The Tales of Beedle the Bard Blog

The Tales of Beedle the Bard was a new experience for someone who spent so much time in the Wizarding world. Well, I spent a lot of time there in my mind. The stories add another layer to the already flavorful universe. For me, the stories represented something most of us can relate to. It parallels the stories that we went to bed with as children, and I wouldn’t change that warm feeling for anything.

            Rowling starts us off in a father / son relationship that literally takes on a mind of its own. The pot that the father leaves his son reflects the people who come in contact with him. The best part of the story for me wasn’t the actual story, but the commentary from Dumbledore. He uses his wide wisdom to explain in detail that children will be children. It’s common Dumbledore, but it is the heartwarming way he describes it that makes me miss the man even more. Skipping through we find the story of “Babbity Rabbity and Her Cackling Stump”.  Babbity is a complex character that we see in many stories from our childhood. Dumbledore puts it best when he says it is the most “real” of all the tales. We learn of Lisette de Lapin from this, and again we are immersed in fiction inside of fiction. It is extremely complex for Rowling to be able to keep these stories concurrent with the actual books. That is what brings me to my favorite of the stories, and one we have seen before in the main series. “The Tale of the Three Brothers” was one of my favorite tales without it being in this book. When I first read it in Deathly Hallows, I was amazed at how well it was tied to the plot of Harry Potter. What struck me about the story after I had read it a couple time was the complexity with which death presents itself to us. Even in the Wizarding world, we see death adapting to its prey. The sheer chill from knowing that the only way to keep from death pervading into your life is to hide, leaves an ominous feeling in the readers mind. I can only see this being a children’s story in the Wizarding world, though. I can’t see this going over very well in the muggle world.

            The stories that Rowling created in The Tales of Beedle the Bard leave readers with more Harry Potter and more complex layering of the Wizarding world plot. I always look forward to extensions of the series, and to reading Harry Potter to my children as their bedtime stories.