Hopping Pot is a postscript to Harry Potter but the magic is there, in Aesop dosesThe story behind the story is that The Tales of Beedle the Bard is left to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore “in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive”. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Granger feels slighted by this gift of fairy tales, a small, frayed book with titles in runes and binding stained and peeling, while Ron Weasley gets the Deluminator and Harry Potter receives the Golden Snitch. Surely, Dumbledore could have trusted her intelligence with something more important. He did, fairy tales require much more than common sense to be understood, and appreciated. Perhaps that is why J.K. Rowling ends the Harry Potter series with a slim volume of stories for wizard children: there are certain lessons that you simply can’t learn well enough. The five tales in the book are straightforward in their values: goodness is rewarded and wickedness is punished. While “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” is about a wizard who did not want to use his magic to help his neighbours till his cooking pot forces him to, “The Fountain of Fair Fortune” tells us about Asha, Altheda and Amata who unwittingly labour their way to a fountain that possesses no magical qualities. More than the stories themselves, the real treasure of the book is “Dumbledore’s personal notes” for every story. With his characteristic insight and humour, he recounts the origin of each story, the history of the wizarding kind and how the Tales have survived several attempts to be destroyed or rewritten by Beatrix Bloxam in Toadstool Tales, a series of children’s books “banned in the wizarding world because they have been found to cause nausea, sometimes to the point of actual vomiting”. With every fairy tale, Rowling follows a pattern similar to the one she adopted for the Harry Potter series, of descending into darker themes. While the first two tales concentrate on kindness and empathy, the remaining three are dark in essence and rather complex. The grimmest of the lot is “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart”: about a warlock who imprisons his heart so as not to be affected by love and compassion while he attains power. On the insistence of his fiancée, he reunites his body and heart. Having grown beastly from the years of imprisonment and disuse, the heart feels the urge to kill the woman rather than revel in her beauty and love. The book ends with the “Tale of the Three Brothers”, already mentioned in Book Seven as it introduces the idea of the deathly hallows. Dumbledore’s last note is poignant as he recalls his own foolish ambition to be unvanquished by Death, a lesson he learnt too late.The reader’s major gripe will be directed towards the publishers, who have not only been frugal with the illustrations but have also unrealistically priced the 107-page, triple-spaced book at Rs 599. Perhaps the publishers wanted to reiterate the fact that some of life’s most important lessons come for a price.
