As a tribute to its most famous occupant, room number 552 in Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel is now known as the J.K. Rowling Suite. It costs £965 a night to stay there, but that hasn’t stopped wealthy enthusiasts from checking in: It is where the British author — despite owning property in Merchiston in the Scottish capital — stayed to finish writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on January 11, 2007. To set it apart from the other suites at the stately Princes Street landmark, the 180-square-foot room has boasted a brass plaque on the front door and a brass owl instead of a door knocker since 2008.
It may have been a full circle moment of sorts for J.K. Rowling as Oprah Winfrey interviewed her in the same place last month. Over tea, the two self-made billionaires looked back on their respective careers, parallel paths, if you will, that have been fraught with rejection then blessed with success. With proceeds from the Potter books, which have sold more than 400 million copies, among other sources of income, Miss Rowling has amassed a personal fortune of an estimated £560 million, making her wealthier than the Queen, according to the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List.
Potterheads may have always known that J.K. Rowling — married name Joanne Kathleen Murray — cobbled the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, her first, in a series of Edinburgh cafés while surviving on state welfare. But being somewhat of a fairweather fan, I didn’t, so stumbling upon The Elephant House was serendipitous. The tea and coffee establishment, located on George IV Bridge in Old Town, is said to have inspired the best-selling novelist, who sat in the back room overlooking Edinburgh Castle. The Elephant House was packed the day I stopped by, presumably with tourists drawn by the sign that read “birthplace of Harry Potter,” so I parked myself at The Outsider, a nearby brasserie that offered similar views.
Edinburgh is extremely pretty in a gothic, Tim Burton way, and I could really see how the surroundings — and the Dior gray skies — helped nourish J.K Rowling’s imagination. The gargoyles at The Scott Monument were breathtaking on their own. What more an entire medieval city.
Those centuries-old images stayed with me as I read up on the genesis of the world’s favorite boy wizard, about how, on a train from Manchester to London, the then 25-year-old writer’s head was bursting with ideas about magic, but she was without a pen. In her Oprah show appearance, the Harry Potter creator noted that each page in the seven-part series was indeed dark and full of death, stressing that the books would not have materialized without her own mother’s passing as the impetus.
Watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I found it impossible not to detect this dreariness. When we first met Harry in 2001, he was a boy who lived on Privet Drive in Surrey, an area with “tidy front gardens” and milk bottles outside front doors. This time, however, we see him navigating a nightmarish landscape, now an adult like most of the audience members who stuck it through for the greater part of a decade. Against a background of loss and failure, the central character in the dizzyingly successful franchise even spends Christmas visiting his parents’ grave. You can’t get more cheerful than that.
The first of two movies based on the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of the Harry Potter series, may mark the beginning of the end, but J.K. Rowling’s influence on an entire generation of readers and moviegoers is only starting to make itself known. Because of Harry Potter, young people learned to unbridle their imaginations, and that, I believe, is the best kind of magic there is.
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