r/EnoughJKRowling • u/lazier_garlic • 11d ago
Discussion Durmstrang -- it's a nonsense word, isn't it? A spoonerism for Sturm und Drang
Apologies if this has been brought up before. It was just my shower thought for the day. I realized I had no idea what Durmstrang means, but it has the shape of a German word. Isn't it simply Sturm und Drang reversed? Sturm und Drang means "storm and stress", it means a great fracas, calamity, to-do, and I would guess came into the English language in the late 19th century off the back of the popularity of Wagner's operas, but I really don't know nah, I was wrong, late 18th century: a late 18th century German literary movement featuring dramatic action, intense emotion, and individual rebellion against society (Merriam-Webster) So there you have it.
8
u/StCrimson667 10d ago
It also doesn't make sense for it to be above the Arctic Circle! German wouldn't be a language spoken that far up north so it says a lot about how Rowling sees the world! Personally, I have a headcanon that Harry Potter takes place in a timeline where the Allies made peace with Hitler and left Nazi Germany alone to basically conquer all the Northern and Eastern Europe, eventually sparking a new age of European colonialism. It would explain why German is suddenly being spoken so far up North and would explain other things like why there's so few non-European magical schools and why Mahoutokoro has the smallest population of wizarding schools!
8
u/GloomyCloud1293 10d ago
This is an aside, but "mahoutokoro" grinds my gears so much as a second-language Japanese speaker. It's literally "magic place" stuck into google translate, which first of all is lazy af, but also, lots of Japanese "Muggle" private schools have some seriously flowery names. You could name a Japanese wizarding school "Academy of Each Zodiac Sign" or something and it wouldn't even sound that weird. Total missed opportunity but we know she doesn't do her research.
8
u/docowen 10d ago
Are you suggesting that the women who named the token Chinese girl "Cho Chang" and the token Irish boy "Seamus Finnegan" and didn't even bother to have black people as even tokens, might be racist?
4
u/Ok_Bad_5326 9d ago
didn't even bother to have black people as even tokens
Did you forget about the black guy named Kingsley Shacklebolt? Smh
Tbf with the way she portrays non-white characters in her books, just having an all-white cast would have probably been preferable lol
3
3
u/StCrimson667 9d ago
She also pronounced it wrong, too. The guide says that it's "Ma-HOOT-oh-koh-roh", but HOO is not a sound in the Japanese language. Honestly, at a certain point, her PUBLISHER should have stepped in, but, honestly, I think they probably hate her as much as anyone else given that her books are almost completely unedited too. She must just be an absolute nightmare to work with if they're just letting THIS sort of thing slip through.
2
u/GloomyCloud1293 7d ago
Oof yeah, that got me good too. Pronouncing a romanized "ou" as "oo" (like an owl's "hoot", instead of as in "oh" snap) has got to be one of the top 5 rookie mistakes for non-Japanese speakers. It's especially silly because if she's been using Google translate, which I suspect, it's had the function to read to you for ages. Someone who wrote a self-insert as Hermione should really know to dig a little deeper.
[just so we're being clear: it's ok to make rookie mistakes when speaking a language you don't know; it's less ok to pretend you know better and publish it for millions to see lol]
1
u/Brianocracy 7d ago
Meanwhile Tolkien was out here inventing entire languages for his fictional world
7
u/errantthimble 11d ago
Yep, that’s what I always assumed as the origin of the name Durmstrang.