We’re in the home stretch of the 60th Birthday Blitz at Hogwarts Professor! On the first of the last four days of July, Nick and John return to the books at a reader’s suggestion in order to give a Lake and Shed reading of the original Newt Scamander textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Nick relays everything you need to know about the genesis of this work and John talks about Rowling’s comments to Stephen Fry in a 2022 interview about “archetypal” animals and the importance of understanding them because human beings are story-telling animals. Her discussion of the Lethifold and Niffler are especially challenging and illuminating. Enjoy!

New to the Lake and Shed Kanreki Birthday series? Here’s what we’re doing:

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the biographical source of her inspiration; the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and their birthday project at the first entry in this series of posts: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.

Tomorrow? John and Nick act on the reader suggestion that we give a Lake and Shed reading of Tales of Beedle the Bard. Nick tells the ‘Three Year Summer’ background of the Wizarding World’s Fairy Tale collection and John talks about ‘The Hairy Heart.’ Stay tuned!

Links to posts mentioned in today’s Lake and Shed conversation for further reading:

The J. K. Rowling 2022 Interview with Stephen Fry about the ‘Archetypes’ of Fantastic Beast — and Why We Love Story

* Etymology of ‘Bejesus’

* Stephen Fry’s Views on Religion

Liminal Women: Mermaids and Swan Maidens in Galbraith’s Strike Novels (Beatrice Groves)

Troubled Blood: A Jungian Reading