Is Rowling a “Master of Death”?
ROWLING HAD ALREADY STARTED TO WRITE about Harry
when her mother died at age forty-five. Her mother’s death
sharpened the story’s focus. “From that moment on,” she has said,
“death became a central, if not the central, theme of the seven
books.”
The history of the Deathly Hallows that’s told
in the final book is a cautionary fable with the same theme,
perhaps the most important in the series.
ON THE ROAD
Rowling has said the story of the Peverell
brothers and their Deathly Hallows was inspired by “The Pardoner’s
Tale,” an episode in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales. A pardoner was an official agent of the
church who sold the church’s forgiveness to people who had
committed certain sins.
The pardoner in The
Canterbury Tales tells
a story (borrowed by Chaucer from other fables) of three men who
take revenge for the death of a friend by trying to find and kill
Death himself. But where they expect to find Death, they find gold
coins. They then decide to rest, and one man goes to buy wine.
While he’s gone, the other two come up with a very simple plan to
keep the gold for themselves. They kill him when he returns. They
then celebrate by drinking the wine, never suspecting that the man
who went to buy the wine had his own simple plan. He put poison in
it. They die, and Death wins again.
In Celtic legend, early gods known as the Tuatha Dé
Danaan brought four hallows to Ireland: a magical stone that could
give a king long life, a sword and a spear of great power, and a
magical cauldron that never ran out of food.
Arthurian legend also names four hallows: a cup
from which Jesus drank, a sword, a platter, and a lance. The lance
is sometimes called “The Spear of Destiny.” According to legend, it
was used by a Roman soldier to stab Jesus on the cross, and still
has Jesus’ blood on it. This makes its owner invincible. In
Hallows, the invincible Elder Wand is
called the “Wand of Destiny.”
Rowling’s version is a little different. Death
tricks the Peverell brothers by giving them three gifts that seem
to make them stronger than he is. With the first two, the Elder
Wand and the Resurrection Stone, there’s a catch. The brothers who
receive those objects soon regret their decisions. But the brother
who does not ask to defeat Death gets the Invisibility Cloak, and
manages to live a full natural life. Wisely, he doesn’t try to
elude Death for longer than that.
Rowling’s version gives the story a new meaning.
In Chaucer’s version, the Pardoner explains that the story
illustrates that “greed is the root of all evil.” As Hermione
explains to Ron and Harry, the fairy tale of the Peverell brothers
is “a story about how humans are frightened of death.”
THE LAST ENEMY
“In many ways,” Rowling has said, “all of my
characters are defined by their attitude to death and the
possibility of death.” In every case, that attitude is or once was
fear. Voldemort, for example, seems extraordinarily powerful to
other wizards, but Rowling doesn’t see him that way. “He’s
terrified of death,” she says. “He’ll do anything not to die.” His
very name gives this away: Vol de mort
means “flight from death.” He’s not going to outwit death; he hopes
to outrun it. This unnatural desire leads him to great evil. Like
Voldemort, Dumbledore lusted for power, to his regret.
It’s also important to understand that this fear
of death doesn’t lead only to evil: Hermione’s drive to be the best
Hogwarts student ever is a desire for a socially acceptable form of
immortality.
The story of the Peverell brothers presents
Harry’s choices in a nutshell. He could make the mistake of trying
to use violence to defeat Voldemort, which he’s tempted to do. He
could make the mistake of using the Resurrection Stone to bring his
parents back for good, letting them be a family again.
Chaucer’s wicked sense of irony is part of the
appeal of “The Pardoner’s Tale.” The narrator gleefully talks about
his own greed. “I will not work and labour with my hands . . . I
will have money, wool, and cheese, and wheat, Though it be given by
the poorest page, Or by the poorest widow in village, And though
her children perish of famine.”
For reasons not yet fully understood, Scotland has
the highest rate of multiple sclerosis in the world. J. K. Rowling
is a patron of the MS Society Scotland, and has helped establish a
research center at the University of Edinburgh.
That’s an even greater temptation. Or he can
accept that death is a natural and unavoidable fate, and that
survivors must move forward. It’s by making this last choice that
he becomes, in Dumbledore’s terms, “a master of death.”
Because her mother was ill with multiple
sclerosis for many years before dying, Rowling’s feelings and
thoughts about mortality would have been developing for many years,
long before she started writing the Harry Potter books. Though she
describes herself as religious, she also says religion did not give
her comfort when her mother died. Instead, Rowling created a world
in which she could resolve the conflict between a desire to cheat
death and the impossibility of actually doing it. Her greatest wish
might be to see her mother again; but by the time Harry has just
such an opportunity to be reunited with his parents, he knows
better.
That’s not to say Rowling rejects the idea of an
afterlife. Her attitude seems to be more complicated.
When an interviewer asked if she agreed with
Dumbledore’s assertion that “Death is but the next great
adventure,” she was a little unsure: “I would like to . . . I’m not
as wise as him. I would like to see it that way. And I do see it
that way, in many ways.” But, she added, “Death still frightens me,
as it frightens most people.”
Yet engraved on the tombstone of Harry’s parents
is the line, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
This is a quote from the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15:26)
referring to everlasting life in heaven.
Whether or not Rowling is certain of what’s in
store for herself, there’s no doubt Harry’s story is connected to
the sense of comfort she feels when she imagines a heavenly life
for others, such as the fictional parents she created for Harry and
maybe her own mother. One of the epigraphs at the beginning of
Hallows is a quotation from William Penn,
the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania: “Death is but crossing the
world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For
they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is
omnipresent.” For Penn that meant a love of God connected him to
loved ones who had died.
Harry may not share Penn’s exact sentiments, but
the happiness that we see in him in the epilogue to Hallows surely began with some belief in the lines
just before Rowling’s selection: “They that love beyond the world,
cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never
dies.”
William Penn (1644-1718)