Epilogue Bashing

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 172940

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, OctobersChild48 at ... wrote:

> There is so much bashing of the epilogue going on that I am posting this  
> excerpt from Cheryl Klein's (editor at Scholastic) blog about Deathly  Hallows.
>    
> And this leads me to the epilogue. It is not receiving much love, I see some 
> people hate it because it doesn't answer all their questions, some  people 
> hate it because it gives answers they don't want, and some people  just find 
> it cheesy. I think it paid off five essential themes of the series  (not just 
> the 
> book): 

<snipped>

Geoff:
I see the arguments behind this reply but what really annoys me about 
the epilogue is that it is skimpy.

I made reference to Tolkien's ROTK recently. In Appendix B "The Tale of 
Years" , he spends some time at the end detaling what happened in the 
years following the fall of Sauron by mainly outlining briefly what the 
main characters did. It is not long or over-detailed but tells us whether 
so-and-so got married, how many children they had, maybe a brief 
comment on what they did as one example Sam became the Mayor of 
the Shire for several terms) and when they died. It amounts to no more 
than a couple of pages but ties up a whole heap of loose ends.

This doesn't happen in DH. What has happened to the Hogwarts staff? 
Has George married? What about Dean or Seamus or Hagrid? And who 
did Draco marry - what has he been doing over this time? And all the 
rest....

We have invested huge amounts of time in following the adventures of 
our friends through seven years and are left scratching our heads - 
except for one family. Was it worth having an epilogue or should it 
have been left to us to speculate? 

I suppose fanfic will have a go at filling the gaps but the epilogue 
currently leaves me feeling as if I had been invited out to lunch and 
only given a ham sandwich. 
:-)