J.K. Rowling Reveals Harry Potter’s Actual ‘Birthplace’ – Why Fans Are Shocked
J.K. Rowling’s revelation this week that she began writing her legendary Harry Potter book series in a different location than fans had originally believed has rocked their world.
And why it’s freaked them out makes complete sense.
J.K. Rowling’s fans visit her writing haunts to feel closer to Harry
From the time the author began publishing her wizarding series in 1997, avid fans eagerly gobbled up any and every tidbit available on the author and what inspired her to write the books.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the seven-book series swept up a generation of children, and more after that, with its depiction of orphaned Harry Potter, who discovers not only that he is a wizard, but that his destiny is connected to the villainous Lord Voldemort.
Once fans learned that Rowling had supposedly written some of the series in a cafe in Edinburgh, it became a regular tourist attraction for Potter fans.
The cafe many thought Harry Potter was born in
For all these years, over twenty to be a bit more specific, the story was created that J.K. Rowling had begun writing the Harry Potter series in The Elephant House cafe in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Finally, this week on Twitter, she laid all the facts out.
After a fan tweeted Rowling along with a photo of The Elephant House, asking the author to ‘tell me the truth about this birthplace of Harry Potter,’ the 54-year-old got honest.
“I was thinking of putting a section on my website about all the alleged inspirations and birthplaces of Potter,” Rowling wrote. “I’d been writing Potter for several years before I ever set foot in this cafe, so it’s not the birthplace, but I *did* write in there so we’ll let them off!”
Fans spent their money to visit what they thought was the actual ‘Harry Potter birthplace’
Now residing in Scotland, Rowling shared with fans that the actual location where one of the greatest literary characters of all time was born . . . was above a sports supply store.
“This is the true birthplace of Harry Potter, if you define ‘birthplace’ as the spot where I put pen to paper for the first time. I was renting a room in a flat over what was then a sports shop. The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction.”
A bookstore in Portugal was another location Rowling was thought to have written the start of her series. But she said, “. . . I never visited this bookshop in Oporto. Never even knew of its existence! It’s beautiful and I wish I *had* visited it, but it has nothing to do with Hogwarts!”
A fan who’d clearly visited the Edinburgh cafe solely because of Rowling’s fame there tweeted, “Damn I spent money wrongly but I admit that The elephant house has the best brownie.”
And another fan who’d plunked money down to say she’d visited a J.K. Rowling writing site said, “Paid for an Irish coffee in the ‘birthplace’ of Harry Potter in November. Little did I know I’d been passing the true birthplace on Northcote Road for years.”
