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A short-lived fix for those pining for Hogwarts
Melanie McDonagh4 Dec 2008
The Tales of Beedle the Bard will come as a disappointment to Harry Potter fans in one obvious respect. It's small, light, and in contrast to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which weighed in at 605 pages, can be devoured at a single sitting. Devotees still in collective mourning because there are no more Harry Potter books will find this a short-lived fix.
The Tales are five short fairy stories for young witches and wizards, written, according to the author's introduction, by a 15th century wizard, Beedle. It featured in the last Harry Potter book, in which a copy was bequeathed to Hermione Grainger by Dumbledore. One story, The Tale of the Three Brothers, was crucial to the plot. Ron Weasley was astonished that Harry and Hermione, from non-wizarding families, did not know the tales, but as Hermione points out, "we didn't hear stories like that when we were little, we heard Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella."
As fairy tales go, Beedle's are not going to challenge the familiar versions. They are a touch laboured, and the morals are a little obvious, even without the commentary with each by Dumbledore. In the Fountain of Fair Fortune, for instance, three witches and a knight try to reach a fountain that grants wishes, only to find that it is the quest that matters, not the fountain itself. But a couple of the tales echo real fairy stories: The Warlock's Hairy Heart recalls stories in which an evil character keeps his heart separate from the rest of him, while Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump is a kind of wizarding version of The Emperor's New Clothes.
As JK Rowling points out in her introduction "virtue is usually rewarded and wickedness punished". The appeal of the book is that it is a fragment from the world of Hogwarts which Harry Potter enthusiasts are desperate to re-enter. As an addition to the Harry Potter canon the Tales are a kind of footnote to the main stories.
