checking out the library book / Love - massively OT, mostly

[davewitley]

Pippin:

> But back to Harry Potter, although the nuns, knights and
> cathedrals appear incidental, they nonetheless establish that
> wizards and Muggles share a past in which the Christian
> religion was important. They set the story  firmly in a
> Christian or post-Christian milieu, and establish a Christian 
> context for interpreting symbols like the unicorn and the serpent.

Well, yes and no.

I think it's accurate to say that JKR, her characters and her 
(British) readers share such a past.  If you set a story in Britain 
and put relics (why, the word 'relic' shows how entwined it all is) 
of its medieval past in, you will get Christianity appearing.  And 
most Britons will probably be influenced in their understanding of 
the serpent at some level by Christianity.  (Unicorns, OTOH, ring no 
Christian bells with me - are the associations of purity and 
virginity supposed to be Christian?  Or are there other associations 
of which I'm unaware?)  

I feel, though, that's a bit different from the issue of a religious 
or even Christian subtext to the books.  As it happens, I am 
inclining more as time goes by to the view that there is one 
(though, not having read Granger's book, I have a hard time seeing 
JKR in the tradition of the Inklings), but that view is pretty well 
independent of the presence of the Fat Friar, sinister-looking 
monks, or Christmas trees at Hogwarts.

David