The Tales of Beedle the Bard

What a fun little read The Tales of Beedle the Bard was! In case you live under a mushroom, this is the book of fairytales wizards tell their children in the Harry Potter universe. This book was mentioned in the final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and played a key role in helping Harry defeat Voldemort. JK Rowling had hand written and illustrated seven copies of this book about year ago, giving six away to people close to her and auctioning off the seventh for her charity, the Children's High Level Group. She has now released the book for mass consumption with all the proceeds going to the same organization. This release, however, contains annotations on each of the five stories from Albus Dumbledore himself and was translated by Hermione Granger from the original runes! What a fun idea that adds to the pure enjoyment of the book.

I, being the the ultimate Harry Potter geek that I am, sprung for the deluxe edition. Wowee! It came in a nifty box that looks like a large leather book. Inside the box on the left side is a package of collectors edition prints of the illustrations in the book. On the right side is a burgundy velvet sack with a gold drawstring and JKR's signature stitched in gold at the bottom. Inside the bag, of course, is the book.

And what a book it is! It's a small book bound in brown leather with silver adornments and blue gems in each of the four corners and on the clasp. In the middle is a large silver adornment with a skull that has the blue gems for eyes. Each of the five silver adornments has a picture on it representing each of the stories. It's quite a book to behold. It also had a green bookmark ribbon attached to the binding to you can easily mark your favorite story. (If any of you marked The Warlock's Hairy Heart you're sick and twisted.)

The book begins with an introduction in Jo's handwriting explaining that these stories are the Wizard equivalent to our Muggle fairytales, such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. She goes on to explain that magic was usually the cause of the problem in our Muggle stories, but that magic in these Wizarding stories is readily available to the characters and it doesn't make their lives any easier at all (a theme that's been carried over from the main Harry Potter books). She also tells us that Dumbledore created this annotated version about 18 months before The Lightning Struck Tower (a chapter that left me breathless and stunned) and he left these papers in his will to the Hogwarts archives.

The five stories are The Wizard and the Hopping Pot, The Fountain of Fair Fortune, The Warlock's Hairy Heart, Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump, and, of course, The Tale of the Three Brothers which played in integral role in the final Harry Potter book. I'm not going to summarize the plot of each of the stories. I want you all to read them for yourselves for the pure enjoyment of it, because they are purely enjoyable - especially with Dumbledore's notes. They all center around the same ideas as Muggle fairytales - good things happen to kind and virtuous people and bad things happen the greedy and malicious.

This is a must read for everyone who has read the Harry Potter books. And if you haven't read the Harry Potter books yet, then get off my blog and crawl back under your mushroom!