When Sherlock Holmes began to prove more popular (and was assumed to be more real) than the person who created him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hurled his cocaine-injecting detective down the Reichenbach Falls in a story called The Adventure of the Final Problem. Elementary, you might think. Except that the loss of Holmes plunged the nation into a grief so inconsolable that Conan Doyle was forced to revive and return his hero to 221b Baker Street, where he still deduces his way through a postbag of problems every day.

In her eagerly awaited new book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, JK Rowling is altogether tougher on her readers. Harry Potter is neither revived nor returned to Hogwarts for another round of adventures in any of these five fairy tales; he is not even mentioned. When we last saw the bespectacled orphan 18 months ago at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he had defeated the enemy and married the fair maiden, and was settling down to a Happy Ever After of suburban sorcery in the Woking of the wizarding world. Fiction has shown us that stories end with marriage, so we have to accept that Harry, although not dead, is never coming back.

Loss is one of the threads that runs through the Harry Potter series, and it is also the subject of these wise and witty stories that have, Rowling tells us in her introduction, been bedtime reading for young witches and wizards for hundreds of years. A moralist, a magician and a great liberal, Beedle is to the wizarding world what Hans Christian Andersen is to muggles (non-magical people). His tales have helped generations of wizarding parents explain to their children that mourning is a part of life (“human efforts to evade or overcome death are always doomed to disappointment”), that muggles must be tolerated, and “that magic causes as much trouble as it cures”.

Rowling’s aim in bringing these tales together is to introduce the bard’s wisdom to a muggle audience, and Potter aficionados will remember that it was during a discussion about Beedle in the Deathly Hallows that Ron Weasley, the class goon, got the better of Hermione Granger, the muggle- born swot. “ ‘You’ve never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?’ he said incredulously. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ” Since then, Hermione has not only corrected her ignorance but produced, from the original runes, the fine translation that Rowling uses for this new edition.

Each of the tales selected here is followed by Dumbledore’s informative observations and commentary. Rowling tells us that these notes were scribbled down by the former headmaster of Hogwarts shortly before he was killed at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the final tale throws some light on his death. The notes were found among many papers that Dumbledore be- queathed to the Hogwarts archive, but whether, Rowling adds, “this commentary was written for his own satisfaction, or for future publication, we shall never know”.

Under Dumbledore’s tutelage we see that while the tales appear translucent, they are in fact as murky as seawater. The Wizard and the Hopping Pot, for example, in which a muggle-loving wizard teaches his muggle-hating son a lesson in kindness to muggles, might seem to be about a one-footed cauldron that brays like a donkey and is covered in warts. But by placing it in the context of wizarding history, Dumbledore shows this seemingly harmless cautionary tale to be a daring and potentially explosive text. “It’s nothing short of amazing,” he notes, “that any copies of the original version survived the flames to which they were so often consigned.” At the time Beedle was writing, “the persecution of witches and wizards was gathering apace all over Europe”, and the pro-muggle sentiment of the story attracted anger.

In The Fountain of Fair Fortune three witches, “each with her burden of woe”, travel to the famous fountain in the hope that its water will transform their lives. On the way they meet a knight called Sir Luckless, whose luck is transfor-med when he falls in love with one of them. An unexpected twist in the tale makes it a perennial favourite, but its popularity did not stop Lucius Malfoy, Death Eater and father of the school bully, from dem-anding that it be removed from the Hogwarts library. “Any work,” Malfoy wrote in a letter quoted here by Dumbledore, “that depicts interbreeding between wizards and muggles should be banned.”

The tales have not always been read as the bard inten-ded, and The Tale of the Three Brothers, in which three brothers encounter Death on a bridge, has been assumed by a small minority of the wizarding world, including no doubt Mr Malfoy, to mean not that death comes to us all in the end, but that death can be defeated. It is harder to miss the meaning of Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump, the most “real” of Beedle’s stories. A foolish king is duped by a greedy subject into believing he can do magic, after which a washer- woman turns herself into a tree and then a rabbit, and the king learns the limitations of his powers. It was Babbitty Rabbitty that taught wizarding children that no amount of magic could bring back the dead. As the wizarding phil- osopher Bertrand de Pensées-Profondes puts it, “Give it up. It’s never going to happen.”

It is hard to imagine how readers who do not know the Harry Potter books would respond to the clubbish feel of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, but Potter fans will not be disappointed. The book is refreshingly original, given how derivative Rowling can be, and surprisingly satisfying, given that Rowling refuses to give us what we really want (Harry, of course). We read Rowling not for her prose, her plots or her people, all of which are pretty ordinary, but because she is fun, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard contains all the playful humour and down-to-earth detail that makes her wizarding world so seductive. No doubt Harry will be buying it for his children this Christmas.

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