Picture the scene. A young man is sent out on a journey by an old, wise wizard with a long white beard and a tall hat. This youngster has been anointed as the One Individual who can save the magical kingdom from the greatest dark wizard of all time, often dubbed ‘The Dark Lord’. The young man’s quest is to destroy a critical object, the destruction of which will considerably weaken the villain’s power. Prolonged proximity to this object of dark magic turns our heroes into irritable, borderline evil versions of their former selves. Meanwhile, this ‘Dark Lord’ has risen again after a long period of weakness and is often referred to as the one that shouldn’t be named. Oh, and the Dark Lord’s followers run around in long black cloaks and empty hoods, bringing auras of darkness with them.
Does that sound familiar? Those who say, “yes, of course, that’s Harry Potter” are wrong. That is, in fact, a description of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Though a lifelong fan of Harry Potter and Narnia, I hadn’t read the other series in the Classic Fantasy Canon: Tolkien’s epic trilogy. I had hitherto avoided Tolkien due to the cultural perceptions that a) the films are superior and b) the books contain long, dull passages of journeying on foot. But when I finally read The Fellowship of the Ring, it pleasantly surprised me. The films are probably better, and there were – undoubtedly – many dull descriptions of journeys, but the plot was phenomenal, and the characters very vivid. However, as the story progressed, a theme quickly began to emerge.
Replace “Gandalf” with “Dumbledore”, “Frodo” with “Harry”, “Dark Lord” with “Dark Lord”, “Ring” with “Horcrux”, and “Black Riders” with Dementors and Death Eaters – and it’s basically Harry Potter. Both stories also feature a character who sacrifices themselves to save others before being resurrected with heavy Christian imagery. J.K. Rowling even borrowed Tolkien’s hiking obsession – the constant journeying is surprisingly reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
However, by no means should we accuse J.K. Rowling of plagiarism. There’s no need to recycle our Potter books in disgust just yet. Firstly, one can argue that she did it better (I would choose Harry Potter over The Lord of the Rings every time). Secondly, it provokes the question of originality and how important it is (or isn’t). Perhaps it is the power of a great artist to take a pre-written story and make it more iconic.
A third-year English student once told me that she plans to write her dissertation on how no literary work is original. Everything’s been done before, so literature is a game of recycling, reimagining, and rewriting. The example she gave was Frankenstein’s many parallels with Paradise Lost. The same can be said for Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It’s certainly the case for Shakespeare. Many of his most famous tragedies – including Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet – were based on poems or plays with virtually identical plots. In Othello, the most notable alteration Shakespeare makes is changing a character’s name from ‘Disdemona’ to Desdemona. How radical.
Many later texts can also be traced back to Shakespeare. In secondary school, I once theorised that Romeo and Juliet inspired Anna Karenina. Both stories feature a female protagonist who is married or engaged to somebody she does not like. Both women start a secret relationship with another man to escape the monotony. Both texts comment on the ruthless ostracisation of women who transcend traditionally submissive, ‘female’ roles. Both stories contain rash and hurried romances (where it’s down to the reader to decide if it’s genuine), and in the end, everyone becomes suicidal. Whether these parallels convince you or not, it is ironic that Tolstoy famously hated Shakespeare.
Another example: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey features an avid reader of romance novels – Catherine Morland – whose imagination runs wild when she visits a friend on holiday. Her Ann Radcliffe-influenced mind forms grossly untrue stories about how her friend’s father must be a murderer. As it happens, this story of imagination leading a bibliophile astray is taken directly from Don Quixote, which was itself satirising medieval romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
This phenomenon is not confined to literature. The James Bond films, for instance, are rabid plot recyclers. The most outrageous example is Moonraker, a carbon-copy remake of The Spy Who Loved Me. The only difference is that The Spy Who Loved Me takes place underwater, and Moonraker in orbit. The Spy Who Loved Me was already a recycling of the earlier You Only Live Twice – where the action, again, takes place in orbit. And I must mention that The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were consecutive instalments.
You get the idea. Artists have ‘magpied’ classic texts for centuries, and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning. Literature has not died out. Literature has not decreased in quality. The impossibility of originality even formed the basis for the postmodern movement of the 1950s. It was accepted then that everything had been done before, and the goal instead was to reinvent the familiar to make it unfamiliar.
This means that Harry Potter’s affiliations with Tolkien do not weaken its credibility. If anything, they make it stronger. J.K. Rowling made Tolkien’s plot more iconic, with fewer endless journeys and more humour and mystery. Likewise, Moonraker is just as fun as The Spy Who Loved Me. Northanger Abbey is far more readable today than Don Quixote. And Shakespeare’s incessant copying does not diminish his status as the greatest writer in the English language. These literary ‘remakes’ entrance us just as much and provide endless fruit for analysis when we compare them to their source material. So, Harry Potter is part of a long literary tradition: the miracle that books from centuries ago can – with just a change of author and a few artistic tinkerings – transform into wholly new stories.
Image “three-hundred & six” by rachelakelso is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.