I wonder if there is a diagnosis for people who, when reading other authors, pick up on unusual words and concepts they have read before in the Harry stories. It happened to me the other day. I was reading some Lord Peter Wimsey stories written in the 1920s by Dorothy Sayers, and in one story, “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention“, I found the words “frog march”, “jiggery pokery”, and “widdershins”. The story involved body snatching and a ghostly death coach driven by a headless ghost and pulled by headless ghost horses which made no noise, which was supposedly only seen by someone about to die. A very old damp book in the library of a mansion entitled “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs” contained gruesome pictures which terrified a young boy. Another story, “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head”, involved a book called “Cosmographia“ with a picture of someone with webbed hands and feet, an elephant trunk and extra heads, and a treasure map with the notation “Hic dracones”, which means “here are dragons”. Yet another story involved a row of even numbered houses on a street called Merrimen’s End, and only one odd numbered house #13. After a constable looks in through the letter box slot of #13 and sees what he thinks is a murdered body in the hallway, he runs for a second constable, and when they return and try to find #13 again, it is totally gone, and all the other even numbered houses have completely different hallways, so they can’t figure out what happened to #13. In this case there is no magic, it turns out to have been an elaborite hoax with a painting of a murder in a hallway, which was placed so as to be seen through the letter box, and the house number was switched.
As used by Sayers, the words frog march meant to hold someone from behind by the elbows and force them to walk ahead of you. Jiggery pokery was the scheme of setting up an object as a deception aimed at gullible people inclined to believe in the supernatural. Widdershins is an old Scottish word based on the German wiedershinnes, and meant to go around the back of a church counterclockwise or against the way the sun shines on a sundial.
As used by JKR, frog march occurs in PS/SS Chapter 12 when Fred and George do it to Percy. Jiggery pokery occurs in CoS Chapter 1 when Harry said it to scare Dudley. Willy Widdershins is a peripheral character who is mentioned in OotP Chapters 22 & 27 and goes against correct behavior. The ghost coach idea suggests the driverless coaches pulled by invisible thestrals that brought the students from Hogsmeade to the castle. The library of old damp books with gruesome pictures suggests the damp spotted book Moste Potente Potions that Hermione and Harry looked through to find the instructions for making the polyjuice potion in CoS Chapter 10. The disappearing house story suggests Spinner’s End and #12 Grimauld Place, and the hallway painting is rather opposite to the idea of a painting of the tunnel in the upper room at the Hog’s Head Inn.
Nine word or idea associations in one set of stories is too much to be a coincidence. I strongly suspect JKR read Sayers and jotted down a few ideas from the Wimsey stories to use in the Harry stories.

Then she must've copied Tolkien too.

1.) A young man forced to oppose the greatest evil of his time. (Frodo/Sauron, vs Harry/Voldy)
2.) Carries an object that causes invisibilty. (Ruling ring, vs cloak)
3.) Has his life saved by an Elf. (Glorfindel, vs Dobby)
4.) Is looked after by a great sorcerer. (Gandalf, vs Dumbledore)
5.) Sees the possible future on a reflective, magical surface. (Mirror of Galadriel vs. Erised)
6.) Is pursued by hooded evil, humanoids. (Ringwraiths vs. Dementors)
7.) Nearly eaten by giant spiders. (Aragog vs. Shelob)

Etc., etc., etc...

This thread will probably get a wider range of responses over in Obscurus Books, which is our lit crit forum.

Everyone hold on while I magic this thread to its new home.

*Mobilithreadus!*

Pleione
LL Moderator

The books we read do end up influencing our writing. It's only natural. Having never attended a boarding school if I wrote a story set in one, it would most likely greatly resemble Hogwarts (without all the magic). Does this mean I'm taking from Harry Potter? Not necessarily. It does, however, mean I've been influenced by it.

I've not read Dorothy Sayer, but it's a good possibility that Rowling has if her works contain similar words, unless these words also appear in other author's texts.

Isn't Frog march an accepted term for the way Fred and George marched Percy to the dining area? (Edited because the former question didn't look quite--right.)

I looked it up:

I'm a big Sayers fan too, but I also love lots of other books by English authors and think many of these things are not unique to her. "Jiggery-pokery," for instance, I've read in various places to mean some trickery intended to fool someone. Maime has already mentioned "frog-march." "Here are dragons" used to be written on the edges of maps, when no one knew what lay beyond. Other things like giants, sorcerers, etc. are part of English folklore. The more books you read, the more you will come across them!

As linden swallow has noted, words such as 'jiggery pokery', 'widdershins' and 'frog march' are not unique to Dorothy Sayers, and the fact that they may have sounded unusual to some readers is probably because they haven't read widely in terms of works by British authors, and/or are not familiar with British English as distinct from American English. Indeed, all those words are known here in Australia too.

* The word "widdershins" means anti- or counter-clockwise, and was originally 'against' the movement of the sun. There is a tradition that it is unlucky to walk widdershins around a church, because that was against the sun, and that's what Sayers refers to in The Nine Tailors. It's also associated with left-handedness, long considered undesirable or evil / sinister (sinister actually meaning 'left'). It's funny, but "widdershins" always brings to my mind the poem "Bullocky" written in 1944 by Australian poet Judith Wright: the first verse, where the word occurs, has long stuck in my mind.

The other terms are still in general use here -
* The term "jiggery pokery" was used only last year in the Australian Senate, in reference to some alleged shady land dealings! I've also seen it used a number of times in an IT context, where people curse the 'jiggery pokery' required to get certain software or systems to work, or work together.

* "Frog march" is the most well-known, and it's common to see newspaper reports of someone being 'frogmarched" off premises, or out of a sporting stadium, etc.

Alkari

Ah, another reader of Dorothy L. Sayers!

QUOTE

I strongly suspect JKR read Sayers and jotted down a few ideas from the Wimsey stories to use in the Harry stories.

I believe you have absorbed a bit of detective instinct yourself. Apparently, Rowling does indeed read Sayers. The book case pictured on the "Links" page of her website includes two Dorothy L. Sayers books (too small to read the titles).

Other posters have already mentioned that words and phrases such as frog march, and widdershins exist in casual English, rather than being coined by Sayers. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is a very real work; first published in 1569 and in many later editions, containing vivid accounts and, as you mention, graphic illustrations of English Protestant martyrs. It both fascinated and terrified many young readers.

Thanks all for your responses.
I neglected to mention "Cosmographia" is also a real book dating from 1544 when people believed in dragons and grotesque humans with multiple heads. It occurred to me that such a belief in those days could have derived from some exaggerated 3rd or 4th hand report of a Siamese twin sighting in some distant land by some seaman. But I suppose we'll never know.

Likewise for basilisks, dragons and unicorns; if you read the earliest written descriptions of them in bestiaries, it sure sounds like somebody saw a king cobra, a crocodile and a rhinoceros, and got a little bit creative in describing them to the scribe.

You are correct that "frog march, jiggery pokery and widdershins" are virtually unknown terms in the USA. My Merriam Webster dictionary does not list the first two, and says "widdershins" first use in English was in 1513 and means "in a left handed, wrong or contrary direction."
Sayers wrote them in about 1928 or a bit later in a series of short Wimsey stories for magazines, and later they were assembled into a book. My copy was published in 1972.

I don't know if she was the originator of "frog march" and "jiggery pokery". I've read Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Dickens, Doyle, Christie and a number of other earlier British authors and never ran across them.

But the idea of a disappearing house was excellent. Sayers fooled me completely in that story. With her it was all a clever deception. So was the death coach. I recall there was a death coach in "Darby O'Gill", too.

But then Rowling takes it and says, what if the house REALLY disappeared. What if the house jumps out of the way of the bus. Excellent!

*chuckles* I am occasionally reminded of Professor Henry Higgins' pronouncement that Americans haven't spoken English for years!

In terms of unfamiliar words used by JKR, it's probably a better idea for readers to check a British online dictionary, of which the Oxford is undoubtedly the classic. After all, JKR is going to be using words in their British sense, rather than American. For the same reason, if I want to check the current usage and accepted spelling of a word in Australia, I will use our Macquarie Dictionary as my first preference.

The Online Compact Oxford's definition of "jiggery pokery" is: informal, chiefly Brit. deceitful or dishonest behaviour. And gives its origin as being probably a variant of Scots joukery-pawkery, from jouk dodge, skulk. It doesn't give any suggestion for the origin of "frogmarch". For "widdershins" it suggests that the word is chiefly Scottish, and its origins as being High German widersinnes, from wider ‘against’ + sin ‘direction’.

However, the online Compact Oxford naturally doesn't go into the level of detail which you would find in the full Oxford, which probably has further information as to the first recorded use of those terms.


Alkari

I agree with Alkari, especially about checking British dictionary rather than an American one.

Would add, though, that 'jiggery pokery' was also used for mischief in Australia. Back in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when I was doing something that I shouldn't, my grandmother would say something like "And what jiggery pokery are you up to young lady?"

Edited to add, I use the same expression to my granddaughter!!

The commonality and similarities between British and Australian English is the result of our history and the long time links to Britain rather than the USA. We actually developed our own linguistic quirks long before we took on the US influence via expanded media in the last 30 years or so.

And that is why for Aussie HP readers, especially those over 30 or so, the British language used by JKR is not at all 'strange' like it is for so many in the USA. We didn't have to have 'jumper' translated into 'sweater' for example, and it was correctly assumed that our readers wouldn't have issues with "Philosopher's Stone", so it didn't have to be changed to "Sorcerer's Stone". And yes, my Aussie "jiggery pokery" search on Google turned up various uses of it recently here, as with that Senate inquiry.

Alkari

Interesting thread: I read and enjoyed long ago, much -- if not most -- of Dorothy L. Sayers's output -- but had either forgotten, or didn't come across, the stories which lupins_protegere mentions. One rather feels that, as posters essentially observe, "the more books you read..." (on the part both of reader and writer)... a nice thing about "self-published" fiction on the Internet, of which I've done a bit, is that there tends to be more latitude there about "borrowing" / "homages", and copyright issues, than there is with "paper and ink".

Have always liked JKR's name Willy Widdershins, for one of Mundungus's fellow-low-lifes. Interesting mention by Alkari, about the word's chiefly-Scottish provenance. I have an uncle (English, though he's spent time in Scotland) who is a lifelong Robert Burns fan -- his favourite poem by the author is "Tam O'Shanter" -- he loves expounding on the bit about the witches dancing "widdershins" in the Haunted Kirk. (I mentioned the word's Potter connection to him, and his lack of interest was marvellous to behold -- well, that's life.)

Alkari -- not saying this to "Aussie-bash" in any way, am just interested and diverted... You mention the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, which I'd not heard of before. In Bill Bryson's book about Australia ("Down Under") -- (I enjoy much of Mr. B.'s writing, though he spoils a lot of it for me by his extreme self-conceit, and by a nasty malicious streak which he rather often displays), he mentions the long-ago governor of Australia, Lachlan Macquarie, and his apparent passion for getting Australian geographical features named after himself, either by forename or surmame. And the bloke has a dictionary named after him, too...!? Bryson implies that Mr. Macquarie seems to have had a touch of the Percy Weasleys... pots and kettles, Bill? ...

LOL at comment about Lachlan Macquarie. Very quick answer: he was an extremely important person in early colonial NSW, as he took over the governorship after Governor Bligh. (Yes, THAT Bligh - after the Bounty, he was involved in another mutiny and rebellion when he was governor of NSW!) And we have a Macquarie University and a Macquarie Dictionary, amongst other things, in recognition of the contribution he made as governor.

Alkari

Thanks Alkari; had forgotten about Bligh's involvement with this scene. Poor chap – his many talents and abilities, seem conspicuously not to have included people skills. One is tempted to wonder whether he had a sweet-kittens fetish and a habit of drawing people's attention with the utterance "Hem, hem"…

Rowling is certainly familiar with the works of Dorothy Sayers - quoting a 2005 interview:



We have also discussed connections to other detective stories earlier in this forum, writers like Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Lots of possible "links and hints" to those as well!

Excellent, Brymorg. I always associated Dolores Umbridge with Nazis, never made the Bligh connection. Perhaps it’s just as well she didn’t have a keel handy. “Mr. Filch, I’ll have that lying boy keelhauled, if you please.” Come to think of it, in the Grandpre illustrations she does look a little bit like Charles Laughton. ;-)
If I remember the context of Professor Henry Higgins’s argument, it was about pronunciation. “Why can’t the English speak English?” referred to Eliza’s use of words like taike, aaooww and gaaarn.
I actually appreciate the British words in the Harry stories; they help me to imagine being there. I saw no need to change the title of Philosopher’s Stone, being already familiar with the term from Chaucer in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale and Scott in Kenilworth. With OotP, Scholastic seems to have finally decided that we can be trusted to understand British English terms like mate and bloke without needing translations into pal, buddy and dude. But I see your point, Alkari, about a word like jumper, which has a very different connotation here, so a translation is probably unavoidable.
I looked up jiggery pokery in the Oxford dictionary (hard-backed library copy, a truly ponderous tome), and found that jiggery pokery dates from 1896 and meant humbug, which itself dates from 1757 and means a hoax, trickery, or to delude. Frog-march was much more interesting and dates from 1871, when it meant the method of carrying a drunken or refractory prisoner face downwards between four men, each holding a limb, i.e. like a frog. So the meaning has changed, otherwise Fred and George couldn’t have done it to Percy without the help of Harry and Ron (but then it might have been funnier).
But to return to my original premise, that authors pick up bits from other authors, I found another one yesterday which we can perhaps all smile at. In 1916 P.G. Wodehouse wrote a short story called The Clicking of Cuthbert, which was ostensibly about golf, but actually about pretentious literati. One of the characters is a minor author who is fawned over by women, and distributes signed photographs and autographed presentation copies of his books. Not enough evidence to support a theory that Rowling read Wodehouse, but perhaps that Lockhart is not the first, that there is nothing new under the sun, that perhaps Wodehouse knew such a person as well.

As I've suggested in the current Lockhart thread on "Character Analysis" – it's been an often-observed phenomenon throughout the human race's history, that some guys, often for no very discernible reason (and Lockhart, though no obvious prize, does have some appealing traits), just happen to have a "broad-spectrum" appeal to the opposite sex --which has the majority of said gender, whom they encounter, varying between feeling well-disposed to them, and swooning over them and falling at their feet. If, as often seems the case, these guys are braggarts / con-men, they are liable to exploit this effect that they have on women, to the max, to further their own agenda. I'm no great literary scholar – but would be willing to bet that this is a type in the "human zoo", which has been enshrined in comedy, as long as people have been producing literature.

Nowadays it would be taken as read, that this scenario would include these guys' getting as much as they could handle, in the sexual-favours line. On less overtly permissive scenes -- such as JKR's wizarding world, and that of our world 90-some years ago depicted by Wodehouse -- what's written about, is such gents capitalising on their appeal, to get what they want from life, short of "the above": common sense tells one that Philip Larkin's implication that sex was invented in 1963, is a poetic conceit not to be taken literally, and that regarding milieux where reticence about that particular matter, is standard, one can read between the lines as one wishes.