World Building And The Potterverse

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 167622

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
>  > Ken:
> > 
> > I cannot believe that JKR chose to make these mistakes. A certain 
> > number of mistakes are unavoidable and we would not criticize 
> > her for a normal amount of mistakes. The quantity and kind of mistakes
> > are jarring. Not killing but jarring. Many of the mistakes are the 
> > kind that *could* have been avoided if the timeline had been as
> > carefully planned out as she claims the plot was.
> > 
> > I don't think that Tolkien expected The Hobbit to go anywhere.
> 
> Pippin:
> We can make allowances for JKR's circumstances too.
>  She says that she set aside a certain amount of
> time to plan her saga and bring it to market. If she didn't
> succeed in that time she was going to give up. Like Harry,
> she was living on the deeply begrudged generosity of the 
> ratepaying class. You can imagine what Vernon would
> think of his tax money going to pay some flighty
> divorcee to make up stories about wizards and dragons
> instead of holding down a real job.
> 
> She couldn't afford an infinite amount of time to
> search for errors, nor hire someone to
> do it, nor was there at that time an obsessed fanbase 
> who would have bid on the privelege of doing it for nothing.

Ken:

Yes, but she didn't stay destitute for very long, did she? Most of
these errors have been made since she had the time and money to devote
to avoiding them. The constrains she faced in the beginning did not
persist for all that long into the series. I've "heard" her cite her
limitations with "the maths" several times in explaining errors. I've
never heard her appeal to her poverty.

> 
> Ken:
> > There is no point in criticizing the Silmarillion, Tolkien never
> > finished it
> 
> Pippin:
> If there's no point in criticizing the Silmarillion because
> it's not finished, how can there be any point in criticizing
> the Harry Potter saga, which isn't finished either?
> 

Ken:

Each book in the HP series up until now *is* finished. Things that
happen in DH might affect our view of some of the apparent errors but
most of them are just errors. Tolkien *never* finished even part of
the Silmarillion. The version of it that he had in mind when he wrote
Lord of the Rings is not the version that his son published decades
later. So you certainly can criticize any errors you see within LOTR
but errors you see between it and The Silmarillion are actually more
likely to be the son's than the father's. Likewise the upcoming "The
Children of Hurin" will be as much son as father. Don't expect a warm,
fuzzy story either.

By contrast there already exists a complete version of the Harry
Potter series that is 100% faithful to the author's intentions. We
just don't have the last installment yet.

Ken