(Untitled)

[abdiel]

I read a pretty interesting observation in Time a couple of weeks ago during all of the Harry Potter fanfare. While magic and the supernatural feature prominently in the Harry Potter universe, there is never any mention of any kind of deities at all; the closest Rowling gets to a spiritual element is Love. The article's author find this silly and

Comments

[inhumandecency]

There may be less metaphysics in the HP universe because that's not necessary to explore the kinds of things we mundanes use metaphysics to explore. They have some pretty clear ideas about what happens when you die; ghosts can talk to you about why they didn't "move on" and what might happen if they did. There's a research team in the Department of Mysteries studying death, and by that they mean that they have a portal into the land of the dead and they're poking it with sticks

[inhumandecency]

Also, I think it's stupid and narrow-minded to criticize HP for not having a transcendent order. All it means is that HP isn't high fantasy. It's the fantasy equivalent of space opera: a store about people and relationships and growing up, set in an intriguingly strange but still perceptually fluent world.

[abdiel]

Really, I lost all respect for that article’s author when made a few passing comments about the relationship between religion in Middle Earth and Tolkien’s Catholicism. In any case, I don’t feel like HP’s lack of some metaphysical system to be a weakness by any stretch, but it does make the series quite different from the other fantasy series to which it is often compared, even from something like His Dark Materials (actually, I seem to remember that HDM’s handling of metaphysics was pretty clumsy). You're right; it's not high fantasy, and it's much more enjoyable than any high fantasy I've ever read. One thing about HP is that I, at least, I wound up finding myself surprisingly uninterested in its background and mythology. Which is to say that I am curious about it, but that curiosity was always dwarfed by my interest in the characters, their interactions, and the story itself. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons the series is so accessible and so enjoyable. And it pretty much works out because, while there is no system, Rowling doesn