2 of 7
What could one say in defense of these books, so unliterary, so unsophisticated in their morality and style, so bourgeois, so heteronormative? Perhaps only this: that J. K. Rowling has produced, in the vast, seven-book, thirty-five-hundred-page arc of Harry's story, the greatest penny dreadful ever written.
Chesterton is among the ablest defenders not just of penny dreadfuls but also of the fantastic imagination more generally: "The things I believed most [in childhood]," he wrote a few years after defending the boys' stories, "the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic." But of course such books can also defend themselves. As George Orwell once noted, poems and stories defend themselves best of all simply by surviving; but it is also the case that works of fantasy can openly consider and debate their own terms, their own way of truthtelling. Think of how Sam Gamgee, in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, pauses at times to ask what sort of story he and Frodo are in, and how it might later be narrated. Or that moment early in the book when Boromir expresses skepticism about the information he has received from Gandalf and others: "But what I have heard seems to me for the most part old wives' tales, such as we tell to our children"—to which Celeborn replies, "Do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."
There are moments like this in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. About a quarter of the way into the story we discover that Albus Dumbledore, the old headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry whose murder was the shocking culmination of the sixth book, has made provisions in his will for Harry and his two best friends. To Harry he gives the Golden Snitch from the first game of Quidditch Harry ever played; Ron gets a little device that puts out lights, called a Deluminator. These gifts are more than they seem to be, of course, but it's Hermione's gift that's particularly intriguing. Not surprisingly, since Hermione is an obsessive reader and haunter of libraries, her gift is a book; but it's not a guide to advanced magic, or the kind of historical or scholarly study that she delights in. Rather, it's a collection of children's stories, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, the wizarding world's equivalent of Aesop's Fables or the Mother Goose tales.
This is strange, and neither Hermione nor her friends know what to make of it; had Dumbledore lacked the foresight to give her a copy in the original ancient runic script—which she must use her scholarly expertise to read and translate—Hermione might have set the book aside altogether. And somewhat later on, when Harry begins to think that one of Beedle's stories, "The Tale of the Three Brothers," might be essential to the quest they are pursuing, Hermione is incredulous. Perhaps she has reason to be incredulous, given that the only person they know who takes "The Tale of the Three Brothers" seriously—who believes it to be historically founded—is one Xenophilius Lovegood, best known in these books for his obsessive pursuit of a purely imaginary beast called the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.
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