The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter (15 page)

Just like Smaug, when Eustace turns into a dragon in C.S. Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
he finds himself sleeping on a bed of treasure—money, jewels, and gold. In Ursula Le Guin’s
The Wizard of Earthsea,
dragons sometimes attack people when searching for treasure. The literary link between dragons, goblins, and treasure is deep indeed.

Hobgoblins, another name for goblins, also appear far back in British folklore as short, hairy, ugly creatures who can be friendly and helpful, but can quickly turn mean and nasty. That folkloric tradition fits the wizarding world’s goblins to a “T.” Goblins and hobgoblins also appear in the
Spider-Man
comics, the Dungeons & Dragons game, and even in Shakespeare (Puck, in
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,
is a hobgoblin).

Technology is irrelevant to wizards—why use overnight delivery services, text-messaging, and e-mail when you can use magic? So a wizard’s first choice for contacting other wizards is not through high-tech means but through the mail service, which travels via owl.

Owls, not carrier pigeons or hawks, are the bird of choice for wizards. In fact, a local post office is little more than an owlery.

The rationale behind using owls is a little murky, but a connection between owls and magic is well established. Magic tends to be practiced under the cover of darkness; owls are nocturnal creatures. The consistent hooting of an owl has long been associated, right or wrong, with impending death, especially the death of a child. The Greeks and Romans believed that witches could turn themselves into owls, and then feast on babies. In fact, in many cultures, owls have been believed to act as messengers for wizards and witches, just as they do in the magical world of Harry Potter. And in T.H. White’s
The Once and Future King,
Merlin has an owl named Archimedes.

The advantage to using owls is that they work seven days a week, they can deliver messages just about anywhere in the world, and they can find the addressee even if no one is supposed to know where he or she is. The downside is that owls must be cared for, fed, and given treats, and they can be temperamental. In addition, cats, another highly magical creature, don’t tend to get on well with owls.

One particular type of mail is a Howler. A Howler looks like it could be a letter in a red envelope, but when you open the envelope you get Howled at by the sender. Ignoring it only makes the screaming worse. When all the screaming is over, the envelope erupts in flames and burns. Howlers are sent mostly by parents to rebuke their children.

Nothing like the World Wide Web (WWW), the WWN is basically a wizarding radio station, playing mostly music. A wireless in the wizarding world is not a cell phone, Palm, or Blackberry, but a radio, as in the term used to denote radios in the early 1900s. “Wireless” was short for wireless telegraphy—the beauty of radio was that, unlike the telegraph, it was completely wireless, operating on radio frequency instead of using wires that crisscrossed the nation, as the telegraph did.

Wizard musicians aren’t any different from nonwizard musicians, except that the lyrics of songs relate to issues wizards can understand (“A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love” or “You Charmed the Heart Right Out of Me”). Celestina Warbeck (from
celestial,
meaning “heavenly,” and
warbler,
a bird known for its sweet songs) is one such wizard singer.

Perhaps the most famous wizard group is The Weird Sisters, a rock ’n’ roll band that sport long hair and torn black robes and might be loosely named after Twisted Sister, a heavy metal band popular in the 1980s. Just as likely is that they are a reference to the three witches in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
Although The Weird Sisters’ instruments include the usual drums and guitars, band members also play the lute, the cello, and the bagpipes, which are all traditional Celtic instruments.

That the subjects in photographs and paintings change in the wizard world—that is, that they are not static—may not come as a huge surprise. After all, many horror stories are predicated on the notion that the “eyes” of paintings are watching you and following your every move. Egyptians painted images in tombs in the hopes that the images would come alive and assist and guide the soul of the deceased. F. Scott Fitzgerald used the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg in
The Great Gatsby
, up on a huge billboard, as a metaphor for God watching us. And perhaps the best-known changing picture is the one in Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The picture ages and displays the scars of a man who has lived a cruel life, while the subject of the painting, Dorian Gray himself, never ages a day.

But wizard paintings don’t just change subtly; they move about, sleep, talk, and even leave their paintings to visit other ones! They can, in fact, be most annoying. The characters in paintings are much like their original subjects—they have the same opinions, tendencies, and characteristics as they did while alive. The Fat Lady, the subject of a painting that guards the entrance to one of the Hogwarts houses, regularly gossips, takes naps while on duty, and is terrified when her painting is slashed. Photos, on the other hand, are like silent movies that replay every few seconds; photo subjects also tend not to talk or leave their frames, but they do wave and smile.

And in what is, perhaps, literature’s best imitation of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
one Sir Cadogan, formerly of a hanging picture, leaves his painting to go on a quest, yelling insults like “Stand and fight, you yellow-bellied mongrels!” A real Sir Alexander Cadogan was Great Britain’s representative to the United Nations just after World War II.

We see plenty of the opposite in literature and culture; that is, people stepping
into
paintings. C.S. Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
begins with the children falling into a painting. And much more recently, in the movie
What Dreams May Come,
Robin Williams goes into one of his wife’s oil paintings.

British wizards eat and party like any Brit without wizard abilities, with some exceptions: