn’t otherwise have. When Harry says it in earlier books there is no penalty, just as those avoiding it aren’t truly safer, they just feel safer. Now this game has become a genuine life-or-death struggle. Voldemort knows that those who do not respect or fear him “properly” are most likely to say it. When they do it is like a homing-beacon is activated for finding his enemies, the flip side to the Deluminator, which Dumbledore gave to Ron—the one in the Trio who is best at playing the Name Game.

Barry Hughes, a game theorist, has applied the cooperation problem to the Name Game in the seventh book. In “Harry Potter, Lord Voldemort and Game Theory,” posted on gametheorystrategies.com on 20 July in 2011, Hughes wrote:

If everyone in the world had overcome their fear and spoken his name then Voldemort would not have been able to find Harry....

If Harry could have co-ordinated enough people to speak the name of ‘He-who-must-not-be-named’ then he would have been safe from being discovered. But the risk of failing to co-ordinate is so great that no-one wants to take the risk.

Now, it isn’t strictly true that Voldemort would not be able to find Harry if he said the name with everyone else; the odds would be against it, but it would just be more of a challenge, and Voldemort might have decided that there was no point to the taboo if people were saying the name constantly. While Hughes is probably right about the risk of failing to co-ordinate being too great, even in a hypothetical in which a large number of people are coordinated and say the name simultaneously, after the first few people (or scores of people) turn up dead or tortured, the cooperative urge would probably evaporate, and no one else would want to be a guinea pig for this experiment. There has to be more of a potential payoff for cooperation, so this isn’t really a viable solution, even if tens of thousands of people, plus Harry, said the name all at once. There is still a chance that Voldemort could find him, and that many, many people would be sacrificed first.

After Harry, Ron and Hermione flee Bill and Fleur’s wedding and are in a café on the Tottenham Court Road, Hermione says, “Voldemort’s taken over the Ministry, what else do we need to know?” This triggers the taboo and soon they’re fighting “a pair of burly workmen” who enter the café immediately after she utters the name. The three of them succeed in subduing the workmen who are really Death Eaters, but have no idea how they were found. Playing a game without knowing that you are playing one, let alone knowing the rules, is one of the most dangerous things you can do in the Potterverse.

It is only by chance that they heed Ron about the name; Harry is incensed at the idea of showing Voldemort “respect” by not saying it. Ron being wounded during Apparating is the only thing that keeps Harry from arguing about it further. Ron stops Hermione from saying the name multiple times, but it is Harry who says it after learning that the name is “taboo”. They now know that they are playing a game, and they know the one rule of that game, but Harry loses the game because he has been following Dumbledore’s example for years, so the game itself feels inherently “wrong” to him.

Once they are in Hogwarts castle, preparing for battle, Ron and Hermione disappear to Myrtle’s bathroom. Ron remembers the word that Harry spoke in Parseltongue to unlock the locket Horcrux: Open. This works for the Chamber as well, and they retrieve the large supply of basilisk fangs that Ron joked about earlier, allowing Hermione to use one to destroy Hufflepuff’s Cup. Ron and Hermione have now played the Chamber of Secrets Game that Harry and Ginny played in the second book:

1. say the secret word (speaking another language, a sign of spiritual maturity)

2. enter the Chamber-of-Sexual-Symbolism

3. get the weapon impregnated with basilisk venom, and

4. destroy the Horcrux.

Ron has been following the “rules” of a game to win Hermione (the book he gave to Harry), but this is not what melts her heart; instead it is his concern for the house-elves, creatures as disregarded by many wizards as Voldemort disregards anything connected to children and childhood. This is followed by a kiss whose equivalent Harry and Ginny did not get until the sixth book, which inverts many events from the second.

Harry’s ability to speak Parseltongue is a unifying power and not inherently dangerous. Despite the bad impression he creates at the Dueling Club in Chamber of Secrets, a mock-war, Harry has never used this as a weapon. It is a weapon against Harry, however, when he and Hermione are in Godric’s Hollow, since he does not realize that Bathilda Bagshot is speaking to him in snake-language. Harry parses it as English, which nearly gets him and Hermione killed.

Speaking Parseltongue opens the locket, so Harry does use it as a weapon in this scene. This is another reason that Voldemort sealed his own fate by targeting Harry: he gave him the means to destroy this Horcrux, which no one can do who cannot say “open” in Parseltongue. This also gets Harry into the Chamber to save Ginny, kill a basilisk and destroy another Horcrux. And because Ron uses it to enter the Chamber, Hermione can destroy a third Horcrux. Had Voldemort never targeted Harry, the locket, the diary and the cup would likely have remained eternally intact and Voldemort would have been immortal. So this is another weapon of Voldemort’s that is turned against him, making his final defeat possible.

While at Shell Cottage, Harry, Ron and Hermione make plans with Griphook the goblin to play the Gringotts Game. It is a reprise, on a more ambitious level, of the first book, when Harry and Hagrid withdraw money for his school supplies and are unwittingly racing with Quirrell to reach the Philosopher’s Stone first. Bill warns Harry:

“If you have struck any kind of bargain with Griphook, and most particularly if that bargain involves treasure, you must be exceptionally careful. Goblin notions of ownership, payment, and repayment are not the same as human ones.”

He tells Harry that he may think he understands the rules to this game, but he does not. Bill also says, “It would be less dangerous to break into Gringotts than to renege on a promise to a goblin,” not realizing that Harry is planning to do both. That Harry plans to cheat—and do more than one dodgy thing during the Gringotts game—is part of why the game is not only terribly difficult but nearly fatal.

The first obstacle in this game of Dungeons and Dragons—which it really is, complete with dragon—is the Death Eater Travers, who notices Bellatrix (really Hermione) in Diagon Alley while he’s on his way to Gringotts. Harry “Confunds” the wizards who serve as guards at the bank’s door so they don’t detect him and Griphook under the Invisibility Cloak; Hermione used this spell the year before to manipulate who gets onto a Quidditch team, members of a metaphorical army. This charm also prevents the wizard guards from detecting Hermione’s and Ron’s magically-altered appearances.

Griphook is like a little devil on Harry’s shoulder when he tempts him to use Imperius to deter a goblin from investigating further when he suspects that Hermione is an imposter. The rest of the game is more difficult from the moment that Harry engages in this bit of cheating. He also puts Imperius on Travers to get him to shut up about Bellatrix’s/Hermione’s wand and hide in a tunnel. But all of this becomes pointless when they reach The Thief’s Downfall, which “washes away all enchantment, all magical concealment,” leaving Ron and Hermione looking like themselves and alerting the management that imposters are in Gringotts. When Harry, Ron and Hermione enter the Lestrange vault they learn more game rules: touching the treasure will burn you, and this also makes each piece touched multiply into many worthless copies.

After quite a bit of chaos, they finally acquire Hufflepuff’s Cup, but Hermione levitating Harry to do it (as if he is flying and catching a Snitch) sets off a cascade of events: Griphook takes Gryffindor’s Sword, a small army of goblins arrives, armed with knives, and this leaves them no choice but to run toward a dragon. Bill told Harry that attempting to renege on a deal with a goblin was more dangerous than breaking into Gringotts; Harry did try to renege, so he doesn’t completely succeed in his mission. He gets the cup, but at a price, and he mainly succeeds at this because he wants to blunt its power, not acquire treasure. He “wins”, having captured the Cup, a Snitch-equivalent, but he cheats, so he loses the sword that could destroy it.

What is happening to Harry, Ron and Hermione now is as out of their hands as if they were under Imperius. Rowling writes:

There was no means of steering; the dragon could not see where it was going, and Harry knew that if it turned sharply or rolled in midair they would find it impossible to cling onto its broad back.

Harry puts Imperius on Travers and a goblin; he takes their wills from them. I believe that this is why Harry, Ron and Hermione are stuck on a mostly-blind runaway dragon soon afterward, completely out of control of their destination and their very lives. 

Before Harry goes into the forest, to his death, there are many game-like battles that include jokes. After an elaborate “Quidditch match” in the Room of Requirement, when Harry catches Draco in lieu of a Snitch, they encounter the Headless Hunt, a warlike game or a gamelike war, which was last seen in the second book. Following this, Fred and Percy fight the puppet Minister (a puppet being another toy), Pius Thicknesse. Percy jokes, “Did I mention I’m resigning?” as he curses his former boss. Fred’s impressed more by the joke than the dueling, but then there is an explosion.

And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred’s eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.

It is appropriate that Fred should have died in battle while laughing, since Fred, like his twin, is a seamless combination of war and jokes, from having the birth sign of the god of war, Ares, and being born on April Fool’s Day. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 17: The Goblet of Games.) But it is also undeniably tragic both because he is leaving behind his twin and because of the reunion with Percy and their bonding over a joke.

A game that has ended is the House Cup competition; Harry, Ron and Hermione flee the castle as the Slytherin hourglass is shattered and spills green emeralds everywhere. Dementors then make a comeback at Hogwarts so Harry must conjure a Patronus, a skill he perfected to play a game. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 15: The Prisoner of Quidditch and Episode 16: The Seeker.) However, neither his, Ron’s nor Hermione’s spells are up to the job, so they are rescued by Patronuses from Luna, Ernie and Seamus, who learned to do this at Harry’s knee in the DA, another mock-war that segued into real war, now for all of its members.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, thePodcast, Episode 26: Until Someone Loses an Eye. 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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