Luna Lovegood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Harry Potter character | |
|---|---|
 Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. |
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| Luna Lovegood | |
| Gender | Female |
| Hair colour | Dirty blonde |
| Eye colour | Silvery-grey |
| House | Ravenclaw |
| Parentage | Half-blood or Pure-blood |
| Allegiance | Dumbledore's Army, The Quibbler |
| Actor | Evanna Lynch |
| First appearance | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, although her family is mentioned in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. |
Luna "Loony" Lovegood (born c. 1981) is a fictional character from the Harry Potter series. She is described as looking like an embodiment of dottiness, with her wand tucked behind her ear for safekeeping, orange radish earrings (not to be confused with turnips),[1] and a necklace made of butterbeer corks.
Luna's father is the editor of The Quibbler, a magazine where he prints (according to her) "important stories he thinks the public needs to know." The stories are often ridiculously untrue and silly; Harry Potter briefly considers that it may be a spoof magazine, until he learns that Luna believes them; thus many consider her beliefs odd. Luna defends her beliefs, her father and his magazine against insults from other characters, most notably from Hermione Granger; these are the only instances where she snaps out of her customary "dreamy phase."
Despite her eccentricity and somewhat bizarre beliefs, Luna seems to be perfectly sane, and the fact that she is in Ravenclaw house suggests that she is also quite intelligent. She also has much moral and emotional insight and appears to be quite good at comforting others.
The character will be portrayed by Evanna Lynch in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.[2] On her website, Rowling has described the actress as "perfect" for the role.[3]
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[edit] Description by J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling has said that Luna is like an "anti-Hermione", as Luna believes things on faith alone and Hermione grounds her beliefs on facts and logic. Hermione repeatedly tries to convince Luna that her beliefs are nonsense, to no avail. Hermione sees Luna as very gullible and Luna sees Hermione as very narrow-minded. By the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hermione seems to have realised that Luna will not falter in her beliefs. Despite Luna's dottiness, she can be very perceptive about human nature, and Harry often notes her knack for blunt honesty.
[edit] Biography
Luna is a Ravenclaw, one year behind Harry Potter (being in the same year as Ginny Weasley). The Lovegoods (Luna's family) were mentioned in the fourth book when they were using the portkey to get to the Quiddich World Cup. Luna is first introduced in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, on the Hogwarts Express. When there is no other compartment for Harry, Ginny and Neville Longbottom to sit in, Ginny convinces them to sit in Luna's compartment. She spends most of the train ride reading a copy of her father's magazine, the Quibbler, upside-down (an article in the magazine says that if you turn certain magical runes on their heads, they reveal a spell for turning someone's ears into kumquats), a publication whose content Hermione considers doubtful.
Luna has straggly, waist-length dirty-blond hair and is described as having a dazed look on her face. Her eyes are described as "silvery" and "misty", which suggests they may be pale grey. They are also described as "protuberant", which adds to the peculiarity of her appearance.
Her unusual affect renders her somewhat isolated from other students at Hogwarts, although she doesn't appear to care about what others think of her; she is aware of but seems unperturbed by the fact that many refer to her as "Loony" Lovegood. Some of her classmates regularly steal her possessions and hide them to amuse themselves. When she offhandedly tells Harry Potter this, she unintentionally wins his sympathy. Harry is angry when he hears that people steal Luna's belongings and offers to help her find them, but she declines, saying that everything always turns up in the end. Luna believes Harry's story about his escape from Lord Voldemort and defends it in front of a group of sceptical students.
During Luna's fourth year she joins Dumbledore's Army (The D.A.), in which Harry notices initially that her performance is uneven. Harry leads her, Hermione, Ginny, Ron and Neville into the Department of Mysteries, where they are ambushed by numerous Death Eaters; following a running battle during which Luna helps an injured Ron and Ginny out of a mysterious "Planet Room", she is eventually knocked unconscious, being one of the last of the Sextet to fall.
Luna claims to have been able to hear voices behind a mysterious veil that seems to separate the living from the dead in the Death Chamber of the Department of Mysteries. Harry could also hear these voices (Neville and Ginny may also hear them as they were likewise affected by the veil), and Luna appears to believe that dead people, including her mother and Sirius Black, are behind the veil. When she explains this to Harry, who is having trouble accepting Sirius's death, Harry feels better.
In her fifth year, Harry impulsively invites Luna to attend Professor Slughorn's Christmas party. She is immensely excited as she has never been to such an event. The invitation makes many girls jealous but pleases Ginny, who expresses her happiness to Harry, another indication of the girls' developing friendship. For Slughorn's party, Harry notes that Luna looks quite nice in spangled silver dress robes and is relieved that she has not opted to wear her trademark radish earrings or butterbeer cork necklace.[4] During this particular scene, she also says that when she was at the D.A. meetings, she thought it was "like having friends". Harry's preference that Luna leave her favoured jewelery behind, along with his reactions to her blunt honesty, indicates that he's still a bit uncomfortable with aspects of her personality. At the party, Luna mentions a few of her outrageous beliefs in conversation with others, causing both shock and amusement.
During the same year, Professor McGonagall appoints Luna as Lee Jordan's temporary replacement as Quidditch announcer for the school. While on duty, however, she absent-mindedly gets distracted from the game and begins to discuss other topics with the crowd, such as the oddly shaped clouds above the pitch, and that she thinks Ginny Weasley is nice, and that Zacharias Smith's inability to keep possession of the Quaffle is a symptom of "Loser's Lurgy". Some of the spectators jeer at her, McGonagall doesn't quite know what to do with her, and people who are fond of Luna fall about laughing. Her unusual commentary wins over Ron Weasley, who initially found her strange but started to reconsider her after hearing her description of the game. (J. K. Rowling, incidentally, commented that she loved using Luna as commentator for what would become the last narrated Quidditch game of the series.)
When Death Eaters attack Hogwarts at the end of book six, Luna is one of the DA members who attempts to protect the school. Shortly after the battle, she attends Albus Dumbledore's funeral with Neville. There, she is seen helping Neville, who was injured in the battle, into his chair.
At the funeral, Harry notes that she and Neville were the only two members of the D.A. (besides Ron, Hermione, and Ginny) to have answered the call from their coins to help fight. He notes that this is probably due to the fact that these two in particular were the most lonely, and probably checked the coins frequently to see if there was a meeting of the club.
[edit] Family background
Though Luna's blood purity is never discussed, both her parents are magical: her father is the editor of The Quibbler, and she marks her mother as an extraordinary witch. This does not necessarily make her a pureblood, however, as it is possible that one or both of them is Muggle-born or a half-blood with a Muggle parent. J.K. Rowling has said that in order to be considered pureblood, all of one's grandparents must be wizards. Therefore, if both her parents are muggle-borns, she might have muggle-born status.
Luna says her late mother was a "quite extraordinary witch" who liked "to experiment". She died when one of her spells went "rather badly wrong". Luna says calmly that the way her mother died was "rather horrible" and admits she still feels sad about it at times, but she is relieved she still has her father. As Luna witnessed her mother's death at the age of nine, she has been able to see thestrals since she arrived at Hogwarts.
Luna and her family do not appear until Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire it is mentioned that a family called the Lovegoods live in the area of Stoatshead Hill (as do the Fawcett and Diggory families), a Devonshire hill within walking distance of The Burrow, the family home of the Weasleys. However, whilst it is thus certain that a family named Lovegood lives there within the context of the series, Rowling has not explained if this family unit includes Luna, or if she is at all related to this family.
[edit] Etymology of the Name
The name Luna is Latin for "moon". The term "lunatic" derives from Luna; this allowed Luna's fellow-students to create their punning nickname of "Loony" for her, in reference to her unconventional mannerisms. Her surname contains the positive elements of "love" and "good", although it is also a real surname.
[edit] References
- ^ Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bloomsbury Group, 236-237. “Luna was wearing what looked like a pair of orange radishes for earrings.”
- ^ Luna Lovegood role has been cast. BBC (2006-02-02). Retrieved on October 23, 2006.
- ^ Rowling: "Evanna is perfect". HPANA (2006-04-05). Retrieved on October 23, 2006.
- ^ Rowling, J. K. (2005). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Bloomsbury Group, 294. “Harry was glad, in any case, that she had left off her radish earrings, her butterbeer-cork necklace and her Spectrespecs.”
[edit] External links
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