ESSAY

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Published 1997

I ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born on July 31, 1965, in Gloucestershire, England, Joanne Kathleen Rowling grew up in rural communities in the southwestern part of that country. Her parents, Peter and Anne Rowling, an engineer and laboratory technician respectively, bought books such as The Wind in the Willows to read to their two daughters. Rowling’s childhood experiences shaped her future literary creations. She explored the English countryside, visiting castles and historical sites which inspired her imagination. Although she disliked science and mathematics courses, Rowling excelled in literature classes. She penned funny, fantastical tales to amuse her sister Diana and friends, especially the Potter siblings whose name she later appropriated for her wizardry novels.

As a teenager, Rowling dreamed of becoming a published author whose books were sold in stores. She kept her ambitions a secret, though, because she feared criticism and discouragement from people who might declare that her writing was weak. Rowling gradually became more self-confident and was named Head Girl during her final year at school. Studying languages at Exeter University in order to be employable as a bilingual secretary, Rowling graduated with a degree in French and Classics. This scholarly knowledge aided her later clever construction of characters in the Harry Potter books. She also earned college credits while serving as an auxiliary teacher in Paris.

Rowling researched human rights issues for Amnesty International, then relocated to Manchester for other office positions. She worked for a company that manufactured surveillance equipment. The self-professed disorganized Rowling loathed her secretarial duties, often writing instead of working. She wrote fiction for adult readers but did not submit it for publication. She also often visited her ailing mother, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a few years earlier. During one of these train trips, Rowling had an epiphany about an orphaned boy wizard named Harry Potter and began inventing characters and settings. After her mother’s death in 1990, Rowling decided to teach English as a second language in Oporto, Portugal.

She outlined seven books to chronicle Harry’s adventures at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft and his battle against evil forces. Each book would feature one year of Harry’s schooling as he aged from eleven years old to seventeen. During the search for his identity as he matured, Harry would avenge his parents’ murder, discover his family’s heritage, and secure sanctuaries where good wizards and witches could thrive. Rowling’s careful planning enabled her to place subtle clues that would later prove crucial to characterization and plot development.

Writing in the mornings and teaching in the afternoon and at night, Rowling met and married journalist Jorge Arantes. Their daughter Jessica was born in August 1993. Several months later, Rowling divorced Arantes and moved with Jessica to Edinburgh, Scotland, where her sister Diana lived. Diana urged Rowling to finish the first Harry Potter novel. The media has emphasized that Rowling was on public assistance during this time, and Rowling clarifies that she was initially unable to find work that paid a sufficient salary for her to afford child care. Later, she began teaching in a local school.

Writing for her own entertainment and sense of accomplishment, Rowling did not intend to write a children’s book. Agent Christopher Little recognized Rowling’s talent and began submitting the book to publishers. Bloomsbury Press bought Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1996. The next year, Scholastic Inc. purchased rights to publish the book in the United States, changing the title’s wording to attract American readers. Rowling received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to complete her second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. She sold film and merchandising rights to Warner Brothers.

Rowling has received praise from reviewers and readers, winning numerous awards, including the Smarties Prize for her first three books, and topping the bestseller lists. She was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2000 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Rowling has become a celebrity, appearing as a featured reader at such events as the White House Easter egg roll. The Harry Potter books are a catalyst for a cultural phenomenon. Millions of copies in more than thirty languages have been sold in over one hundred countries. Readers of all ages apprehensively wait for new books then voraciously read them. The dark themes explored in the series have caused some conservative groups to attempt to ban the books from classrooms. Rowling responds to such attacks by stating that she does not believe in witchcraft and thinks children deserve to know the realities of evil.

II OVERVIEW

The first of the “Harry Potter” books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone introduces readers to Harry Potter on the cusp of his eleventh birthday. Born to a well-respected and much-loved witch and wizard, Harry Potter was orphaned as a baby and left to be taken care of by his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon Dursley, along with their son Dudley.

Harry bears the scars of his parents’ fate and his orphaned status both literally and figuratively. The evil wizard Voldemort (“He Who Shall Not Be Named”) killed Harry’s parents but could not vanquish their son. As a result of the battle, Harry wears a curious, lightning-shaped scar on his forehead—a scar that burns when Harry is in danger or when he wakes up from a repeating nightmare of infant memory. Nevertheless, being the son of a successful magic couple and defeating an evil wizard as a one-year-old babe is not without benefits. Harry Potter is renowned in the magic world, a child hero. But he is a child hero unaware. In their wisdom, Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall leave Harry on the Durlsey’s doorstep. The Dursleys are staunch and proud Muggles, non-magic people who live in a flat, gray, and oppressively over-systematized and inconvenient world—the world of present-day Great Britain.

Harry is perceived as a burden and potential embarrassment to the Dursleys. He is told that his parents were killed in a car accident, never shown any photographs of them, and kept ignorant of the magic world and his own possible place in it. Harry Potter cannot explain how he was able to jump on top of the school building when being chased by bullies, nor how he dissolved the glass front of a snake’s habitat and conversed with the boa constrictor during Dudley Dursley’s birthday outing to the zoo. Indeed, these are the very things that leave him friendless, isolated, and very unheroic in his own (and everyone else’s) eyes.

The first ten years of Harry’s life bear a resemblance to Wart’s, the young King Arthur’s, childhood as depicted in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Where White’s long-bearded Merlin gives the Wart in fosterage, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Rowling’s Professor Dumbledore farms Harry out to distant relatives. Where White’s young Arthur is treated as a second-class son compared to the up-and-coming Sir Kay, Rowling’s child hero is abused and maligned by his aunt and uncle and their spoiled, ridiculous son Dudley. Where White’s protagonist is unwittingly trained for kingship by Merlin before he stumbles across the sword in the stone and his heroic self, Rowling’s title character is eventually relieved of his unhappy Muggle upbringing by Professor Dumbledore’s letter of acceptance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Noble parentage and inherent heroism are revealed and Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone takes off into a description of the non-Muggle world, the wonderful landscape and lifestyle of Hogwarts school, and the first-year student adventures of Harry and his new friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Together, they embark on a quest for the Sorcerer’s Stone, a magical stone that, as they discover, is hidden deep within Hogwarts.

III SETTING

In some ways, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is a traditional English boarding school located in the fairy-green countryside well beyond London. The meddlesome caretaker, Mr. Filch, and his cat, Mrs. Norris, carefully monitor the building, and the grounds are well kept by the beloved Keeper of Keys and Grounds (and Hogwarts drop-out) Rubeus Hagrid. During the long-standing tradition of the Sorting Ceremony, first-year Hogwarts students are separated into four houses (Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin), each with their own proud history, alumni, and secret traditions. The faculty are respected scholars and authority figures removed from the emotional and interpersonal experiences of their students. The curriculum is carefully structured and deliberately traditional, and residents take classes by year and with students from other houses. Points are given and taken away for academic achievement, behavior and deportation, and athletic competition—all in an effort to win the much-coveted house cup at the end-of-year feast.

And yet, Hogwarts is a world all its own, a non-Muggle world. Students arrive by a train taken from platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross station. During the journey they snack on candies—Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans (including “spinach and liver and tripe”), Cauldron Cakes, Licorice Wands, and Pumpkin Pasties—which they have bought with Sickles and Knuts (“[s]eventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle”). They amuse themselves by trading cards of famous witches and wizards (Professor Dumbledore among them) from packages of Chocolate Frogs. The campus is located inside a moat and the building is a castle. The house dormitories are in the four round towers located at the corners of the building and accessed by secret passwords that open portrait holes. The Sorting Ceremony stars a Sorting Cap that reads the new students’ minds before assigning them to the appropriate house. Not only do the portraits have a frustrating tendency to visit other paintings in the castle, thereby foiling the adventures of many an erring student, Mr. Filch and Mrs. Norris are not the only “caretakers” to avoid. Peeves the poltergeist will insist on reporting students out of bed after hours, and the other ghosts (Nearly Headless Nick and the Bloody Baron among them) have loyalties to certain houses. The faculty members also have their allegiances—as well as curious (possibly threatening) involvements with the adult, magic world. Course work is difficult and requires much study, whether dry and boring like History of Magic with Professor Binns, “complex and dangerous” like Transfiguration with Professor McGonagall, or disappointingly uninformative like Defense Against the Dark Arts with Professor Quirrell. The sport of choice is Quidditch, a challenging game “that’s sort of like basketball on broomsticks with six hoops.”

The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is set in a comfortingly traditional and delightfully off-beat way—much like the apprentice magic world of the Hogwarts students as compared to the adult magic world for which they are preparing, or like the whole of the magic world as compared to the Muggle world. Accepted Hogwarts students walk through a wall in order to reach platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross station. Tapping a brick behind the Leaky Cauldron pub three times with your magic wand will open it to Diagon Alley, the shopping center of the magic world, home to Eeylops Owl Emporium, Ollivanders wand shop, and Gringotts, the wizard’s bank run by goblins. Diagon Alley is also the only place in London where a prospective student can get everything he or she needs, from the uniform (such as “[o]ne pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)”) to course books (like “Magical Drafts and Potions by Arsenius Jigger”) and other equipment (“1 cauldron (pewter, standard size 2)”). The Ministry of Magic works to ensure that Muggles remain ignorant of the actuality of the magic world because “‘everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems ... we’re best left alone’.” And the commonplace systems of the Muggle world amaze and confound witches and wizards. For example,

[p]assersby stared a lot ... as they walked through the little town to the station. Harry couldn’t blame them ... he kept pointing at perfectly ordinary things like parking meters and saying loudly, “See that Harry? Things these Muggles dream up, eh?”.

The layering of experiences and perspectives in Rowling’s text work to keep the reader both grounded and aware. As such, the reader enjoys a setting that has been wonderfully and completely imagined, described, and realized by Rowling in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERS

Like the setting of the novel, Rowling’s themes and characters are both traditional and off-beat. British to the core, the themes and characters of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone contain a delightful blend of classic fantasy and Victorian sentiment minus the tendency towards what a contemporary audience might consider saccharine. Ideally—and at their best—both classic British fantasy and Victorian literature enjoy the great themes of love and death, of good and evil. This is true of Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, wherein the title character, our noble hero, having been orphaned and overshadowed by a cruel and ignorant world, continues to battle issues of class and conscience even after he is delivered to a better, more accepting and acceptable, place.

It is this better place, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the magic world more generally, that inspires and insists Harry learn from his orphaned status—that he grow into his own great person rather than be beaten down for being different and for having fewer “normal” advantages. Understandably preoccupied as the orphan is with death, Harry’s hero’s adventure suitably involves the quest to find, to recover, and to restore the Sorcerer’s Stone by which the Elixir of Life can be manufactured and immortality achieved. It is a dangerous tool in the wrong hands, and Harry risks his own life in order to ensure the quality of the lives of others.

In the end, Harry Potter accepts and promotes what Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts and co-creator of the Sorcerer’s Stone, so eloquently explains: “to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” With this acceptance comes additional emotional support. Harry’s parents are dead, yes, but this is more of a shift in fate than it is an irreparable loss. In her characteristic layering style, Rowling points out that not only have Harry’s parents left the gift of Harry behind, but they have left Harry with a gift. At the novel’s end, when Harry asks Professor Dumbledore why Quirrell, the evil wizard Voldemort’s accomplice, could not touch him, Dumbledore replies:

Your mother died to save you. If there’s one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign ... to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.

Thus Harry is not only scarred literally and figuratively by his orphaned status, he is also, alternatively, positively marked by it. And this is something that we hope the young adult audience, the intended audience for Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, might learn to recognize as a theme in the real magic of their own lives.

It is the students of Hogwarts, the fictional contemporaries and peers of the intended audience, who demonstrate that these great themes—love and death, good and evil—are part and parcel of every life lived. Whether that student be the quintessential bully, as is Draco Malfoy (and his henchmen Crabbe and Goyle), or the overweight, clumsy, and somewhat untalented but nevertheless good-hearted Neville Longbottom, each individual’s psyche and personality is shaped by how they perceive and respond to the great themes in their own lives. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Rowling’s characters are complex, dimensional, and interesting, because they perceive and respond to the signature notes of these themes in their own lives.

Indeed, the bully Draco Malfoy suffers from feelings of inferiority due, in part, to the success, expectations, and snobbery of his father. Neville Longbottom, raised by his grandmother and unpopular for the resulting lack of style this upbringing has caused, carries his own, similar yet distinct, sense of illegitimacy. Ron Weasley is one of seven children (including five boys ahead of him), all of whom have met with great success while studying at Hogwarts—be it as head boy, Quidditch captain, house prefect, or wildly popular pranksters. Hermione Granger negotiates the stress of being a Type-A overachiever from a Muggle family.

The adults of the magic world, too, are not above the struggle to commandeer their lives and worlds—a facet of Rowling’s fiction that may account for the literary success of the Harry Potter books in the real, adult world. Professor Snape struggles with the guilt and frustration of not being able to repay his arch-rival, Harry’s (now dead) father, for saving his life. Rubeus Hagrid has been shamed by being expelled from Hogwarts, by having had his wand broken in half and forbidden to use magic thereby leaving him an obvious misfit in the Muggle world as well as one marginalized within the non-Muggle world. Even the wise Professor Dumbledore, a near-perfect man and wizard, must come to terms with the foibles and disappointments that color the human experience. When asked what he sees in the Mirror of Erised—a bewitched mirror that not only bears the inscription, “Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi” (I show not your face but your heart’s desire), but also reveals Harry’s family to him and shows Ron Weasley himself as head boy holding the Quidditch cup—Professor Dumbledore replies: “I? I see myself holding a pair of thick, woolen socks.... One can never have enough socks.... Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.” However tongue-in-cheek it may be, Professor Dumbledore’s remark nevertheless speaks a greater truth: in recognizing our great ability to want what we do not have, we just might stumble across an appreciation for what we have been given. It is, ultimately, a restatement of what our young protagonist has learned from the loss of his parents and one that benefits both Rowling’s characters and audience—young or old.

V LITERARY QUALITIES

Whether because they offer a natural metaphor for coming-of-age audiences transitioning into the adult world, or because—either in cause or effect—they are generally considered most appropriate for the developmental phases and developing psyche of the young adult, the canonized classics of British fantasy traditionally feature young adult protagonists. “The Sword in the Stone,” Book One of T. H. White’s aforementioned The Once and Future King (1958), searches back through history, legend, and the author’s own boyhood, to expand the Arthurian legend by contributing the story of Arthur’s young adulthood. Appropriately, White, a teacher of young adults, expands Arthurian legend by describing what the young Wart learned in his lessons with Merlin in order to explain the genius of Wart’s later kingship.

But T. H. White is simply one of the more recent authors to artfully and respectfully redefine the traditional parameters of the fantasy genre. He follows such great masters as Lewis Carroll and C. S. Lewis and such beloved characters as Alice Liddell and Lucy Prevensie. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1866) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), Carroll describes a series of experiences that mature Alice both emotionally and intellectually in order to prepare her for life as a logical, reasoning, and kind-hearted woman. In the seven books that make up C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), Lucy and the Pevensie children (as well as Polly Plumber, Digory Kirke, Eustace Scrubb, and Jill Pole) accomplish a series of moral tasks that underscore Lewis’s and the novels’ Christian sentiment and earn the characters a place in heaven.

In accordance with, and in honor of, this proud literary history, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone begins the story of Harry Potter, age eleven, apprentice wizard and self-doubting hero—a novel that, and a protagonist who, has been inspired by the motifs of classic British fantasy. Clearly, Rowling aspires to further define, and to excel within, the genre of fantasy. In her general examination of the young hero’s mentor and his acquisition of wisdom, Rowling’s Harry Potter resembles White’s young Arthur. Though not privately tutored by Hogwarts headmaster Professor Dumbledore, Harry nevertheless is trained within his school and according to his pedagogic system. And it is at crucial times in the narrative of his training that Harry is given the opportunity to consult with Dumbledore: when he develops a dangerous preoccupation with the Mirror of Erised, when he must negotiate the prudent use of the invisibility cloak, and after he has successfully (and for the second time) defeated “He Who Shall Not Be Named.” Additionally, Dumbledore resembles Merlin both personally and physically; he is an avid lover of books and wisdom who wears flowing robes and a long, white beard. This resemblance suggests not only how much White’s master wizard has influenced—and continues to influence—audience expectation, but how that influence has determined Rowling’s use of classic fantasy motifs.

Rowling also credits Lewis Carroll and C. S. Lewis through her description, and use, of a reflective device and a train ride to achieve passage into a fantastic other-world. In a manner that suggests a parallel to the rites of passage of young adulthood, Harry Potter boards a train at platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross station. Harry’s trip will bring him to the wondrously magical and separate (though whimsically and pointedly parallel) world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After many railway trips, many happy adventures, and the conclusive suggestion that they might be outgrowing such adventures, the Pevensie children of Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia access the kingdom of heaven when they are killed in a train wreck. In Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice speeds through the countryside of her own parallel world, the reversed world of “nonsense” on the other side of a mirror, while she is engaged in a giant game of chess that she must win in order to return transformed and victorious to the “real,” that is adult, world. Harry passes the preparatory “test” of the Mirror of Erised (with a great deal of help and guidance from Professor Dumbledore), gaining the strength and confidence necessary to help him (along with Ron Weasley) face the challenge of the giant chess game towards the end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Alice’s success in the chess game, involving the maturity required to eschew the paradoxes (bureaucracy) of the Red Queen and her supporters (political, governmental systems), informs Rowling’s description of Harry’s and Ron’s actions during the giant Chess game, as well as our perceptions of them. Chess, a game of logic requiring patience and experience, tests and proves both the capabilities of reason and fantasy, and Harry and his friends must further establish themselves as heroes by exercising both of these capabilities—much in the way the audience does in the act of reading, in the act of entering a reflective art form.

Thus, as a fellow reader and creating author, in book one of the “Harry Potter” series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Rowling gives due credit to the precedents of her literary forebears and extends a hand to those writers who may hope to follow. And the readers and keepers of the tradition of classic, British fantasy, would do well to acknowledge agreement in Rowling’s debt as well as the reader’s debt to Rowling.

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITY

In a television interview aired in July of 2000—just prior to the release of the much-anticipated fourth Harry Potter book—eminent children’s and young adult literature critic and scholar Jack Zipes described Rowling’s fiction as formulaic and sexist. Because Zipes was not given the chance to fully support his thesis within the format of the televised sound bite, any response to his thesis must be based, in part, on conjecture. Nevertheless, that Rowling’s Harry Potter books should be described as formulaic is problematic. The “Harry Potter” books are, after all, a series, and, at least thus far, the action takes place during the academic year. Aside from some scattered highlights of Harry’s summer holidays, the plot of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone follows the unchanging rhythm of a highly structured educational calendar. While an academic year provides a useful template by which Rowling may structure her fiction, the description of such a template as formulaic seems unfair and a refusal to acknowledge just how reliant a young adult audience is on the academic calendar—or how useful it is to the plot structure of British fantasy. Indeed, Lewis Carroll’s Alice has her adventures while she is not engaged with her studies in both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and throughout C. S. Lewis’s The Narnia Chronicles, his young protagonists travel to and from Narnia while on vacation from school.

In terms of Rowling’s potential sexism, it may be likewise argued that, as she follows and departs from a traditional academic structure in her novels, so too does Rowling follow and depart from traditional gender roles. Mrs. Dursley characterizes the standard housewife in the opening pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, while Mr. Dursley presents us with a mock-image of the bowler-capped British businessman. But it should be noted that Mrs. and Mr. Dursley are not beloved characters (certainly not characters after whom young readers would be inclined to model themselves), and that other characters do not always line up according to standard expectations of gender: Professor McGonagall is a witch and a teacher to be respected and admired, Madame Hooch coaches the (co-ed) Quidditch team, Hermione Granger is as capable of getting herself out (or in) trouble as Ron Weasley or Harry himself; Professor Dumbledore is a homebody, Professor Quirrell is a weak and fearful wizard, and Hagrid has undeniably strong mothering instincts. Ultimately, that some of Rowling’s characters inhabit traditional gender roles while others do not may be the best, and most elegant, argument against the enforcement of those roles.

And yet, the defense of Rowling’s fiction as formulaic or sexist does raise some interesting considerations regarding social concerns in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Because the novel follows the British school year, there are few—if any—references to non-Christian faiths and practices. Thus, the witches and wizards at Hogwarts celebrate Christmas—even despite their supposedly pagan history. Harry is able to afford Hogwarts because of the large inheritance left to him by his parents, a detail that can serve to example a limited representation of economic stratification. Due to his last name and his red hair, we might assume that Ron Weasley is of Irish descent; such an assumption would then lead us to argue that the depiction Ron’s family, poor and well-populated, reveals a prejudice against Irish Catholics in Rowling, Great Britain, or both. Similarly, while several referenced characters represent other races and ethnicities (Lee Jordan, for example, is black), the main protagonists of the novel, the characters in whom readers are most invested, are white.

Considering the anxiety that contemporary audiences and critics have regarding the fair and equal representation of peoples in literature—and particularly in literature for children and young adults—these observations are both legitimate and unavoidable. But, too, readers must consider the transcendent possibilities of fantasy novels. If one of the benefits of fantasy is to remove the reader from an oppressive social reality, and thereby to offer a lens through which he or she might critique and resolve social injustices, critics cannot expect fantasy to perform the same instructional modeling as contemporary realism. This is not an excuse or a justification, and it is not because fantasy does not mirror and model life as does all literature (and all art). It is because, as a genre, fantasy behaves according to its own history, tradition, and purpose. Though it is appropriate to expect contemporary fantasy to fairly and accurately represent social diversity, a more appropriate concern for fantasy may be how well it models the readers’ ability to see themselves within their social system and how convincingly it argues for their deserved equality. That Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does, indeed, reflect and address social diversity, and that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone inspires both young and old readers to see their worlds in new and different ways (ways that may result in social activism and change), offers a strong argument for our acknowledgment of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as fantastic literature worthy of a place in the canon.

VII TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone introduces readers to all sorts of interesting magical objects (the Nimbus 2000, the remembrall, magic wands, mail-delivering owls, live chess sets, the invisibility cloak ... not to mention the sorcerer’s stone). If you could have and use any one of these objects, which object would it be and why? Can you tell a real story about something that happened to you once when that object might have come in handy? How might the story have gone differently if you had had that object?
   
   
2. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, readers find out many interesting things about the magic world, and many magic characters think some pretty funny things about Muggles. What if, instead of you visiting them at Hogwarts when you read a Harry Potter book, they were to visit you at school or read about you in a book? What would they see? What classes, teachers, traditions, or sporting events might they find curious? Why?
   
   
3. If you were assigned to one of the houses (Griffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin) which one would it be? What about your next door neighbor, your teacher, or the principal? What about some of the characters in your favorite television shows? Why?
   
   
4. In the “Harry Potter” books, Harry has a scar on his forehead—and a story to go with it. What, if any, scars do you have and what is/are the stories behind them? If, like Harry, you had special powers because of the scar (and based on the story), what would they be?
   
   VIII IDEAS FOR REPORTS AND PAPERS
   
   
   1. The Harry Potter books are set in England, but the author, J. K. Rowling, lives in Scotland. What has the relationship between England and Scotland been throughout history?
      
      
   2. Before shopping at the stores on Diagon Alley, Harry and Hagrid take a short walk through London. Research the city of London and report on what Harry and Hagrid might have seen on their trip. Consider such tings as the demographic population of the city, the ethnic populations, principal businesses, historical sites, and architecture.
      
      
   3. Research the London Underground and the British railway system (especially the King’s Cross railway station). Which came first, the Underground or the railway? What is the connection between the Underground and the railway? What routes do they follow? Can you find any maps and timetables using the Internet?
      
      
   4. J. K. Rowling had been a school teacher and was a single mother when she started writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in a neighborhood coffee house. Research the author in order to find out more about her. What kind of insights has she given in interviews? Are there any parallels between the author’s life and her text?
      
      
   5. To date, there are three more “Harry Potter” books: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Read one (or more) of the other “Harry Potter” books and compare it/them to the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
      
      
   6. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry learns many interesting facts and unusual stories about the game of Quidditch and its history. What sort of interesting facts and unusual stories might you find when learning about one of your favorite sports? What are the similarities and differences between Quidditch and the sport that you researched?
      
      
   7. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Hagrid is surprised by such Muggle inventions as the parking meter. Who invented the parking meter and why? What other Muggle inventions might readers take for granted?
      
      
   8. Research the game of chess in order to explain (and to demonstrate to your class) the game played towards the end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Does Ron play well? How might the game have been played differently? Were there better moves that could have been made?
      
      
   9. Research the logic puzzle that Hermione solves with the bottled potions in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. What kind of logic puzzle is it? Does it have a name? What other kinds of logic puzzles are there? What are their different purposes?
      
      Contributed by: Evelyn M. Perry, Framingham State College
      
      Source: Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults. Copyright by Gale Group, Inc.
      
      Reprinted by permission.
      
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