Harry Potter’s last battle with Lord Voldemort is no mere summer blockbuster. The movie marks the end of an odyssey that began in June 1997, when English publisher Bloomsbury printed 500 copies of a debut fantasy novel by an unknown author called J K Rowling. For the last 14 years, Rowling has kept millions of his fans under Imperio — a curse the dons at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry taught their pupils to bring someone completely under the caster’s command — prompting them to line up at midnight to buy books and movie tickets. Much before the curtain fell, the young wizard had scored a decisive victory where it counted — at the box office, on the bestseller lists and in the crowded arena of fantasy driven popular culture.
The spectacle of heartless outsiders murdering a beloved character in the final episode has driven Potter’s audience to tears. That such a bloody saga of violence should cast its spell on young minds might surprise some. But as US Supreme Court Justice Antonia Scalia has noted, children’s stories have been steeped in violence. A study of 200 nursery rhymes by literary critic Geoffrey Handley-Taylor found eight references to murder, three drownings, nine cases of missing children and a decapitation. Explaining the seeming incongruity, pioneering child psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, in defence of the ghastly fairy tales in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, argues that it makes children learn to cope with their own fears when they confront horrors at arm’s length. What endears Harry to his fans is not the violence in the world of wizardry. It is his search for identity after he discovers, at the age of 11, that he is not normal by muggle standards. In the process, he discovers that the muggle values — happiness, peace, and fraternity — are universal in their application.