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J.K. Rowling
Chapter Two - Page 3Sound and Sense
The school and the characters within it all needed names, and Rowling proved especially adept at composing them. All her life Rowling had jotted down quaint, peculiar, or odd-sounding names she had seen on street signs, maps, war memorials, gravestones, and other places. The unusual hobby paid big dividends as the young writer attempted to populate her world. She plucked the name Hogwarts from a visit to a public garden. “I thought I made up Hogwarts,” Rowling later said, “but recently a friend said, ‘Remember we saw lilies in Kew gardens.’ Apparently there are lilies there called Hogwarts. I’d forgotten!”
Although Rowling has claimed to have “a slight blind spot about poetry,” she composed the names of her characters and places in her novels with a poet’s sensitivity to sound and meaning. She later told an interviewer how she came up with the name of a prominent wizard who is the author of many books:
Rowling sometimes used the root meanings of words to enrich her characters’ names. For example, Dumbledore, the name of the headmaster at Hogwarts, is the Old English word for bumblebee. Rowling felt the word “seemed to suit the headmaster, because one of his passions is music and I imagined him walking around humming to himself.”Gilderoy Lockhart is a good example. I knew his name had to have an impressive ring to it. I was looking through the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable—a great source for names—and came across Gilderoy, a handsome Scottish Highwayman. Exactly what I wanted. And then I found Lockhart on a war memorial to the First World War. The two together said everything I wanted about the character.
Copyright © 2008 by Bradley Steffens
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