Is this the post that we think was from JKR?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 120736


 Carol earlier:
> > Yes, but I also notice that she refers to the author as JKR and to 
> DD as the narrator--that last is a glaring error and IMO makes it
> > impossible that "Jo" is JKR. 
> 
> Is is necessarily a glaring error?  We do not know yet what place 
> the "Potter" books occupy *in their own universe.*  LOTR, after all, 
> is supposedly culled from the Red Book of Westmarch, being the 
> writings of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam.  Perhaps the HP books occupy a 
> similar place in the Potterverse, being memoirs written by 
> Dumbledore.  In that case Dumbledore would be the "narrarator," i.e. 
> the fictional author, whereas JKR would be the author, i.e. the real 
> author. <snip>

Carol responds:
Actually, no, that's not correct (except in the distinction between
author and narrator). The voice that narrates "The Hobbit" is that of
an avuncular storyteller who says things like "I don't know what river
it was, but it was a rushing red one"--clearly not the voice of Bilbo
turned into a third-person narrator. Nor is the narrator of "Lord of
the Rings," who knows things that none of the hobbits know, a
composite of their voices and that of, say, Aragorn (who has no time
to write books after becoming king) or Gandalf (who, so far as we
know, never committed his vast knowledge to writing before sailing
into the Uttermost West). Tolkien poses as a historian retelling the
stories, using Bilbo's diary and Frodo's and Sam's accounts in the Red
Book of Westmarch along with other materials as sources, often writing
from the perspective of the hobbits but not necessarily using any
particular hobbit as his POV character. The Pippin/Merry first-person
segments of the story are noticeably different from the rest because
they reflect those characters' personalities, especially Pippin's,
which is distinctively lively and, well, hobbitish.

In contrast, JKR is writing *mostly* from Harry's perspective (see my
other posts on this topic) and almost never from Dumbledore's. Even in
chapter 1 of SS/PS, we are seeing DD and MacGonagall from the outside,
not privy to their thoughts. Neither the perspective nor the *voice*
is Dumbledore's. JKR *could* be using *Harry* as a third-person
narrator relating his own adventures in the future using the third
person to trick us, but there's nothing recognizably Harryish about
the voice, and in any case, that would be a bit of a cheap trick.
Instead, she's using an ordinary anonymous personalityless
third-person limited omniscient narrator who clearly is not one of the
characters in the books, or even a historian. "Newt Scamander" and
"Kennilworthy Whisp," the personae she adopted for FBWT and QTA, have
distinctive voices. The nameless narrator of the HP books does not. If
it were Dumbledore's voice, we would recognize it, if only by the puns
and the eccentric dry humor. In any case, a character/narrator is
always identified as such by the author, if only through a pose like
the one Tolkien takes in his Preface and Appendices.

If you don't understand what I mean by "voice," read the narrative
portions of the books aloud. The "voice" of the narrator changes
perceptibly between SS/PS and OoP, but it never sounds like Dumbledore
or any other character whose style of speaking we might recognize (Ron
or Snape or MacGonagall, for example). The narrator of the HP books is
not a character but a device (which occasionally changes to fit the
needs of the plot). And JKR, if she talked about the narrator at all,
would know that.

Carol, with apologies for the schoolmarmish "voice" of this post, for
which you can blame my twenty years of teaching college English