Parts of Harry Potter Plagiarized?...

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i read an article about it and it didn't say which book J.K. Rowling may have taken material from, but one of the commenters speculated that it might be this one called, The Adventures of Willy the Wizard by Adrian Jacobs published in 1987 and after checking out the book's website, it does seem there are some excerpts that are eerily similar...

here's a link to the book's website, but more specifically a page with a list of the similarities and short excerpts from the book .

(click here)

Its hard to write a book bout wizards and not get accused of this. I mean theres only so much stuff you can write about.

The mistake is to assume that Potter was groundbreaking, instead of just another (albeit well-written and successful) in a long tradition of books about young magicians.

Bit like people thinking The Matrix introduced the idea of zoinks-we're-in-a-virtual-world when it's been common in sf for decades.

also there was another book published by Nancy Stouffer in 1984 called
"The Legend of Rah and the Muggles" with similarities too such as using "muggles" to describe people. The main character of that book's name is "Larry Potter"

both books preceed Rowling's series

Well that is a blatent idea pinching.
No co-incidence there.

*Sigh*
EVERYONE gets their ideas somewhere. It's impossible to create anything without standing on the backs of people who came before you. A book isn't good because of the originality of it's ideas, but because of how far it takes and how well it presents those ideas.
It doesn't matter if Rowling was influenced by Willy the Wizard, King Arthur or anything else. Harry Potter's still praiseworthy.

Read The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. D100 sanity loss is not optional. The word "Muggle" is the only connection between the two.

(Wish I could inflict *ahem* provide a link - it used to be readable online but I can't find it anymore. There's some commentaries linked off TVTropes but it ain't the same.)

Last edited by Ambivalence on 17 Oct 2010, 1:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

When I first heard of Harry Potter back in high school, I was like "This all sounds far too familiar, I already read this book when I was little."

I don't have the book anymore, but I'm 80% certain it was this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard%27s_Hall

There were also some suspitions that she based many aspects of her story on the "Mr. Kleks' Academy", the series by some author from my country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Kleks

There were some movies made on Mr. Kleks and they were aired in Great Britain too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v07s7jc ... re=related (this is one of the scariest moments in Polish movies for children, as claimed by Poles - the attack of the wolves from "Mr. Kleks' Academy" )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9T1LXLU ... =1&index=8 And this is "Dog's Sorrows" song - the main character visits dogs' heaven where bad kids who used to do bad things to their canine friends have their penance in there.

If that were so, then just about everything is plagarized in one way or another. There is simply no such thing as a completely original story.