JK Rowling opens further windows on Harry Potter’s world for Advent

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/15/jk-rowling-harry-potter-advent-pottermore

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JK Rowling has been tantalising her readers over the weekend with snippets of new writing from the world of Harry Potter – including her revelation of the existence of a “ghost plot” that never made it into the final books.

Rowling’s website Pottermore is marking the approach of Christmas with the daily release of new material from the author every day at 1pm. On Friday, users of the site were asked to solve a short riddle: “In a house on Spinner’s End / A meeting takes place / A mother begs help for her son, tears on her face / Agreeing to help though he doesn’t know how / which potions master performs an Unbreakable Vow?”

Entering the correct answer – Professor Snape – brought new information from Rowling about the town of Cokeworth, where Harry’s mother Lily, and a young Severus Snape, once lived. The name, writes Rowling, “is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime”, and when Harry’s aunt and uncle are trying to avoid the letters from Hogwarts, they travel there because “perhaps uncle Vernon has a vague idea that Cokeworth is so distinctly unmagical, the letters will not follow them there”.

Unlocking further riddles reveals that one Florean Fortescue, owner of an ice-cream parlour in Rowling’s magical London street Diagon Alley, “is the subject of a ghost plot (a narrative that never made it into the final books”. Harry meets Florean in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and discovers that a former headmaster of his school was called Dexter Fortescue.

Rowling revealed over the weekend that Florean is Dexter’s descendant, and that she had originally planned for him “to be the conduit for clues that I needed to give Harry during his quest for the Hallows”. To this end, she had him kidnapped, intending that Harry and his friends would rescue him, but then decided that Phineas Nigellus Black would be a better means for the friends to find the clues.

“All in all, I seemed to have had him kidnapped and killed for no reason. He is not the first wizard whom Voldemort murdered because he knew too much (or too little), but he is the only one I feel guilty about, because it was all my fault,” she admits.

Other new writing from Rowling delves into the history of the Leaky Cauldron pub, situated on Charing Cross Road and the oldest pub in London, according to the author. “It is believed to have been built some time in the early 1500s, along with the rest of the wizarding street,” she writes, and “was initially visible to Muggle eyes”, before the Statute of Secrecy was imposed. “Charing Cross Road is famous for its bookshops, both modern and antiquarian. This is why I wanted it to be the place where those in the know go to enter a different world,” writes Rowling.

The novelist also reveals to users of the site that chemistry was her “least favourite subject at school, and I gave it up as soon as I could”, so it was the natural choice for what Harry’s enemy Snape would teach. “This makes it all the stranger that I found Snape’s introduction to his subject quite compelling (‘I can teach you to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death …’), apparently part of me found Potions quite as interesting as Snape did,” she writes.

And she provides a history of cauldrons – “many folk and fairy tales make mention of cauldrons with special powers, but in the Harry Potter books they are a fairly mundane tool”, she writes, adding that “all cauldrons are enchanted to make them lighter to carry, as they are most commonly made of pewter or iron. Modern inventions include the self-stirring and collapsible varieties of cauldron, and pots of precious metal are also available for the specialist, or the show-off”.