Harry Potter is dead – that is, the series is dead. It’s over. Finito. What started with a silly children’s book (Philosopher’s Stone) actually ended with a relatively gripping piece of literature. The Deathly Hallows is by no means a great work of art, but it provided much-needed entertainment on my trip to Taiwan. I finished the book on the flight home, and I would much have preferred to read more about the illustrious Harry Potter than continuing to delve through Gödel, Escher, Bach. I think that’s a good sign that the book was rather interesting.

Anyway, the ‘net is full of reviews and opinions and critique and whatnot, so I won’t even bother offering my own view. (Harry Potter is a dumb whiny bitch, but I loved the fairy-tale escapism of the books! *Cough*) Instead I’m going to ramble about some more esoteric areas.

I have a tendency to want to know more about the media I experience; I constantly surf IMDB to read trivia about films and directors and actors, and I always read about authors and all kinds of things on Wikipedia. So of course I recently searched for information on Harry Potter and Rowling. Did you know that Joanne Rowling was asked by the publisher to adopt a gender-neutral name in order to not scare away the little boyos who might want to read the Potter books? She decided to just use the initials J and K…but the interesting thing is that she has no middle name, so she used her grandmother’s name for the middle initial. I’m a sucker for useless trivia.

This is a slippery slope, and I soon ended up spending a lot of time reading about Harry Potter parodies, legal disputes, blood purity, and all kinds of other things. After a while I became bored with Wikipedia and looked up some other sites, such as MuggleNet.com. That’s where I found this list of anagrams in the books. Although…it wasn’t really a list of intended anagrams. It was a list of strange and weird coincidences. Here are some good examples:

• Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson is an anagram of Cue fine new film drama starring Potter lad
• Mike Newell’s ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ is an anagram of Enthralling film, yet we prefer to read the books
• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is an anagram of Halt! Interbred arch-foe lord not happy
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is an anagram of Treachery rests on Transported Hero
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an anagram of Portrayed Orphaned Hero for the Next Hit
• Tom Marvolo Riddle is an anagram of Immortal, Odd Lover
• Harry Potter is an anagram of Try Hero Part
• Ollivander is an anagram of An Evil Lord
• Dolores Jane Umbridge is an anagram of Dumbledore goes in jar
• Peter Pettigrew is an anagram of Tip: Pet We Regret

I suggest that you follow the link above and check out more of these – they’re quite amusing! I’m not very good at finding anagrams myself, but I have this urge to make a webpage with lots of anagrams for various book titles. The twist is that not a single one of them would be a correct anagram – it would just be close enough to fool most people. I can just imagine the observant readers who notice an error and immediately send me complaining e-mails…without noticing that every single anagram is in fact wrong. Maybe it’s my warped sense of humour, but I find the thought of that site and the huffy complainers absolutely and completely hilarious.

And as a final note, what’s this about ars manga? Is Harry Potter coming as an artistic manga? Well, who knows. But you should be able to figure out what I really mean from the last few paragraphs.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 9:57 am and is filed under Awesome Stuff, Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.