“You know, suddenly I halfway through Goblet of Fire and suddenly everyone would just have a really great life and … the plot would go AWOL.” In a battle between good and evil this epic, not everyone would make it through alive-that would have led to “very fluffy, cozy books,” Rowling told Meredith Vieira. Rowling’s struggle with depression after her mother’s death. The Dementors in Harry Potter are based on J.K. “But because I always cleaved to this mental image of Hagrid being the one carrying Harry out … That was so perfect for me, because it was Hagrid who took him into the world, and Hagrid who would bring him back … That’s where we were always going. I knew we were always working towards a final battle at Hogwarts, I knew that Harry would walk to his death, I planned the ghosts-for want of a better word-coming back, that they would walk with him into the forest, we would all believe he was walking to his death, and he would emerge in Hagrid’s arms.”Īnd that mental image is what kept Hagrid alive, despite the fact that he “would have been a natural to kill in some ways,” Rowling said. “I always knew-and this was from really early on-that I was working toward the point where Hagrid carried Harry, alive but supposedly dead, out of the forest, always.
Rowling calls the idea that she had the first chapter of Deathly Hallows written and locked away in the safe “rubbish.” But there was a small element of truth to it: “I had, very early on-but not the first day or anything, probably within the first year of writing-I wrote a sketch for what I thought the final chapter would be,” she told Daniel Radcliffe, who played Potter on the big screen, in an interview for the Deathly Hallows Part 2 DVD extra features. Rowling wrote a sketch of the final chapter of the final book. Incendio, which lights a fire, comes from incendiarius, or “fire-raising.” And Hogwarts’s motto is Draco Dormiens Numquam Titillandus-“Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon.” 4. I see it as a kind of mutation that the wizards are using.” Expelliarmus, for example, combines expellere, meaning “drive out” or “expel,” with arma, meaning “weapon,” and knocks weapons from an enemy’s hands. “I take great liberties with the language for spells. “It just amused me, the idea that wizards would still be using Latin as a living language, although it is, as scholars of Latin will know,” she said in 2000. At university, she minored in Classics, and she put that education to good use, peppering the books with Latin.