Tonight I went out with my family and saw Harry Potter at the local IMAX. Yes, we are lucky enough to live in an area with an IMAX no more than twenty minutes away. But that is not my point. I’m sure there are millions of reviews of the movie so I’ll leave such things to those better qualified. No this post is simply going to be about a single observation while watching the movie.
An observation which as a classical civilizations and Latin major I am qualified to make. I know something other than mere uneducated opinion?! It’s not as rare on the internet as you think.
In J.K. Rowling’s magical world magic seems to simple be a matter of inherent ability (genetic determination), a wand and a dead language. Not just any dead language though. No, the wizards that teach at Hogwarts and exist in the shadowy parts of the Muggle world all use Latin when they need to work their craft. This raises some interesting questions… Where the Latin people the first magic users? Was it their language that gave them the power? If so when did it become a genetic trait that? Was there no magic in the world until Latin evolved? What about it’s parent languages? Were they semi-magical?
In parts of the world where the Romans never went and Latin was never spoken was magic also absent? No Chinese wizards? No Aztec witches? Harry Potter is only a fictional character in a fictional world but the use of Latin as the language raises two points. The first is the mystic relationship westerners have today with the language. Anything sounds better in Latin and people who know it are automatically assumed to better in some sense the those who don’t. Secondly, and more pernicious is the eurocentric no, anglocentric view of the the books. Being optimistic I’m going to say that Rowling was acting unconsciously. Unaware that biases and prejudices she didn’t know she possessed were creeping into her novels. The entire book looks no further than the borders of Great Britain. With the control and government of the magical world to be a wholly British affair.
