Harry Potter isn’t a character in The Tales of Beedle the Bard, but that familiar name, with its lightning-bolt “P,” takes pride of place atop the book’s cover.
As it should. J.K. Rowling’s latest addition to the Potter canon, published Thursday, doesn’t feature new adventures at Hogwarts, but it expands the magical universe she created in her seven enormously popular novels in intriguing new ways.
Potter fans will of course have heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. The book, a collection of five fairy tales for wizarding children, played a crucial role in the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
In that book, a very old copy of Tales was bequeathed by Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore to Hermione Granger, and, ever the girl to do her homework, she spent much of the novel puzzling out the significance of one fable, The Tale of the Three Brothers research that helped Harry defeat the evil Lord Voldemort.
The wizard Beedle purportedly wrote the five stories down in the 15th century, but don’t fear any struggle with their language in this book, a modern translation “from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger,” as the title page advises.
Once again, Rowling demonstrates her mastery of folklore and how it works. Where the novels are expansive, packed with characters and plot lines and all the paraphernalia of an alternate universe, the stories are spare and focused, none as long as 20 pages.
There are some differences between wizarding fables and the Muggle kind (Muggles being nonmagical people), as Rowling points out in her introduction.
For example, “Beedle’s witches are much more active in seeking their fortunes than our fairy-tale heroines ... witches who take their fates into their own hands, rather than taking a prolonged nap or waiting for someone to return a lost shoe.”
But, like all genuine folk tales not the sanitized, safe, boring modern versions these stories bristle with everything from bodily fluids (The Wizard and the Hopping Pot) to bloody murder (The Warlock’s Hairy Heart).
And like all fables, they have moral points to make, and their recurring themes are universal: humanity’s struggles with prejudice, power and death. Hating others for their race, creed, whom they choose to marry inevitably turns and poisons those who hate; power always puts those who crave it in peril; death, no matter how strong one’s magical powers, is final.
Tales didn’t exist outside the pages of Hallows until Rowling created seven hand-written, illustrated copies of it last year. Richly bound and garnished with jewels, six of them became gifts to her friends.
The seventh copy was auctioned to benefit the Children’s High Level Group, a charity for kids that Rowling co-founded (www.chlg.org/). Amazon paid a cool US$4 million for that copy, and it became clear the little book had a mission.
So now it’s in bookstores, in a first US printing of 3.5 million copies (a modest number for a Rowling book).
There are no real jewels on its cover, but the stories and Professor Dumbledore’s commentaries on them are little gems.
The commentaries, the introduction tells us, were a surprising discovery “among the many papers that Dumbledore left in his will to the Hogwarts Archives.”
It’s a pleasure to hear the old wizard’s voice again. He writes of The Wizard and the Hopping Pot, “A simple and heartwarming fable, one might think in which case, one would reveal oneself to be an innocent nincompoop.”
He reminisces about an ill-fated dramatic production of The Fountain of Fair Fortune, comments witheringly on those who rewrite or censor fairy tales to “protect” children and ruminates on the nature of love.
He is also shockingly disingenuous in his commentary on The Tale of the Three Brothers, which played that critical role in Hallows a discrepancy that will no doubt have dedicated Potterites racing to re-read the books, heat up the message boards and solve a new mystery.
Sept. 28 to Oct. 4 Opening in 1971, Singapore’s Wisma Theatre (海燕歌劇院) was entirely modeled after Taiwanese live variety shows, combining singing, dancing and drama. Even its performers were recruited from Taiwan. The formula was an instant hit, selling out on the third night with the crowd fighting outside for tickets. Among its key figures was 31-year-old Chi Li-nan (紀利男), an acclaimed saxophonist and band leader who had entered Taiwan’s live entertainment scene at age 19 with zero musical training. Chi wasn’t even supposed to be there. He had accompanied his girlfriend, pop singer Shang Kuan Ping (上官萍), to negotiations with Wisma’s agent.
The tussle between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) allies and fellow travelers, and the pro-Taiwan side in politics is in part a struggle over defining the nation’s agency in international spaces. What kind of agency does Taiwan have? The United Daily News (UDN) recently reported that former National Security Council secretary-general and longtime KMT stalwart Su Chi (蘇起), popularizer of the fake “1992 consensus,” contended that the US was both unable and unwilling to protect Taiwan. He also asserted that the threat from the PRC was rising and that the future depended on the
The Changhua County commissioner race is the most exciting and dramatic in this election cycle, with surprises within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) popping up every week or two. Most recently, County Commissioner Wang Huei-mei (王惠美), who is about to term limit out, alleges that KMT Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) pushed for unknown entity Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) to be the party’s candidate for the position far earlier than was previously known. If true, Wang’s accusations raise a lot of questions about Cheng and the party leadership’s motives. Many local factions and power brokers in Changhua are in open revolt against
Serving as interpreter during Culture Minister Li Yuan’s (李遠) visit to Britain offered an unusual view of cultural diplomacy — not as ceremony, but as a series of conversations capable of becoming lasting relationships. During four intensive days, from Sept. 6 to Sept. 9, the delegation moved between museums, arts centers, universities and literary organizations. The program ranged from urban planning and museum access to translation, illustration and contemporary dance. Yet one question connected these encounters: How can an initial meeting become a relationship that lasts? Li described himself as “greedy” about the possibilities. The word was characteristically humorous, but the ambition
RSS