It is likewise clear to me that Muggles are, if not to be despised, at least to be pitied.

Well, only in the same sense that I pity my husband for being colour-blind and tone-deaf. Nevertheless, he functions perfectly well, and has no ambitions whatsoever toward becoming an interior designer or joining a choir, so he’s not suffering. And it seems quite evident to me that’s the way JKR portrays the difference as well. The fact that many wizards either disdain or ignore Muggles (with a few very notable exceptions like Dumbledore and Arthur Weasley) doesn’t prove they’re right to do so — in fact JKR has demonstrated on several occasions already that popular opinion in the wizarding world, like popular opinion in our own, is frequently biased, ill-informed, and unreliable.

In short, I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe that JKR is setting up the wizards as an inherently superior race, or Harry as uber-mensch, at all.

This actually strikes me as the flip side to the arguments I had with my mother, who originally thought the HP novels pagan. After reading the second two novels, she came to the conclusion that the whole series was a Christian allegory (thus suspending the need for overt Christian references in the text, since it’s all in the subtext). At the same time, though, she decided that Harry was the only person with any integrity or strength of character in the series.

But that’s my mother.

Firstly, I think we have to take into account the fact that your canon is wrong — it’s Harry’s guardians who are cruel, and Harry has only saved the world once (and that was really his mother’s work, IMHO).

Harry is an extremely unreliable narrator. JK Rowling takes great delight in misleading Harry, and even more joy in sending her readers off in the wrong theoretical direction all together. So we can’t just assume that anything in the series is concrete until book 7 has been published and analysed to death.

It is my belief that the HP novels are a different kind of fairy tale — the story of a young man learning to become a hero. So his first triumph is really his mother’s, and his next couple are instinctive. His morals at this stage are untested. He says the right things, but he’s never truly tested.

By Book 3, we have his moral choices becoming more certain — he chooses not to murder the murderer of his parents, even though this will lead to greater problems in the short-term. This is the climatic scene of the book — Voldemort doesn’t appear at all.

Book 4 marks the end of an era, the theft of Harry’s innocence. It’s my belief that this is the last time Harry will face Voldemort without full knowledge of his background, and the ability to control his rather extraordinary intincts.

My point is, it’s really a bit unfair to say that Harry’s less heroic than Frodo or anyone else at this stage. Were the children of the Narnia books heroic? All of them? Peter was incredibly two-dimensional, Susan was short-changed in the end. Of the original four, only Edmund and Lucy struggle for their achievements. Eustace and Jill are far more satisfactory as heroic characters, but their flaws are deep and serious.

It’s also worth noting that in The Horse and His Boy, Shasta’s theft of the Tarkaan’s horse and his foster-father’s food etc are justified by Lewis on the grounds that Shasta had never been well-treated by the fisherman anyway.

It’s not yet clear whether or not Harry Potter was born to be a demi-god. He might be a powerful wizard. But at this stage, any attempt to take on, say Dumbledore, would be met with a pat on the head and a detention. Asking us to disprove Harry’s greater powers is asking us to prove a negative with no evidence, which isn’t fair.