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Werewolf Watch
The next Full Moon occurs on Monday, September 15, 2008.
Latest Harry Potter News:
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Welcome to Beyond Hogwarts, the only ongoing online Harry Potter fan conference.
Beyond Hogwarts is an academic resource, unraveling and discussing the mysteries
of the Harry Potter saga, and beyond the books, into the future of Harry's Wizarding world.
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We've all lived through the decade it took J.K. Rowling to get the Harry Potter books written
and printed.
All during that time, what she said in interviews and public events was relevant to the
discussion of the then unfinished books.
But as of July 21, 2007, with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the
books are done. They stand as they are. Your thoughts and ideas about the books, as
reader, are just as valid as anyone's, including J.K. Rowling.
Harry Potter belongs to us now! So, grab a book, and join in the discussions!
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Exciting News!
Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Amazon will be publishing The Tales of Beetle the Bard to be available on December 4!
Make sure you get your copy right away, so that you can join in our discussions about Beetle's Tales here on Beyond Hogwarts!
Read more about the publication of The Tales of Beedle the Bard on Wizard News.
Beyond Hogwarts Featured Discussion:
 | | A forbidden peek at young James and Sirius 
J.K. Rowling's 800 word prequel to the Harry Potter story, which she wrote for charity and which sold at auction for $50,000, was posted online last month by UK bookstore Waterstone's. In this brief glimpse of a story, James and Sirius are being chased, and run afoul of the muggle police. Who was chasing them? And does their nonchalance with the muggle police give us an insight to James' upbringing? Did he possibly have a muggle childhood like Hermione? [More...]
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Beyond Hogwarts Articles and Discussions:
 | | The Five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law
Elemental transfiguration is the magical art of physically converting one thing into another. But as with all types of magic, there are limitations to what you can do with transfiguration, as we learn in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Hermione mentions the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration. But she only tells us one of them. What are the other four? I think we know two more, and can guess another. [More...]
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 | | The next Harry Potter: Back to the future or the past?
Should J.K. Rowling write some new books that also involve the world of Harry Potter? Or, in the words of the Beatles, should she Let It Be? And if she does, what should they be about? Would you like to read books about Albus Severus Potter and his adventures at Hogwarts? Or would you like to know more about the times of James, Sirius and Remus? How about going all the way back to the time of Dumbledore and Grindelwald? Or even further? [More...]
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 | | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts 1 and 2
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is dense with information that is crucial to the overall story. It's definitely too much to stuff into a two hour movie. So, do you think it's possible that the final Harry Potter adventure, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will be made into two movies? And if it is, where would you end movie number one and start movie two? [More...]
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 | | Doing the Math: How many kids are at Hogwarts?
On October 16, 2000, in an interview, J.K. Rowling was asked, "How many students attend Hogwarts, and how many students per year per house?" and she replied, simply, "There are about a thousand students at Hogwarts." And because she said it, this has persisted as the proper answer accepted by most fans. But I don't see how that could be correct. [More...]
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 | | The Repeating History of Dumbledore
When we first meet young Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I believe J.K. Rowling is wording descriptions of events with it in mind for us to see similarities between Tom Riddle and Harry. But now that we know the end of the story, and now that we know more about Dumbledore himself, I have lately been thinking more about similarities between Tom Riddle and Gellert Grindelwald. [More...]
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 | | J.K.'s surprising revelation about Dumbledore
Just a little over a year ago, on August 2, 2006, J.K. Rowling made a statement at her reading in New York City, at Radio City Music hall, that was big news and related directly to what we talk about on this web site. Well, tonight she's done it again. This evening, again in New York City, this time at Carnegie Hall, J.K. Rowling dropped a bombshell on the Harry Potter fan community. [More...]
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 | | The Secrets of the Fidelius Charm
The Fidelius Charm is a powerful charm that is central to the Harry Potter tale. The house at Godric's Hollow, 12 Grimmauld Place, and Shell Cottage are three properties that are protected by the Fidelius Charm, three properties that have been secured against Voldemort and his Death Eaters. But within each property we see differences in the way the Fidelius Charm works. [More...]
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 | | Sinking our teeth into the character of Snape
I've personally strongly believed for a long time, and still do, that Severus Snape is a vampire, or at least, is part vampire. There are clues in all the books that point to this conclusion, over the years, J.K. has (sort of) denied that he is, and yet she continued dropping these hints even throughout book 7. [More...]
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 | | The trials of the Hogwarts IT director
Headmaster: I regret that I must resign my position, effective two weeks ago, at least. It is simply impossible under these conditions to create a modern, integrated, flexible IT architecture aligned with the school's educational mission and objectives. Despite my best efforts, Hogwarts' IT communications infrastructure will remain dependent on owls, talking letters, the use of Floo powder and a fireplace network, and of course, divinations, dreams and visions. [More...]
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 | | Severus Snape: Heel or Hero?
Is Snape a hero? Would James and Lily be alive now if not for him? Would Harry be dead now if not for him? Did he ever care about Harry, or only Lily? At the end of the epilogue, Harry says that Severus Snape was the bravest man he ever knew. Did he feel that way only after years of reflection? How do we feel now, while it's still fresh for us? [More...]
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 | | J.K. Rowling goes Beyond the Epilogue
J.K. Rowling has announced in a new interview with that the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was vague on purpose. She admitted her original epilogue was "a lot more detailed," but now that Book 7 is in our hands, J.K. no longer has to hold back any information about Harry Potter, and has now given us a lot of new details about the story and the characters. [More...]
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 | | The Aftermath: We were all correct
Sometime a week before Book 7 came out, someone commented that Harry would die, but then come back. I think most everyone on the site thought it was a silly idea. But I told several people at that time that I thought that just might be the perfect solution, although I couldn't figure out how J.K. could make it work. J.K. did, of course! So, the half of the Harry Potter fans in the world who thought Harry would die were right! And the other half who thought he would live were also right! [More...]
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 | | Mischief Managed... Not!
I believe there is a small mistake in the movie script of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The error is when Lupin says "Mischief managed" to the marauder's map just after saying goodbye to Harry at the end of the movie. Fred and George stole the map from Filch. They would have no way of knowing the original incantations used to operate it. But Lupin uses the same incantation in this scene. [More...]
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 | | An Introduction to Arithmancy
Arithmancy is one of Hermione's favorite subjects at Hogwarts, because it is a very precise, measurable and almost scientific method of predicting the future. Arithmancy is a method of divination by numbers first used by the ancient Greeks. Today, Wizards can use arithmancy to help predict trends in the future. [More...]
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 | | Wands from a Muggle Perspective
The wand is a very important tool in the lives of witches and wizards of the Harry Potter universe. I believe the magical wands of Harry Potter's world could actually be tiny hand-held computers. This is a look at those wands, from the perspective a muggle computer programmer, using actual examples from the Harry Potter books. [More...]
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 | | Wand Basics 101
As long as there have been Witches and Wizards, there have been magical wands. No part of Harry Potter's magical heritage goes back further. The ancient Celtic Druids who lived in what is now called Scotland employed wands all the way back to 500 BC. As a matter of fact, "Druid" actually means "man with the wisdom of the wood". [More...]
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 | | Character changes in Goblet of Fire
In the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie, there is a scene in the Gryffindor common room, where Harry is lamenting that they still don't have dates, the Patil sisters walk by, and in unison they say, "Hi, Harry!" But wait! What is Padma Patil doing in the Gryffindor common room?! [More...]
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 | | Foreshadowings in Prisoner of Azkaban
In an interview released around the time of the theatrical premiere of Prisoner of Azkaban, an interview which is also on the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD, J.K. Rowling said, "Alfonso Cuaron had very good intuition about what would and wouldn't work. He's put things in the film that, without knowing it, foreshadow things that are going to happen in the final two books." [More...]
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