A Yahoo! article indicates that a legal action filed in England is claiming that J.K. Rowling copied significant portions of Goblet of Fire from a 1987 children’s book written by Adrian Jacobs, called Willy the Wizard.
It named the estate’s trustee as Paul Allen, and said that Rowling had copied “substantial parts” of “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard — No 1 Livid Land” written by Jacobs in 1987.
It added that the plot of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire copied elements of the plot of Willy the Wizard, including a wizard contest, and that the Potter series borrowed the idea of wizards traveling on trains.
“Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures,” the estate statement said.
“It is alleged that all of these are concepts first created by Adrian Jacobs in Willy the Wizard, some 10 years before J.K. Rowling first published any of the Harry Potter novels and 13 years before Goblet of Fire was published.”
According to the statement, Jacobs had sought the services of literary agent Christopher Little who later became Rowling’s agent. Jacobs died “penniless” in a London hospice in 1997, it said.
The website for the book certainly alludes to very similar language found in all the HP novels. There are Wizard Trains, Wizard Chess, “Snake Tongue Communication”, a Wizard Government, and even a Magical Map that indicates Willy’s location. However, checking many of the excerpted passages, the imagery and devices described seem very different from Rowling’s work. Again, that is only surmised by perusing the excerpts provided on the web site from Jacobs’ estate.
The web page is copyrighted 2008 and does show artwork indicating a book cover, illustrated by Nick Tidnam. Google searching the author and title didn’t yield much. A quick search through the World Catalogue shows a book authored by Jacobs and Tidnam called Livid Land, published in ‘87 by Bachman and Turner Publishers. The full title listed on the web page is Willy the Wizard, No. 1: Livid Land. World Cat indicates that 5 libraries in the world own the book, all of them in the British Isles (including Oxford and Cambridge). The book’s web page offers the book for sale, and it appears to be either self-published or publish-on-demand. I haven’t found any record concerning how many copies were published or sold.
Rowling and Bloomsbury, of course, are denying the allegations:
In its response, Bloomsbury said Rowling “had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy the Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004, almost seven years after the publication of the first book in the highly publicized Harry Potter series.
“Willy the Wizard is a very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution. The central character of Willy the Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school.”
Bloomsbury added that the claim was first made in 2004 by solicitors acting on behalf of Jacobs’ son, who was the representative of his father’s estate.
“The claim was unable to identify any text in the Harry Potter books which was said to copy Willy the Wizard.”
I came late the HP experience, but I’ve never heard a whisper of the 2004 allegations. I know HP was embroiled in some brouhaha with Nancy Stoufer several years ago regarding accusations of plagiarism. The American judge threw out Stoufer’s accusations, pointing to fraudulent testimony and documentation provided by Stoufer.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Riddikulus!
With such a low distribution rate, this really seems quite improbable. Quite the coincidence though.
Thin to an extreme. WOW, wizards travel by train, ooooohhhh, how’d she think of that?!
Ashley, I think the allegations are insinuating that the literary agent Jacobs sought out then gave the ideas over to Rowling when he became her agent.
I couldn’t help but wonder how much the language on the website was tailored to mimic HP after-the-fact. The links to excerpts clearly showed close similarities in language. But the excerpts themselves that I looked at were very different from what’s described in HP. I couldn’t look at all of them because the website was so slow.
I’m guessing the web’s ever-roving masses of the curious are crashing that site’s servers!
Dave, you could try disabling graphics in your browser then using a link via the Coral Cache:
http://www.willythewizard.com.nyud.net:8090/
I’m getting reasonable responsiveness that way.
Depending on your bias, you will either see blinding similarities, or profound differences.
I first saw yellow stars on a pinkish/purplish background, but with persistence, found this:
Willy’s father was not a blacksmith, but the angelsmith of Switzerland, and Willy remembered that as a child all angel repairs were done by his dad Billy, who had a contract with God. It gave him the exclusive monopoly on all angel defects.
One day his dad had handed him a large red book.
‘Here Willy. Angel Pretty left this for you. ‘For me, Dad?’
‘Yes, for you.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. He said not to open the clasp.’ ‘Thanks Dad.’
Willy at fourteen was a caring child, an absent-minded dreamer.
That’s how it all began because he had been given the Book of Secrets with
directions as to his initiation into Wizardry.
I don’t think so.
It’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that Rowling, who isn’t a big fan of fantasy in the first place, read and stole from Jacobs, and almost as unlikely that the agent Jacobs sought out remembered an insignificant 36-page book from over 10 years prior and passed ideas from an unsuccessful book on to Rowling to use.
This claim seems silly. I am positive, however, that Rowling took a bit of Dudley Dursley from the character Raymond Trottle in Eva Ibbotsen’s The Secret of Platform 13. Raymond is a very spoiled child and has a tantrum because his knickerbocker glory is not big enough. Yes, he does.
Eva Ibbotsen decided just to let it lie. And her book is super, in case anyone wants to read it.
I’ve been following HP news since I started reading the books in 1999, and I’ve never heard of this one. Thanks, Red Rocker, for the excerpt, as I couldn’t get to the web page either. It sounds nothing like anything out of Harry Potter.
Sounds to me like Jacobs’ son wants to make some money, and figures it’s worth a try.
There are other books out there which seem more like they could have provided Rowling with ideas for HP, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them.
We had a similar conversation back in the day here:
http://thehogshead.org/around-the-common-room-34/
The real clincher for me is the estate’s claim concerning contests and hostages in the hands of fantasy creatures:
Jacobs “created” these concepts? Hasn’t the idea of a “contest” used to demonstrate a character’s worthiness in freeing “human hostages” held by “half-human, half-fantasy” creatures been around for — oh, I don’t know — a frikkin’ millenia or two?!
It’s been about 8 months since I taught it, but I’m pretty sure that’s also a reasonable description of Dante’s descent into Hell in Inferno (which is getting a video game adaptation, BTW — go figure).
Hmmm, let’s see. There is an element of that in both Gilgamesh and Beowulf. I’m not familiar enough with ancient Greek literature to know specifically, but I’m pretty sure the trope is rather common there, too.
I tend to initially look at legal cases pretty seriously. But the more I think about this one, the more absurd it seems based purely on the claims given in the Yahoo! article.
I don’t want to be cynical, but the cynic in me is saying that the estate of Adrian Jacobs is just trying to get a settlement since Rowling has made billions. I don’t doubt that there are similarities between the stories, there are lots of similarities between many stories. There was a post a month ago here making fun of the similarities between the new Star Trek and the original Star Wars. If you have two stories about wizards it’s bound to happen.
Rowling would never write anything as poor as the excerpt Red Rocker quoted above.
I find it almost funny that all great (or “great”) books seem to have someone claiming copyright for them. Perhaps it was a coincidence, and even if it was not- she paraphrased and the original author should be happy their idea is such a hit.
The quality of the writing is an obvious difference. Now how about the plot similarities? Here’s the quote:
“Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures,” the estate statement said.
Here’s the bathroom excerpt:
Willy sat in his bath. It was here in his yellow bathroom-come-study that he did his best thinking. He lay full length; at the feet end there was a flat wall which lit up at the touch of a knob by his left hand. A switch by the right hand tap engaged by a twiddle from his big right toe motivated a slide out screen.
Relaxed he was able to study, as the green treated water toned his body with Aqua Superba, a newly developed water additive from Health Clinic in Puerto Rico. This additive only available to wizards with 5 stars had the ability to drain all superstar mind-clogging pressures and re-charge the system for endurance, excitement contests.
The screen concealed the selector mechanism. Willy had fed in the contest details that he had been given at the wizards’ conference and having adjusted the selector, every detail of the text was magnified so that he could peruse it at his leisure.
GAIN ENTRANCE TO LIVID LAND! AND RELEASE FEMALE PRISONERS FROM ANGRY SAM’S COMPOUND. FORTY POINTS AWARDED FOR EACH PRISONER RESCUED. Willy pressed the activator remote control and scanned the prize awards list. Wizards achieving more than 1000 stars would receive life membership of Stellar Land. Every wizard’s dream of retirement….
Here’s the bit on snake tongue communication:
“The Quebec communicator was a one-off invention and could not be reproduced for it was powered by a vein extracted from the tongue of the now extinct Sahara serpent snake. The vein coiled with a strip of specially treated gauze would provide Aquatera waves for visual and speaking communication.”…………they could talk, but only for about twenty seconds….
And here’s the bit on wizard chess:
Willy had been on Cloud 84 which was for Wizard Chess Players.
These were pullman-like trains made of see-through platinum, and inside the trains were chess rooms. Willie was handicapped 18. There were Wizard Chess Masters who were virtually unbeatable. Willie had made a daring move. He didn’t want to watch his opponent’s response and his mind wandered at the moment that Angel Sandy had tapped violently on the train window….
My first thought was how unlikely it is that JKR – or anyone else – would have read or remembered this awkward prose. My second thought was that yes, the ideas are similar, but details are everything. Between the Prefects’ bathroom and Willy’s yellow bathroom, between being a Parselmouth and the Quebec communicator, and between the Wizard’s Chess with the deadly pieces and the Wizard’s Chess in the see through pullman cabs there is an incredibly wide gap. It’s not just the details; it’s a matter of clear and compelling vision. One is fully realized; one is a crude cartoon sketch. One is magical, the other pedestrian.
Again: I just don’t see it.
What horrible prose! Almost incoherent at points.
Adrian Jacobs is DEAD! Get a life, losers. I’ve read the book –> Adrian’s. it’s a ridiculous book, making little sense and it’s bores people. HP and the Goblet of Fire is MUCH better. What a bunch of lies. They’re jealous of JKR. Losers.
I totally agree with you, Red Rocker and revgeorge. Rowling’s work can’t even be read as alluding to Willy the Wizard much less plagiarizing. Tolkein’s estate would have a better case (not a good or even colorable case, just a better case) if it sued over Rowling’s use of giant spiders. Better of course is a very easy standard to achieve here, since Willy’s case seems to have about zero merit.
As for Rowling’s wizard chess, it owes a lot more of its inspiration to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass than to Willy.
I agree with everyone. Clearly there’s no case. JKR planned her novels before even writing GOF. The writing is horrible and the events bear no resemblance to what JKR was writing. It’s like reading different stories because (duh!) they are.