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 source of her inspiration and 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 this birthday project at the first entry in this series of post: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.

Today’s video conversation is about the fourth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Nick talks about the trip Rowling made as a teenager to Cornwall as a young woman in which some Quidditch World Cup camping may have been involved and about her core beliefs about bigotry and prejudice. John reviews Rowling’s tagging Goblet as a “crucial” and “pivotal” part of the seven book series and introduces how the ‘story turn’ in a ring composition reflects the beginning and end of the story. This involves, believe it or not, an explanation of why Harry meets with Sirius on 22 November between midnight and 1 AM, the dragons of Philosopher’s Stone, Goblet, and Deathly Hallows, and five of the twenty-five points of correspondence between the first, the fourth, and the seventh Harry Potter novels.

The three HogwartsProfessor birthday videos posted thus far in this series can be read here:

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

* A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Tomorrow? It’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Big Blue Book and alchemical Nigredo. See you then!