Fluffy and the Gates of Hell

They were looking straight into the eyes of a monstrous dog, a dog that filled the whole space between ceiling and floor. It had three heads. Three pairs of rolling, mad eyes; three noses, twitching and quivering in their direction; three drooling mouths, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs.

It was standing quite still, all six eyes staring at them, and Harry knew that the only reason they weren’t already dead was that their sudden appearance had taken it by surprise, but it was quickly getting over that, there was no mistaking what those thunderous growls meant.

In the second episode of the “Midnight Duel” chapter, Draco Malfoy has challenged Harry to, well, what the title indicates – a Wizard Duel, at midnight. Though Harry is worried about pressing his luck by breaking another school rule, he keeps seeing “Malfoy’s sneering face… looming up out of the darkness”… and knows he can’t pass up the opportunity to “beat Malfoy face-to-face.”

Of course, Malfoy doesn’t show up. But he does seemingly let Filch, the caretaker, know that some students will be in the Trophy Room at midnight. In the ensuing chase, Harry and company enter the forbidden 3rd floor corridor and discover the monstrous three-headed dog.

There’s plenty of character development in this episode:

• Malfoy proves as cowardly as he is malicious.
• Harry (no matter what) cannot back down.
• Ron is impulsive and quick-tempered (in fact, he’s the one who speaks up for Harry when Malfoy makes the challenge).
• Hermione goes into control-freak mode and decides that she just has to prevent the boys from losing Gryffindor any more points… and so follows them out of the portrait hole, “hissing at them like an angry goose.”
• Neville, again, cannot remember something (in this case, the password), and so has been stuck outside Gryffindor Tower for hours.

Once the adventure starts, neither Hermione nor Neville can return to Gryffindor because he Fat Lady has left her portrait. So instead of two Gryffindors and two Slytherins meeting up in the Trophy Room, there are four Gryffindors (two of whom are not at all happy to be there) and no Slytherins – acting as sitting ducks for Filch and his cat Mrs. Norris.

Of course, the ensuing chase leads Harry and company to flee into the forbidden third floor corridor… and discover the monstrous three-headed dog.

Since JKR was trained in the classics we should assume, of course, that some Greek and Latin myth will wind their way into her tale. The description of the dog is one her first forays into all-out classical myth.

In fact, the three-headed dog is one of the more memorable images from the classics and Western Civilization in general. It alludes to Cerberus – the guardian dog of Hades – whom Hercules must retrieve during his final labor. But beyond the labors of Hercules, Cerberus also makes a memorable appearance in Dante’s Inferno, as a tormentor of damned spirits in Hell:

Cerberus, a beast fierce and hideous, with three throats barks like a dog over the people that are immersed there; he has red eyes, a beard greasy and black, a great belly, and clawed hands, and he scars and flays and rends the spirits. The rain makes them howl like dogs, and the profane wretches often turn themselves, of one side making a shelter for the other.

When Cerberus, the great worm, perceived us, he opened his mouths and showed us the fangs, not one of his limbs keeping still, and my Leader [Virgil] spread his hands, took up earth, and with full fists threw it into the ravenous gullets. As the dog that yelps for greed and becomes quiet when it bites its food, being all absorbed in struggling to devour it, such became these foul visages of the demon Cerberus, who so thunders at the souls that they would fain be deaf.

The way JKR draws the dog has many echoes of Dante’s description. The three-headed dog, then, has overtones of the Hound of Hell (despite Hagrid’s naming the poor misunderstood creature “Fluffy”). And given that symbolism, we could argue (as I would imagine John Granger does) that what’s underneath the trap door is some sort of Underworld – the Hades of Hogwarts, if you will – and that this Underworld is one into which Harry must descend in order to succeed in his first confrontation with Voldemort.

Regardless of Underworld symbolism, meeting up with Fluffy is very decidedly not a good thing. Though our heroes escape, through sheer dumb luck, the dog will later nearly rip Severus Snape’s leg right off.

Still, meeting up with the dog does set up the major plot that will play out through the rest of the story. As Hermione points out when they (successfully) make their way back to Gryffindor Tower, that dog was not just standing there. It was standing on top of a trap door. It was guarding something. Harry and Ron, and soon Hermione, will be speculating on what that dog is guarding – and conclude that it’s the package that Hagrid retrieved from Gringotts, the titular Philospher’s Stone. And eventually, they will brew wild fantasies about how Snape [sic] is trying to steal the Stone.

Their attempt to prevent that outcome will lead to their first adventure together to save the Wizarding World… and their first lesson that appearances may not always be quite what they seem.