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Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump

BR: Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump

“Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump” is a wizarding world fairy tale, part of the collection The Tales of Beedle the Bard. In the story, a foolish king decided to claim all magic for himself. He banished all true witches and wizards and hired a charlatan to teach him magic. The charlatan collected pay for teaching nonsense to the kind, until the monarch decided to demonstrate his new skills to his people. The charlatan, realizing that Babbity, the old washerwoman, was actually a witch, convinced her to help make the kind’s supposed magic appear real. Babbity cleverly used the moment to teach the king and the charlatan a lesson.

Interesting facts and notes

Jo's comments about the story:

Babbity Rabbity'"Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump" is the stupidest title ever written by man or beast...and of course, when I wrote it, I never... I had not, at the point when I gave Ron that title, I didn't imagine for a second that I was actually gonna write the story.  And I did have this, there was this kind of margin of time when I could've... where I knew I was gonna write "Beedle the Bard", and the book wasn't published, we were still editing.  I could've gone back and change the titles.  And I really like the idea of keeping those titles then finding out what those stories were, so...  But "Babbitty Rabbitty" was a challenge.  But I did get there, and it's a story about revenge, one witch's sort of cunning way of revenging herself from persecution, from Muggle persecution. '  (PC1)

Other Canon Notes

Characters:

  • Babbity Rabbity
  • foolish Muggle king

Items and other details:

  • "cackling stump"
  • Brigade of Witch Hunters

Characters Introduced

Commentary

Related images:

Pensieve (Comments)

Tags: black cruel gold laughing old powers silver twigs white witch hunt

Editors: and

The Harry Potter Canon