An A–Z of Harry Potter

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.

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’.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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