Red Hen Publications

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Beauty x3 Fire and Hemlock Reconsidered So, What’s “Literature”, Anyway? On Education
& the Internet The Doorstop Effect Fanfic, Electifying the Oral Tradition On the Good ’Ship Granger/Snape At the End of Time
A History of Magic Magic & Wizards Wizards & Muggles: Part I Wizards & Muggles: Part II
Wizarding Britain,
by the Numbers The Art & Science
of Wandmaking A Hogwarts Education Transit & CommunicationThe Poverty Issue The Servant Problem Wizards & Children Wizards & Feminism Wizards & Religion
Part I Part II Part III
The Child Foretold Broken Promise: An
Introduction to Horcruxes Horcrux Redux Horcrux Redux,
Yet Again Raiders of the
Lost Horcrux C.S.I.: Godric’s Hollow
The Power he
“Knows Not” Minding the Gap The Significance
of 1979 The Longbottom Affair The Courage
of Lily Potter The Art of the Possible
The Framing of
Rubeus Hagrid The Werewolf Caper 24 Hours The Quirrell Debacle The Year of the Basilisk The Minister for Magic Hostage to Misfortune The Pensieve Gambit Exeunt Albus:
Setting the Scene Exeunt Albus: Showtime!
People of the Potterverse
The Significance of 1945 Aberforth (& the Goat) Living Waters Potter’s Profession His Fatal Weakness Pachyderm in the Parlor
The 7th Son The Grindelwald Conspiracy Coward + Oathbreaker The Sorting Hat Horcrux The Pettigrew Puzzle Redeeming the Potterverse
Endgame: Expectations Endgame: Possibilities Second Guessing
The Battle of Hogwarts and Other Fakery The Balognium Factor Holy Baloney! Loose Canon Post-Mortem
Red Hen Publications — Commentary Collection: The Potterverse Essays
The Potterverse Essays

Trying to make the Potterverse make sense since 2003!

What this Batch of Buttons Mean:

The “Foundation” Essays: Theories need a base to reason from. Unfortunately, J. K. Rowling didn’t really provide one. This is an attempt to draft some workable paradigms for Magic in the Potterverse. This set of assumptions underpin the rest of the articles on this website.

Oh Wide, Wide (Wizarding) World: Topics pretaining to general subjects related to the Wizarding World, as it is portrayed throughout the series. Which is to say, modern-day Wizarding Britain. Addressing how things appear to be done there. Touches uopn various social issues and the Art of Wandmaking.

O! The Times are Out of Joint!: An attempt to construct a timeline for the Wizarding World leading up to the opening of the series of Harry Potter. Which, in effect, boils down to events of the British Wizarding World over the course of the lifetime of Albus Dumbledore.

Harry Potter & The Dark Lord: Matters specific to Harry Potter and the former Tom Marvolo Riddle. Examines some problems with Prophecies, and more extrapolations about Horcruxes than you ever wanted to have to deal with.

Missed Oportunities: Matters where I truely believe that with only a slightly different handling (and perhaps a stronger grasp on the concept of numbers) we would have had something that played out rather better than what we got in canon.

With 20/20 Hindsight: A second, closer look at some of the things we thought we knew.

Potter People: This link will take you to the opener page of the people of the Potterverse collection, related to character studies.

The Briar Patch: Wherein breed plot bunnies. Anything posted here reads more like fiction than theory. But still not altogether flights of fancy.

The 7th Son Collection: Theories which were all shot down/abandoned before the series was complete. Feel free to point and laugh

Endgame: Considerations made after the release of HBP, while looking forward to the final book.

Scorecard: Considerations and criticism of the series as a whole, after the release of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Note: A lot of these pieces are very long. Over a period of five years, while the canon was still open, the whole collection was gone through and updated semi-annually. During this period, I didn’t always delete an older theory just because I’d worked out a new one. Consequently, several of these articles are a historical overview of theories as they developed over a span of several years.

In addition, I don’t know just where anyone is likely to be starting out with this collection, due to the possibility of their accessing it from external links, so, for clarity, there’s a a fair amount of duplication as well.