Essay: The Long Game

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, JK Rowling explicitly introduces the theme that had merely been implicit in earlier books: people disregarding, to their detriment, such things as games, toys, “blood-traitors” or those with so-called “dirty” blood (including house-elves), and (ironically) fairy tales. All will play a role in defeating Voldemort. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table.)

The best weapons or skills Harry has are those that he acquires to play games; a children’s story teaches him a lesson about death; and Harry, a half-blood, with another half-blood (Snape), plus Snape’s abiding love for the Muggle-born Lily and the aid Harry receives from his Muggle-born and blood-traitor best friends, along with his consummate game-playing skills, combine to defeat someone who disregards all of these things: Voldemort.

The first time in Deathly Hallows that Harry, Ron and Hermione go “camping”, a fun pastime for many people now that began as a part of war, it is the night that they spend on the drawing room floor of number twelve, Grimmauld Place after they must flee Tottenham Court Road and the Death Eaters. This happens because Hermione loses a round of the Name Game, which none of them know yet has become an actual life-or-death game.

During their escape from the Ministry with the locket Horcrux, the Death Eater Yaxley tags along on their trip back to Grimmauld Place. Hermione finally shakes him off, but Grimmauld Place is now compromised, so they Apparate to the campground where the World Cup was played. It is not some random park—it is a place where a metaphorical battle was fought for the title of World Champions. They have one of the tents used by the Weasleys for the World Cup, which Mr. Weasley gave to Hermione. Here Harry, Ron and Hermione begin their “campaign”: the camping equivalent to soldiers at war. They are at war—as are the wizards and Goblins camped near them at one point, including Ted Tonks, who is on the run from the Ministry. Harry’s fear that he will have nowhere to go in the third book (after he inflates Aunt Marge) bears fruit in Deathly Hallows when he cannot return to Grimmauld Place.

By eavesdropping on Ted Tonks, Dean Thomas and Griphook, Harry learns that Mr. Lovegood’s publication, The Quibbler, has changed a bit. This wizarding tabloid might as well have been a collection of fairy tales when Hermione sniffed at Luna for reading it early in Order of the Phoenix. Now it is the place to get “real” news since Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry and the Daily Prophet. The formerly-disreputable publication is now known for printing the truth and the previously most-trusted wizarding publication has become a propaganda machine. Ted Tonks informs his fellow campers that The Quibbler is no longer a “lunatic rag” and there wasn’t “a single mention of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in the last issue”.

Harry spends a fourth of the book camping, which is appropriate for a soldier. Camping evolved from a wartime activity to a pastime for people who don’t need to rough it, who aren’t migrants or nomads, but in wartime it devolves back to its original form. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 15: Prisoner of Quidditch.)

The entire last book in the series is a game: a scavenger hunt, first for Horcruxes, then for Horcruxes and Hallows. After all of the mock-battles that evolved into real battles, Harry now fights a battle that is itself an elaborate game, and playing will enable him to win the war. Harry, Ron and Hermione triumphed over the seven game-like obstacles protecting the Philosopher’s Stone and now Harry successfully playing the Horcrux Scavenger Hunt destroys Voldemort’s seven defenses, making him vulnerable to death—the opposite of achieving eternal life through the Philosopher’s Stone.

At Bill and Fleur’s wedding, Hermione does not realize that Luna’s father is wearing the Deathly Hallows symbol, nor that it was associated with Grindelwald; she wants to visit Lovegood because she found this symbol on a grave in Godric’s Hollow and it is drawn by hand in the book of fairy tales that Dumbledore leaves her in his will. When they locate what they assume is the Lovegood house, we are clued in right away that a battle will take place there because Ron brings up the mock-war at which he excels: chess.

...a most strange-looking house rose vertically against the sky, a great black cylinder with a ghostly moon hanging behind it in the afternoon sky. “That’s got to be Luna’s house, who else would live in a place like that? It looks like a giant rook!”

“It’s nothing like a bird,” said Hermione, frowning at the tower.

“I was talking about a chess rook,” said Ron. “A castle to you.”

Hermione should have understood Ron immediately; the rook is the role that she played in the life-sized chess match. In addition to the house resembling a chess piece, Harry finds that the house’s second level resembles a maze, a part of the Triwizard Tournament. We have not yet reached the point in the story when Harry is trying to find Ravenclaw’s diadem in a labyrinthine version of the Room of Requirement—though the Lovegood house is the place where we have the first mention of the diadem—but Rowling is now practically hitting the reader over the head with the idea that a confrontation will occur at the Lovegood house.

On seeing the desolation of Luna’s room, Harry realizes that she has not been there in ages; this is followed by the attack on the “rook” house—something resembling a chess castle that’s now under siege—and the assault is from people using the traditional weapon for playing in the mock-war of Quidditch: the broom. It is as if the attackers are pursuing a Snitch—which they are, technically, because they’re pursuing Harry, and he is a metaphorical Snitch. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table.)

Hermione doesn’t quite get it when she disregards the “children’s story” about the Deathly Hallows and says, “Harry, this isn’t a game, this isn’t practice! This is the real thing...” What she fails to appreciate is that it is both “a game” and “the real thing”; this is how it has always been for Harry. Games become battles and battles take the form of games. A game and a battle are essentially the same for Harry. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 11: Wargames.)

“Please,” she said as he started to speak, “please just answer me this: If the Deathly Hallows really existed, and Dumbledore knew about them, knew that the person who possessed all three of them would be master of Death—Harry, why wouldn’t he have told you? Why?”

He had his answer ready.

“But you said it, Hermione! You’ve got to find out about them for yourself! It’s a Quest!”

Later, when Harry, Ron and Hermione go from Aberforth’s pub in Hogsmeade through a passage to Hogwarts, they end up in the Room of Requirement, a former place of mock-battles that is also how the Death Eaters enter the castle in the sixth book, and the reason this passage exists is because Neville Longbottom, who with Ginny and Luna is one of the leaders of the resistance at Hogwarts, in Harry’s absence, has become an expert at the Room of Requirement Game. It is now a camp for the real Dumbledore’s Army. Highlighting again the link between warlike games and Harry’s game-like war, Rowling evokes Quidditch once more when they arrive at the clandestine camp.

The next moment, he, Ron and Hermione were engulfed, hugged, pounded on the back, their hair ruffled, their hands shaken, by what seemed to be more than twenty people: They might have just won a Quidditch final.

When Dumbledore’s Army vacates the room and Harry re-enters it, now in its incarnation as a junk room, he is again in a setting for mock-battles, competing with a rival Seeker—Voldemort—to be first to catch a Snitch-equivalent that is intimately connected to Voldemort just as actual Snitches are to Harry. This time the Snitch is the diadem of Ravenclaw, another round, golden object. Though Voldemort is the main Seeker Harry is competing with, he is not there yet, so another Slytherin Seeker takes his place: Draco Malfoy, joined by Crabbe and Goyle, the Slytherin Beaters, and while they are doing this, they are flying around the room on brooms, fighting for their very lives.

Just your typical Quidditch match.

Voldemort does not discover that he is losing the Horcrux Game until he learns that Harry took Hufflepuff’s cup from Gringotts. He knows that the diary, an un-Snitch-like Horcrux, was already destroyed, which is another possible source of animus toward Lucius Malfoy. He becomes preoccupied now with checking on the locket in the cave and the ring in the ruins of the Gaunt cottage, where Dumbledore found it, before checking on the diadem, leaving this for last. He also keeps his snake, Nagini, another Horcrux, with him at all times. Harry knows that they must go to Hogwarts to find and destroy the Ravenclaw Horcrux before Voldemort can move it. Harry is ahead in the game and wants to stay ahead.

Aberforth identifies his brother’s chief game as “secrets and lies”. When Neville and other DA members clamor to help Harry he decides that he no longer wants to play Dumbledore’s “secrets and lies” game; he changes the rules and tells the others a little about the scavenger hunt. This produces results because the game doesn’t need to be played exactly the way Dumbledore decreed.

Ron turned suddenly to Harry.

“Why can’t they help?”

“What?”

“They can help.” He dropped his voice and said, so that none of them could hear but Hermione, who stood between them, “We don’t know where it is. We’ve got to find it fast. We don’t have to tell them it’s a Horcrux.”

Harry looked from Ron to Hermione, who murmured, “I think Ron’s right. We don’t even know what we’re looking for, we need them.” And when Harry looked unconvinced, “You don’t have to do everything alone, Harry.”

Luna brings up the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, seemingly the best candidate for a Ravenclaw Horcrux, and we learn that to access the Ravenclaw common room a game must be played: a brain-teaser. There are no passwords, as with Gryffindor and Slytherin, the only other common rooms Rowling shows to her readers. Ravenclaws cannot just memorize passwords, they must solve a brain-teaser, which makes Ravenclaw seem a little more elitist than Slytherin, but not in a bad way, since one is supposed to earn entrance.

Nearly Headless Nick tells Harry that the Ravenclaw ghost is the Gray Lady, but she does not want to help him because she assumes that he wants the diadem for personal gain. He tells her that he does not want its power, he wants to destroy its power, since it is a Horcrux. She is the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw, daughter of the Founder Rowena Ravenclaw, whose diadem she stole to acquire wisdom. When her mother was on her deathbed she sent the (Bloody) Baron, long in love with Helena, to find her, but she refused to come home with him. He was known for being hot-tempered and stabbed her, then stabbed himself in remorse, and ever since, the Bloody Baron has worn “his chains as an act of penitence.”

While still alive, Helena Ravenclaw concealed the diadem in a tree in a forest in Albania, which is where the Baron found her. It is possible that JK Rowling chose this to be where the daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw fled because “Albania” is a re-Latinization from the High Medieval period of ALBION, the Celtic/Brythonic name for the isle of Great Britain that was at one time used just for Scotland. ALBION is in turn related to ALBA, the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland; this is the name it bears in the Celtic Nations, six regions of western Europe in which Celtic languages are spoken or Celtic cultural practices still continue. The regions are Scotland (ALBA), Brittany (BREIZH), Wales (CYMRU), Ireland (ÉIRE), Cornwall (KERNOW), and the Isle of Man (MANNIN). ALBA is based on the Latin word for white, which is also where Dumbledore’s given name, Albus, comes from.

 The Sorting Hat song that JK Rowling includes in the fourth book, as well as an overwhelming amount of imagery and symbolism in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, suggest strongly that the four founders came from the four major regions of the British Isles: Gryffindor from England, Slytherin from Ireland, Hufflepuff from Wales and Ravenclaw from Scotland. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 18: The Wide World.) We see this especially in relation to the Yule Ball, “The Unexpected Task.” This is linked to Ravenclaw, just as the first task is linked to Gryffindor and to England, the hostages in the lake are linked to Slytherin and to Ireland, and the final task is linked to Hufflepuff and Wales.

At the Ball, the band includes a set of bagpipes and is called The Weird Sisters, a reference to Shakespeare’s MacBeth, also called The Scottish Play. The country to which Helena Ravenclaw fled has a name related to the ancient name for Scotland: Albania. However, this is only what English-speakers call the country. In Albanian it is Shqipëri or Shqipëria, though the full name is Republika e Shqipërisë (Republic of Albania). The popular meaning assigned to the name of the country of Albania in Albanian is “Land of the Eagles”. The eagle just happens to be the emblem for Ravenclaw house, and a double eagle, like the emblem for the Holy Roman Empire, appears on the flag and coat of arms for Albania. 

Albanian flag

Rowling could have sent Helena Ravenclaw to any country in the world—she does not actually mention many other countries in the seven books—but she chose the one with a name in English that links it to Scotland, the region of the British Isles aligned with Ravenclaw, and a country whose name, in its own language, means, “Land of the Eagles”—the creature that represents Ravenclaw.

JK Rowling also confirms in Deathly Hallows that another student heard Helena Ravenclaw’s tale of hiding the diadem in a tree in Albania: Tom Riddle. Harry believes that Riddle retrieved the diadem from the Albanian forest and hid the diadem in the castle when he came to see Dumbledore about the Defense Against the Dark Arts job, after which he cursed the position, so that no one could hold it for more than a year.

During Harry’s search for the diadem in the castle, he is distracted by Hagrid and the destruction of some gargoyles, which leads him to make some important connections: first he recalls the sculpture at the Lovegood house, which wears a fake diadem; then he thinks of a bust of Ravenclaw with a sculpted diadem that he saw in the Ravenclaw common room; and finally, he remembers a bust in the Room of Requirement on which Harry put a tiara to mark where he hid the Half-Blood Prince’s book. Rather than being with mountains of treasure, like Hufflepuff’s cup, Harry realizes that the diadem is hidden amongst centuries of junk.

Once the diadem of Ravenclaw is destroyed and Voldemort has Nagini kill Snape, Harry sees Snape’s full story in the Pensieve, at last learning the truth: Harry is another piece in the Horcrux game. Many of the Horcruxes have filled the role of a Snitch in elaborate Quidditch-like scenarios (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 26: Until Someone Loses an Eye), but Harry is not only a symbolic Snitch, he is the Horcrux Voldemort never meant to make. Harry must be destroyed to cut the final cord between Voldemort and life. Only if he is killed, in addition to the other Horcruxes, will Voldemort be mortal, with no hope of resurrection if his body is destroyed again. The scavenger hunt is down to two pieces: Nagini and Harry. Both must die for everyone else to win.

With this knowledge, Harry makes the agonizing decision to present himself for death. As he goes into the forest, Rowling uses her Quidditch metaphor yet again.

The long game was ended, the Snitch had been caught, it was time to leave the air...

When Harry thinks of the end of his life, the end of all his battles, he thinks of it as the end of a Quidditch match. He remembers the Snitch that Dumbledore left him, instinctively knowing now the meaning of the legend engraved upon it: “I open at the close.”

This was the close. This was the moment.

He pressed the golden metal to his lips and whispered, “I am about to die.”

The locket is a Snitch-like object that Harry had to retrieve from the toad-like Umbridge; it contained a portion of Voldemort’s soul, whose repeated ripping diminished Voldemort, made him incomplete. Harry, however, was not diminished when he became entangled with the Snitch; he was augmented, made more complete, as he was augmented again when Voldemort took Harry’s blood to regain his body. This blood now tethers Harry to the world, giving him the option to return to life after Voldemort kills him and destroys the piece of Voldemort’s soul that was in Harry. When Harry is entangled with something that ties him to life the way that Horcruxes tie Voldemort to life, he is not diminished or less integrated, as Voldemort is, which is again because this is a power Harry does not seek—it is simply given to him. Wilhelm Grimm used various story elements to illustrate the theological concept of grace in his fairy tales and this is JK Rowling’s version of grace. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina  and Episode 28: The Grimm Campaign.)

The Snitch is metaphorically born of Harry when he spits it out, becoming part of him in his first match; using the Resurrection Stone inside the Snitch, he calls up the shades of those who will always be a part of him, entangled with him: his parents, Sirius and Remus. In all significant moments of his life he is accompanied by the archetypes of the Mother, Father, and Wise Old Man. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 5: Our Father.)

Here the Mother is Lily, the Father is James and the Wise Old Man is Sirius; Harry himself is doubled, since Remus is also an archetypal Youth, as well as a Liminal Being, the two archetypes that Harry also embodies. Harry puts his wand away, thinking of the blazing look and lips of the girl he kissed after a Quidditch match and on his birthday, someone else with whom he is entangled, who has caught Harry-the-Snitch repeatedly—and he is glad to be caught. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 22: The Phoenix Games.)

Only Harry knows that by his losing this game everyone he cares about wins, just as Krum, a Harry-doppelganger, caught a Snitch to end a game that he lost, to protect those who would suffer more if he hadn’t ended it. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast: Episode 17: The Goblet of Games.) Ginny, Harry’s counterpart, does the same thing during her first match as a Seeker. It was in Krum’s power to protect others by giving up the World Cup; it was in Ginny’s power to protect others by giving up her first Quidditch victory; and it is in Harry’s power to protect the wizarding world by giving up his life.

Two books earlier Rowling foreshadows what Harry has to do by having his female counterpart do the same thing; and in the very first book his best friend makes a sacrifice play to enable Harry to win a chess match and go forward to protect the Philosopher’s Stone, which foreshadows the events in the fourth book that also foreshadow Harry’s sacrifice by having Viktor, Harry’s doppelganger, do the same thing in the context of a game: a Quidditch match with the name of “the World Cup”. Harry plays his own World Cup at the end of Deathly Hallows.

When he approaches the place in the forest where Voldemort is waiting with his minions, Rowling writes:

Every eye was fixed upon Voldemort, who stood with his head bowed and his white hands folded over the Elder Wand in front of him. He might have been praying, or else counting silently in his mind, and Harry, standing still on the edge of the scene, thought absurdly of a child counting in a game of hide-and-seek. Behind his head, still swirling and coiling, the great snake Nagini floated in her glittering, charmed cage, like a monstrous halo.

As Harry faces his death his killer reminds him of someone playing a children’s game: hide and seek. Though Nagini, as a snake, does not generally resemble anything round or golden, like a Snitch or the other Snitch-like Horcruxes, now, because of the protection Voldemort gives her, Nagini does have these attributes.

Soon after Neville destroys Nagini-the-Horcrux, the resurrected Harry is the one playing hide-and-seek beneath his Invisibility Cloak, helping with the battle. When he reveals himself to Voldemort, they are in a virtual arena with many spectators watching their “game” as the sun, of which the phoenix is a symbol, rises. Like a phoenix himself, Harry has risen from the ashes to face Voldemort once more.

Harry again makes his signature move, demonstrated by Severus Snape in the only meeting of the Dueling Club: he casts the Disarming Charm, as he did in the graveyard at Little Hangleton, and as it is right for Harry, the anti-soldier, to do. (See Quantum Harry,the Podcast, Episode 19: Not Playing to Win.) It is both a refusal to fight and a way to take mastery of the weapon wielded by an opponent. Harry becomes master of the Elder Wand through wresting Draco’s wand from him, and Draco acts as an anti-warrior when he disarms Dumbledore rather than killing him, which would rip his soul. By choosing not to abuse power, not to kill, Draco is given the power of the Elder Wand, though he doesn’t know this or seek it. Harry is not the only recipient of grace in the series.

Unlike the beginning of Deathly Hallows, when Voldemort attempts to confront Harry, who is master of his wand, with a wand over which Voldemort is not the master (it is Lucius Malfoy’s), and in opposition to Harry’s wand, which recognizes Voldemort as Harry’s enemy and acts on its own because of that, here Voldemort makes an even graver mistake: not only is Harry using a wand over which he is master (Draco’s old hawthorn wand), Voldemort is using a wand that recognizes only Harry as its master. The “contract” between wizard and wand is metaphorical quantum entanglement (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 25: The Wand Game), like between Harry and the Snitch, a connection that augments rather than diminishes Harry, as a Horcrux would. A wizard reunited with a wand over which he is the master is, like Harry catching a Snitch, a reunion of parts of a whole that can now face the world as one, a complete and integrated magical force.

In the end, Rowling writes again of Harry-as-Seeker:

Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling... spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last. And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell...

Harry, the youngest Seeker in a hundred years, catches the Snitch again, winning not the Quidditch World Cup but the world.

 

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 29: The Horcrux and Hallows Game. 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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