Harry Potter and the Castle in Transylvania

I never was a Harry Potter fan; I thought the novels were silly. Of course, I had seen some of the movies and they were okay. But,… I had seen better. I used to look at my friends who were Harry Potter fans, with sarcastic smiles; just like what could’ve been on the faces of the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling.

Until now.

Last December¹, I finally became a little open-minded and decided to give the books a try. Even though I was a little too old to read them, I found them not just entertaining, they were unputdownable. I enjoyed every minute and every word of them. They somehow felt “concentrated” than most of the other books I’ve read. No boring descriptions about the environment, no unnecessary elaborations on characters (Moby-Dick, I’m looking at you), and everything was just right.

However, things started to get a bit quirky with what I did next.

I started reading the classic novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker. I don’t need to tell you what Dracula is. (The actual history of Dracula is a different story though.) There is a zillion pieces of literature written around Dracula and vampires. Movies, cartoons, animations, even decorations,… Dracula is a culture. I had already read Dracula numerous times, however, translated into my native language (Sinhala). So, I wanted to read the original, because, there is always some loss in the translation and I wanted to find out what I would feel reading the original.

Immediately, I could judge the quality of the translations I read. Apart from that, I started getting déjà vus halfway through the book. And, I realized that these were not from the translations.

I started noticing strange similarities between Dracula and the Harry Potter series; especially, the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (However, as I will explain later, Harry Potter is what I call an “engineered” novel, rather than a “written” one, so other books also contain some similarities.) I will list below some of the points, and you can judge for yourself.

I also felt that some of the things that came under “Magic” has a strong connection to Computer Science and Engineering. Maybe we’ll discuss that in a decade or so. I added a few links when I couldn’t resist, though.

The Lightning Bolt Scar

Wilhelmina “Mina” Harker (nee Murray) is the main female character in the horror novel Dracula. She has a scar on her forehead where the Sacred Wafer touched when Van Helsing tried to guard her using a religious spell of some sort.

As he [Van Helsing] had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh …

… “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day.”

Harry Potter also has a lightning bolt scar on his forehead which stands for the thunderbolt port, just kidding, which happened when Dracula cast “Avada Kedavra” (“I will destroy as I speak.”) and couldn’t kill baby Harry.

Bound by Blood

A little while before Mina got the scar, Dracula drank her blood — of course, this is how vampires reproduce. But Dracula also did something else here.

[Dracula] he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. … seized my [Mina] neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the---- …

Gross. Now, please don’t think too much.

Anyway, Harry Potter and you-know-who also share a connection like this. On one side, Harry Potter has a part of you-know-who’s soul which he unknowingly gave when he killed Harry’s parents and tried to kill him. Also, you-know-who has a part of Harry Potter (hence also the protection which his mother had put upon him) because he used Harry Potter’s blood to rebirth himself into human form again at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Reading Minds

Both the affairs above have put the protagonist and antagonist in each story in a unique position: they can read each other’s minds. (Although I don’t believe this is an uncommon skill, they have added that under magic.)

Mina could look into Dracula’s mind and be able to extract some information under hypnosis by Van Helsing. Harry potter also could do this, and also was misled by you-know-who.

(This also feels like ad hoc WiFi, if you think about it. Mind reading is also almost doable using an EEG headset.)

Horcruxes

Parts of you-know-who’s soul resided on several (8) Horcruxes, the books say. You have to get rid of them all to be able to kill the dark lord.

Similarly, you couldn’t kill Dracula while he had the 50 boxes of sand from his ancestors’ graves where he used to sleep in.

(See also: Mind Uploading)

On the Way to Kill the Devil

Harry Potter and Hermione Granger use several charms and spells to protect themselves from death eaters, humans, and anyone passing by in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, such as the Muffliato charm, which muffles the voice from inside the protected area.

(See also: Active Noise Cancellation, Sound Masking)

Similarly, van Helsing used to draw circles and protect them with some Holy Circle of sorts.

… for the wheeling figures of mist and snow came closer, but keeping ever without the Holy circle

In fact, these circles are quite common in literature. Something akin to a firewall for the magical/supernatural.

Supporters

Dracula had other fellow vampires, and some human supporters too. You-know-who’s human supporters were called “Death-Eaters”, mmm, yum. He also had support from dementors, which I think is similar to the fellow vampires Dracula had. This similarity is not very clear, as every villain has supporters. The thought occurs to me that J.K. Rowling probably just had some political party in mind when writing about the death eaters. I definitely could think about one.

Baby Names, Anyone?

One of the most important similarities is, how the protagonists would name their children. And this comes at the end of either story.

Harry Potter’s children are named James Sirius Potter, Lily Luna Potter, and Albus Severus Potter after Harry’s fallen friends/mentors. Similarly in Dracula,

… our [Jonathan + Mina] boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey.

London Calling

Dracula wanted to come to London, to go mainstream. That’s what the whole Carfax + Piccadilly, etc. business were about. Most of Harry Potter takes place in Britain as well. Both authors have lived in Britain and Bram Stoker was Irish by birth.

I should also mention that a quick search revealed that the book “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” won “The [now discontinued] Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers” in 1999.

Conclusion

Jo conceived the idea of Harry Potter in 1990 while sitting on a delayed train from Manchester to London King’s Cross. Over the next five years, she began to map out all seven books of the series. She wrote mostly in longhand and gradually built up a mass of notes, many of which were scribbled on odd scraps of paper. — from jkrowling.com

I’m pretty sure she was reading Dracula on that delayed train. Just kidding. What I wanted to say is that it looks like the Harry Potter series has had some influence from the Gothic horror novel, Dracula.

A quick search would reveal more similarities the Harry Potter series has with other books. LotR’s Nazgul vs. HP’s Dementors, The Dark Lord, Gandalf vs. Dumbledore, Smeagol/Dobby both referring to themselves in the third person, the Ring having a negative influence like the Horcrux on the wearer. And then Star Wars, etc. You can see them here. Also, the series borrows a lot from common folklore like dragons, magic, spells, potions, castles, werewolves, etc. But that is to strengthen the existence of magic. Most, if not all cases filed against J. K. Rowling for plagiarism were dismissed by the courts.

So I’m not in any way, suggesting that she plagiarized any content. I’m just trying to show you the similarities. This could purely be a coincidence. For example, when I first thought about this article, I tried to find related literature. I got to know about “The Worst Witch”, “Lord of the Rings”, “Star Wars”, etc. but I didn’t see even one article connecting Dracula and Harry Potter. However, now that I wanted to finalize it after a few years, I’m seeing several articles on that written around the same time that I had the idea. One of the articles even has organized the content in a similar order to what I have here. I swear I didn’t copy them, but would you believe it? Fortunately for me, I have tweeted about the idea in January 2020 so I have proof that I got their first. (I’m not that popular so I don’t think anyone used my idea to write an article either.) Dracula was written in 1897, so J. K. Rowling can’t have that kind of proof.

Anyway, adapting, or using an idea is not necessarily a wrong thing. I don’t even believe in absolute good or bad, but that’s a different story. The first wheel was a milestone in transportation. The improved wheels paved the way for better, and more comfortable transportation. The gist here is, Harry Potter is very thoughtfully constructed, And we’re thankful for that. On another note, we live in a world, or should I say, at least, I live in a country where there are advertisements in newspapers offering to write other people’s Ph.D. theses for money and professors who copy other people’s work verbatim to profit. What did I/you expect?

P.S.

I believe there are several ways to write a novel.

One is to start writing from the beginning and take the novel wherever the author’s mind takes them. I’m aware at least some tv series are produced this way. They never end. It’s easier to write linear stories this way. Otherwise, it’s easier to mess things up and create plot holes. This is mere “writing”.

Another way is to have a plot/plan and fill in the gaps. This could work better but some things may not fit when all the details come in. This is an advanced form of writing.

Well, another way apparently, is to read a helluva lot (wink) of books and combine them into one. This isn’t easier than any of the other ways above and takes careful planning. But this way, your book will have the best of all worlds, and the book would probably be a hit. I will call this “engineering” because I couldn’t find a better word that fits.

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If you don’t understand the title, Transylvania is where Dracula lived.

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Advice from Dracula: Open-mindedness might not be what you think you have right now. It took me so long to digest but, as Van Helsing puts it, (he believed in vampires) we have to admit that there are unexplainable phenomena.

P.P.S.

I checked my timeline again and realized that I might have noticed the similarities before reading the original Dracula, and I read the book just to confirm what I noticed.

References

• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Harry Potter Wiki
• Other openly available sources
• Cover photo by Montse Esca on Unsplash

Footnotes

1. All the mentioned dates are relative to the date I started writing this article, which is around May 2020. ↩