Today’s Lake and Shed framed conversation is about the seventh and final Harry Potter novels Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. John and Nick discuss the ‘Deathly Hallows’ symbol, a triangulated and vertically bisected circle, from both its biographical point of inspiration to its anagogical or sublime depths. Nick reveals Rowling’s story about how she was watching the 1975 John Huston film ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ the night her mother died and that believes the “Masonic tag” of the story-line was her sub-conscious source for the Deathly Hallows '“triangular eye.” John thinks Rowling is really reaching here, akin to her claim that the name ‘Hogwarts’ came from a trip to a public garden rather than the Molesworth books. He reviews the five eyes of Deathly Hallows and explains how Rowling embeds both a key to the four-level interpretation of symbols in how characters respond to that image and a model of how we are to interpret and understand her ‘transformed vision’ mission as a writer.
New to the Lake and Shed Kanreki Birthday series? Here’s what we’re doing:
On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the biographical source of her inspiration; the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and their birthday project at the first entry in this series of post: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.
The six HogwartsProfessor birthday videos posted thus far in this series can be read here:
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Tomorrow? It’s Casual Vacancy, the first post-Potter publication in Rowling’s oeuvre, the most transparently auto-biographical, and the book Rowling Readers with few exceptions (I’m one!) deny ever re-reading. See you then!
Links from today’s Lake and Shed conversation:
“The Crimes of Grindelwald,” Kipling, and the Origins of the Deathly Hallows Symbol (Beatrice Groves)
The Deathly Hallows Lectures (John Granger)
‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows’ Lecture in NYC, 2010
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