Goblet of Fire: Page 725
Phonetics of fictional accents, the importance of the salt content of the lake, Hogwarts' underwater transit system, and a surprisingly poignant moment for Hermione.
Good Morning! Having recovered from Brady vs. Stafford and Allen vs. Mahomes, we now turn to an even greater spectacle: a surprisingly ordinary page of Goblet of Fire. There are a lot of emotions hidden just below the surface, and also a lot of strange details that can be explored in great detail. Enjoy!
Page 725 of Goblet of Fire might be — I hesitate to describe it this way, but it may be true — the first page we’ve covered in this newsletter that’s really not exciting. The trio is outside Hogwarts as everyone leaves; the entire page is basically just Fleur and Krum saying their goodbyes.
Still, though, as always, we can find things that are interesting. There’s always some detail or other to explore. So let’s dive in.
Fictional Accents
“Good-bye, ‘Arry,” Fleur says as she’s leaving. “It ‘az been a pleasure meeting you!”
Is this an accurate written portrayal of a French accent? Sort of, right? What Rowling is doing is basically splitting the difference, finding a balance between pronunciation and proper spelling. If she wrote out every word into phonetic French-accented English, it might look like this:
“Geud beh, ‘Arry, eet ‘az been a pleasurgh mitting yeu!”
But obviously, that’s not sustainable; you can barely read it. But it would also be strange if Fleur’s dialogue was written without any alterations, because we know she has a thick French accent. So what Rowling is doing is making the easy, obvious changes, while leaving the more complicated ones untouched. She’s trusting that the changes she makes will be enough to let readers imagine Fleur’s French accent in their heads, but not so much that it becomes unreadable. Well, either that or Fleur’s accent just isn’t that thick, but I think the first possibility is clearly the true one.
There could be a whole debate here about, like, the philosophy of text, but that’s beyond the scope of this newsletter. There’s also an even more complicated possibility that I don’t even want to consider. Obviously, J.K. Rowling is British, while lots of readers are American. The series is written from the perspective of someone who thinks in a British accent, so maybe Fleur’s French-accented English, as written, is how a person with a British accent would write out the pronunciations of a person with a French accent. The default speech pattern for the series is a British accent; with that base, maybe a French accent is written differently. I said we weren’t going to have this conversation, but it’s quickly spiraling out of control, so let’s cut it off right now. Especially since there’s more accented text almost immediately.
Krum is next to leave. “D’you reckon they can steer that ship without Karkaroff?” Ron asks. Then Krum speaks from behind them.
“Karkaroff did not steer,” he says. “He stayed in his cabin and let us do the vork.”
Krum’s accent is, if possible, even more interesting than Fleur’s. He’s an 18-year-old kid who has spent his entire life (we assume) living in or around Bulgaria, so he’s definitely going to have a pretty thick accent. I don’t actually know what a Bulgarian accent sounds like — the country borders Greece, Turkey, Romania, Serbia, and North Macedonia, so who can tell, really; Krum might also go to school in a different part of Eastern Europe, since we don’t know where Durmstrang is, so that might complicate his accent further — but I do know that it’s pretty significantly different from a typical English one. And yet, pretty much the only changes Rowling makes to Krum’s speech are changing w’s to v’s.
Part of this might come down to the fact that a fair amount of Krum’s Eastern European accent is expressed through inflection or individual letter pronunciations rather than syllabic changes. When he says “Karkaroff,” for instance, Krum might roll the r’s, and really bite into the “off” at the end. “Not” might be more like “nöt.” But there’s no real way to write that out without getting into the whole universe of phonetic symbols, which is just overkill. When I pasted “Karkaroff did not steer” into a phonetic text generator, for instance, here’s what it spit out: “Karkaroff dɪd nɒt stɪə.” No one who’s reading this has any idea what that means, and clearly Rowling can’t write all of Krum’s dialogue with these letters. This isn’t even Bulgarian phonetics; this is English phonetics. Throw in Bulgarian inflections, and who knows what the words will look like?
So, we’ve the philosophical question I promised we wouldn’t have: is it enough to simply tell readers that a character has an accent? If a character is French, is it okay to leave it up to the readers to imagine the accent in their heads, or does the author have to put work in to give characters accents? The way I see it, there are three options, which I sort of laid out above:
1) Write dialogue normally without making any phonetic changes; tell the readers what kind of accent the character has, then leave it up to them to imagine the sounds.
2) Make some changes to the character’s speech, just enough to give the reader a sense of what the accent sounds like, but leave enough words unchanged that the text is still easy to read while also containing a hint of accent.
3) This one isn’t really an option, but if you really want to, you can write out every word in the character’s voice exactly as they would say it (Rowling sort of does this for Hagrid, but still not quite, I don’t think).
Overall, Rowling is at about a 1.75 on this scale: she makes a few changes to characters’ voices, definitely fewer than are possible, and emphasizes explanations of what each character sounds like. You see that when Krum is talking: even though she doesn’t alter his actual pronunciation that much, she does mention that he’s talking in “a gruff voice,” so that you’re already thinking of his sharp, Bulgarian pronunciation.
The Durmstrang Ship
Karkaroff, Krum said, did not steer the ship; he stayed in his cabin and let the students do the work. But what exactly does “the work” mean? What’s going on on the Durmstrang ship?
From what we see in the book, a few things are true of the ship:
When it arrives, it comes up out of the lake; when it leaves, it sinks back down into the lake.
The Durmstrang students who come to Hogwarts live on it for the duration of the school year.
One assumption I think we can make is that the ship is probably a lot nicer on the inside than it looks on the outside. It’s sort of like the Perkins’ tent of ships. On the outside, it looks like an old pirate ship, but I would imagine that the inside is more like a dark-side Hogwarts. It’s a ship for wizards, after all, and they’re not going to spend a year living on a rotting boat. The ship also must be waterproofed and sealed. That’s just basic nautical awareness.
Here’s a bizarrely specific question that’s actually extremely important. Is the Hogwarts lake an ordinary lake — an enclosed, isolated body of fresh water — or is it a saltwater loch? In the books, it’s portrayed as the former. In the movies, it also looks like the former, but we can’t rule out that there’s a channel connecting it to the North Sea or the Irish Sea (which side of the British mainland is Hogwarts on, anyway?).
Why is this important? If it’s an enclosed lake, then obviously there’s no passage out to the ocean, which means that the Durmstrang ship must make a magical jump from the lake to the open sea. If it’s a saltwater loch, on the other hand, then the ship can just sail like an ordinary submarine. Both possibilities are intriguing.
First off, if it’s an enclosed lake, then the ship is doing what amounts to apparition. We’ve gotten interesting new context on apparition from the Fantastic Beasts series: basically, Rowling confirmed that distance is a factor, and you can’t just apparate, for instance, from England to Bulgaria. But I would imagine there’s technology that can make those longer-distance jumps possible at greater scale — a ship, for instance. Especially with the institutional backing of a large school and presumably the wizarding government of Bulgaria, it’s not outlandish to imagine the Durmstrang ship jumping from under the Hogwarts lake to out in the open sea. It there’s a passage out to the ocean, on the other hand, then the ship can just sail through it.
But either way, there’s one glaring question: why does it have to go underwater at all? If it’s sailing like an ordinary ship (in the saltwater loch scenario), it can just sail. You might argue that it makes the journey underwater in order to avoid detection, but A) it’s just a boat, so there’s not really anything to detect; it’s not like it’s a flying boat, and B) even if it somehow stands out and will be spotted by muggles, it can’t be that hard to disguise. The entirety of Hogwarts is disguised as a ruin to muggles; surely Bulgarian officials could disguise the Durmstrang ship as a small muggle cruise ship so that it wouldn’t attract undue attention on the journey, or just make it invisible?
I bring this up because of a simple fact: on balance, it’s better to travel above the water than below it. So why does the ship take the submarine route when it can just be a ship?
One very exciting possibility is that somewhere beneath the lake, there’s some sort of magical marine transportation hub. Just imagine it: you go down into the lake, and there are giant underwater ship tunnels, one to the Irish Sea, one to the North Sea, maybe one straight to the Atlantic, one down towards the English Channel, one towards the Thames, near the Ministry of Magic. What an incredible addition to canon this would be, especially for the Fantastic Beasts series: Newt takes the gang into an underwater bubble on the back of some nautical beast, and they go from the English Channel or the Thames through a tunnel, and burst out into the Hogwarts Lake right in the nick of time.
Another thing we really don’t know about the Durmstrang ship is what the overall quality of life is like, both while the ship is docked and while it’s traveling. I think I can sum up this question in a few words: is the ship leaky? That’s basically a proxy for the level of magical attention dedicated to solving the problems that most muggle boats face. When the ship is underwater, are the pressure changes that pop your ears magically removed? Do they have a system for storing and preparing food so that they’re not reduced to hardtack, rainwater, and fish? Or is it just like traveling on an old-fashioned muggle pirate ship, with all the unpleasantness that entails?
The Taylor Swift Moment
Krum takes Hermione off for a private conversation. Looking back, it’s not too difficult to tell what’s going on here, and it’s explicitly revealed two books later when Ginny and Ron are shouting at each other about snogging. But once you know what’s happening, it seems like Rowling is going out of her way to emphasize how clueless Harry and Ron are. Ron spends the next few minutes “craning his neck over the crowd to try and see what Krum and Hermione might be up to.” They return soon; Ron stares at Hermione, but her face remains impassive.
This is a surprisingly poignant moment to read in hindsight. Just imagine the emotions Hermione is feeling. She and her strange, mysterious, first boyfriend have just said what must have been a very passionate goodbye, and now they’re parting for what for all they know could be forever. Harry and Ron are clueless, so they don’t notice the emotional roller coaster going on — perfect time to mention “the emotional range of a teaspoon” moment — but when you think about it, we really don’t see moments like this for any other character in the series.
All of the trio’s other relationships either fall apart naturally and sometimes comedically (Cho, Lavender, McLaggen) or succeed (Ginny, Ron/Hermione). So there’s never really a crushing breakup. The trio never has a Taylor Swift moment, where one of them gets dumped and falls apart for a few days and gets hooked on Celestina Warbeck, or whatever the Wizarding version might look like. That never happens — except for maybe this moment right here. Hermione and Krum have been together for more than six months, which is a solid amount of time for high school kids, and now they don’t know whether they’ll ever see each other again. Hermione keeps herself composed on the journey home, but the next few days after that? She might be a wreck, and honestly, it would be perfectly understandable. In fact, we may see part of this at the end of this very page. When Ron finally overcomes his jealousy and asks for Krum’s autograph, we get this interesting description:
Hermione turned away, smiling at the horseless carriages that…
The gist of it is that Hermione is smiling because she’s amused at what Ron is doing. But what if the reality is different? What if we read that Hermione is smiling because that’s what Harry assumes, but what’s actually happening is that Hermione is turning away because the humor of the situation gives her an excuse to hide the fact that she’s devastated, or even trying not to cry? That’s partly a discussion about narrative voice — does the narrator (possibly Eldred Worple!) know what Hermione’s expression was, or do we get Harry’s version of events relayed in the third person? — but we certainly can’t rule out the possibility that her emotional state doesn’t match the happiness that the narrator assumes.
Of course, in the moment, we see absolutely none of this. Hermione and Krum go off for a second to do whatever, they come back, and life goes on as normal. Harry, Ron, and the narrator notice nothing. That’s usually the case. It’s the emotional version of “ah, of course, I haven’t told you.” Because Harry and Ron are clueless teenaged boys (especially Harry, because he really determines the narration of the story), we never experience the emotions that other characters, especially Hermione, are going through. This gets thrown into stark relief in book five — again, the famous “emotional range of a teaspoon” moment — but it’s true throughout the entire series. And because we don’t experience those emotions on first or second reading, they’re all the more interesting to explore when we finally realize they’re there.
We also see Krum dealing with his emotions in a classic teenaged male way: avoiding them by making awkward small talk with others. He comes up and says to Harry, unprompted, “I liked Diggory, he vos alvays polite to me.” Let’s face it: that’s the kind of thing you say when you just kissed a girl you may never see again and you’re desperately casting about for a new topic of conversation.
We also learn from Krum that Durmstrang’s headmaster situation is still not settled. Not to beat a dead horse here, but doesn’t that make the boat ride home a little bit of a liability issue? It’s obvious when you put it in muggle terms. Imagine a group of Eastern European high school seniors sailed to Scotland for a senior year exchange trip chaperoned by the headmaster, then the headmaster got fired before the trip ended. The school certainly wouldn’t just tell the seniors to get back on the boat and try to sail home. Come to think of it, shouldn’t Dumbledore or the Ministry intervene? They should really have an interest in preventing the kind of international incident that the loss of an entire Durmstrang class at sea would inevitably become. I wrote literally sentences ago that the seniors absolutely wouldn’t just be herded back onto their ship with no adult and cast off to sea — but somehow, that’s exactly what happens. At moments like these, sometimes Dumbledore starts to enjoy himself too much, so you get an interjection from Professor McGonagall that keeps him under control, but evidently, not this time. No one had a problem with sticking a bunch of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids (including an international Quidditch superstar) onto a ship without any adults present and just hoping they made it back.
Then again, a Hogwarts student has literally just died and Voldemort is back, so the people in charge have bigger fish to fry. They’ve got a lot on their mind — even before you get to the question of how their accents should be written out.