Читать книгу An A–Z of Harry Potter - Aubrey Malone - Страница 6

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Babbling Beverage

Potion that causes the victim to talk nonsense. Snape threatens Harry with it in The Order of the Phoenix.

Bagshot, Bathilda

Author of A History of Magic, she was a family friend of the Dumbledores. She’s killed by Voldemort in The Deathly Hallows.

Baked beans

Rowling was so poor in her early writing career that one day when she tried to buy a tin of baked beans she found she was two pence short. To hide her embarrassment she pretended she’d left a ten pound note in her other coat. The beans, meanwhile, remained at the counter. Many nights she went to bed hungry before fame struck.

Balderdash

Password used to gain entry to the Gryffindor common room. Another one is Flibbertigibbet.

Balmoral Hotel

The venue at which Rowling completed The Deathly Hallows on 11 January 2007.

Banishing Charm

The opposite of the Summoning Charm.

Bans

In some countries Harry Potter books have been banned, thereby giving them even more publicity. Joking apart, the people who accuse them of encouraging children to practise witchcraft, or appearing to condone such an activity, are dramatically over-reacting to their subject matter. As Lisa Cherrett remarks in her book The Triumph of Goodness (published by the Bible Reading Fellowship), ‘This immediately puts a barrier between Christian youngsters and their peers, and begins to breed in them the ghetto mentality of fear and suspicion.’

Banshee

A female spirit, derived from the Gaelic ‘bean’ (woman) and ‘sí’ (fairy), that wails and shrieks when death is imminent. No wonder Rowling’s Irish character Seamus Finnigan (is there a nod to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake here?) is terrified by the prospect of them.

Interestingly enough, during Rowling’s bohemian years, when she was drifting aimlessly between jobs and immersing herself in the dubious delights of punk rock, she formed an attachment to the music of a group called Síouxie and the Banshees, now long forgotten. This phase of her life was necessary for her to rid herself of her rebellious streak, paving the way for a time she would be entertained by the Queen—and end up out-earning her!

Bashu

Chinese publishing house that brought out three apocryphal Harry Potter novels, making quite a profit out of all of them before Christopher Little, Rowling’s agent, put it out of business. The books were called Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk up to Dragon, Harry Potter and the Golden Turtle and Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase.

Basilisk

The terrifying serpent in Chamber of Secrets that can turn people to stone. The only thing that can control a Basilisk is a Parselmouth. One of them killed Moaning Myrtle.

Bell, Katie

One of the three Chasers on the Gryffindor Quidditch team.

Bibliomania

Rowling is so fond of reading she says that if she finds herself in a bathroom with no books, she reads the labels on the toiletries.

Bildungsroman

A novel dealing with the spiritual, moral, psychological and social development of its main character, from the above German term that translates directly as ‘novel of education’. The Harry Potter saga certainly fits this particular bill.

Binns, Professor

This is Harry’s History of Magic professor. We can see what Harry and/or Rowling think of his ability by dint of his surname, though when Hermione asks him about the Chamber of Secrets in the book of that name, all the class are agog. Unfortunately, in the American version of the book, ‘dustbin’ is changed to ‘trash can’ so this pun is lost. Binns, it should be added, is a ghost, having forgotten to bring his body to class with him one day. (As you would.) He enters the classroom through the blackboard.

Birthdays

Harry was born on the same date as Rowling: 31 July. Daniel Radcliffe, who plays him in the films, was also born in July though not 31 July as Connie Ann Kirk mistakenly states in her biography of Rowling.

Black, Regulus

Younger brother of Sirius.

Black, Sirius

The literal meaning of his name is ‘Black Dog’. He’s Harry’s godfather and the former best friend of Harry’s father, but we initially fear him after he escapes from Azkaban because we hear he’s a serial killer. Only later does it emerge that he’s been framed by Peter Pettigrew and is actually on Harry’s side. (Unfortunately, he dies before managing to clear his name.) He’s also his secret benefactor, providing him with his trusty Firebolt broomstick. Black dies protecting Harry from Voldemort, which is a pity as he was a popular character with readers, and one of Harry’s few true allies.

Blood

Wizards can be pure-bloods or half-bloods. Draco Malfoy is a pure-blood (this in fact being his password to get into the Slytherin common room) whereas Tom Riddle and Harry himself are half-bloods. Those born of Muggle parents are ‘filthy little Mudbloods’, as Malfoy delights in reminding them. When Hermione reaches higher academic standards than he does, he puts it down to teacher favouritism. Rowling has ostensibly written a wizard story but the class struggle is ubiquitous. The fact that she makes the aristocratic pure-blood the villain nails her democratic colours to the mast very early on. Her background in the classics has enabled her to capture the collegiate atmosphere to a ‘t’, but she’s also known poverty and has an empathy with the poor, like Ron and his siblings. Her books undermine elitism from the inside.

Bloody Baron

The house ghost of Slytherin.

Bloomsbury

Rowling’s publishers, who offered her an advance of £2000 for her first book in 1996. It was a huge amount to her at that time as her marriage had just broken down and she was living on lean rations, but of course it would be mere pocket money to her now.

Bludgers

The balls used in Quidditch that try to knock players off their broomsticks.

Blyton, Enid

People sometimes denigrate Rowling by saying her books are little more than Enid Blyton on broomsticks. She says herself that she was never really a fan of that author, though she’s read the Famous Five books, and certain elements of the solidarity of Harry, Ron and Hermione are similar as they go about their fact-finding missions and suddenly end up in life-threatening situations before all comes out well in the end.

The difference, of course, is that there’s a Peter Pan element with the Famous Five. They remain the same age throughout all the books, unlike Rowling’s characters, who go through hormonal changes in adolescence, like ‘real’ children. Rowling originally intended to bring out one book a year but interruptions of one sort or another gave rise to delays; this has affected the timescale of the films as well, which means that her characters have aged more quickly on the screen than in the books.

Boarding schools

Rowling seems to celebrate these in her books, but says she’s not exactly a fan of them. (She never went to one, and nor did Enid Blyton, another author who liked writing about them.) Rowling’s critics say this element of her work makes it a thinly disguised lament for ye olde England, but that hasn’t stopped readers lapping it up, even (especially?) if it has a certain anachronistic element.

Even though Harry is a wizard, he has to worry about things like homework, exams, practical jokes, teasing, detention, boring classes (Professor Binns take a bow!), one-upmanship, punctuality, peer group pressure, not wandering out of bounds, succeeding at games, etc. Rowling weaves these details seamlessly into all the chapters dealing with spells, potions, trolls, owl posts, centaurs, boggarts, sphinxes, Basilisks, werewolves, secret passageways, passwords, flying broomsticks, death curses, giant spiders, speaking snakes and so on.

Hogwarts is a co-ed, multicultural school of learning with Head Girls, Head Boys and prefects. It doesn’t have flogging, like, say, the institutions of the Tom Brown’s School Days era of literature—point deduction is the preferred mode of censure—nor does it have ‘fagging’, i.e. the practice of new pupils becoming older ones’ gofers, though the house elves seem to some extent to serve this function. Like Tom Brown, however, Harry is bullied, he’s good at sports, he breaks rules when he feels he has to, he has a wise headmaster—Brown’s was Dr Arnold while his is Professor Dumbledore—and he eventually becomes a hero to his class.

What Rowling has done is to serve up old wine in new wineskins, as well as throwing in some occult villainy for good (or bad) measure, and we relish the unique mix.

Boggarts

These chameleon-like creatures can take the form of anything they wish, depending on what the person looking at them is fearing. Rowling probably based the word on the bogeyman. You can get the better of them by imagining diverse things at once and making them assume shapes one finds amusing.

Book signings

Rowling’s have been compared to Rolling (Rowling?) Stones concerts for their hysteria and hype. At one in Boston in 1999, she signed no less than 1400 books in a single day. She must have wished for a magic signature wand that day to stave off a stinging wrist.

Borgin & Burkes

Shop on Knockturn Alley where one can buy items relating to the Dark Arts.

Branagh, Kenneth

The actor who plays the sensationally narcissistic Gilderoy Lockhart…with sensational narcissism.

Bryce, Frank

The caretaker of Riddle House.

Bubble-Head Charm

A spell that encloses the caster in a bubble of air. Cedric Diggory uses it to travel underwater without drowning in The Goblet of Fire.

Buckbeak

This is the hippogriff that Hagrid brings to his Care of Magical Creatures class. Harry approaches him gently winning his confidence and succeeding in flying him. Draco Malfoy, however, annoys him and Buckbeak slashes his arm. Malfoy exaggerates the injury and Buckbeak is sentenced to death. Hermione rescues him posthumously with her trusty Time-Turner, and Sirius Black rides away on him, thereby sparing both of their lives.

Budleigh Babberton

The village where Horace Slughorn lives as a recluse before Dumbledore prevails upon him to return to Hogwarts.

Burnings

It’s hard to believe that reactions to Rowling’s work would be so emotive that her books would actually be burned by those who felt they exercised unhealthy influences on impressionable children, but this is exactly what happened in New Mexico in 2001 when Jack Brock, a pastor of the Alamogordo Community Church, organised a communal burning of the texts, his congregation singing ‘Amazing Grace’ as the volumes went up in flames. Another burning took place in Pennsylvania around about the same time. Ironically, such incidents only increased Rowling’s cult status. (Banning of books often has the same effect.)