JKR and the Hallows of Hogwarts?
This is about an interview posted on the HAH website in which JKR says that the working title for Deathly Hallows for years was "The Hallows of Hogwarts" or "Hogwarts Hallows." She says in the interview that her lawyers had created a company called "Seabottom" that posted several bogus titles online (see list at the link) just to keep people guessing, but one of them was close to the actual name of Book Seven.
JKR: Yeah, I sent them a list of plausible titles, including the real one. Hallows of Hogwarts for years was going to be the title of the seventh, and it was wrong, just wrong.
MA: They aren't all of Hogwarts.
JKR: Exactly. It changed completely, so Deathly Hallows was definitely the right way to go. I like the title of Deathly Hallows.
This intrigues me because I sometimes disagree with my friend
exhpfan who believes that JKR changed her mind about the storyline of DH at some point and rewrote in a way that makes the final book unsatisfying. JKR seems to be confirming his belief to an extent by admitting that the Hallows were originally supposed to be at Hogwarts instead of elsewhere. That's a big change! As the author, it's her perogative to write any way she likes, of course. But it's an interesting exercise to see if there are any clues still in the series that would lead to this alternate universe of the Hogwarts Hallows.
Understand that I'm not writing this because I "dislike" Deathly Hallows as it is, because I do like it very much. I'm just curious about several things.
If the Hallows and even some horcruxes were all at Hogwarts, then Harry wouldn't have had to go on the long, pointless camping trip in search of them. He wouldn't have abandoned Neville, Ginny, and Luna, and the Trio could have hidden there in the Room of Requirement and kept an eye on things. The Silver Doe could just as easily have appeared on the Hogwarts Grounds in the Forbidden Forest rather than the Forest of Dean. This would have been foreshadowed by Prisoner of Azkaban, and Harry's own patronus. Snape might have known they were there somewhere, even if he and Harry never had that heart to heart talk.
Instead of the search at Gringotts for the Cup, which seemed contrived with the random dragon and all, they might have found the cup at the school. It would have been just as dangerous with the Carrows around. Since Hermione and Ron destroyed the cup in the Chamber of Secrets, maybe that's where it was originally supposed to be anyway! Dumbledore says that Voldemort was very careless with the horcruxes and just left them lying around anywhere, so that fits if Tom had hidden it at the school.
If Harry had been at Hogwarts for that whole year, he would have had time to open the Chamber again, and we would have been spared the embarrassing plot point of Ron suddenly understanding Parseltongue. Instead of Harry being told about the cup's destruction by Ron, Harry might have seen it for himself, and Hermione would have had a scene in which she actually participates in destroying a horcrux. A few weeks ago, I actually forgot that plot point because it seems so insignificant in the book, and I can't figure out why JKR would do that to Hermione unless there was a major rewrite. JKR makes it sound in her interview as if that is true.
I believe there is foreshadowing in Books One and Two that never panned out, and that might mean that JKR did, indeed, change her mind about the plot.
For instance, in Book 2, Ron coughs up slugs all over Tom Riddle's shield award in the trophy room. Coughing up slugs is alot like the Dark Mark symbol, and maybe that is supposed to harken to Ron learning Parselmouth later on, but it seems unlikely. I thought it forshadowed the plotline about Slughorn teaching Tom about the horcruxes, and I wrote an essay about that Here on Mugglenet.
My theory before DH was that Tom's trophy was a horcrux he had made while returning to the school, which we learn that he did when asking Dumbledore for a job in HBP. I also tied the name "Slughorn" to the idea of a family crest, and one of the "possible" titles for DH was "The Peverell Quest," which I think fits the whole Hallows idea quite well.
There are alot of Trophy Room references throughout the books. Peeves is often hanging around in there. JKR put the trophy room on her Official Site, although we never heard much about all those major awards and why people won them, except for Quidditch. James is connected to both the Peverell Family and the Trophy Room, so that dovetails together also.
It just nags at my mind that something in that room was supposed to be more significant than what we received in the last two books.
Perhaps we can speculate that instead of fiendfyre destroying the Room of Requirement, that it was originally supposed to destroy the Trophy Room? Was it supposed to burn up Tom Riddle's award for solving the death of Myrtle by framing Hagrid? Working back from that scenario, the burning of Hagrid's Hut in HBP would be foreshadowing, and the burning of the trophy room would have been revenge for that.
Instead, we have the rather unsatisfying burning of the Room of Requirement (how is that actually possible since it burned up stuff that others might "require" someday?), and the destruction of "Cupboard Man," or the hiding place of the Half-Blood Prince Book. One thing that really bothers me in DH is the burning of Snape's boyhood achievement, because Harry truly cared about that book, and besides the Diary of Tom Riddle, this is the only book destroyed in the course of the series. Yet it wasn't a horcrux, nor a Hallow. It's just a book, although one that Hermione doesn't think is worthy. However, there is no doubt that it was Snape's legacy to Harry, yet it burns it up along with the tiara.
This is totally speculative, but I keep wondering whether JKR changed her mind about the Trophy Room so that in some future sequal, Harry's children could go and see Grandpa James's Quidditch trophies? Of course, even though Albus Severus is a namesake for Snape, the next generation wouldn't give a damn about the Half-Blood Prince or his book, or even know about it, so toss that on the fire. This is disquieting to me, and yet, I think there's something to it, but we will probably never know.