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.

“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.

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.

“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.”

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.