[HPforGrownups] Ron's death, Neville's role and Harry's travel

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

No: HPFGUIDX 32790

At 9:14 AM +0000 1/4/02, grey_wolf_c wrote:
>
>Th. 1: Ron's Death
>I think JRK told us his longing to be better
>than all his ther brothers becuase she's planning to make it so.

Nice, but she's produced a lot more rumblings about killing Harry 
than about killing Ron.  (I think she's bluffing about that, too, but 
only time will tell.)  If Ron became Harry's strtegist-in-chief, put 
himself in another sacrifice position, and (as on the chessboard) 
ended up only receiving an incapacitating wound, rather than dying, 
wouldn't that serve the same purpose?  He would still be a greater 
hero than any of his brothers, for being willing to make that 
sacrifice.

>Th. 2: Neville's role in the books
>In a much less dark tone, I've been thinking about what's to come for
>Neville. I don't know if you're aware that the only enemy of a dragon,
>by oriental mythology, is a small yellow bird (I remembered this during
>the Weasel/Basilisk discussion). We know that Neville turned into a
>canary (which suits him quite well, really), and the "dragon" of the
>series is: Draco Malfoy (who's name means "dragon"). Thus, my theory
>suggests, Draco will turn bad after all (as if it didn't look that way
>already), and Neville's the one who's going to defeat him.

I find this unconvincing, for a number of reasons:

(1) There's no such thing as "Oriental mythology;" there's Chinese, 
Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc. mythology.  The dragons of 
these mythologies are related, as are the dragons of the Western 
mythologies, but they're not all the same, just as a dragon in the 
ancient Greek myths is not the same as the one in the legend of St. 
George.

(2) In many Chinese dragon tales, at least, the enemy of the dragon 
is the phoenix (itself different from the Western one).  Different 
dragons have different enemies.  I've never heard the "yellow bird" 
theory, so I suspect it's attached to a particular strain of Eastern 
dragon.

(3) Most of the dragons of the Far East are not evil.  (As a 
dedicated dragon fan, I would stop here and point out that many of 
the dragons of the West are also not evil, but unfortunately that 
does not hold in Britain, so I'll skip it.)

(4) While the snakelike, wingless dragon with the forked horns and 
the mane is often called "Draco orientis" in the faux-Linnean 
classification of dragon fans, if Draco had been named after it, his 
name would be Lung.  He is almost certainly named after "Draco 
europa".  (Although perhaps we should re-vamp the species names after 
the species given in FBaWTFT - Draco hebrideae, Draco norweii, 
Quetzalcoatlus peruvii, Lunga sinesis, etc.  Yes, my dog-Latin is 
bad, but so is it on most genus-species names.)

(5) There's no connection between yellow birds and any of the the 
Euroepan dragons.

Okay, so I'm a dragon geek.  Sorry about that . . .

-- 
  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles at earthlink.net
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