JKRowling Updates Site

There’s some updating going on at JKRowling.com‘s Rumors section – check it out…she answers some questions about time travel (knocking down a very popular fan theory, sorry Milly), about Nicholas Flamel, Lupin’s papers, Snape’s Crosswords, and the Creevey brothers as Quidditch players.
And the updates continue on the FAQ page with info about writing book seven, Flitwick, the Wizard cards, movie spells and more…

Update: Milly (of Hogwarts Galleries) and Helen, the main proponents of the fan theory JKR just shot down, sent us a quick response to JKR’s big – but nice – torpedo. 🙂 Here you go:

Ms. Rowling, your inventiveness knows no bounds and has opened up many exhilarating new vistas of possibility to explore for us, your fans. For that, we thank you and hope you enjoyed reading our wild speculations as much as we enjoyed making them. We are thrilled and honored that you mentioned our pet theory on your site. We may have been wrong, but it was all in the spirit of ‘if you have your wits about you, you can figure it out’. We are very much looking forward to HBP. Thank you. – Helen and Milly (aka, LizardLaugh and ixchelmala of Knight2King.net.
P.S. — while we have your ear, would you mind telling us what colour Ron’s eyes are? Thanks!

Hehe. Thanks girls!

UPDATE #2: Steve of The Harry Potter Lexicon has sent us this bit of clarification on JKR’s statement on the Wizard Cards:

The cards Jo is talking about on her web site are NOT the cards from the Trading Card game. She’s talking about the Famous Wizard cards, and yes, the Lexicon has a full list of them. The cards on this list fill in a lot of background information about the Wizarding World. As she mentioned, it is from these cards that she’s choosing the Wizard of the Month for her web site.

There are three types of Harry Potter cards available. The first is the Harry Potter Trading Card Game, which Wizards of the Coast put out a few years ago. The cards for this game contain a lot of new information, including the first names of some characters, but we still haven’t been able to determine how much input Rowling had into them, so they remain non-canon. In retrospect, I wish I’d asked my question a bit differently and found out whether these cards were also written by her. Bummer…

I have talked with Wizards of the Coast about this and all they are allowed to say is that Rowling worked with their people to assure the accuracy of the information. I have since learned from them and from the folks at Electronic Arts that companies which create Harry Potter information are forbidden by contract to claim to present “new Harry Potter information.” In other words, they can’t say that their product is canon, even if it is by our definition.

The second type of Harry Potter cards were trading cards with photos from the films. These cards offer no additional information, they’re basically souvenirs of the films, and the films definitely aren’t canon.

The third type of cards are the Famous Wizard cards, the ones Jo was talking about on her site. These cards have appeared in several forms. They are included in the candy Chocolate Frogs you can buy in the store. They also appear in the Electronic Arts video games, and it is from those games that we get the entire list of cards. You can read the entire list of cards on the Lexicon, which has the complete and detailed list of all that information, information which we now know is canon.

Thank you Steve!