Happy New Year

Thank you to all readers and commenters here at Sword of Gryffindor! In just two months, you’ve made this little side project of mine a lot of fun, not to mention a tad overwhelming! I certainly did not expect the amount of traffic this site has seen, though I am very grateful. Here’s a brief look at the past year in Harry Potter, and then a few things you can expect to see from Sword of Gryffindor for the New Year:

Harry Potter in 2005

2005 was a big year for Harry! We had the release of Half-Blood Prince as well as the movie adaptation of Goblet of Fire (my review). We learned all about Voldemort’s history, and we’ve been debating horcruxes since July. We suffered through the death of Dumbledore, and my guess is there are a lot of tear-stained pages near the back of Half-Blood Prince. We are all eagerly anticipating the final installment and are glad JKR is getting to work on it.

The New Year at Sword of Gryffindor

In the coming year, I plan to continue to work at getting a few posts up a week to keep the discussion going. My guess is that we’ll be seeing a bit of “down time” in the Harry Potter world due to the time it will take to release the 7th book and the 5th film, but we’ll keep plugging away here at SoG.

We’ll keep speculating about horcruxes and the various other issues in anticipation of book 7.

We’ll continue sorting through the various themes and Christian symbols employed in the novels.

We’ll continue looking at Harry in the context of other literature. I’m taking a Mythology class this coming Spring, so I’ll be delving into various mythologies that might give us more insight into these books.

We’ll try to keep an eye on the most important and interesting Harry Potter stories in the news.

I’ll be working through JK Rowling interviews and adding a category dedicated to considering the Harry Potter author herself.

And when necessary, we’ll keep up our “Defense Against the Harry Critics” classes.

I welcome suggestions for the site as well as for topics to be covered. I’m planning, as soon as the holidays are over and I have time to write again, a series on the prophecy and its surrounding issues (divination, the centaurs, fate and free will, as well as what this all could mean for book 7).

Happy New Year to all!