Patroni (speculation) WAS: (Re: CHAPDISC: Ch. 19: The Silver Doe)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182934

zanooda wrote:
<snip> BTW, about Xeno's "hair-brained schemes" - rabbit usually
represents quick-thinking and guile, not stupidity :-).
> 
Magpie responded:
> Maybe there's a "mad as a March hare" implication? Rabbits are also
> associated with fertility and with intuition and the moon. <snip>

carol responds:
I think we should look specifically at hares rather than including
rabbits. (Maybe Lavender Brown, whose pet rabbit died, had a bunny
Patronus? I can't remember whether hers was mentioned.)

But JKr's Luna/lunacy/moon connection is clear, and, bearing in mind
the  "mad as a March hare" idea, I did a quick Google search. It turns
out that the moon and hares are connected in many mythologies. Since
JKR's version of witchcraft and wizardry seems to have fairly strong
Celtic connections (after all, Britain was Celtic before it was
Anglo-Saxon or Norman), I think Celtic mythology might be what JKR had
in mind when whe assigned Luna her Patronus. 

One of the sites I checked put the connection rather succinctly:
"Celtic Myths*~
The Celts believed that the Goddess Eostre's favourite animal and
attendant spirit was the hare. It represented love, fertility and
growth and was associated with the Moon, dawn and Easter - death,
redemption and resurrection. Eostre changed into a hare at the full
Moon. The hare was sacred to the White Goddess - the Earth Mother -
and as such was considered to be a royal animal."

Fits nicely with Luna, I think. Well, maybe not the fertility part,
but love, dawn, death, redemption, resurrection--look at the timing of
Luna's Patronus cast in DH. It occurs in "The Elder Wand," the chapter
in which Snape dies, and those themes pervade the next few chapters:
death and redemption and love in "the Prince's Tale" and "the Forest
Again" and "King's Cross," love and dawn and resurrection in "The flaw
in the Plan." I could be reading too much into the symbolism, but
surely some of it is there, along with the common perception of Luna
as "loony" and hares and full moons associated with madness. (Hares.
like cats, were considered to be witches' familiars by medieval
Christians, according to some of the sites.)

Carol, now wondering whether Celtic mythology will throw any light on
Seamus's fox and Ernie's boar (assuming that the order in which the
names are given is intended to match the order of the Patronuses)