On the lighter side! (with a touch of Ricardian!JKR thrown in)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 172165

Doug:
> >Re: the "Harry" name.... I believe it is somewhat traditional in
Royal Families to name children after the more accomplished ancestors
with the better reputations. So you will not likely see a royal child
named "John". I believe "Harold" or "Harry" was one of those Kings
with a sullied past, so Prince Harry was a daring break with that
tradition.
> >
> >Any actual British here to conform this poor Canadian Colonists
speculation?
> 
Lenore: 
> I'm not British but I have always associated "Harry" with Henry V.

Carol responds:
Also not British, but I, too, thought of Henry V, only to remember
later that he's Prince Hal, not Prince Harry, in Shekespeare's "Henry
IV," "Harry" in that play being Henry Hotspur (no commoner but not a
prince). I didn't think of the present Prince Harry, nor did I think
the joke particularly funny, but it did make me wonder whether Petunia
knew that England has had eight kings named Enery, erm, Henry, more
than any other name except Edward.

As for Harry being a nickname for Harold, I suppose it could be, but
its a medieval English form of Henry (like Robin, Rob, Bob, and Hob(!)
for Robert). And Harold means "leader" or "ruler," making it no
"nasty, common name" (if there is such a thing). Poor Harold the Saxon
wasn't evil. He had just dispatched a horde of Vikings only to be set
upon by William of Normandy, whose claim to be the rightful king of
England was as spurious (IMO) as Henry Tudor's (Henry VII) some five
hundred years later. Harold's body was hacked to pieces by William's
soldiers, and William became known as the Conqueror. True, England has
had no King Harold since that time, but not because Harold was a weak
and corrupt king like John. Doug is right about the tradition of
members of the royal family being named after ancestors or illustrious
predecessors, as Charles Philip Arthur George testifies. (Arthur, of
course, is a fictitious king--don't tell the witches and wizards who
swear by Merlin's beard--and the two Prince Arthurs whose existence
I'm aware of must have had very short lifelines considering that both
died in their teens.)

To return to the scene with the Dursleys, "Howard," another name
Vernon pretends to think is Harry's, is no "nasty, common name,"
either, being the last name of a noble house that probably goes back 
as far as the fictitious Blacks. The Howards (now Fitzalan-Howards)
have been Dukes of Norfolk since the reign of Richard III's older
brother, Edward IV.

I have a funny feeling that JKR knows considerably more about history
than she does about math or herpetology. I know I'm not alone in
thinking of Richard III in connection with "The Cat, the Rat, and the
Dog" in PoA:

"The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog
Rule all England under an Hog."

The Cat and the Rat are Richard's supporters, Catesby and Ratcliffe.
Richard's friend Francis Lovell had a spaniel on his coat of arms and
Richard had a white boar ("bore" being an anagram of "Ebor," short for
"Eboracum," the Roman name for York). Inns and taverns with the sign
of the white boar or boar's head were probably fairly common during
his brief reign; ostensibly, at least one of these boar signs was
painted blue after Richard's death on Bosworth Field. The Hog's Head
and the flying boar statues and all the hog imagery (Hogsmeade,
Hogwarts) always make me think of Richard and make me wonder whether
JKR is a Ricardian, i.e., a defender of Richard III. "The House of
Gaunt" gave me the same feeling, John of Gaunt being the father of
Henry IV, founder of the Lancastrian line, which opposed the Yorkists
(Edward IV and Richard III) in the Wars of the Roses--interesting that
the House of Gaunt in HBP is corrupt and ends with the evil
megalomaniac Voldemort. (I think Lewis Carroll was a Ricardian, too,
as evidenced by the Red Queen in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
but I could be misreading the evidence in both cases.)

I almost forgot--I want to follow up on the intention of the original
poster to the thread and mention some of the humorous tidbits that
make me love the HP books. One is Harry, not usually the wit, telling
Ludo Bagman that he thinks he can find his way back to the castle by
himself (are you sure, Harry?). Another is the Twins calling Percy
"Weatherby." One thing I don't care for is the attempts to appeal to
the fondness of prepubescent readers for gross-out humor or mild
scatology: troll bogeys, puns on Uranus, etc. *Those* I won't miss.
But the puns, Ron's jokes (other thn Uranus), Harry forgetting how to
make a Forgetfulness Potion--all the playful love of language that
can't possibly come through in a translation--those I'll miss as much
as I miss the characters and Hogwarts itself.

Carol, wishing she could recall more of the moments that nearly caused
her to spew coffee onto the pages of her books but too worried about
her imaginary friends to think straight