I Know Who Will Die in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”!
It’s Princess Di!
How do I know this with absolute, without-a-doubt certainty? Nope, it’s not that I have even the somewhat questionable Divination powers of Sybil Trelawney; rather, I have just looked up a disturbingly obsessive Potter timeline that informs me that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is set in August 1991–June 1992. Therefore, Book 7 will begin in the summer of 1997.
As Diana was killed on August 31, 1997, she will no doubt be the Muggle-death that sometimes begins Harry Potter volumes–little did we know that Voldemort was one of the paparazzi that fateful night!
The only question is: was she one of the deaths Rowling had planned from the beginning, or is she one of the two additional characters who will bite the dust in Deathly Hallows?
Seriously, the Harry Potter Lexicon timeline is amazing. And odd. I’d heard people say that Harry Potter was born in 1980, but I never knew the reason behind the claim. It all stems from Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington’s (a.k.a. “Nearly Headless Nick”’s) Deathday Cake, which appears in Chamber of Secrets. His cake states that he died on October 31st, 1492. According to Lexicon creator Steve Vander Ark,
“This party was to celebrate Nick’s five-hundredth Deathday, which means the 500th anniversary of his death. Add five hundred years to 1492 and you get 1992 [Y12], so the party, which took place on Hallowe’en night, took place in the fall of 1992 [Y12]. This reference is the only direct date given for an event in the Harry Potter books. It is from this single note that all the rest of the timelines of the books have been derived. By the way, an inconcistency found in book one, where Nick bemoans the fact that he hasn’t eaten in ‘almost four hundred years,’ has been remedied. The text of book one has been amended to say ‘five hundred years,’ which supports the Deathday Cake date as canon.”
What’s even more interesting is that Rowling and her franchise seem to have drawn their official timeline from the HP Lexicon. Again, here’s Vander Ark:
“According to sources at Warner Bros. who worked on the DVD of Chamber of Secrets, here’s what happened. The folks at Warner came up with a timeline. There is pretty strong evidence that the timeline they came up with was from the Lexicon–the master timeline and the day-by-day calendars of the first two books. They showed this timeline to Rowling. She looked it over and made one or two comments or little changes, then approved it.
That timeline now appears on the DVDs of Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, and Goblet of Fire. You can’t get to it on your television; you need to put the second DVD in a computer’s DVD drive. Since it was approved by Rowling, it is considered to be official. . . .
How do I (Steve Vander Ark) know that they borrowed the timeline from the Lexicon? Because I had made a tiny, stupid little typo on my day-by-day calendar of the first book. I had accidentally put the first visit of Harry and Ron to Hagrid’s cabin on Saturday instead of Friday. I did that because I write Monday-through-Friday schedules all the time as part of my job, filling information onto week grids. The last square of the calendar I work on usually is Friday, so I put the visit to Hagrid’s cabin in the last square without thinking. That typo is reproduced in the ‘official’ timeline on the DVD.”
Well, I guess obsession pays off. Or something.
1 comment July 13th, 2007