Another dumb question--Halloween?

Geoff Bannister gbannister10 at aol.com
Mon Apr 25 06:57:52 UTC 2005


No: HPFGUIDX 128034


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Phyllis" <poppytheelf at h...> 
wrote:

Phyllis:
> It's canon - see Ch. 4 of PS/SS, where Hagrid tells Harry  "All 
anyone 
> knows is, he turned up in the village where you was all living, on 
> *Halloween* ten years ago" (my emphasis).
> 
> The Lexicon makes it clear that there are many discrepancies with 
the 
> dates in the series - with regard to the reference to Bonfire 
Night, 
> specifically, it says:
> 
> "'Perhaps people have been celebrating Bonfire Night early -- it's 
not 
> until next week, folks!...'
> 
> Actually, it can't be. If November 1 is on a Tuesday, November 5 
will 
> be the Saturday of that same week. Jim is a bit addled from all the 
> owls and shooting starts, perhaps."

Geoff:
I wonder whether Jo Rowling researched her dates thoroughly when she
first started to write Philosopher's Stone.

Did she realise that the book and its successors would become so
popular and widely read - and, as a result, placed under the
microscopes of so many people investigating the minutiae of her
creation?

Philosopher's Stone was first published in 1997 which suggests that
she may have been writing it for some time before.

I wonder whether she may have initially taken the dates from the year
in which she started to plan the book - in which case, 1st November
fell on a Tuesday in 1994. Admittedly, this still leaves the
discrepancy of the weather forecaster referring to "next week".

The marrying up of dates is often a problem, especially if a writer
is trying to do this when checking back on a book. For example, JRR
Tolkien is known to have spent a great deal of time trying to match
up dates and phhases of the moon and other linked data in LOTR. I
have a favourite book about a schoolteacher - "To Serve Them All My
Days" - in which the author's timeline is a complete mess.

Perhaps we need just to stick with the information fixing the year of
the attack as 1981 and leave it like that.

I can run with the date discrepancies; I don't feel that they cause
too many problems. After all, recalling on which day of the week
an event occurred is not always easy. For example, I have to think to 
recall on which weekday the 11th September attacks on New York 
occurred but
I can name the day of the week of the John Kennedy assassination
without batting an eyelid - it all depends on what I was doing at
that precise moment.









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