J.K. Rowling's tall tales

The Tales Of Beedle The Bard

By J.K. Rowling

111 pages

Available at Powerbooks

In the spare hours when author J.K. Rowling is not counting money or preparing for the next Harry Potter movie to sweep up at the box office, she has apparently developed an itch for writing again. Not surprisingly — like fantasy authors of the past J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis — her thoughts do not stray far from the subject to which she devoted over a decade of imagination and writing: the world of Wizards and Muggles.

So comes to us The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a slim volume with a postmodern angle that may remind some readers of that series of revamped children’s stories published a decade ago, Politically Correct Fairy Tales. Rowling’s latest does present a series of fables set in 16th-century Muggle society, a time when wizardry coexisted, however uneasily, with the human world. But unlike that ‘90s novelty item, Rowling is much too careful a writer to simply go for easy, disposable targets. She has an eye toward her faithful readers, and jots off these short, illustrated tales (really, the book could not have taken longer than a Harry Potter production meeting to write) in the context of the larger literary landscape she has already created. Even the subtitle (“A Wizarding Classic from the World of Harry Potter”) and the handsome packaging lead us to expect more — a stop-gap franchise, maybe, or at the very least additional tales to come.

The conceit here is that Hermione Granger has translated this ancient text — first alluded to in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, for all you nerds out there — from its runic origins into English. “Beedle the Bard” (a pen name, not unlike Aesop or Uncle Remus) has written down this collection of moral-driven takes on Muggle behavior, complete with enchantment, spells and wizardry.

The twist is that the (short) book is interspersed with frequent and critical commentary by Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, who casts a grouchy, modern-day eye on Beedle “in preaching a message of brotherly love for Muggles.”

Clearly, humans and wizards did not see eye to eye in those days. Prejudice and fear, folly and greed are the qualities Dumbledore (and by extension, Rowling, of course) finds in ancient humans — so very little has changed, apparently.

Does this make Beedle an Uncle Tom? A wizard who apologizes and sucks up to the Muggle world? The Tales of Beedle the Bard is smart enough to explore this angle in ways that adults can enjoy, while kids may find the fables instructive, even if they haven’t immersed themselves in the Harry Potter world.

The first tale, “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot,” concerns a young wizard who inherits a cauldron from his recently deceased and “well-beloved” wizard father. The son, who sees no value in using magic to help humans, also inherits a single slipper which he tosses inside the pot as blithely as he turns away the Muggle visitors who knock on his door seeking wizardly cures. With each rebuffed visitor though, the cauldron gains an ailment of its own — a single brass foot, a noisy cough, a cluster of warts — until the son is obliged to parade through the village with the dancing pot, curing this and that, and take up his father’s role.

Dumbledore, in his commentary, responds with undisguised scorn. Beedle, he writes, was “out of step with his times,” a period when wizards were forced to cloak their powers, else face persecution, prison or worse from the Muggles.

But then Rowling takes the postmodern spin further. The fairy tale is deconstructed not once, not twice, but thrice.

While “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” raises Dumbeldore’s skepticism, he mentions that Wizarding families developed their own version of the tale (“In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbors by chasing them away from the wizard’s cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole”), and that this Wizard-centric revision helped them retain their sense of identity in troubled times. Rowling is literate enough to know that history is often told by the victors; but the juiciest stories actually come from the downtrodden.

She goes even further, with Dumbledore recounting how Beedle’s tale was later co-opted by a clean-up brigade led by Mrs. Beatrix Bloxam, who found The Tales of Beedle the Bard had “an unhealthy preoccupation with the most horrid subjects, such as death, disease, bloodshed, wicked magic, unwholesome characters and bodily effusions and eruptions of the worst kind.” Her sanitized versions, accordingly, read like lobotomized fairy tales.

But to really work as a children’s book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard needs to be tested on a child. I decided to read a few tales to my Muggle daughter, Isobel, age six, to see what she made of it.

After reciting “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot,” I asked her if she understood the story. “Pretty much.” What was the lesson here? “It’s better to help people than be selfish.” Well done. I read Isobel the next one, and she had no trouble explaining to me what it was all about. Though things took a pretty diabolical turn around the third tale, “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” which seems more Edgar Allen Poe than Harry Potter. (By that time, fortunately, Isobel had fallen asleep.)

If you’re a Potter completist, The Tales of Beedle the Bard will probably end up on your bookshelf. Those seeking more clues to the background of Rowling’s Harry Potter world will find juicy and historical asides here by Dumbledore, who reveals that the Wizard caste can be just as prejudiced, fearful and thrill-seeking as its Muggle counterpart.