• Location: work, wishing I could take a nap
• Mood: exhausted

Links to Deathly Hallows essays/discussion, and a few fic recs as well

Okay, I've been collecting some links that I think some of my fellow fans of the Boy Who Lived may find interesting in the wake of the final book. (I just realized that Harry's birthday was yesterday, as was JKR's. Many happy returns of the day to the Boy and his author!)

Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows abound through these links, and even some of the link text may be spoilery, which is why I am lj-cutting them all. You've been warned.


Transcript of Dateline special, in which JKR answers questions posed to her by young fans, talks about deaths and Snape and her own journey writing Harry.

Bloomsbury chat transcript--JKR answering fan questions in a chat, including things like "what jobs do the trio get after the series is ove?" and "who killed [spoilery for 2 deaths]?"



These 5 are general Deathly Hallows essays or discussion forums:

Hogwarts Professor John Granger's Deathly Hallows 20 Discussion Points cover topics from Christianity to the Hallows to the use of Unforgivable curses.

Travis Prinzi's site Sword of Gryffindor also has a large number of essays and many discussions are going on in the comments to each post.

The Gospel According to J.K. Rowling is an article from Christianity Today.

eldritchhobbit posts her 10 Reasons Why I Love Deathly Hallows.

And from cesario, we have an excellent post about Dumbledore.

During the Dateline interview, this exchange happened, the first time JKR addressed the religious...hints...in the books:

Young voice: Harry’s also referred to as the chosen one. So are there religious–
J.K. Rowling: Well, there– there clearly is a religious– undertone. And– it’s always been difficult to talk about that because until we reached Book Seven, views of what happens after death and so on, it would give away a lot of what was coming. So... yes, my belief and my struggling with religious belief and so on I think is quite apparent in this book.

Meredith Vieira: And what is the struggle?
J.K. Rowling: Well my struggle really is to keep believing.
Meredith Vieira: To keep believing?
J.K. Rowling: Yes.

There have been some lovely responses to this, including:

Janet Batchler (a Christian screenwriter and HP fan) on her blog,
Quoth the Maven.

John Granger has also blogged about this, as has

Travis Prinzi at Sword of Gryffindor. Travis took it a step further by addressing the "struggle to believe" directly, linking to a wrenchingly honest essay by The Internet Monk: I Have My Doubts.


And now for four post-Deathly Hallows fic recs.



These 3 fics are all from fernwithy, the wonderful author of the novel-length Lupin/Tonks parallel stories "Shifts" (OotP) and "Shades" (HBP). All through DH I was happily anticipating a new parallel story from Fern...and then the Lupins died. She's not writing a parallel DH right now (and I can't blame her), but she's written a couple of lovely shorts featuring Teddy Lupin:

A Place to Rest--Harry wants to meet his godson; Andromeda is determined not to lose the only real family she has left.

Pointless--16-year-old Teddy is still trying to cope with the deaths of his parents.

Fern has also embarked on a longer fic focused on Teddy's first Hogwarts year: Teddy Lupin and the Forest Guard.

Right now I'm not reading a ton of post-DH fic, but I will pass on one more, with a caveat: Seven Photographs, by casirafics, is a fine seven-scene fic, taking place during and after the end of the book. The only scene I really didn't go for was the first one, but that's because I haven't figured out my personal canon on what happened to Tonks and Remus during the battle. I highly recommend the rest of the fic, though.


Whew! Have at, you all.