Isn’t it required by law to indicate that an abridged book is to be designated as such? Several of my Harry Potter books were gifts, but such as I bought and paid a good price for.

Thursday, November 29, 2001

Isn’t it required by law to indicate that an abridged book is to be designated as such? Several of my Harry Potter books were gifts, but such as I bought and paid a good price for. And I’m free to tell you that discovering that my Potter books have been abridged has me, if not hopping mad, at least leaning in that direction.

I’d read all four of them once and a couple of the first ones twice when the announcement was made that the movie was to be shown in Albert Lea. I’m hoping to see it before Christmas. In the meantime it seemed a good idea to re-read the entire four. Well, maybe not such a good idea. As usual I’m a bit behind in everything and once I start a good book I can’t lay it down.

As I recall I started reading the books on the Thursday before Thanksgiving and was just coming in on the home stretch, Book Four, when the article about the St. Cloud Clergy denouncing Harry Potter as satanic appeared in The Tribune.

That was when I made the horrible discovery of how much had been left out of my books. I’ve only read them twice or three times, of course, but I have no recollection of anyone teaching or being taught profanity in one single one of the books. Blaspheme God? The entire theme of the saga is the constant warfare of the good and innocent against the powers of darkness and evil. Is that blasphemy?

I don’t know what butterbeer is. If it is an alcoholic drink the only character in the book it seemed to affect was a house elf named Winky. Moreover this book was written in the British Isles. There, as well as in the rest of Europe, and for that matter even in this country, alcoholic beverages are often served on the family table and children grow up drinking them.

In Puritan New England even unweaned babies were given a bit of the creature, probably to keep them from freezing to death. One hesitates to say that the high rate of infant mortality may not have been due to this misguided intent.

I know that the fundamentalist Christians were mocked in &uot;The Pickwick Papers&uot; and &uot;Martin Chuzzlewit&uot;, not to mention a number of other Dickens’ novels, but I suppose it’s a little too late to do anything about that now.

I’m a little puzzled, too, that the St. Cloud area ministers have to watch a documentary videotape about Harry Potter. Now that I no longer work full time at The Tribune I am not acquainted with most of the ministers in our area. But back when I was editing the church page I knew most of them. We may not have always seen eye to eye theologically speaking, but with one or two exceptions I never met a single one of them that couldn’t have read a Harry Potter book and figured it out for himself.

Other bits left out of my books were human sacrifice, the possession of demon spirits and the sucking of human blood. I tend to resent the omission. As I say I paid just as much for my books as I’m sure the denouncing clergy — such as purchased the book — paid for theirs. And their books obviously contained a lot of good stuff missing from mine.

I must express gratitude to the St. Cloud Clergy for having brought this to my attention. I also commend them for finding the time to pay attention to this threat to the minds of innocent children. With the hungry to feed, the sick to heal, the homeless to help and molested children, battered wives, and the bereaved to comfort, it must have been difficult to find the time.

Twice this past week I have been startled by young adults, young enough to be my grandchildren, expressing their contempt for fantasy.

Had I been blessed with children, I would have taken a page from the book of Lewis Carroll’s White Queen and encouraged them to imagine at least six impossible things before breakfast.

I can think of no work of art, or for that matter no invention of importance, that was not rooted in at least a touch of fantasy. Fantasy is the net we cast to catch the shining magnificence of unseen treasure.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.