You know, I've often wondered if the Stone was a fake all along. If you know about or read up on alchemy, Hermetics, and the Philosopher's Stone, you know that it was called "the Stone that is not a Stone." The alchemists believed every physical thing was made up of a ratio of two or three elements, depending on their particular school of alchemical thought.

Anyway, it makes for a nice little plot bunny to think that there *was* no actual Stone for Voldemort to steal, and that Dumbledore (and Flamel) had themselves a nice laugh at Voldemort's expense, playing him for a fool that whole first book.

And of course Harry had to be deceived as well; after all, D'dore already suspected that a scrap of LV was hitching a ride in Harry's noggin, and it would be a waste to have LV find out the Stone was still in existence once he was able to rifle through Harry's little mind.

Now, what exactly the Stone turns/turned out to be, I have no idea. Some of the other alchemists I've read about believed that just as animals and humans do, the elements "grew" from base ones to more advanced and/or rare ones as time went on and they came up from the center of the earth. For example, magma or lava was plentiful and pretty much useless down in the earth, and matured (for lack of a better word) to more useful minerals like silver and gold as they neared the earth's surface, and this came as a result of moving through the mysterious "stone that is not a stone."

So yeah, it could be used to good effect in a story, but I haven't made any leap in working out how.

Sounds like a good plot bunny to me.

THIS.

You've just summed up a big portion of the threads on DLP.

I never thought of that! I like the idea of Dumbledore riding a Thestral far more than a broom. Just seems waayyy cooler.

@nmb: I told you those muthafuckin Thestrals were fast! Dumbledore and Henry FTW!

 

Dumbedore should've just kept the damn stone in his pocket.

 

:gasp!: But what if he mistook it for a sherbert lemon, and swallowed it?

 

It's called the sorcerer's/philosopher's stone, not the sorcerer's/philosopher's pebble. It's bigger than a sherbert lemon.

 

Yeah, but its not called the sorcerer's stone, unless you are a retard. Its called the philosopher's stone. Its called that not just because that was the original name of the first book, but because thats what its been called throughout history. Its never been known as the sorcerer's stone until some idiotic American publisher decided to rename it, and JKR was stupid enough to allow it.

 

Just out of curiosity, was it called the Sorcerer's Stone within the text of the American version, too?

 

Yes, stupidly, it was.

 

Or we can just assume Rowling wrote this for children when she was poor and wasn't thinking one-hundred percent about world-building and internal consistency. Lets be honest with what it is. Portkeys, floos, legilimency and a great deal of the cute little things we called advanced magic were at best stray thoughts in her head. Applying all we know from interviews and the six following books is a colossal waste of time to arrive at what we already know. Why act naive about it?

It's not unlike reading a fanfiction story that takes forty bajillion years to complete and you get to the later chapters and all of a sudden the person has added a bunch of absurd shit that doesn't jive with the earlier story. They came up with really cool ideas to implement and couldn't restrain themselves when it came to policing their canon. George Lucas does it, Rowling does it and most of the people here do it.

Fault of Rowling? Yes, obviously. Not too big a deal to me anymore though.

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How dare she make money. If only a more principled, awfully imaginary poor person were there to turn down that hundred thousand dollar check while living on government assistance--all over a title that would only offend nostalgia fags who weren't alive in the 15th century. If only those same nostalgia fags knew what they believed was the philosopher's stone itself was a recent invention that doesn't come close to what it meant originally. Maybe they'd get off their fucking high horse and quit bitching about stupid shit.

Yes, wikipedia it. No, you are still a cunt.

 

Don't forget the movie. Nothing like doing two sets of takes for one scene.

Still, I understand why it was done... for the less widely read Americans. History teachers can't really be arsed to talk about imaginary stones and (the frauds who were involved with) alchemy; they concentrate more on wars, (the frauds who were involved with) political scandals, et cetera.

Hell, I'm not sure how I ever made ANY progress in history class, since it seemed like, each year, the new teacher would start all over again in medieval times... I feel like I skipped straight from serfs to the American revolution in my years as a student.

Honestly, if the average (young) child (here in the U.S.) were looking at a shelf, confronted with a choice about a book that is clearly about magic, and another that is apparently about philosophy, I know which one most would choose.

1. Was calling it Sorcerer's Stone the 'safe' move? Yeah.
2. Was it a move designed to pander to an assumed lowest common denominator? Yeah.
3. Did they think they'd get bashed for this later? Maybe.
4. Did they sell a gazillion fucking books and make stupid-huge mountains of cash? Yeah, and if I were on welfare and had a potential money machine like Potter sitting on my desk, I'd let the publisher call the book anything they thought would sell, as long as it still represented the content of the book.

If you want to really dissect it: How different is swapping "Sorcerer's" for "philosopher's" from the changing of the various characters' names between different language versions of the books? I mean, Snape (while it does sound like "snipe" and, thus, conveys a certain flavor) isn't a word anyway, so why should it matter what language it is? And yet... Rogue. Raws. Kalkaros. Plesneala...

 

We learned about the sorcerer's stone in chemistry where we spelled aluminum correctly.

 

lol

And how old were you when you took chemistry? The target age for a Harry Potter book? People like to bash on this, but I'm afraid that the majority of Americans are probably twice the age of someone the first book is aimed at by the time they hear about Alchemy in school.

If they hear about it in school. :|

 

Warlocke
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Harry Potter forum
Age: 35
Gender: Shem
Posts: 1,507

And the woosh is palpable.

 

Vague and pointless retorts aside, I'm just pointing out what the publishers pointed out (or at least believed) years ago, via their own actions. And, it's no secret that the US public school system is an internationally recognized joke.

If the average person didn't hear about the Philosopher's Stone until they took Chemistry, and the average school system doesn't teach that until high school (for example), then most commercial entities are going to look at that information and say, "Are we potentially cutting out paying customers between the ages of 'Look, I can read!' to 'Look, I have armpit hair!' by keeping the original title?"

And, guess what... most commercial entities would balk at the very suggestion that they do such a thing and potentially miss out on all of that profit.

Do a lot of kids end up reading about the history of people who believed in alchemy and their ideal of a Philosopher's Stone before such an age? Of course. I did, for example. However, most companies are going to play it safe and try to make the book as inviting to everyone as possible.

Are you seriously surprised that big businesses underestimate the intelligence and education of people, let alone children?

 

I just don't know, Warlocke. Back in my day, we learned about preformationism in 3rd grade. Great deal of application since we were little people ourselves.

 

So... Not every school district is the same, and businesses will assume the worst and shoot for the safe option more often than not.

Fascinating... :facepalm

 

I had to google that, and when the Harry Potter books were release I was their target audience, in an above standard school system, and I consistently received A's and B's in school. I could ask anyone else my age about that topic, and I would bet they hadn't ever heard about it either.

That being said, I DID know what a philosopher's stone was by the time I was 12, but everyone tends to discount personal experience as unreliable, mostly because it is.

 

It's subtle.