I just finished reading JK Rowling's Beadle the Bard (translated we're told by Hermione Granger) It consists of five tales with commentary by Albus Dumbledore that gives little tidbits about wizarding society.

The tales themselves are winsome and fun, but I found the commentary the prize. Lots of tidbits that could provide grist for the fanfic mill. No mention of Snape (or of Granger other than as translator.) But some Malfoy lore...

( Tidbits that could be considered spoilersCollapse )

I wasn’t going to put in my 2 cents in about the revelation. For one, lots of others have already expressed what I’ve felt, and frankly, also because in some ways I’m not sure what to feel, because how I felt about Dumbledore was left so unsettled by Deathly Hallows where several of Dumbledore’s acts and words chilled me.

Dumbledore used to be my favorite character—I dogeared his speeches. It was really because I couldn’t accept that “Please, Severus” at face value that I rethought Snape. I find the challenges and decisions and choices necessitated by leadership fascinating. Certainly I learned in my campaign life that often you have to put the mission, the project, ahead of what might be best for an individual person, and that when dealing with volunteers, the line between persuasion and manipulation can be uncomfortably blurred, so I had a lot of sympathy for Dumbledore’s situation.

What made me decide to post about this though, is one particular article in Time Magazine by John Cloud, that I found fascinating because it was the first place I saw expressed in a non-fandom context a great deal of my concerns.

Outing Dumbledore

The article is short and makes several points I agree with—among them how disturbing it is that Dumbledore’s one true love should prove to be a Hitler-like figure—but the main point that resonated with me was this one:

Why couldn’t he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn’t spare two of those words to help define a central character’s emotional identity: “I’m gay.” We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful.

There are fictional gay characters who are handled with grace and who while I was growing up helped influence my own attitudes towards homosexuality before it became fashionable to be tolerant, let alone accepting. I’m thinking in particular of Mary Renault’s fiction based on Ancient Greece like The Last of the Wine and Mercedes Lackey’s Herald Vanyel of the Last Herald-Mage series that starts with Magic's Pawn. Those authors deserve credit for taking chances—chances that could have affected sales.

Rowling doesn’t.

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Two other articles/posts of interest on the subject picked up from my f-list:

Neil Gaiman Post on Character Backgrounding provided by silburygirl

Harry Potter and the Author Who Wouldn't Shut Up linked on snapedom