If you could ask JK Rowling one question....

For fecks sake do people not realise that just because there are similarities between two areas of literature dosen't mean one "ripped" from the other. Writers borrow used ideas all the time and put their own twist on it. For example take any play Shakespeare ever wrote

Is "Kill Ginny" a question?

I couldn't agree more with the post above.

In fact it annoys me abit when people right off a brilliant series such as Harry Potter as a rip off of lord of the rings or any previous fantasy writers have come up with before this.

The magic of Rowling, Toolkein or C.S Lewis's books is that they utilise great fantasy characters like 'The Wizard' 'Goblins' or Centaurs, take their basic characters features Gandalf and Dumbledore are both very powerful wizards, centaurs are stargazers and goblins are greedy and in the case of Lord of the rings irreconcilably evil and then develop their personalities which stretch far beyond the work which went into previously creating what a goblin is. And so we get character’s like Merlin, Gandalf and Dumbledore who on the surface look like your typical 'wizard' but when you delve abit deeper you see there totally different. Merlin was subservient to Arthur, Gandelf very much believes he is superior (and all of his kind) to other beings, therefore he adopts the role of leader in the fellowship without question or too much hassle, in fact the Lord of the Rings book deals quite heavily with the issue of hierarchy, the one ring, the true king of Gondor etc. Dumbledore although is accepted as the natural leader of the wizarding world by a great proportion of the wizarding community, never takes on a role in which he has absolute power. he does not believe himself to be superior by his willingness to give others free reign and of course his modesty, which we don't see from Gandalf.

J.K. Rowling merely touches on these well adapted characters with little explanation or uses a highbred of more than one magical character. J.K adds the word Magus (the Latin word for wizard) ani to form the term animagus animal-wizard. Durmstang schools comes from the art style Sturm und Drang, which was favoured by the Nazi hierarchy. David Colbert's wrote a whole book about the sources of JK creatures which highlights 100's of other examples.

So in the light of this I pose the question, J.K Rowling do you keep a record of all the creatures characters, items and happenings and if so would you ever consider publishing them? please

Illuvatar wrote:

He didn't really use old english legends to create his masterpiece of literature.
He created a whole new world and gave it a huge history. Tolkien loved the celtic and old english languages and wanted to use them, hence the languages of many races.
Gandalf is not completely a Merlin type person but the movie portrays him as one. Read the Silmarillion it has everything in it and more on the history of Middle Earth. Tolkien's view and the way he made Gandalf was to be a angel of sorts.
Tolkien also created a whole new type of evil. I haven't seen anything that resembles an Orc, Balrog, Sauron, ect. Trolls on the other hand were all ready created by someone else's mind, but he didn't "rip off" Trolls. I don't think there's a copyright on the word "Troll". He has a vision of what a Troll looks like to him, only the word hasn't changed. You use your own story, characters, world, and languages and that's exactly what he did.

Yeah, sorry, that was a generalisation - in reality it's "based on", not "ripped off" and not just Old English legends, but all sorts of others too, spun in his own. I was arguing against Laguna saying that HP was a rip-off - just because it uses the fantasy archetypes doesn't mean it is. Nearly every fantasy uses these archetypes as a base, from the Nibelungen onwards, and even before (admittedly some of them are newer than that, but the point still stands...)

JK Rowling to write a new novel, Love to ask her is it going to be the start of a new fictional treasure. I hope so