Knight2King

[pegkerr]

I may have mentioned this before, but I'm rather taken with the rather elaborately drawn Knight2King theory for the Harry Potter books. (Click here to read the first essay in the series, and then follow it up with this one which further developed the theory after the release of Order of the Phoenix.)

They sure had a lot of fun making it up, anyway. And some of the speculations and supporting evidence are surprisingly convincing.

What do you think?

Comments

[lizardlaugh.livejournal.com]

I am so glad you like it :) ixchelmala and I had a blast putting it together, though there is so much more we need to add.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

For the slightly interested passerby, just what is the theory? I'm not very involved in the HP universe.

K.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

It is quite fascinating, really. The theory is that the chess game that Harry, Ron and Hermione play near the end of the first book is a metaphorical foreshadowing of the series as a whole. And once you look at it that way, the evidence actually does seem to fit rather well. Harry is the black bishop, Sirius is the one of the black knights, Hermione is the rook, Neville is the other black bishop, and Ron is . . .

That's the most fascinating bit. Ron is one of the knights, but as Rowling tells us in OotP, "Weasley is our king." That, according to the Knight2King theorists, is a big fat clue. In the books, Dumbledore is our king, i.e., the head of our troops, directing the action. Which suggests that Dumbledore is actually Ron Weasley. The Knight2King theory posits that Ron will go back in time (probably using a timeturner) and eventually become Dumbledore.

What is so interesting about this is that so far, pretty much everything has fallen in place. "Their first real shock came when their other knight was taken. The white queen smashed him to the floor and dragged him off the board, where he lay quite still, facedown." This represents Sirius Black, who was taken down by the white queen Bellatrix LeStrange. You need to read the essays in their entirety to follow all their reasoning and evidence, but what they predict is that Harry's seven moves (three squares to the right, four to the left) represent the seven books. In the last book, they predict that Bellatrix will "take out" Ron Weasley. They point out that Rowling carefully notes that when the White Queen takes out the Black Knight (Ron) "He seemed to be knocked out. But Harry, although shaken, sticks to the game and checkmates the King (Voldemort).

I'll be very intrigued to see whether their predictions pan out. And very impressed with Rowling if she did, in fact, set the series up metaphorically so far in advance, using the chess game.