Casting mis-steps

[Miles]

Carol wrote:
> 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!

Miles:
Yes, that's what I thought when I first saw photographs of him after rumours 
were afloat about him playing Grindelwald. And there are several photographs 
of him in a very androgynous style, but I very much doubt Warner will dare 
to play the gay card.

Carol
> 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).
-snip
> 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").

Miles:
Wald is forest, and Grindel (I had to look it up) is Old High German for 
palisade or stockade. Since I never heard the name Gellert used as a first 
name in Germany or Austria (google seems to know it as a surname only), he 
might come from Hungary or any other country with a Hungarian minority. 
Maybe again Transylvania ;).

Carol
> "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.

Miles:
No, Nurmen is not German (the city is called Nrnberg in German, "Nrn" 
probably coming from cliffy). Wictionary knows nurmen as genitive form of 
the Finnish word for grass. Which would bring us back to Hungary, since 
Hungarian and Finnish (along with Estonian) are closely related. Wictionary 
identifys "gard" as a slavic word for town or city.

Carol:
> 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.

Miles:
Yes, this was my initial idea as well. "Gellert Grindelwald" sounds like a 
name an English author would invent to let it sound German - but I think 
that would be below Rowling's level.

Carol
> 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.
-snip-
> 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?)

Miles:
We only see Beauxbatton and Durmstrang, but that does not implicate that 
there is nothing else. If there is a French speaking school in France and an 
English speaking school in Scotland, there most certainly are schools for 
other languages as well. The language is crucial - while children from 
wizard families could be prepared to learn a second language for the wizard 
school, what about the muggleborns?
Additionally, we only see British and Irish students in Hogwarts, all the 
Beauxbatton students have a French accent, and the ones from Durmstrang a 
slavic accent. But we know there are wizards in all countries - and they 
apparently do not attend Hogwarts or Beauxbatton or Durmstrang.

Miles