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(RFF: Maxa ping)

Harry Potter is about as nefarious as The Three Little Pigs. At its core, it's essentially the same story. Overpowering forces exist; be prepared, be smart, do right, and you can win out in the end.

The author of Potter got a lot of inspiration on a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland she said in a recent interview.

Coincidentally, Rudy Maxa, travel writer who has a PBS travel show, just aired his trip to Edinburgh in my market last week. Old Edinburgh legends and folklore would point a very imaginative writer toward a Harry Potter character. Hulking dreary ancient buildings there could easily be imagined as a school for wizards. There's even an "Apprentice Column" in a church in Edinburgh, a much better column than others in the church created by an apprentice whose work so angered the jealous master sculptor that he tried to kill the apprentice.

Though Maxa said nothing about the similiarity to the Potter books, the seeds are all there for anyone to see. I guess that good Christians should never visit Edinburgh, Scotland, the last outpost on the road to hell.

For convenience sake, I offer Harold Bloom's commentary on Potter. It mirrors my own 100%. Yes, yes, I know. I'm a curmudgeon, a party pooper, and likely a mugwup. Can't be helped. It's in my DNA.

From Dumbing down American readers By Harold Bloom, 9/24/2003:
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."