Friday, June 10, 2011

Professor Quirrell







  1. Unless, of course, she has read TAoTB, in which case she has encountered dumbledore, and capitalized to boot.

  2. Right, John, good point! This is something I noted myself a few years ago, but I was a bit hasty here. I suppose, too, it depends what one means by “general reading”; what is general for you or me or Jo Rowling is not necessarily general for others. :)

  3. Unlikely that she got it from Tolkien, who spelled it differently. It's much more plausible that she learned the word from Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, as I argued several years back in this Usenet post:

  4. Hi, Anon. You might be right. On the other hand, we do know that Rowling read Tolkien (though not obsessively); do we know whether she read Hardy? If she did, it’s something I’ve never heard, though not at all unlikely. We know she loved Jane Austen. I’m a Hardy fan myself, by the way, though I haven’t read him in many years. As a side-note, the final e doesn’t really matter; it’s the same word.