An A–Z of Harry Potter

A

Abandonment

Many people imagine that J K Rowling was an overnight success because of her sudden explosion onto the literary scene. In some ways she was. Unlike most fledgling authors, she didn’t wallpaper her room with rejection slips. But she did abandon two novels before hitting the jackpot with Harry Potter. What’s the betting they won’t turn up on some publisher’s desk in the years to come? If so, she may well submit them under a pseudonym. Not using a pseudonym, she might feel, would give her an unfair advantage over the opposition.

Acronyms

Hermione coins one of these: ‘SPEW’, standing for ‘Society, for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare’. Ron does likewise with ‘SPUG’, which stands for ‘Society for the Protection of Ugly Goblins’. A less graphic one is ‘OWL’, shorthand for ‘Ordinary Wizarding Level’, and there’s also ‘NEWTS’ for ‘Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests’.

Advance sales

In July 2000, the internet site Amazon had clocked up advance sales of The Goblet of Fire to the tune of 290 000 copies. Two years later the VHS and DVD versions of The Philosopher’s Stone were at the top of both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites as best-sellers three months before copies were actually available.

Age

Rowling turned 42 on 31 July 2007. She shares her birthday with—guess who—one Harry Potter.

Age line

This is the golden line Dumbledore drew around the Goblet of Fire to keep people under 17 years of age away from it. Fred and George Weasley took an Ageing Potion to try to circumvent it but they were still thrown back.

Alohamora

The spell Hermione uses to open the door in The Philosopher’s Stone so she and her friends can escape without being caught out of bounds by Argus Filch.

Alternative career

Rowling was a teacher before she became a full-time writer. On her last day in the classroom she informed her class she was leaving the job. One bright spark piped up, ‘Are you going to become a stripper, Miss?’ Instead of telling him off she thanked him for the compliment.

Amnesty International

Rowling worked in this human rights organisation for a time, but left when she found that she was doing too much paperwork and not enough campaigning for causes. She worked secretly at her writing during lunch-breaks, which made her something of an oddity in the eyes of her colleagues. Was she having an affair, they wondered? In a sense she was—with her muse.

Anapneo

This term is Greek for ‘breathe’ and is said to the victim of a spell to reduce the ill effects of a blocked airway.

Animagus

This is a wizard (‘magus’ is Latin for wizard) who can transform him or herself into an animal. Minerva McGonagall turns herself into a cat at the beginning of the first book. Sirius Black becomes a dog—Harry mistakes him for a Grim—in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Peter Pettigrew transforms himself into a rat (with one of his toes missing because he himself is missing a finger), and even Harry’s father, James Potter, became a stag at one point of his life, which led to his nickname of ‘Prongs’.

Animagi reflect one’s personality. Witness Rita Skeeter becoming a beetle. (Journalists are sometimes called deathwatch beetles because of their voyeuristic nature.) If Rowling could turn herself into an animal, she says she’d become an otter. (One might have expected her to say a rabbit, her favourite pet.) Hermione becomes one, reflecting this wish—Hermione being Rowling’s alter ego in many ways.

Aparecium

This substance performs the unique feat of making invisible writing readable. Hermione used it to try to read Tom Riddle’s diary in Chamber of Secrets but it didn’t work for her.

Apparate

Basically this means to appear. Its opposite, hardly surprisingly is ‘disapparate’.

Arachnophobia

A condition that Rowling—like Ron—suffers from. It means a fear of spiders.

Aragog

Giant spider-like creature with the gift of speech. It dies in The Half-Blood Prince.

Arantes, Jorge

Portuguese television journalist who married Rowling in 1992 when she’d gone to that country to teach. The marriage, however, lasted only little more than a year. In a violent outburst one night, he threw her out of their home after she told him she didn’t love him any more. She stood on the street lost and forlorn, her whole world having crumbled…and her daughter Jessica unreachable inside with her fiery spouse. The police were called, a row ensued and Arantes finally parted from the little girl.

Rowling took Jessica back to Edinburgh, but Arantes followed her there. A period of intense friction followed. She finally obtained a restraining order against him and they formally divorced soon afterwards. He later wrote a kiss-and-tell article about her. Or perhaps that should be a write-and-tell one, because in it he claimed he had played a significant part in ‘midwifing’ Harry Potter. Rowling discounts this claim as arrant nonsense.

In one of the Potter books Rowling makes a wry reference to her wedding date, 16 October, by also making this the date Professor Sibyll Trelawney tells Lavender Brown a dreadful event will befall her. Hell hath no fury. It’s also significant that Rowling wore black on her wedding day. Had she a Potter-like premonition that things would go wrong?

Arithmancy

Hermione’s favourite subject, this is the process of predicting the future through numbers. It’s also called numerology. It comes from two Greek words: ‘arithmo’ meaning number and ‘mancy’ meaning prophecy.

Arresto Momentum

This is the spell Dumbledore used to prevent Harry from falling to his death on the Quidditch pitch in The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Ascendio

Harry used this spell to rise up over the lake water in Goblet of Fire.

Aubrey, Bertram

A Hogwarts student from the 1970s. Harry’s father once received detention for causing his head to double in size.

Auction

The first time Rowling heard her agent Christopher Little speaking to her about an auction she thought—furniture. Only later did it dawn on her that he was referring to a megabucks bidding war for her book. The rollercoaster ride had begun…

Austen, Jane

Rowling surprisingly lists this author as one of her main inspirations. She liked Pride and Prejudice as a teenager but her favourite Austen novel is Emma, which she claims to have read a whopping 20 times. From Austen’s Mansfield Park she got the name of Argus Filch’s cat, Mrs Norris.

Autobiography

Rowling hasn’t written this yet, but has spoken often about her life. The character who most resembles her in her books, she says, is Hermione. She admits she seemed to be something of a swot at school. (She read Vanity Fair at the tender age of 14!) Like Hermione, Rowling says she was insecure behind the perceived swot image. (However, she hasn’t been known to cast spells with the same success as Ms Granger).

‘I was neither as bright nor as annoying as Hermione,’ she said in an interview once, adding that if she was she would have deserved ‘drowning at birth’. She was, of course, only joking here. As the series goes on, Hermione becomes much less irksome when she realises there are more important things in life than reading and being first at exams—like friendship, for instance. (Rowling says she doesn’t believe in magic either, except for the magic of love.)

Avada Kedavra

This is the curse that Voldemort used to kill Harry’s parents (and almost Harry). It’s Aramaic for ‘abracadabra’, which literally means ‘Let the thing be destroyed’. (In its original usage it was a plea for a cure rather than a curse, the ‘thing’ being an illness.) Harry is the only person ever to have survived it, both at his birth and during a duelling bout with Voldemort wherein they both have similar wands, which detracts from their potential.

Azkaban

The prison from which Sirius Black escapes after turning himself into a dog. It sounds somewhat similar to Alcatraz, which was also high security and located on an island.