Casting mis-steps

[Carol]

Miles wrote:
<snip>
> 
> Miles, who thinks Jamie Campbell Bower is is a very good choice for Gellert Grindelwald (despite his age), not knowing which country Gellert is supposed to come from

Carol responds:

I agree that Jamie Campbell Bower is well cast (he doesn't look twenty or twenty-one), assuming that he can manage a mischievous grin and a merry personality concealing evil intentions. But, please, don't let him sing!

Gellert (with an accented second e that I can't recreate from Yahoo) is apparently the Hungarian version of Gerard (Saint Gellert was a martyr drowned in the Danube, according to an etymology website). 

http://www.behindthename.com/name/gelle10rt  

And Grindelwald is a village in Switzerland ("wald" is "forest" in German, right? I'm not sure about "Grindel"; one website says that it means "wooden fence"). Maybe he's from Austria, right between Switzerland and Hungary? "Nurmengard" sounds German to me, but apparently it isn't. "Gard" could be an alternate spelling of "garde" (French for "keep" in the sense of fortress, castle, prison?), and "Nurmen" suggests "Nurem" in "Nuremberg." Grindelwald has the blond coloring of the "Aryan" ideal valued by the Nazis. I don't think that's accidental.

Somehow, I always thought of him as German, I think because of the vague parallels with Hitler and Nazism, and the timing of his defeat coinciding with the end of WWII. 

Anyway, it seems to me that JKR's WW is organized rather differently from Muggle Europe. It seems to have a British component, represented by the British MoM and educated by Hogwarts; a French component of which we see only a few Beauxbatons students and their headmistress (oddly misrepresented as all-female in the films), and a Germanic/Slavic component represented by Durmstrang and its students, including the Slavic Krum and the apparently Germanic Grindelwald. (Karkaroff seems Russian, but I'll bet every galleon in my Gringotts vault--all zero of them--that he was educated at Hogwarts. Dolohov also seems Slavic, but as he doesn't have any accent, I'm guessing that his family immigrated to Britain several generations earlier.) 

Anyway, Grindelwald represents that non-French, non-British Central European component. (Maybe Southern Europe has a separate school in Greece or Italy that we don't hear about. The "Greek chappie" who sold Fluffy to Hagrid might have attended that unnamed fourth school. BTW, making him an "Irish chappie" in the film version makes no sense at all. Haven't Kloves and Columbus ever heard of Cerberus?)

Carol, trying to get back to Movie List topics at the end of the post!