Rare Harry Potter manuscript pages go on display at Wigtown
Two framed pages in a bookshop in a town of about a thousand people. That is the whole exhibit, and it is enough to draw readers across Scotland to Galloway.
Original handwritten manuscripts by Harry Potter author JK Rowling are going on display as part of a book festival in the south of Scotland. The two pages contain The Ballad of Nearly Headless Nick, a piece originally written as part of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets but edited out before publication. They will be shown at the Wigtown festival, which runs from 24 September to 3 October, at ReadingLasses bookshop.
The manuscripts were donated by Rowling to the Scottish Language Dictionaries in 2005 to help fund a new Scottish language dictionary.
The cut that made the ballad valuable
The Ballad of Nearly Headless Nick is the ghost's own account of his botched execution, forty-five strokes of a blunt axe leaving his head attached by a flap of skin. It explains, in verse, why he is barred from the Headless Hunt.
Rowling wrote it for Chamber of Secrets and then took it out. That is a normal editorial decision and a slightly painful one: the ballad is good, it tells you something about the character, and it stops the plot dead for a page and a half. Books get better when writers cut material they like.
What makes the pages collectable is precisely that they were removed. A published passage exists in millions of copies. A cut passage in the author's own handwriting exists once.
Why a dictionary needed the money
The destination of the donation is the part of the story most reports skip past. Scottish Language Dictionaries, now known as Dictionaries of the Scots Language, is the body responsible for recording Scots, the Germanic language spoken across the Lowlands and Northern Isles and closely related to English without being a dialect of it.
Lexicography is slow, expensive and almost entirely invisible. Compiling a dictionary means reading centuries of texts, tracing every sense of every word to a dated citation, and paying editors to do it for years. It attracts very little commercial funding, because a completed dictionary sells modestly and takes a decade to produce.
Scots has the additional problem of being caught between categories. It is not a foreign language to English speakers, which makes it hard to argue for as an endangered tongue. It is not standard English either, which means generations of children were told their own speech was simply wrong. A dictionary is the instrument that settles that argument. Once a word has a citation and a date, it stops being a mistake and starts being vocabulary.
What Rowling actually gave
The donation works on two levels. There is the money the pages raised, which was real and useful. There is also the transfer of attention, which was worth more. A body cataloguing Scots words cannot buy the kind of coverage that two pages of Harry Potter manuscript generate for nothing.
The Scots language also runs through the books themselves, quietly. Hogwarts stands somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. The Hogwarts Express leaves from a Scottish glen. Rowling wrote much of the first book in Edinburgh. The series is Scottish in setting and in furniture, if not in speech, which is part of why the country's literary institutions have always claimed it.
A festival built on nothing but books
Wigtown is Scotland's National Book Town. It has a population of roughly a thousand and something close to a dozen bookshops, an economy rebuilt deliberately around the trade after the closure of its creamery and distillery in the 1980s. The Wigtown Book Festival is the annual peak of that experiment, ten days of readings, talks and events in a town most Scots have to look up on a map.
Putting the Rowling pages in ReadingLasses rather than a museum is entirely in keeping with that. It is a working bookshop, not a vitrine. Visitors come for the manuscript and leave with three paperbacks, which is the whole economic model of the place.
Manuscripts, translation and the words that will not move
There is a nice irony in a Harry Potter manuscript funding a dictionary. The Potter books have been translated into more than eighty languages, and translators have wrestled with every invented name, spell and pun in them. Literary translation of that kind runs into the same wall lexicographers do: some words carry a history that does not travel.
Ask any translator what to do with a Scots word that has no English equivalent, let alone a Japanese one. The honest answer is that you lose something, and the dictionary is where the lost thing is kept.
Readers who want to argue about which passages should have survived the edit will find no shortage of opinions in reading groups and lists of book club books. The ballad has more defenders now than it did in 1998, when Rowling and her editor decided the book moved better without it. Cut from a novel, framed on a wall, sold for a dictionary. Not a bad afterlife for forty-five strokes of a blunt axe.