The Harry Potter Lexicon

A new page today for number twelve, Grimmauld Place.

I have begun a sweep of the character pages, but it is going slowly because it is so complicated. First, old style pages need to be switched to the new design, then double-checked for Book 7, all the old [Y-whatever] dates have to be removed, and then I need to check the page against the floods of new canon we’ve received since the last book came out. In some cases, the old page has details that once seemed pertinent or mysterious, but don’t anymore now that we know the whole story (Neville’s toad Trevor comes to mind), so most of the old entries are being re-written. Whew.

On the A-Z pages, I am re-indexing them with the names on the “No surname” page because it seems silly now to separate them. Why should people have to think about whether it is a first name or not? Eventually the “No surname” page will go away entirely. Can anyone find the new names I added?

So far I have finished the A, B and C pages. I work on them when I get home from my job and am averaging 2 nights for one letter of the alphabet. I know we keep saying this but please be patient. I know I lost about two months when it became too painful to think about Potter stuff.

I have some questions for you: Over the years I have struggled with what to call the two types of pages we have for important characters. One kind of page [sample] was meant for quick reference (though in Harry’s case, that’s a joke). The other kind of page is a more leisurely read, written in a narrative style [sample]. How do you use the two types of pages? Which do you think of as the “Main” page? What would you call them? I am thinking, for example of dropping the “Quick lists” and Quick facts” headings and using simply “Lists” instead. So it would be “Harry James Potter: Lists.” But what to call the other type? Should it just be titled “Harry James Potter” with no qualifyer? I don’t want to use “Essay” because that would be confused with our essay section and “Narrative” has always seemed clunky to me. Does “Profile” work for you?

P.S. How come people hardly ever draw Hannah Abbott? I know she started out as kind of a whiner, but come on! I’m looking for a portrait that shows what Neville loved in her (and sticks to canon, of course).

Update #1: I am mostly finished through “L” now, and all of the “No surname” entries have been moved over, so I have deactivated that page. As I go, I am taking extra pains to differentiate staff commentary with canon information through the use of italics. There are still a few pages that need such careful work that I am putting them off for the time being: the Death Eater page is a good example. Basically if you don’t see the “Deathly Hallows” triangle, I am not finished with that page yet. I just lost all my work on the Macmillan page (Dreamweaver doesn’t like Vista), so I guess I will end here for the night.

Update #2 (Jan. 21): Well most of my 150 character pages have been updated. Narcissa now has her own page, and the pages for Rita Skeeter, the Weasley family, Molly Weasley, and Ron Weasley have been substantially revised.

Still on my list to work on: Dobby, Death Eaters, Harry, Snape, Sirius, Muggle people, the Potter family, the Beings list, the book quotes and the character timelines. Whew. I also edit the “What Happened the Night Harry’s Parents were killed” page and that will need to be re-worked because of the revelations in the PotterCast interviews. Then, I want to work in a more systematic way on name derivations and do a better job of linking to our excellent essays. This stage of the work will go more slowly — I have 50+ roses to prune and/or re-pot in the next 2 weeks, and important work over at Accio Quote to do.

My favorite bit? It is still the profile I wrote for Neville.

P.S. Thanks for all the great comments on labeling. I have decided to keep “Profile” as the label for the narrative portions, and begin moving to “Data” (”Lord Voldemort: Data”) for the raw info sections.

After discussion with Lisa, I’ve decided to change the way we indicate Pottercast references. The interview with Jo is now referenced as PC-JKR1 and PC-JKR2. Any other Pottercast references will be given as PC#, so that a citation of Pottercast 121 will be PC121.

There have been some questions about the dates Jo has used for the deaths of Dumbledore (1996) and Fred (1997). In each case, she has given the date of the start of the school year (and therefore the book) in which the deaths occur. However, the actual events happened after the New Year in those books and therefore would actually be 1997 and 1998 according to the timeline of the stories (as verified by the dates given in book seven and other canon sources). We indicate the most correct canon dates in the Lexicon, so we list Dumbledore’s death as 1997 and Fred’s as 1998. We’ll keep an eye on this and let you know if we get clarification at some point.