Mandrakes and The hand of glory

[earendil_fr]

No: HPFGUIDX 96124

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "alshainofthenorth" 
<alshainofthenorth at y...> wrote:
> Here's an interesting coincidence I stumbled across a few weeks 
ago, 
> and I don't think I've ever seen a Harry Potter site make the 
> connection before. I thought people might be interested to find 
out.
> 
> The etymology of the Hand of Glory goes like this: 
> 
> The Latin name for mandrake is Mandragora Officinalis. In the 
French 
> vernacular, 'mandragore' was corrupted to 'main de gloire' (which 
> means exactly 'hand of glory', and the root looks a bit hand-
shaped --
> well, it looks a lot more like a hand than a human body.)


Earendil:

Ok, throwing my 2 French Eurocents in :-)

Are you sure about mandrake/mandragore being corrupted to 'main de 
la gloire' in the French common language? (even if now that you 
mention it, it *does* sound alike when said out loud)

As a native French speaker myself, I've never heard of 
mandrake/mandragore under any other name than this one. OTOH, I'm 
not really known for my botanics knowledge or skills, so I asked a 
friend of mine (HP reader too) who is a biologist and have an 
extended knowledge about botanics (or at least far more extended 
than mine will ever be).

She told me that the only other names she could remember for 
mandrake, although not accurately, were of the like of "something 
root" or "human something".

When checking my French-French dictionary, I could find no allusion 
to 'Hand of Glory' under the mandrake reference, nor could I find 
any to mandrake under the hand or glory references.

Then I checked my English-English dictionary (Oxford Illustrated 
dictionary, rather old edition), and here is what I found for 
mandrake:
"Poisonous plant with emetic and narcotic properties, with root 
formerly thought to resemble human form and to shriek when plucked 
up from the ground."

Now does that description ring a bell? Human form, shrieking when 
plucked up from the ground? The mandrake roots in CoS are described 
as looking like ugly babies, and *do* shriek.

IMHO JKR only played around the original common beliefs about 
mandrakes, like adding the lethal part of the shriek or the roots 
properties.

I don't know what a mandrake root looks like in the RW, whether it 
looks more like a hand or a human body. But we all know for sure 
that a mandrake root in the WW looks like a human/baby body. So I 
suppose any connection between mandrake and the hand of glory would 
be fortuitous.


Earendil.