Ep. 1 Text: Dreams, Mirrors, and Seven Cursed Diamonds

July 31, 2019—Taylor: Hello, and welcome to Dwelling on Dreams, where two passionate Harry Potter fans dive deep to examine the Wizarding World. I’m Taylor, a Ravenclaw…

Victoria: …and I’m Victoria, a Hufflepuff. Thank you for joining us. For those of you who haven’t read the books or seen the movies yet, what are you doing listening to us? Please, go and do that now because if you stick around, you can expect spoilers ahead.

Taylor: Today on Dwelling on Dreams, we’re going to talk about why we started this podcast, kind of the inspiration for it, and what you can expect from us going forward. And we’re also going to pay tribute to the woman who started at all, JK Rowling.

Victoria: Our first segment will typically be something that we are calling Wizarding Wireless News, where we wish happy birthday to some of our favorite characters, call out different events as they would be happening in the Wizarding World, and discuss new releases from JK Rowling or other things that are currently happening in the Wizarding World at large. Today, we want to wish happy birthday to two of our favorite characters, Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom. So very happy birthday to both of them, even if they are not real.

Taylor: Yes. Yesterday Neville turned 39, and then today Harry turned 39, as the seventh month died. So happy birthday to both of you and many happy returns.

Victoria: Yes. And just a little teaser, we’ll be talking in a future episode about how, with their birthdays, how things could have turned out a little bit differently for the Harry Potter world. But…

Taylor: It’s not an original idea, but it is interesting to consider what would have happened if a single choice had been different on Voldemort’s part.

Victoria: Indeed. We also wanted to talk about the new e-books that JK Rowling released a couple of weeks ago on History of Magic. There is one on Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts and then another on Potions and Herbology, which should be very, very interesting. I think she has two more coming out soon-ish?

Taylor: She does. And she’s really some others in the past. So once they are all official, the outs and being consumed by the public, you’ll hear more about those from us and our thoughts. And what she, how she is expanded the universe. On this podcast. We will also sometimes highlight quotes or thoughts from the books or the movies that we particularly enjoy. And today’s Wit and Wisdom comes, of course, from Dumbledore.

Victoria: Because how can you not start out with a Dumbledore quote?

Taylor: Yes and Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s, for those of you purists, Stone is the foundation for it all. So, when Harry was looking at the Mirror of Erised, Dumbledore said, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. Remember that.” Now, we understand that our podcast is called Dwelling on Dreams, which flies in the face of Dumbledore’s. instructions.

Victoria: We do.

Taylor: And we are very deliberately disobeying him, so, apologies to the memory of Albus Dumbledore, but we think that is in the service of a good cause.

Victoria: We do indeed. I think part of our thought process when deciding on the name for our podcast was, again, looking at this quote and saying, we do realize that this is a fictional world, but it is something that we both love and that a lot of the themes and the character lessons that we learn, things that JK Rowling was very deliberate to impart to her readers are things that are applicable to everyday life. So, while we don’t want to dwell on dreams and forget to actually live our real life world, I think there’s a lot of things that we can take with us that are applicable and helpful.

Taylor: And it certainly has had a big impact in our life, not just because it consumed so many hours of our time reading and watching, but on our friendship. It has such a big effect on our friendship, on how we have grown together. And I think that’s also part of the inspiration for this podcast was that we have dwelt on these dreams of Harry Potter for so long together that we now want to share it with you guys.

Victoria: We do. We, we’ve had many, many a Harry Potter discussion and we don’t always agree, which I think is a good thing. We don’t always disagree. And I think together we provide a really well-rounded look at the Wizarding World as a whole and some very interesting perspectives that I don’t normally hear in just talks and reading online. So we’re excited to start sharing these with you. We hope that you’re excited to start listening.

Taylor: But we also think it’s important to remember Dumbledore’s words that they are usually true, even if we’re disobeying. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Victoria: Yes.

Taylor: We’re also going to occasionally discuss an object or creature or multiple objects and creatures in a segment called Snidgets and Gobstones. And today’s highlight is appropriately the Mirror of Erised.

Victoria: So my question about the Mirror of Erised has always been and always probably will be, “Why?” Why is this a thing? Why? I mean obviously I understand from the point of driving the plot and it being something as a storytelling device, but just like, okay, if, if the Wizarding World was real, who in their right mind thought to create this thing that, like, people die in front of it?! Like, wishing for something that never can be, can never be instead of going out there and living life. I mean it…. I see why we have the dwelling on dreams quote when it’s in the context of this Mirror of Erised. And it just has been something…who, who?? Can I have a word with the person who made this because it’s…why did they think it was a good thing?

Taylor: I’ve always thought that whoever invented the Mirror of Erised was not necessarily like evil or bad, but at least a little sinister showing people their truest desire. It doesn’t actually serve, like you said, any purpose of any sort. It doesn’t help the person either. That’s the thing – They’re, they might be sinister but they can’t see what anybody else sees. That was cleared that Harry and Ron could not see what each other saw a mirror. So it’s not like this person could invent the Mirror and then like bring his worst enemies to see it and then find out what they’re greatest desire was and use it against them. That can’t happen because no one can see it.

Victoria: It just makes the greatest enemy sad.

Taylor: Yeah. But it’s also- it made Ron happy- because his greatest desire was possible. It was not, uh, you know, Harry’s was something that couldn’t be true, because his parents were dead. They couldn’t come back. Ron wanted something to be achieved/greatness in the future, which of course, whatever your opinion of Ron, that’s still something that 11 year old can dream of and still a possibility. So it doesn’t even necessarily make you feel bad.

Victoria: See, I’ve just, I’ve always had this kind of internal debate about like, I mean is there something, is there something more sinister to this? Because is it something where like it feeds on like your like, you know, a dementor feeds on your emotions and all of those like happy memories. So that what this kind of thing does and that’s how it functions and sustains itself? I mean it’s an object technically, but…

Taylor: But most objects in the Harry Potter universe don’t need any sort of recharging- the marauders map laid dormant for years in Filch’s office and he’s not even magical, so. I guess I assumed that Dumbledore would not have let him go back night after night after night to be fed on by an object.

Victoria: Mmmmm……

Taylor: But I mean, think of Dumbledore. He didn’t usually let Harry just sustainedly stay in danger for a long time.

Victoria: Mmmmm……

Taylor: He let him go into danger for short periods of time.

Victoria: He let him keep the Horcrux in his head for six books…..

Taylor: Okay. Well yeah, you can’t really prevent that.

Victoria: Mmmmm……

Taylor: Like some people are like, oh, why didn’t he try going to this place or that place to figure out how to get the horcrux out of Harry’s scar? I think Dumbledore exhausted his options. I don’t, I don’t think that Dumbledore just said, “He has to die,” and then let it go.

Victoria: Ok!

Taylor: But I do have a reason that I don’t think Dumbledore just phoned it in and said, oh, well he’s a horcrux, he has to die.

Victoria: Stay tuned, more on that to come….

Taylor: Where were before that?

Victoria: That Dumbledore wouldn’t just let him get fed on by the Mirror of Erised if it was THAT sinister.

Taylor: I mean, the dementors, Dumbledore fought strongly against them because of their dramatically detrimental effects for the students. So I don’t think he would’ve let the Mirror of Erised just feed on Harry night after night.

Victoria: Why, why even have that in a school?

Taylor: Well, okay. That’s that we will be discussing

Victoria: Why??

Taylor: Soon we’re going to have a discussion about why Dumbledore made many of the decisions he made with Hogwarts and whether they were wise or oversights or just plain stupid.

Victoria: Yes. I’m very much looking forward to that discussion.

Taylor: Yes, me too

Victoria: But back to the original point of who, who thought to make this up and why, why was it a good idea?

Taylor: All right. Well, the inscription, for those of you who have not gone back and looked at the internet, ever since Sorcerer’s Stone came out. The inscription reads, um, “I show not your face but your heart’s desire,” uh, backwards, which is Erised, it’s “Desire” backwards. That’s where the name comes from. So I just think someone was…

Victoria: Cause they could? Maybe this was those things cause they could? Which is never a good reason to invent something!

Taylor: This is true. But maybe it was something sinister, but maybe someone was lonely or sad or something happened and they didn’t want to look back at an image of themselves at that moment. They wanted to see something better or something that they wanted and they were smart enough to inven the fricking Mirror of Erised, so they did?

Victoria: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah… Intelligence without purpose though, sometimes. I mean we could have another just big debate on that.

Taylor: I mean, think about the Peverels- their inventions were born of one of them wanted power, one of them his, his girl died, his wife, his whatever she was. Was she a wife?

Victoria: No, I think he was engaged to her, engaged like a fiancee.

Taylor: And that was our look it up sound effect, which you’re going to hear every time we have to confirm something against a source material. So, so you don’t have to hear us actually looking for things in source materials. Uh, but yes, the 3rd, 2nd brother, um, whose name was Cadmus, the person that he brought back from the dead, that he hoped to marry one day. So sort of engaged, but it doesn’t explicitly say so. Anyway, that invention was born of grief and of a terrible, terrible sadness. And so I think that it’s possible to, the Mirror of Erised that shows, not your face, but your heart’s desire could be something similar. And it honestly served a similar function for Harry.

Victoria: It did. It did, and Dumbledore as well. I mean, when you look at it and what he says, you know, where he sees a pair of socks, which has been confirmed to be related more to his sister.

Taylor: Right. It’s also- Harry says he thinks it’s the only time that Dumbledore’s ever lied to him. I don’t agree.

Victoria: No, I don’t agree either, but…

Taylor: Cause Dumbledore said he…a lot of things. But Harry thinks that the only time he ever directly lied was about the Mirror of Erised, which I think is telling about the object itself.

Victoria: Do we think Dumbledore destroyed it after the chamber? I mean I know he says it went somewhere else away, but wouldn’t the best thing really have been to destroy it afterwards?

Taylor: I never thought that he destroyed it. I mean he certainly was not susceptible enough to it to really worry about it. I think he probably just put it somewhere wherever he put the horcrux books and the, you know,

Victoria: Room of Requirements!

Taylor: He…he was a bit of a censor. So I think he had some place where he put things that he just didn’t want people to have access to. And I mean not that he chose bad things to censor. I mean obviously you don’t want horcrux information just lying around the library, but I think that probably mirrors or maybe he was on loan from someone else as well and he gave it back.

Victoria: Oh, that is true.

Taylor: Cause it never really explains where it came from or…

Victoria: Where it went.

Taylor: Yeah. And all the other stuff that was protecting the stone was borrowed or devised by someone else. So I’ve always kind of assumed that like the stone itself, the mirror wasn’t his.

Victoria: Yes, I know, I assumed that as well. But um, I thought maybe he had bought it or like he talked to the Flamel’s about destroying the Philosopher’s Stone or the Sorcerer’s Stone, whichever one camp you fall into.

Taylor: But I think this Mirror wasn’t as dangerous to everyday students as it was to Harry, like I said. Ron was, was excited by the idea of what he saw. But he wasn’t, like, going to sit in front of it for hours and hours.

Victoria: Well, I mean, and we never know every, I mean there’s a bunch of students in Hogwarts, and she doesn’t flush out all of them. So we never know who- Harry, obviously, is extremely susceptible.

Taylor: I’m sure there are way orphans.

Victoria: Yes. Yes. Neville Longbottom. Could you imagine if Neville Longbottom was sitting- Oh my heart. Neville!

Taylor: Neville’s so sad.

Victoria: Neville’s so sad.

Taylor: I mean, he’s awesome as well.

Victoria: I think he has one of the best transition arcs, though.

Taylor: Yeah, and you barely see it. It’s like blink and you miss it.

Victoria: I know! It’s all in the background of…

Taylor: Especially the seventh book.

Victoria: Yes. Yup. Oh my goodness. Okay. So I guess that means we’ll have to have a character development story on Neville sometime in the future.

Taylor: But I think we can all agree that he would see something very similar to Harry were he would look in the Mirror of Erised.

Victoria: Yes. So you never know a student’s background. But yes. And even Ron actually, you know, I could see him staring and wasting away in front of it too, just, you know, wanting that so badly but not seeing it being achievable in his everyday life just because he, you know- Head Boy is something that needs a lot of academic achievement. Not saying that Ron was unintelligent. I just think he didn’t apply himself.

Taylor: I think that Hermione was way smarter than him and he knew that. I mean, he outright says it, that you’re cleverer than me. You have a better memory than me. That’s why I don’t do as well in school, and he implies that’s why he doesn’t try because Hermione’s always going to be better. And I think Harry is somewhere between the two of them. And so Ron was never gonna measure up. And again he’s not stupid. He’s not, you know…

Victoria: Yeah. I mean that comes through with chess.

Taylor: He’s average in a lot of ways.

Victoria: Which there’s nothing wrong with being.

Taylor: Nothing wrong with being, yeah. That’s certainly not a character flaw. But he is outshone by very talented brothers and friends. But we’re going to talk about that later too.

Victoria: Just out of a desire to prove himself, I could see that especially being young and being 11, cause at 11, you know it’s hard to have that ambition.

Taylor: I imagine that that ambition would’ve changed, like that if he’d looked in the Mirror of Erised a couple of years down the road, it would have changed. Because at 11 his dreams were very cookie-cutter, very much based on his brothers, and his personality was still very much overshadowed by his family.

Victoria: I would have loved in a way, you know, just as to find it interesting for my point of view to see at the end of the war where some of the people, you know, like him and Harry, what their reflections would’ve showed them in the Mirror. A lot of this, at least at Harry’s, which just probably would have been more people added to his parents. But Ron’s I think would have changed drastically.

Taylor: I think at the end of the war or maybe right before the end of the war, Harry’s would have just been peace, but then afterward, knowing Harry, I’m sure he went through a very long period of survivor’s guilt and self-loathing because that’s just how Harry is, when it would have been the people that have died, that he considers having died for him, coming back. But yeah, Ron definitely, definitely by the end of the war would have been totally different. His priorities shifted so dramatically between when he was 11 and when he was 18. Now returning to the topic of dreams. We’re going to talk today as I mentioned before about JK Rowling and how her amazing, inspiring series came about. How she took it from an idea that she had on a train one day to making her one of the richest people in the entire world and kind of how that journey happened.

Victoria: Well, I think for me, something that I’ve always just really admired about JK Rowling is the fact that she did develop so much of this, according to her, beforehand. You know, she had a lot of this planned out, which as an aspiring writer is just kind of hard to get my mind around. A lot of times when I’m developing different casts and stories that usually never see the light of day, but just the fact that, you know, she had all this planned out and that she was able to actually bring it into conception, it’s just- I mean, this was her dream, so I’m sure that it’s very satisfying to her to see this now in completion. And I mean it’s never really complete because there’s so much that you can do and she is developing it.

Taylor: Yes. Some people have criticized her a great deal, and I’m not saying she has never made any missteps in how she has developed the world post-books and -movies. But, I don’t think that- I think she’s perfectly entitled to that decision. She- It’s her world; it’s her dream, as it were, and if she wants to keep explaining things and expounding and- that is her prerogative and I’m grateful that she has it.

Victoria: Yes. Oh definitely. I mean she even was just writing when she was younger, which was really interesting to me, reading through different biographies of her online from especially, I think this one was from, Bloomsbury had a little profile on her and which you guys can look up and find. But when she was 11, she wrote a novel about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them. And I just, that just stuck out with me because I was just like, oh, Harry Potter. Things like from, you know, her childhood actually ended up coming through. She’s talked a lot about how the dementors really were a metaphor for her depression and how her mother died when she was around the age of 20 and how that influenced a lot of what Harry Potter, the series, became. I found it really interesting that she brought aspects of stories that she’d written as a child through with, you know, seven cursed diamonds, seven cursed Horcruxes. Like, that was really interesting to me to see that.

Taylor: I enjoyed a little anecdote she shared once, that her first story was when she was very young, and she wrote a story about a rabbit called Rabbit.

Victoria: Yes. I saw that too.

Taylor: That makes me smile. I enjoy it.

Victoria: You know, I think as kids, I always- I had a teddy bear named Teddy.

Taylor: Yeah. But she first had the idea for Harry Potter, according to her, on a train in 1990, and the first book didn’t come out until 1997. She didn’t- she spent five years just developing the story. Obviously not just Sorcerer’s Stone/Philosopher’s Stone. Cause that would not take five years for anybody to develop, much less master storyteller like JK Rowling. So things that you see in the first book that are referenced or explained or become more important later on, she had in mind right from the start. Things as insignificant as “Harry caught the Snitch with his mouth,” she knew that that was going to be important later on and that he was going to have to use his mouth to open the Snitch in the seventh book.

Victoria: Yes! Oh, the foreshadowing, just. I love that it’s not even, like, obvious foreshadowing. It’s just, you know, weird little things that as I was reading it, you know, when I was able to read all the books, just reading it and being like, that’s a weird detail. That’s something interesting. Okay. You know, just move on, move on, move on. There’s so much happening. There’s so much going on. There’s so many characters. It’s a lot to wrap your mind around when you first start reading. And so, in the seventh book it’s just like ahhh, I remember that!

Taylor: It all comes together!

Victoria: I thought that was weird then. Oh, okay. Neat. I just thought that was so cool.

Taylor: The thing with her books is that the devil is so much in the details. Like there’s- there’s so many things that just a random throwaway sentence, you know, she brings back later and it’s suddenly a huge plot point. But there’s also so many red herrings, like, entire characters are just totally, you know, exist throw you off the scent. So the fact that she is able to weave those in starting from the first book and then bring it all together, weaving it in a nice little tapestry and then the seventh book you suddenly see, okay, that’s what it is. It’s, it’s quite impressive.

Victoria: It really is. And it makes you go back and read the other books, something about this series. I mean, it inspires such a big cult following because it’s just so readable at any age, and you just, you, you want to go back and you want to look at all those details and find things that people may have missed or that you missed moving forward the first time. Like I said, there’s so much going on. So I think part of why it’s become so popular is you just can keep rereading it and rereading it and finding new things. Which is very impressive.

Taylor: All right, so the biggest theme, not theme, the biggest plot point that everybody wants to know: Did she know that Harry, that there were Horcruxes and that Harry was one the whole time? I feel like we just need to say categorically: Yes. She knew.

Victoria: There are so many hints, I feel like, coming through the books.

Taylor: And while it’s true that you can go back and kind of co-opt a previous plot line or, you know, instance and then make it work into a future, you know, a future plot, I think that that was the thrust of the entire novels. That’s what it was all building towards the entire time. Some of her subplots some of her minor, more minor, characters. I think that maybe, yeah, she worked it in and she kind of, you know, made it up as she went along to an extent. But the framework, which Horcruxes are the framework of the entire series. Arguably there’s other frameworks. Obviously there’s only parts of the framework, but…

Victoria: Right. And the whole thing about love and sacrifice, that’s it. I mean, you know, at the end, Harry Potter sacrifices himself- spoiler, like we said, spoiler, if you haven’t read them. Harry’s sacrifice- [cough, cough, cough] Sorry, I just hadn’t put that out there. Harry sacrifices himself for- out of love for all of his friends. And that’s something that Tom Riddle would never do. And that’s when you look at kind of people comparing them and how they grew up and just their trajectories that parallel each other in so many ways. But it’s Harry’s choices, right? Which Dumbledore says: It’s your choices that make you.

Taylor: Right. And I am very much of the opinion that Harry and Voldemort are two sides of a coin, but they are very different sides of the same coin. They mirror each other in many, many ways, like you just said. But the whole series is about how one of them loves and cares and has a conscience and the other one doesn’t. And that’s how- that’s, the entire series revolves around those, those two elements.

Victoria: Right. So, to me that’s something that she tied in very much from the beginning. That was the whole, like you said, framework for the entire books. The Horcruxes, just, you can’t-

Taylor: That was the plot.

Victoria: That was the plot. I mean, that’s something that I’m pretty sure she figured out pretty early on.

Taylor: Yeah. Anyway, when I typed in this question – how much did she know? – that’s the first thing everybody was, that’s the biggest thing was, did she know about the Horcruxes? Yes.

Victoria: Oh, that’s interesting.

Taylor: Yeah, it was by far the biggest thing. Some people feel weirdly about Deathly Hallows. How much do you think she knew about the Deathly Hallows from the get go?

Victoria: Oh, that’s interesting.

Taylor: Yeah. Cause they don’t become a plot point really at all until the seventh book.

Victoria: I mean it’s always hard. You can’t, you can’t speak for somebody.

Taylor: Of course not. This is all speculation, People.

Victoria: This very much all speculation.

Taylor: In case you’re curious, we don’t know JK Rowling.

Victoria: Disclaimer!

Taylor: And have no idea what she was thinking at any point in her life.

Victoria: Correct. Other than what we have read through interviews and have picked up. I don’t think so. I think that’s something that maybe was developed later on. It’s very interesting. But it’s not like the Horcruxes; it’s not woven through every single book. But then there are things that are mentioned- I mean maybe like around the middle when things kind of start heating up a bit?

Taylor: Yeah, I think the Cloak is a big question mark. Did she know that the Cloak was special right from the get-go?

Victoria: I think maybe yes. But I don’t know if she worked everything out.

Taylor: Yeah. And also she did specifically say she knew about the Snitch, and the Resurrection Stone- Did she know that the Resurrection Stone would need to be opened in the Snitch, or did she just think that maybe that’d be a cool container at some point, so she made Harry swallow it. It seems like she wouldn’t have made that much of an effort unless she knew about the Resurrection Stone.

Victoria: Yeah, but I don’t know. I’m kind of of the opinion, maybe she would’ve woven in the tale a bit sooner if it had been something from the very, very beginning. I agree, maybe, that the Snitch, “The Snitch would a good container” might’ve been a thought process in her mind, like, “Oh, I need to save this for later.” But I think that they might would have woven in the tale a bit sooner of the three brothers. It just doesn’t-

Taylor: Well, the thing is I- she needed a mystery for the seventh book because that’s really the core of her books are the childhood sleuths who, you know, are figuring out what their evil teachers are doing, basically. Without the Deathly Hallows, though, there’s nothing that you’re wondering about the entire book. Cause yes, you learned that Snape is, you know, not actually evil, but you’re not wondering about that during the book because you think it’s a done deal. He is evil. It’s not a mystery.

Victoria: You’re 100% certain.

Taylor: That kind of comes out of like left field.

Victoria: Way left field! So some people will really like it; some people really don’t. Again, we will debate this later.

Taylor: Yeah. Yes, we will. So anyway, the only thing in the seventh book that you, makes you curious to read more is the Deathly Hallows, which to be honest, was not my favorite part of the book. I preferred the actual, you know, plot the, the way things moved forward, the action, which is different from most books.

Victoria: I was a little confused when I read the seventh book. Just, it felt like, whew, okay, so we’re going to completely jump tracks here and add in this whole other thing with all this stuff going on, and it just, it muddled it a bit for me just cause it was all crammed into that one book, pretty much.

Taylor: Yeah, that’s true. And I Dumbledore…

Victoria: I mean, I liked it. I liked the whole- From a conceptual point, I do like the Deathly Hallows. I think that’s a very interesting point, and I think that really brings in some more of Dumbledore’s character that we get to see, even post-mortem. Again, spoiler. He dies. You know, post-mortem Dumbledore, you really learn a lot more about him, I feel like than you learn about him throughout the whole book/series before that.

Taylor: Oh absolutely. Because Harry never doubts him or questions him when he’s right there in front of his face. It’s after he’s gone and he can’t ask him questions or confirm things with him that he starts really exploring Dumbledore as a person. And because Harry Potter is the narrator, that’s when we start exploring Dumbledore as a person.

Victoria: It’s kind of funny how that works.

Taylor: Yes. And that’ll also be something we talk about in the future. How Harry’s perspective distorts things or encourages things for good, bad, ugly.

Victoria: And so it is just a very interesting thing, though, looking at the Deathly Hallows and Harry as the Master of Death and the whole debate on if he hadn’t have had those when he had been able to come back, even though he was sacrificed- It’s a whole thing, but…

Taylor: Oh Harry coming back, that’s a whole pile of mess.

Victoria: That’s a whole thing.

Taylor: Spoilers, People! Harry comes back.

Victoria: Harry comes back! And so just looking at all of that together, it’s, it’s interesting. I just, I do wish she’d split it up a little bit between the last two books or put some more foreshadowing, cause she does such a good job of that, like we talked about before, and in a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of different things, she does a really, really good job with foreshadowing. That one, I just feel missed the boat a wee bit.

Taylor: Let’s see. I’m trying to think of foreshadowing specifically with the Deathly Hallows. I mean obviously the Invisibility Cloak was there the whole time, but they don’t really address what Invisibility Cloaks are supposed to be like until they’re talking about the Deathly Hallows. The Resurrection Stone- Harry mentions in the books that there’s a squiggle on the ring, but that was the sixth book, so it’s not really that much foreshadowing.

Victoria: And that’s one of those, like, dropped lines that just is in there. And you just kind of skim over it.

Taylor: There’s a, there’s a marking of some sort on Stone.

Victoria: Okay, cool, let’s move on.

Taylor: Right. And the Elder Wand’s really the thing that I think should have been woven in more. I’m trying to think if there’s, like, mention of Dumbledore’s wand in any sort of way other than he performed magic with it, and I am drawing a blank. I could be wrong.

Victoria: Right, because they don’t talk about his past really until the seventh book, and you know he’s had, he has the elder one the whole time Harry’s at school. So it’s not like anybody would mention, oh his one changed, cause Grindelwald has already been defeated way back.

Taylor: And everybody just accepts that he’s super powerful, so when he does amazing feats of magic, it’s not strange or unusual.

Victoria: Right. I think people should have questioned that more.

Taylor: That Dumbledore was super powerful? I mean, he was super powerful and talented before he got the Wand.

Victoria: True.

Taylor: That’s been made clear in multiple sources that when he was young, even before Grindelwald’s fall, he was regarded as very talented, very powerful, very smart. How he got the Wand from Grindelwald, I’m curious about. I’m very, very excited for that because, it’s supposed to be unbeatable, and yet Dumbledore beat him. And how did that work?

Victoria: What happened there?

Taylor: Fantastic Beasts. I- can we just skip to the last movie so we find out how it all ends?

Victoria: Please?

Taylor: Not that I’m not excited to find out more about Newt.

Victoria: I do like Newt. I do. He’s a precious cinnamon roll of a person.

Taylor: I don’t know that cinnamon rolls make the best leads for movies, but he is sweet and enjoyable as a character.

Victoria: He is sweet and enjoyable. I mean he is a fellow Hufflepuff. How can I not root for a fellow Hufflepuff? Because we just aren’t mentioned a lot.

Taylor: Yeah, well, Quirrell was a Ravenclaw, so I can’t really make the argument that I should root for all Ravenclaws.

Victoria: No, you can’t.

Taylor: I’m trying to think of any, like, bad Hufflepuffs that would be examples of why, oh, Zacharias Smith wasn’t great.

Victoria: He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t evil like Quirrell. So, yeah. Point for Hufflepuff. Yes. I think something else interesting to note was the fact that she sent this off to 13 publishers before it got actually picked up by one of them. And I read somewhere that it wouldn’t actually been picked up, except for the publisher gave it to his 8-year-old daughter, at the time, to read, and she adored it. And the publishing house still was a little bit tentative. They didn’t really think it would go over very well, but then it just pretty much from the get-go was a very good seller and kind of surprised everybody.

Taylor: Yeah, she actually once said in an interview with BBC, that quote, “I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven-book series when I didn’t have a publisher and no one had heard of me.” End quote. So I think that was also a struggle for her in trying to get a publisher and getting her work out to the world in that people look down on her decision to plot everything out and have a rigid framework for her stories when no one knew who JKR was and no one could guarantee that the story would ever even see the light of day. Every once in awhile when I’m feeling nostalgic- trying to imagine being that publisher, that you don’t have any of the other books, you don’t have any of the framework, you don’t have any of the support that she has now because by the time I got into these, it was already huge. So trying to imagine looking at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with absolutely no prior knowledge, no preconceptions- It’s hard to imagine what it would be like and what, why they made the decisions they made.

Victoria: Right. I mean, it was very different than anything really on the market. I remember when it first, at least, hit America that it was very different from anything I’d heard of before. And you know, some people accepted that with a lot of trepidation; some people were all for it. And this came out before all of the big series, I think, that have happened in the last 30 years. Like The Hunger Games or Percy Jackson, you know. Just thinking about middle-age children’s literature, you know, it really set a trend in a way for more fantastical things.

Taylor: And it re-introduced in many ways as well, reading to children or young adult, that demographic because there’s, before that there were no big series or even isolated books that, you know, everybody knew about if they haven’t to haven’t read…

Taylor: In that age bracket, I think. You know, people think about reading to children when they’re younger and early readers, but they kind of just let them go. And the biggest books I really can think of about for that age, before Harry Potter were like The Giver or How to Kill a Mockingbird- you know, things that when you’re getting into upper elementary/middle school that your school requires you to read. It is just a very interesting fact that she had so many things set up, you know, almost make you fail in a way that you didn’t have a lot of confidence from the publishing house and all that kind of things. But she triumphed over that, and people ended up really loving the story as it came out, which is really neat. I mean there’s multiple references to the fact that they made her add in, invent, a middle name for herself to sound more like a man and use her initials, than just publishing under Joanne Rowling and the fact that it would be received better, which is kind of a commentary on the times of publishing at that point in history.

Taylor: I actually saw an interview with her where she said that she liked the fact that she had a separate pen name. I mean obviously the fact that they forced her to do it is bad, but she said she liked having a professional name that’s, like, the writer, and then Joanne is, you know, the mom, the person. She liked having a little bit of separation there and boundaries, which I thought was interesting.

Victoria: Well, that is nice, then. That worked out really well for her. That is nice. I’ll be discussing more of this in a supplementary post that we’ll be publishing on our webpage, which was dwellingondreamspodcast.com for anybody interested, as just some more supplementary information on this podcast. But going into detail more about her speech that she gave at a 2008 commencement for Harvard, which really discussed the merits of failure and the importance of having imagination and perseverance through those hard times and just seeing it through to the end, which should be really interesting.

Taylor: Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading that as well. That’s a fairly famous speech, within certain circles anyway, and it’s very- it’s good speech. It’s very inspiring, and I’m excited to hear your take on it. Of course there are some people – and they might have some valid points – that say that the fact that she pigeonholed herself that early, that she had decided the story’s end before she really began- The story suffered for it because then the characters evolved and the plots evolved in ways that didn’t necessarily serve the crescendo of the seventh book, if you will. And I seen some parts of that and she’s even admitted, you know, that she doesn’t necessarily think the Harry and Ginny should’ve been together, but that she just had married that storyline and couldn’t let it go. But I also think that that’s how a master storyteller works, that they figure out exactly what they want their story to be and then they make it happen. And could it have evolved differently if she hadn’t called her shot early on? Maybe, but, again, that’s her prerogative and I enjoy how it went.

Victoria: Right, the story needs to go somewhere. It needs to end. At some point, as sad as that may be and how unsatisfying that may be to certain people. You know, I think there’s an aspect of it where no one’s going to be happy 100% with a story that they absolutely love ending the way that it does. There’s always going to be- even if, you know, the main plot ties together nicely, a sub plot might not or things like that. And I think that, I think she did, you know, I think we’ll discuss later on other episodes different things that we wish may have been a little bit different just personally, but it does need to be tied up in a bow somehow, some way.

Taylor: And on that topic, check out our blog for some more thoughts on what could’ve gone differently, what could have been added to the Harry Potter books if we had unlimited amounts of time to write and read. So check it out at dwellingondreamspodcast.com.

Victoria: I’m really actually very excited to read this series that Taylor’s going to be starting, as it’s something that I think comes up a lot in our discussions, things that we would have maybe liked to have explored a little bit more, in a little bit more detail. I haven’t really seen a lot of people discussing these. It’s going to be some really unique and interesting topics that she’s going to be looking into a bit more over, I think, the next four weeks-ish.

Taylor: I think there’s going to be four posts, but it’ll be every other week.

Victoria: Every other week. So be sure to check out our Facebook and Twitter pages to stay up to date on all the latest from Dwelling on Dreams podcast. So do you think that JK Rowling, when she, you know, first sent it off to a publisher, first kind of conceptualized all there is of Harry Potter, do you think that she really ever could imagine that it would have done as well as it has done?

Taylor: Well, I don’t think anybody could predict that level of success in any venture. I mean, I’m trying to think of a parallel in another field, and I’m drawing a blank because that level of success is- you can’t, you can’t imagine that; you can’t expect that or you’re going to be woefully disappointed in your everyday life. But she did spend a long time developing a very detailed world, populating it with a lot of very interesting characters, a lot of very thick plot. I can’t imagine that she would put all that time and effort into it if she didn’t expect that once it was published, that once she got someone to put it out there that it would be well-received enough to keep going. Because I mean, why waste that much effort if you only kind-of half-think maybe it kinda might work, you know?

Victoria: Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, I think I agree too. You know, to put so much effort into something and to be so persistent and to be thinking about it for five years, just conceptualizing it and putting it all together and starting to write it. I mean, you obviously think it’s gonna go somewhere. You know, and I’m sure, you know, she had friends encouraging her and telling her to keep going and things like that with it. But I’m sure after a while it just is like, oh my goodness, is this is ever going to happen. And oh, the nervousness of, of getting that out there.

Taylor: Getting that first publisher to take a chance. And I’m sure- she has spoken obviously publicly about the, you know, the rejections and the failure at the beginning, but again, you’ve gotta believe that she believed that this was, there was something there. Because if she didn’t believe that, I don’t understand why she would put herself through that, set herself up for that much disappointment, that much disappointed hopes, if she didn’t really believe that there is something to Harry Potter. And she was right. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Harry Potter is a thing.

Victoria: For the past twenty years… Yes, it’s definitely a thing.

Taylor: And she appreciates the level of success she’s had. She appreciates the people, the fans that have put her there. I mean, as much engagement as she has with the fandom, online, she’s active with fan sites, with social media. I mean…

Victoria: Even developing Pottermore just to have, like, to keep it going and have a digital platform where she can explain more.

Taylor: I know some people think that she has, you know, held on too long and won’t let go. But I appreciate that she knows how much of an impact she’s had on so many people, and she understands that, and she responds by, you know, interacting with us.

Victoria: Yeah, that’s something I’ve always really thought was very neat about her as a person. I think, you know, she’s still very down to earth, even with as much success as she’s had, as much fame as she’s gotten, as much money as she has now. It’s still, you know, she’s still kind of kept her same self about her, and she very much identifies with people from all walks of life, which is very relatable, and it comes across in her writing. And I think that, you know, you can’t ever take for granted the people that got you where you are. And I think she’s very aware of that fact. And, I mean, the Harry Potter world is large with all the people that interact with it and love it and just go nuts over any new release. I mean, we are two of those. It’s very much appreciated because there’s so many authors out there that don’t.

Taylor: And there are so many authors that are jealous of their work and protective of it. And JK Rowling lets us play. She encourages the fan sites and the discussions and the wild theories, and she doesn’t try to keep things just exactly the way that she wrote them and that she imagined them. And if you don’t like, you know- I think that she could have this fandom, this phenomenon. I think she could have stopped this if she had tried to stifle that early on, if she tried to nip in the bud and get protective of her work and her way or the highway, and then everybody else is stupid for thinking otherwise. I think that the fandom wouldn’t have grown to what it is now and continues to grow and will probably grow forever and ever, amen. Because she let us into her world and let us play with it.

Victoria: Yeah. And JK, we’re very, very grateful for that.

Taylor: Yes.

Victoria: And that’s all for today. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit, dwellingondreamspodcast.com to subscribe to the show. We’d also love to hear from you on social media.

Taylor: And if you like what we’re doing, you can show your support with a review or on our Patreon page. Thanks again for listening. Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode, out in two weeks, to hear more from a Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, Dwelling on Dreams.

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Photo courtesy of HarshLight.