New Harry Potter Title

Well, after much speculation, JK Rowling has released the title for book 6. Despite her making people work for it, its been dissipated on the internet fairly well. Its Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Now we can begin the speculation on what it means. Rowling has released a few clues that we can play around with for a while. Obviously, Harry is not the prince and Rowling has already stated that the prince also is not Voldemort. Rowling has also mentioned that she thought about using this title before settling on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for book 2. She said that to do this, she would have had to include some information that she decided would fit better in book 6.

So now we can speculate if the prince is someone we already know or a new character. Given that Rowling almost used this for CoS, I lean towards it being someone we already know. So who are the half bloods we already know? Of all the people's ancestry we know, only two people match this description: Seamus Finnegan and Rubeus Hagrid. Everyone else is pureblood (Malfoy, Ron, Neville, etc.) or is Muggle born (Hermione, Dean Thomas, etc.). We could argue that its someone whose ancestry hasn't been revealed yet, but what would be the fun in that ;)

Seamus has been relegated pretty much to a background character as of now. His only real stint has been his extended argument that lasted through most of Order of the Phoenix. So, I'm dismissing him for the moment. Someone who did have a reasonable role in CoS was Hagrid though. Many people (including myself) thought that Hagrid was going to be the famous death in OotP. But Rowling continues to keep him around despite his real lack of purpose. He was important in the first book, but he's pretty much been relegated to a means of expressing the trio's thoughts about each crisis. So at the moment, I suggest Hagrid as our prince, until better information is available.

I'm sure someone will have a proper breakdown of CoS and what we might be missing to construe the title to any such characters as needed. In the meantime, we'll all just have to wait.