Like many people, I’m a fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and pre-ordered Book Six from Amazon. When it arrived, I settled back and prepared for the story to get deeper, darker, and more “adult.” I wasn’t disappointed. These are clearly not children’s books anymore — in fact, that category really only applies to the first several in the series.
I loved Book Six (The Half-Blood Prince), and I’m not going to discuss the plot much here, since I know a few friends who have not yet had a chance to read it. Instead, I want to echo Mika LaVaque-Manty’s thoughts on Harry Potter as a morality tale. Morality in the books comes not from supernatural forces (of any kind) — good and evil are situated quite concretely in the actions and predilections of individual wizards. Harry and his friends are responsible for their own moral growth, and are not “told” how to solve their greatest challenges. Dumbledore has never forced Harry to fight Voldemort, nor does Dumbledore (recall the end of Book 5) seem to regard the “prophecy” as a force unto itself; instead, the prophecy is given force by Voldemort’s (and to a lesser extent, Harry’s) belief in it. Dumbledore’s consistent role throughout the books has been as a guide for Harry, and a protector until he was sufficiently awake to his powers and situation that he could assume the role of an independent moral agent.
In this way, the Harry Potter series is quite different from Tolkein’s saga as a morality tale. Lord of the Rings is clearly identifiable as an epic struggle between good and evil, but in the grand tradition of epic poetry and Norse sagas, morality is situated at the level of the tale as a whole — individuals within the LoTR cycle don’t really evolve. I’m quite sure that’s overgeneralized, but at some level it’s true — Aragorn doesn’t change much if at all throughout the series; instead, Aragorn changes the events around him, and the events tell the morality tale. (One could make a case, for example, for moral evolution in Boromir, but it plays a fairly minor part in the overall story). The Harry Potter series, on the other hand, is all about individual moral development, and is for that reason a much deeper tale than the simple moniker “children’s literature” would seem to suggest.
