The series of seven bestselling books and eight blockbuster films became a pop culture staple throughout the world.Īs I got older, I found myself returning to Harry Potter during times of comfort and hardship. I wanted to live among the characters, who even at the height of their angst embarked on daring adventures while attending the coolest boarding school imaginable. I wanted to taste a chocolate frog, a barf-flavored Bertie Bott’s bean and feel the warmth of a freshly brewed Butterbeer. The adventures were grandiose and epic, a battle of good versus evil wickedly waged with wands and incantations.
The world of Harry Potter seemed vast and alluring, that of a young mistreated boy becoming the chosen one in a world full of magic and magical creatures. Seuss and wore down my copy of “Felix Travels Back In Time,” and I vividly recall us reading through the entire Harry Potter series one chapter at a time. I can’t remember every book we read, though we definitely worked through Dr. Long before I was able to read on my own, my father would sit in a white rocking chair and, with my chubby little body on his lap, read to me. Fully shaped by her mother’s death and own mental health struggles, Rowling finished her manuscript and two years later saw “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” become a smash hit.
At the same time, she put pencil to paper and began to sketch out the story of a young wizard boy, which had miraculously come to her, fully-formed, while on a train. A school teacher who thought herself a failure, Rowling left with her child and scouted for somewhere safe, somewhere she could truly get more out of the life she desired for herself. Joanne (Jo) Rowling dreamed of escaping her troubled marriage. Something about the allure of a different world enthralled me magical, fantastical or realistic, I wanted the adventure that novels promised to take me on.
And yeah, "Slytherin" sounds a bit like "slither in" or "sly therein." Almost all of the spells in the Wizarding World play around with Latin, and pretty much every name has some hidden significance (except for maybe Lavender Brown?).I grew up in a house in the middle of the woods, surrounded by deer and trees and friendly small-town neighbors, but I spent a lot of my childhood immersed in books instead. Fluffy looks an awful lot like Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the Ancient Greek underworld. I'm not going to bother with a basics, because you probably know them already: "Minerva" was the Roman goddess of wisdom. Here are twenty brilliant references in Harry Potter, for the 20 years we've all been calling Hogwarts home. But you might be surprised to learn that there are still a few tricky references buried in the series that you never picked up on. You can name them all backwards and forwards, you know every plot twist, and (like it or not) you know which characters get married and what they name their wizard kids. If you're a Harry Potter fan, or even just someone who was alive in the late 90's, you probably feel like you know everything about the books.
The series is almost old enough to legally crack open a butterbeer.
Harry Potter has been around for over 20 years now.