Common Knowledge / Literature

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• Nineteen Eighty-Four:
  • While often claimed to be a warning about fascism, communism and/or theocracy (with some claiming socialism, since the ruling movement is referred to as "English Socialism", or IngSoc in newspeak), the story is intended to speak out against totalitarianism in general rather than any particular political ideology. Orwell was personally a socialist, but detested authoritarian regimes that had been put in place in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The original political leaning of the Party is deliberately vague, and their sole concern is retaining power — no more, no less, as stated In-Universe by O'Brien near the end. O'Brien also derides communism and fascism as being less advanced than Oceania's form of totalitarianism, implying that the Party doesn't follow either ideology.
  • The book does actually not have the ultimate Downer Ending as most people would think. There's an often overlooked appendix talking about the history of Newspeak referring to it in the past tense written in Standard English, implying that the Party eventually did fall. While the final message is left open to interpretation, many people are completely unaware of the appendix's existence, which can be considered relevant to the story. There's at least somewhat of a "Ray of Hope" Ending.
  • Lots of people think this book depicts a society where you're under surveillance all the time. You aren't, not all of the time. You just don't know when you're being watched and when you aren't. However, one could argue this creates the illusion that you are being watched all the time out of paranoia. Effectively, it is all in your head.
  • There's also the misconception that everyone is watched and under the government's heel. Only government officials are watched; the 80% of the population that is the Proles are essentially "free", hence the slogan "Proles and animals are free." Though the misconception about Proles being spied on is not completely unfounded as it is stated that the Party finds the brightest and most troublesome Proles and eliminates them.
  • The "We've always been at war with Eastasia" scene during hate week is often held up as a major Wham Line. However, the concept of the alliances shifting suddenly and being instantly retconned is brought up early in the book and intermittently until that point. The Hate Week scene is just when the reader can see so for themselves. In fact, the real wham line involving this phrase is when Winston begins to think it himself, and again in the final chapter when the narration casually remarks that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, signalling his complete transformation.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:
  • The title refers to the distance the sub travels while underwater, not the depth to which it goes. A league is now a standardized measure of 3 nautical miles, but it used to be how far someone could walk in an hour, and it's used to measure distance, not depth (depth is measured in fathoms). No part of the ocean is 20,000 leagues deep; the deepest it gets is less than eight miles. This SNL sketch parodies this misconception.
  • The battle with the giant squid, the most famous scene in the story, also falls victim to this. Though it's the one plot point that practically everyone is aware of (even if they've never read the book), most people remember it as a climactic showdown with one king-sized squid when it was actually a prolonged skirmish with several of them. The 1954 Disney film has a lot to do with this misconception, since it simplified the squid-battle sequence by leaving it at one (presumably because there was only enough money in the budget for one animatronic squid).
  • Though he's certainly the most famous character in the novel, Captain Nemo is actually not the protagonist of the story, but the antagonist. The protagonist (and narrator) is a scientist named Pierre Arronax who spends most of the story as Nemo's captive. Nemo himself is a Nominal Hero at best, and a full-on villain at worst.
• The Signature Scene of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is sometimes misremembered as "Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are tasked with whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence, but trick other children into doing it for them." Actually, Tom alone is the trickster in that scene; it takes place before Huck is even introduced.
• The Aesop Fable of The Lion and The Mouse is often misremembered as "The lion spares the mouse's life, and when later the lion gets a thorn caught in his paw, the mouse pulls it out." For example, in The Rescuers, the portrait of the Rescue Aid Society's founder Euripides Mouse shows him standing proudly next to a lion with a bandaged paw, from which he presumably pulled a thorn. Actually, the thorn-pulling comes from another of Aesop's Fables, Androcles and the Lion. In The Lion and the Mouse, the lion is captured by hunters, but the mouse rescues him by gnawing through the hunters' net.
• Agatha Christie never wrote a story where The Butler Did It. This has become possibly the most famous Dead Unicorn Trope.
• Everyone knows the story of Aladdin: a young Arabian man finds a lamp with a genie inside that grants him Three Wishes, right? Well, no. In the original story, Aladdin is Chinese, and the genie grants unlimited wishes. There are also two genies, one in a ring and one in a lamp, although the one in the lamp is more powerful, and an Evil Sorcerer ends up stealing the lamp genie. It wasn't until the 1940 adapatation ''The Thief Of Baghdad'' that the detail about only three wishes and only one genie was established. It was also the first to give the Sorcerer the name "Jafar", as he is unnamed in the original story.
• Speaking of Aladdin; if one asked most people to name stories from Arabian Nights, the most common answers would generally be Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Sinbad the Sailor. The thing is, despite being the stories most associated with it, none of them were originally in Arabian Nights. Antoine Galland, the French translator who was behind the first and biggest western translation of it, also added in a bunch of unrelated stories and tales he learned from other Middle-Eastern writers during his work; and somehow, they ended up as the most recognizable out of all of them.
• By the Waters of Babylon is not set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Aside from the description of the ruined city not matching that of a nuclear wasteland, the story was written eight years before the first atomic bomb was built. The cause of the apocalypse is not stated, but has significant parallels to Rome, suggesting that everything went wrong at once and society couldn’t maintain it, resulting in a mass die-off, similar to what happened in the Early Middle Ages.
• The Catcher in the Rye is the definitive Coming of Age Story... except it isn't really. Holden remains the same angsty adolescent at the end as he was at the beginning.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
  • This book features the character Grandpa Joe who accompanies Charlie into the titular Chocolate Factory, as does the 1971 movie version, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. A popular misconception is that Grandpa Joe is a despicable character who takes advantage and doesn't help the rest of his impoverished family out, Obfuscating Disability by lying in bed all the time only to reveal after Charlie finds the Golden Ticket that he's fully capable of getting up and walking, and later convincing Charlie to steal the Fizzy Lifting Drinks at the factory. However, the book's Grandpa Joe is genuinely weak and bedridden at first, but gains the strength to get up from sheer joy when Charlie finds the Golden Ticket^note it does not help that the film version made this moment much more slow and deliberate rather than a completely spontaneous reaction as it is in the book, and the 1971 film's Fizzy Lifting Drinks subplot is Adaptation Expansion. Some people think that Tim Burton's version, as well as several stage plays, try to "change" the character to be more sympathetic and less egocentric than in the 1971 film, but these "changes" actually come from the source material. Not helping the misconception apart from Adaptation Displacement is the fact that Roald Dahl is very much known for having Evil Old Folks, Abusive Parents, or Adults Are Useless in his work.
    • What also wasn't helping this is that some stage plays would often add moments that weren't in the book in which Grandpa Joe is either helping the other bedridden inhabitants in/out of bed and/or depicting him standing up before as the "least" frail^note which by itself wouldn't be enough to be an issue — being able to stand and walk a tiny bit is a long way from being able to work — but it serves to reinforce the prior misconceptions of the character. Others wouldn't cast anyone to play "Mr. Bucket" due to pragmatism, and just give a casual Hand Wave as to why he's not present as "He's at work".
  • Some people will describe the book and movie's Signature Scene this way: "One of the factory tour guests is a Spoiled Brat girl who's always exclaiming, 'I want [insert thing here]!' and 'I want it now!' When she wants to try a piece of gum, Wonka warns her that it's not ready for tasting yet, but she screams, 'I want it now!' and chews it anyway, then turns into a giant blueberry." This misremembered scenario combines two different little girl characters into one. The girl who chews the special gum against Wonka's orders and turns into a giant blueberry is Violet Beauregarde, whose vice isn't being a Spoiled Brat, but chewing gum all the time. The "I want it now!" Spoiled Brat is Veruca Salt, whose fate is to be labeled a "bad nut" in the factory's nut room (or, in the 1971 film, a "bad egg" in the chocolate Easter egg room) and dropped down a garbage chute.
  • Everyone "knows" the nationalities of the four bratty kids: Augustus Gloop is German, Veruca Salt is British, and both Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee are American. Almost all the screen and stage adaptations portray them this way. But believe it or not, the book never mentions any of their nationalities, and they all speak British English. All the adaptations that portray them as a Multinational Team are simply following the example of the 1971 film.
  • Everyone "knows" (or at least "knew" until the 2005 film was released) that Mike Teavee dresses like a cowboy. This is thanks to Joseph Schindelman's classic illustrations and the 1971 film both dressing him this way. But the book only describes him as wearing toy pistols and a windbreaker with a picture of The Lone Ranger on it, not a full cowboy costume. The 2005 film and the 2013 stage musical have probably both reduced this assumption by dressing him in modern clothes, though.
  • Some people think that the naughty kids die — in actuality, they're seen coming out of the factory just fine, albeit a bit worse-for-wear (Augustus is a bit squashed, both he and Veruca are Covered in Gunge, Mike is stretched out, and Violet is still blue). This misconception may have come from the fact that we don't see them leaving the factory in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and/or the fact that the Oompa-Loompas sing about making Augustus into fudge (this was stated to be a joke, however) and Veruca is said to have landed in an incinerator (but she got lucky; it wasn't lit).
• Charlotte's Web: The fact that Charlotte dies is universally known, but many people misremember her death as happening at the very end of the book, giving it a Downer Ending. It actually happens in the second-to-last chapter, while the last chapter shows the hatching of Charlotte's children from her egg sac and three of the baby spiders staying in the barn to be Wilbur's new friends, ending the story on a happy note.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Everyone knows that the books are about another world known as Narnia. Except Narnia is actually the name of just one of many countries in the other world, not the world itself. Other lands in the same world include Archenland, Calormen, and Telmar.
  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has overshadowed the other books to such an extent that many people assume it's the only Narnia book, or at least aren't familiar with the others. Due to this, many people just know Narnia as the land of Eternal Winter, even though for most of the series it actually has a fairly temperate climate and a regular seasonal cycle (it's even neighbored by a hot desert empire called Calormen). The Eternal Winter in the first book is just the result of the White Witch's reign, and it ends halfway through the book as soon as Aslan comes back to Narnia.
  • In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, thanks to the 2005 movie, many people assume that the Pevensie siblings' father serves in World War II, that Edmund especially misses him, and that this is his Freudian Excuse for his bad behavior and later betrayal of his siblings. The books actually never imply that Mr. Pevensie serves in the war, and Edmund's implied Freudian Excuse is that he's been attending a bad school.
  • There's a lot of chronological confusion due to the extremely jumbled-up order the series was released in. The Magician's Nephew is often assumed to be the first book as it is the earliest set, but it was actually one of the last to be written. This is largely the fault of compilations and bookset releases of the entire series which put them in chronological order, labelling The Magician's Nephew "1", The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe "2", and so on.
• Invoked in-universe in the Ciaphas Cain series. Cain is shocked to discover a Sister of Battle having an affair with the Schola Progenium's headmaster, since it's well-known that Sisters are supposed to be celibate. On further reflection however, he realizes that there isn't actually any rule against Sisters having relationships — most of them just either don't live long enough to get the chance, or are stationed in places that make it impractical.
• Depictions of The Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange are common enough to have their own trope page, but very few of them get all the details right. People seem to think that it's a type of brainwashing that causes the subject to adopt whatever behaviours are shown to them. However, it's actually a form of aversion therapy that conditions the subject to have a negative physical response to the stimulus that they are forced to watch. The point of the book is that the technique can modify Alex's behaviour, but it can't brainwash him into wanting to be good or otherwise actually make him a better person. It's also very common for people to miss out the fact that Alex was given an emetic to provide the negative stimulus (nausea) for him to associate with the positive one (violence). Without this negative stimulus, the process would not work. Because of this misunderstanding, examples sometimes have Ludovico's Technique failing to work on someone who enjoys the material they're being forced to watch. This makes no sense as the technique was developed specifically to be used on those sorts of people.
• As everyone knows, Conan the Barbarian is the archetypical Dumb Muscle fantasy protagonist, a hulking brute who solves all his problems with mindless violence and runs around everywhere in little more than furry boots and a loincloth. Except this has very little to do with anything in the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, and stems largely from later stories written after Howard's death, the cover illustrations by Frank Frazetta, the Marvel comic series, and the Schwarzenegger films. In the original stories, Conan was a very intelligent man to match his strength, his cunning was an important skill, and he used whatever equipment was needed for his missions, often including full armor; he usually only went without it if he was being sneaky, or if he was captured and stripped of his belongings.
• Everybody knows that Dan Brown's Robert Langdon thrillers are all about a Badass Bookworm tangling with sinister Ancient Conspiracies that secretly rule the world. Except they're not. Questionable fact-checking aside, the novels practically always end with Langdon discovering that the supposed Ancient Conspiracy is a lot more modest in scope than it initially seems, and the bad guy practically always turns out to be a lone nutjob with an agenda.^note The Ancient Conspiracy also isn't always evil. In The Da Vinci Code, for example, the Priory of Sion are depicted as the heroes. Case in point: Angels & Demons portrays the Illuminati as having long since gone extinct, the Priory of Sion in The Da Vinci Code are just a close-knit group of scholars with an interest in the occult, and The Lost Symbol (more-or-less accurately) portrays the Freemasons as a highly exclusive social club for people with humanist beliefs.
• Discworld is a lighthearted parody of fantasy tropes. Sure, if you're talking about the first three books, and your definition of "lighthearted" includes a scary apocalyptic cult that The Grim Reaper calls DEATH OF THE MIND, and a young girl almost losing her mind to the instincts of an eagle. Mort is an original story based on established Discworld concepts rather than a direct parody of anything, and subsequent books are generally more the former than the latter, and where they're parody, are more likely to parody things other than classic fantasy.
  • As many a Discworld character might say usually before presenting a sincerely and confidently held belief, which turns out to be untrue, semi-true, or hopelessly garbled:
    Well-known fact, innit?
• Doctor Dolittle: Dr. John Dolittle, M.D. did not, contrary to popular belief, have any kind of special ability that allowed him to talk to animals. He simply learned how to talk to animals (the same way that one would learn any other foreign language) by taking lessons from his pet parrot Polynesia, who could naturally speak to both humans and animals.
• Dracula: The pop-culture perception of the book and its titular character is very skewed thanks to a century of movie versions.
  • The count is not a clean-shaven, devilishly handsome seducer the way Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee portrayed him. He's a hairy, ugly old man who gets younger, but not handsomer, when he drinks blood.
  • Sunlight does not destroy him. Instead, he simply loses much of his power during the daytime hours, even if he stays indoors. This was probably assumed because he originally died at dawn when a knife was plunged through his heart.
  • His English is described as being excellent and nearly un-accented, in contrast to Lugosi's heavy accent, which has been further exaggerated by pop culture.
  • He has an aversion to garlic flowers, not garlic bulbs as nearly every adaptation depicts.
  • Dracula is killed by a knife to the heart, not a stake (though stakes are used to take care of his vampire brides) and he's also simultaneously beheaded with another knife.
  • Dracula also does not sleep in a coffin. He simply transports large crates of soil from the land around his castle wherever he goes and sleeps in those. This is a confusion similar to the stake thing. Lucy sleeps in her coffin during the day.
  • Ever since the publication of In Search of Dracula in 1970, everybody "knows" that Dracula and the historical figure Vlad Tepes (also known as "Vlad Dracula") were implied to be one and the same, but the truth is less clear. While Stoker clearly borrowed the name and general history of Vlad for his vampire, he goes to great pains to never explicitly equate the two, and a number of contradictory details hint that the count is meant to be an elaborate Captain Ersatz who is like Vlad, but not actually him. Case in point: Dracula famously hails from Transylvania, while Vlad was from Wallachia, which is a different region of present-day Romania. They're explicitly not even the same ethnicity; Dracula claims to be Szekely Hungarian, an ethnic minority in Romania. He also has Van Helsing infer that whatever Dracula is may have purposely taken Vlad's form.
  • Likewise, Castle Dracula is not a real place. Bran Castle is often advertised as the real deal because Castle Dracula was apparently modeled after it, but Stoker fully intended the count's home to be a distinct location elsewhere in Romania. Contrary to popular belief, Bran Castle was never actually inhabited by Vlad the Impaler, either. He did make use of the old Poenari Castle, which has been identified as "the real Castle Dracula" as a result, but Poenari was already a crumbling ruin centuries before the novel (with its perfectly habitable castle) takes place.
  • The three vampire women that accompany Dracula are often referred to as the "Brides of Dracula", even though they are not actually explicitly called like that in the novel, but instead are referred to as "weird sisters". Two of them are heavily implied to be Dracula's daughters or sisters (due to their physical resemblance to him) rather than being his actual wives, though these aren't mutually exclusive since they do mention loving him. They are also not a blonde, a brunette and a redhead like most adaptations, but two brunettes and a blonde, with the latter identified as the youngest and the leader.
  • Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is a skilled and experienced Vampire Hunter, right? Not in the original book. He's just a scholar with a good deal of folkloric knowledge that makes him suspect Lucy Westenra might be suffering from vampire attacks. Moreover, it's heavily implied that he doesn't actually have any prior experience with vampires before coming to London.
  • A commonly stated piece of vampiric lore is that the classic Missing Reflection originated from how old-timey mirrors used silver as their backing, which is anathema to vampires. The original novel, which is the first appearance of this idea, says no such thing. Bram Stoker's notes suggest that this is a manifestation of how you can't capture Dracula's image, period, meaning that photography wouldn't work, either (a remnant of this idea shows up in Jonathan Harker's camera, which is mentioned in early chapters)^note At this point, some people start talking about silver nitrate film, which is a logical extention of an idea that isn't in the book, but doesn't change that it isn't in the book., which is reinforced in the fact that Dracula Casts No Shadow.
• Dune: Several unofficial sources give Lady Jessica's full name as "Jessica Atreides". This is incorrect: Jessica is the mother of Duke Leto Atreides' children, but they aren't married—she's just his concubine.
• Eragon:
  • "Eragon" isn't the name of the dragon on the cover. It's the name of the farmboy who finds the dragon egg. The dragon is Saphira.
  • The series is commonly referenced as being "written by a teenager" but that's only really true of the first book. Christopher Paolini started the first books when he was 15, and it was independently published when he was 18 and re-published by a larger company a year later. The rest of the series was published while Paolini was in his 20s, although it's certainly possible that at least some work was done on Eldest in his teens, given that he was 21 when it was published.
• Eugene Onegin: It is Common Knowledge that at the end Tatiana marries an elderly man. Actually, her husband's age is never mentioned. The narration hints that he's just several years older than Onegin.
• Fahrenheit 451:
  • Books are not banned. They're very rare, since nearly all books have been banned a la the Qin dynasty, and most "useful" books have been put on foresight's best approximation of digital media, but there exist books that are legal to own. There's even a scene where Montag tries to dramatically reveal that he's preserved a banned book, and everyone present thinks it's a fireman's manual.
  • Furthermore, Fahrenheit 451 is not about government censorship but rather self-censorship — Ray Bradbury believed that a decline in interest in literature in favour of other media such as TV was a very bad thing, and in fact got very annoyed at people's constant insisting that it was about state censorship.^note It should be mentioned here that Ray Bradbury changed his explanation of what the book was about many times, with the self-censorship reasoning only coming to the forefront later in life when he became strongly in favor of increased government power in the aftermath of 9/11.
  • It is assumed that the repurposing of firemen from extinguishing fires to burning books is an example of heavily skewed priorities of a tyrannical government. In reality, firefighters are simply obsolete in the setting due to advances in construction technology, and they were reassigned to burning illegal materials simply because there was nothing better for them to do.
• The Fountainhead is a novel by Ayn Rand, and as such is largely believed to be a story that gushes over the earning of profit as man's highest and most noble endeavor, that lavishes praise upon wealthy executives and business owners as heroic saviors of the helpless and undeserving working class, and that sneers at anyone who suggests that morality means something more than having the most money as soft, weak, and anti-scientific. Not only is this incorrect, it's largely the opposite of what Rand actually wrote and argued. This is largely the result of Popcultural Osmosis conflating the book with Rand's other major work: Atlas Shrugged.
  • The primary conflict of the story is the struggle of the brilliant architect Howard Roark (who is very deliberately portrayed as the ideal man) to preserve the beauty and integrity of his work in a world of corruption and compromise. Throughout the book, Roark constantly refuses opportunities that would grant him fame and fortune because they demand compromises which he isn't willing to make. It is Roark's fellow architects — his corrupt foils — who immediately agree to any work which promises them money and reputation. In reality, The Fountainhead is at the top of the list of stories that argue against the idea that profit is inherently good. While profit is not portrayed as inherently evil, it is made vehemently clear that it should always come second to moral considerations and to put profit above such considerations is evil.
  • The upper-class executives and business owners of the story are portrayed as anything but heroes. With a few notable and important exceptions, they are portrayed as very mediocre men contributing very little to their respective enterprises or to the world at large, and who either inherited their wealth and position or sucked their way up to the top. Meanwhile, the working-class characters of the story (granted, there's really only two — this is a book about the very white-collar profession of architects) are portrayed as good, honest, and productive men. At the same time, these upper-class characters are not portrayed as actively malicious, just feeble men pursuing the only things they are capable of understanding.
  • The real villains of the story are not government regulators — who are not criticized or even mentioned at all — but the 'social intelligentsia' — the "woke" crowd of the period — whom Rand mercilessly criticizes as immersed in hypocrisy, fanatically obsessed with being morally congratulated, and who secretly — even to themselves — desire a world with as much suffering and misery as possible, because groveling on behalf of victims is the only place they are able to obtain power and praise.
• Frankenstein is the subject of many misconceptions, many of them deriving from the 1931 film Frankenstein, which is a very loose adaptation.
  • The public has unilaterally made "Frankenstein" the name of the monster, when it's actually the name of his creator. The more informed/pedantic will usually call him "Frankenstein's Monster", which is more accurate, but even then, he's only ever called "the Creature" in the text itself. A popular joke among fans of the novel is to claim that the monster's name is actually "Adam", based on a passage in the text where he compares his own life to the story of Genesis, and tells Victor "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel."
  • People typically believe that Victor Frankenstein is a doctor. In the original novel, he does not have a doctorate of any sort, and is merely a medical student.
  • The public perception of the Creature as a lumbering simpleton who means no harm comes from the film. In the book, he is extremely intelligent, well-spoken, physically adept, and very wrathful.
  • The idea that monster was brought to life with lightning comes from the film. The novel specifically avoids saying how it was done. There is a mention of Victor Frankenstein being fascinated by the effects of a lightning strike earlier, but that's it.
  • The Creature's appearance, with green skin, a flat top, and bolts come out of his neck, are all inventions of the film. In the novel, Frankenstein believes that his creation is perfectly proportioned when still dead, but once he's animated with life, the Creature is horrifying to look at, apparently due to some uncanny valley effect. He's described as having a lipless mouth, foggy eyes and skin too tight for his frame.
  • The story is often summarised as the one where "creator is destroyed by his creation". While The Creature certainly does come to hate Victor, torments him and murders his friends and loved ones, it doesn't kill him. Victor dies of exposure and illness after a mad chase after the Creature across the Arctic.
• The Giver is a novel about a futuristic society where everyone looks and acts the same... except it's not. People in the Community have distinct personalities — government-mandated personality tests are actually a huge plot point — and the government actually encourages this up to a point (i.e. so long as it doesn't become disruptive) because it's better for them if different people have different strengths as it allows them to fill a wide variety of jobs with people who are especially suited to them; there also are a handful of people in the Community with distinct looks (the protagonist and his love interest have uncommon blue eyes and red hair, respectively, although the latter trait isn't visible to most people due to lack of color vision) though selective breeding by the government tries to prevent this. The Community does restrict everyone into formulaic lives (all families have one male and one female child, children's lives are largely scripted year-by-year) and there isn't a lot of freedom of choice (spouses and jobs are assigned, not chosen), but it's a bit more complex than just "Everyone is the same!" In fact, there's even one scene where they have to choose one of twin infants to euthanize, because having two people who were exactly the same would be "too confusing".
• Great Expectations: Everyone thinks of Miss Havisham as an elderly woman and she's always portrayed as such in film adaptations. Actually, Dickens' notes indicate that she was only in her mid-30s at the start of the novel. Of course, the stress of her life and her lack of sunlight may contribute to her aging faster.
• Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates: No, the book doesn't climax with Hans Brinker saving the country by plugging a hole in the dike with his finger. The tale of the dike-plugging boy, "The Hero of Haarlem," is only a Story Within a Story, and the boy not only isn't Hans, but has No Name Given.
• Harry Potter:
  • Wizard children aren't invited to enroll at Hogwarts on their eleventh birthday. Harry was, but that's just because the Dursleys tried to destroy his letters, forcing Hagrid to track him down and deliver his invitation in person, on what just happened to be his birthday. He got hundreds of letters before his birthday, but he wasn't able to read any of them until Hagrid finally found him. All wizard children get their letters in late July, it just so happens that Harry's birthday falls out in that time of year as well.
  • Many non-fans like to mock the apparent stupidity of Hogwarts' curriculum, since it teaches young children advanced magic without bothering to teach them English, mathematics, science or history. Except they do teach history at Hogwarts. There's a whole "History of Magic" department devoted to teaching the kids about the history of the Wizarding World. And while they don't teach the other subjects, Hogwarts is the Wizarding equivalent of a secondary school and students aren't invited to join until they're at least 10 years old, so wizards would have learned all the English and maths they need before attending. That is to say, while wizards probably don't know trigonometry, they should know basic arithmetic, which is really all one strictly needs to get by in life. Even the argument "they don't teach science" is arguable — one could say that certain classes are essentially the magical versions of physics (Charms and Transfiguration), Chemistry (Potions), and biology (Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures); Hogwarts also offers, though does not require, courses in the magical versions of advanced math (Arithmancy), linguistics (Ancient Runes) and social science/anthropology (Muggle Studies). There are, however, still some glaringly missing subjects from all the classes we've seen (no form of literature or critical thinking course).
  • A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the series is a Cliché Storm of boarding school tropes. While its most basic premise is drawn from British boarding school novels like the Greyfriars stories, most of its Once per Episode conventions are pretty unique to Harry Potter, and aren't really inspired by anything in particular.
  • Everybody knows that "The new teacher at Hogwarts is always evil". Except they're not. There's always a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in every book, since nobody has ever been able to keep the job for more than a year. But of the seven professors who take the position over the course of the series, only four (Qurinius Quirrell, Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, Dolores Umbridge, and Amycus Carrow) would really qualify as "evil". And even then, Quirrell isn't a new teacher (he was a Muggle Studies professor before Harry's first year), Moody turns out to be an impostor, Umbridge is an Obstructive Bureaucrat who doesn't outright join the Death Eaters until they take over Britain, and even then it's more of a career power move and Carrow never actually taught Harry. Of the remaining "new" teachers, Gilderoy Lockhart is a Manipulative Bastard who steals credit for heroic stories by wiping memories, Remus Lupin is decidedly heroic, but he is a werewolf, and once this is leaked, Fantastic Racism costs him his job, and Mad-Eye Moody was absolutely Crazy-Prepared and more than a little paranoid, but in a subversion, he never actually taught at the school due to being kidnapped and imprisoned. Slughorn filled the "new teacher" role for Half-Blood Prince, but was a subversion in just about every way; he was not a new teacher but an old one coming out of retirement, he was not teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts but Potions, and while he was a cowardly egotist who openly played favorites, he was not evil (and he even redeems some of the negative qualities he does have by showing courage in the final battle). The new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher during that year was Snape, who is most decidedly not new (he was Potions teacher since the beginning of the series), and he ultimately proves not to be evil, but working with Dumbledore.
  • Whenever a non-fan hears about Harry having romance in his life, they'll often assume that it's with Hermione—because she's the most well-known female character from the books. In fact, Harry and Hermione are strictly Platonic Life-Partners, and they were never even hinted to have romantic feelings for each other in the books, and Hermione would get together with Harry's best friend Ron. The movies are partly responsible for this misconception, since they tended to play up Daniel Radcliffe's chemistry with Emma Watson, and they removed many of the moments where Harry and Hermione openly fought and bickered in the books. But even then, the Harry/Hermione pairing never went beyond Ship Tease. Another factor is that it'd be very easy to write her as such, and many writers not named J.K. Rowling probably would have done it, as it is usual for The Hero to get together with the one girl, as opposed to the best friend (Ron in this case) doing it. It just happens that this is a major exception to the rule.
  • A common joke in the fandom is that Harry would have died in the first book if not for Hermione, and that Hermione was an Only Sane Woman who solved all of Harry and Ron's problems without getting any of the credit. While this is true to a point (she is an empowered woman of strong conviction, and she's the most academically gifted of the trio), she also has her share of Not So Above It All moments, and Harry and Ron save her almost as often as she saves them. Case in point: Hermione first became friends with Harry and Ron when the latter two saved her from almost getting eaten by a (magical, not online) troll. Some of these misconceptions are likely due to the film adaptations, which omit many of these less shining moments while also giving Hermione a disproportionate role when it comes to saving others; for instance, the movie version of the Devil's Snare scene has her being the one who keeps her cool while Ron almost gets killed because he panics and has to be rescued by Hermione.
  • Everybody knows that Severus Snape turns out to be Good All Along at the end of the series, right? Well... sort of. He turns out to have been loyal to Dumbledore all along, and it's revealed that he was never really on Voldemort's side—but he still does plenty of other morally questionable things that have nothing to do with his loyalty to the Death Eaters. Among other things, he regularly abuses his authority to make his students miserable for petty reasons and he tries to get one of his colleagues fired by outing him as a werewolf. Much of the issue is that the story does end with Snape being seen on a rather unusually rosy note, and Rowling being very defensive of the character's morality ever since the books ended, insisting he was just misunderstood rather than an Anti-Hero.
  • It's a pretty common joke that Hogwarts has Swiss-Cheese Security thanks to Dumbledore being an incompetent fool who regularly lets horrible things happen to the students under his care. This is often given as a half-joking explanation for why Hogwarts always seems to be in grave peril. In fact, even if you ignore the fact that we only see six years of Dumbledore's tenure as Headmaster (when he had the job for decades), most of the major incidents at Hogwarts aren't actually his fault. Probably the biggest "disaster" that happens on his watch is the basilisk's attack, which was the result of a trap planted by Salazar Slytherin centuries ago. Most of the others happen because of new Hogwarts professors causing trouble from within the school, which is (partly) because of a curse that Voldemort put on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. Before the events of the series, the only real disaster at Hogwarts (that we know of) was the death of Moaning Myrtle, which happened under Dumbledore's predecessor Armando Dippet. And things don't get really dangerous at Hogwarts until the Death Eaters take over the school, which happens after Dumbledore's death.
  • One common assumption is that, since Gryffindor has a tower, the other Hogwarts Houses have towers as well. Not only is this never said to be the case (although Ravenclaw's dorm and common room are in a different tower), it's explicitly untrue in the case of at least one other House: Slytherin's common room and dorms are located down in the dungeons, a fact established in the second book. Source material also says that Hufflepuff House is on the same level as the kitchens, which are located directly under the Great Hall.
  • Everybody knows that Harry Potter is the classic example of a kids' series that accidentally attracted a massive Periphery Demographic of adult fans, just because it was so good. Though the books are generally marketed to young adult readers, J. K. Rowling has pretty consistently said that she wrote them for a general audience, and didn't specifically have kids in mind. Also in England, good children's literature has always had Multiple Demographic Appeal, right from Lewis Carroll himself. Then, of course, is the fact that the books were released over the course of 10 years, meaning that plenty of the adult fans were just people who started reading them as kids and simply grew up as they came out.
    • This misconception most likely stems from the series' reception in the US. Remember that the first Potter books were released to America in the late 1990s, a time when most major children's and YA literature titles were paperback series which typically put out new books once a month, had many of their stories penned by ghostwriters, and typically assumed their readers had very short attention spans. By the time Potter hit the states, many of these series had been going on for a decade or longer and had produced so many volumes that most traditionally-written kids' books would have been fighting a losing battle just to get on the shelf, let alone find a sizable audience. Rowling—who had no prior literary record—only got into bookstores by getting lucky and winning the confidence of Scholastic Books, who up till then had been milking the trend more than any other publisher save possibly Bantam/Random House. It can therefore easily be argued that much of Potter's Periphery Demographic came (at least initially) from adults buying the books not for themselves but for their children—not because the books were particularly good by themselves, but simply because they were something noticeably different than the "paperback pulp" that in their eyes had long overstayed its welcome. The series' critical reception likely followed much the same thought pattern; most literary scholars presumably crediting Rowling—alongside contemporaries such as Lemony Snicket—with having broken YA literature out of an extended Audience-Alienating Era which saw children's books as having become (perceived as) little to no better then their TV counterparts (at least in the perspective of Public Medium Ignorance), and ushering in a new era of quality storytelling which future series such as Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Divergent, and The Hunger Games would arguably continue.
  • In general, a Running Gag among the casual fans and press is to point out that Harry has "saved the school X times" every time someone doubts or mistrusts Harry, X being the number of previous books. To say that Harry makes a habit of "saving the school" is extremely inaccurate; while he certifiably did so in the second book, none of the other books feature him doing any such thing. Plus, all of his heroics involve excessive rule-breaking and generally have few if any witnesses.
  • Everyone knows that Hagrid describes Hufflepuff as "a lot o' duffers". Except, he doesn't. What he said is "Everyone says Hufflepuff are a lot o' duffers, but-", so he was almost certainly going to dispute the claim, rather than confirm it. This is reinforced by his next bit of advice to Harry: "Better Hufflepuff than Slytherin." He clearly holds Hufflepuff in higher regard than the house of Voldemort and many of his Death Eaters.
  • There are many people unfamiliar with the books who assume that catching the Golden Snitch is an Instant-Win Condition for the team whose Seeker accomplishes it. Not quite — the Snitch gives whichever team catches it 150 points. While this does secure a victory for the team that catches the Snitch most of the time (it takes a whole 15 goals with the Quaffle to match the number of points the Snitch gives), it doesn't guarantee that the team that catches it will win. Bulgaria loses the Quidditch World Cup final even though their seeker Viktor Krum caught the Snitch because the opposing Irish team was just that far ahead (the fact that the outcome of this World Cup match is never shown in the movies may contribute to the misconception). Of course, this isn't something most Seekers would do, as you don't want to cost your team the game, but if the team is losing badly and it doesn't seem likely that they'll be able to close the gap enough, a Seeker might choose to catch the Snitch anyway just to end the misery and lose with some dignity rather than risk the massive blowout that would ensue if the winning team were to catch it. The first movie may have helped create this misconception; in the scene where Oliver explains the rules to Harry and shows him some Quidditch balls, he tells Harry "You catch this (the Snitch), and we win".
  • Less dramatically, the Marauders as pranksters. This one abounds in fanon and fanfiction (sometimes to painfully annoying levels) largely due to a mistake easily made: in Prisoner of Azkaban, when describing the Marauders, Hagrid compared them to the Weasley twins. This is forgetting the fact that it was in response to McGonagall explicitly describing them as troublemakers, causing fans to think the Marauders were class clowns who did nothing but prank other people. In the actual books, the Marauders are less class clowns than jocks, and there is exactly one mention of any of them pulling a prank, that being the homicidal one Sirius played on budding Death Eater Severus Snape.
    • The Marauders' nicknames. Fanfiction often features them using the names Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs casually or affectionately. In canon, they aren't nicknames at all, but codenames. They used them only when it was necessary to keep Remus' werewolfery and related exploits from being discovered. Wormtail is the one most commonly referred to by that named by Voldemort and the Death Eaters, but their usage appears more disparaging.
    • On a related note, the Marauders are collectively referred to as such in the books exactly once, and even then, by a character who was not even born during their school days. The word "marauder" in the name of the Marauder's Map is singular, not plural.
  • It's commonly believed that Voldemort was unable to understand love because he was conceived via love potion. It's been stated that this was symbolic rather than a direct magical effect of the love potion, and that Tom would've turned out differently if his mother survived to raise him.
  • "Dumbledore is attracted to goats" is sometimes said by fans. Actually, it was his brother who apparently cast an "inappropriate" spell on a goat, and even then, it's never said how it was inappropriate.
  • Some commentators have criticized Cho Chang's name for being an inaccurate Chinese name, or sounding too stereotypically East Asian. Some have even accused JK Rowling of basing her name on the phrase Ching Chang Chong, which is a racist, mocking imitation of the Chinese language. However, "Cho Chang" is a common (or at least possible) name in Chinese-speaking regions — it's the Wade-Giles reading of "張卓," which would be written as "Zhuo Zhang" in Pinyin, the more commonly used Chinese romanization scheme today. Wade-Giles is still in official use in Taiwan, and was still not uncommon when the books were being written. Given that the character was born in 1979, when use of the Wade-Giles translation was common, this simply means her name is based on an older translation.
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, several readers, including those on This Very Wiki, think that the book and Harry and Dumbledore somehow justify Merope Gaunt's rape of Tom Riddle Sr. via Love Potion. In actuality, the book not only doesn't condone her actions, Harry outright calls any use of love potions as black magic. Harry and Dumbledore do sympathize with Merope's childhood but they never try to justify what she did to Tom.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Anyone who specifically thinks/says "Haruhi is God", when all the audience or any of the characters in the story know is that she's some sort of Reality Warper, and being "God" is just one theory which is stated to not be particularly likely. In fact, it's Koizumi who makes the God claim, and it's established that a lot of what he says is a lie. He also says that he's working under that assumption mostly because it's the worst-case scenario.
• Heavenly Ways by Ivan Shmelyov attracts a lot of vitriol from the Orthodox Christian community (which is, incidentally, the novel’s target audience) because the main character is in a romantic and sexual relationship with a nun who quit the convent for his sake. Except, of course, that he isn’t. Although it’s true he is living with a lover without getting married, due to already having an estranged wife elsewhere, his lover isn’t a runaway nun but an ex-postulant (who quit the convent quite legally). The whole point of being a postulant is to decide whether one really has the vocation for monastic life before taking any vows.
• Heidi:
  • Despite being Swiss, Heidi doesn't have blonde braided pigtails. She has short, curly black hair. Several of the screen adaptations make her blonde, though.
  • Klara isn't Heidi's cousin. They're not related: Klara is related to the woman whom Heidi's Aunt Dete works for, and Dete brings Heidi to be Klara's live-in companion. People who make this mistake must either remember the 1968 TV film version, which makes the girls cousins, or else have them confused with Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden (which also has a disabled child learning to walk due to being in nature).
• A lot of people think that in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is "the meaning of life". Actually, it's specifically referred to as the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The reason nobody can understand why 42 is the answer is because they don't actually know what the question is.
• H. P. Lovecraft:
  • His stories are all about people meeting an ancient Eldritch Abomination (often the centerpiece Cthulhu) and in the end getting killed or insane. Except... not. To start with, few stories of Lovecraft feature an abomination itself (and especially Cthulhu, who appears only in "The Call of Cthulhu" and is mentioned fairly little beyond that), instead often showing smaller races who worship these Old Ones (the most prevalent being Yog-Sothoth, and Lovecraft fittingly called his mythos "Yog-Sothothery") and rarely dealing with the direct end of the world, but instead focusing on humanity's lack of importance on a grander scale. And last but not least, very few protagonists of his die and few of them go insane. Most of them just live...but of course, they have to live with the knowledge of what they know.
  • And, in a possibly even more ubiquitous case, he never called the fungi from Yuggoth "Mi-Go" as a proper name for the species. In his story that truly introduced them, "The Whisperer in Darkness", they are compared to, or suggested to be the origin of stories of the Mi-Go — and the protagonists later conclude that the "mi-go" is, in truth, definitely the same as what they're dealing with — but the term is simply a pre-existing name (another name for the yeti) that they decide is truly, if unwittingly, referring to these creatures, rather than the more common conception of what one is. It would be just as valid to call them fauns, dryads, satyrs, or "kallikanzarai" [sic], all other pre-existing creatures of myth and folklore that they're similarly compared to.
  • The only thing everybody knows about Lovecraft as a person is that he was extremely racist, which means that all the unknown horrors in all of his stories are seething, thinly-veiled allegories for black people and/or other minorities, right? Not so. Not only did Lovecraft not really write any stories that could be considered allegorical, but he was a sheltered, antisocial man with many phobias (including that of the sea and of the oppressive soul-crushing expanse of the stars, which show up very, very often in his writings). He really was that racist, but the extent to which it seeped into his writing is often vastly overblown, probably because when it actually does it's very blatant (cf. "Medusa's Coil").
  • Cthulhu is often thought to be an extremely powerful combatant. While this is the case in some adaptations and much of pop culture, the original stories are a different matter; he's not even one of the stronger Great Old Ones in them. In "The Call of Cthulhu", during an encounter with eight sailors, he only manages to kill three of them, and is knocked out when another sailor rams a ship into his head. Cthulhu is terrifying due to the influence he holds, his alien incomprehensibility, and the fact that his mere presence is enough to warp minds, not because he can destroy entire cities with a wave of his hand.
  • Most depictions of Cthulhu after it entered public domain center on the idea of summoning it, usually with some kind of ritual or ceremony held by a cult - probably conflating him with a demon or djinn. In the original story there is a Cthulhu worshipping cult, but they aren't actively working to bring the old one back - they have predicted his return is imminent and carry out depraved ritual ceremonies purely for religious purposes. When Cthulhu does show up, he wasn't summoned - a group of sailors land in the ancient city where he's sleeping and more or less trip over him while looking around.
  • Also, a lot of Lovecraft-inspired media depicts merely looking at monsters as being enough to drive humans insane. However, in the Lovecraft's actual works, the characters can usually look at the monsters just fine. What does drive them insane is learning the Awful Truth. For example, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the protagonist isn't driven insane by seeing the Deep Ones. He goes mad when he discovers he is going to become one.
• The Irregular at Magic High School's protagonist is often said to have no emotions outside of his love for Miyuki, but what the series actually says is that his emotions are drastically muted, which is a big difference. His having feelings for people unrelated or even opposed to Miyuki is a plot point in the Visitor and Reminiscence arcs.
• Jane Eyre:
  • Jane and Mr. Rochester's love story is often misremembered as "a plain young governess and a handsome Byronic Hero fall in love." But the book makes it emphatically clear that Rochester is not handsome. Neither he nor Jane is particularly good looking. Of course it's easy to forget that when most of the film and TV versions give him Adaptational Attractiveness.
  • Helen Burns is never said to have curly red hair, nor is her hair cut by Mr. Brocklehurst to discourage her from vanity. The girl with the red curls which Brocklehurst orders cut is named Julia Severn. The 1943 and 1996 film versions give the curls and the Traumatic Haircut to Helen, and the subsequent 2006 miniseries and 2011 film also feature curly red-haired Helens, even though neither includes the haircut scene.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth:
  • It's commonly believed that almost every fantasy stereotype originated with Tolkien. He was extremely influential on the fantasy genre as a whole, but his descriptions of most fantasy races found in his work differ significantly from their stereotypical aspects as found in "Tolkienesque" fantasy that developed in his wake. In addition, very little of Tolkien's characterization of his fantasy races originated with him. His sources were somewhat older. Trope Codifier, perhaps, but not Ur-Example.
  • Lord of the Rings being an intentional allegory for World War II and the One Ring representing nuclear weapons is one of the more widely-assumed cultural takes on the story. This is an idea so pervasive that Tolkien himself refuted it in the introduction to a later edition of the books, pointing out that he wrote his first drafts of the story throughout the late 30s and early 40s, and therefore many of the events he was supposedly allegorizing hadn't happened yet. He also claimed to dislike intentionally-written allegory in general (though he was okay with Applicability), believing it made stories feel less real or forced a single interpretation onto them. Lastly, he argued that, had he been trying to tell a "nukes are bad" story, it wouldn't have had the good guys refusing to use their Fantastic Nuke, and would probably have been a huge Downer Ending as a result. Even in terms of inspiration from Tolkien's life (something he acknowledged as a possibility), scholars have mostly pointed to World War I as the better guess, since he actually served in that war.
  • Elves being closer to nature than humankind is just part and parcel of them being derived from The Fair Folk of various European mythologies. But while it's often assumed that Tolkien's Elves are vegetarians, this is only said to be the case for the Green-elves of Ossiriand. This is never said to be the case for Elves in general; in fact, some populations are explicitly said to eat at least some meat. For example, the Elves of Mirkwood have a feast that includes meat dishes, and Thorin is fed meat while imprisoned there.
  • Tolkien's elves are also not exclusively forest-dwelling recluses living in small towns and villages. That's the case when the story is set, but The Silmarillion goes out of its way to point out that they used to live in massive cities and were renowned for their industriousness and craftsmanship, especially the Noldor. The elves in the Third Age are essentially survivors of multiple apocalypses.
  • It's common today to depict Tolkien-style "human" elves as androgynous, and game-based fantasy universe are also likely to make them smaller and/or frailer than humans to "balance" their advantaged in speed and agility. Tolkien never described his elves that way and was reputedly annoyed when artists drew Legolas as a Pretty Boy. To Tolkien, elves were lean, but also tall, muscular, and strong (even the women were stated to have less of a strength differential compared to their men than was the case with humans), befitting a Proud Warrior Race.
    Christopher Tolkien: There was nothing filmy or transparent about the heroic or majestic Eldar of the Third Age of Middle-earth. Long afterwards my father would write, in a wrathful comment on a 'pretty' or 'ladylike' pictorial rendering of Legolas: 'He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazgul, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.'
  • There's a stereotype fueled by adaptations in other media about Elves always using bows, and conversely other races like Dwarves not using bows. Similarly, Dwarves using axes, and Elves and other races not using axes. Neither are quite accurate. While Tolkien did come up with the association of axes with Dwarves (it's their traditional battle cry) this comes off more strongly in The Lord of the Rings since Thorin in The Hobbit uses an Elven-made sword for much of the story, only replacing it with an axe after he loses it, and later an army of Dwarves is said to have swords as sidearm (paired with shields) while their main weapons are mattocks. Thorin and his Dwarven companions are also said to use bows and arrows while journeying through Mirkwood. In earlier works Tolkien also wrote about Elves using axes, iron-studded clubs and maces which would be distinctly un-elflike in other settings.
  • Also, his Dwarves do not explicitly use war hammers like in later fantasy despite being great smiths as in real mythology. In fact, nobody in his body of work seems to use war hammers explicitly, as an ancient Elven clan called "The Hammer of Wrath" (also known for their smithwork) use maces instead, and the Dark Lord Morgoth has a weapon named Grond which is dubbed "The Hammer of the Underworld" but directly called a mace too. This is probably because war hammers were not used in the real world until the Late Middle Ages (the impetus being improved protection in the form of transitional and plate armor), while Tolkien's setting is consciously based on the Early Middle Ages (with mail being the best form of common armor, though some characters wear bits of plate like vambraces). As a philologist and history enthusiast he would've been well aware of this.
  • In general, Middle-earth swords, spears and axes are often depicted in various media adaptations and visual depictions as used with two hands, especially when named characters use them. This isn't quite accurate because Tolkien mentions the use of shields a lot due to his taking influence from the Early Medieval Period. Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas all borrow shields, which implies their weapons weren't as long as sometimes depicted. Aragorn's sword is a "long sword" and "great sword", but not a "longsword" or "greatsword" because the general feel of the books would make that anachronistic. Longswords, greatswords, and two-handed axes were by and large not used until the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, the impetus again being improvements in armor technology that rendered shields largely obsolete (so two-handed weapons became a lot more popular) and armor-piercing weapons more valuable.
  • Similarly, despite various other media depicting otherwise, Tolkien never clearly mentions plate armor (apart from individual pieces like wrist guards) and his body armor tends to be chainmail or scale armor, in keeping with the Early Medieval vibe. Full suits of plate armor like in the movies and tons of art would be akin to the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods instead. The closest it may get is an ambiguous reference to Imrahil and his Dol Amroth knights wearing "full harness", which typically refers to full plate suits but not necessarily, and in context just means that they were fully armored and equipped in contrast to the more lightly-equipped levy and fief troops they're contrasted with.
  • The Lord of the Rings isn't Frodo Baggins, nor his uncle Bilbo. It refers exclusively to Sauron. There is only one Lord of the Rings, and he doesn't share his title. This is actually mentioned in both the book and movie versions of The Fellowship of the Ring; in the book, during the Council of Elrond, Pippin jokingly says, "Behold! The Lord of the Ring!" in response to Frodo taking the Ring, and Gandalf quickly reprimands him, while in the movie he mentions it in response to Saruman's belief that his alliance with Sauron will allow him to share the latter's power.
  • "Pipe-weed" is definitely not marijuana. It's the Middle-Earth counterpart of tobacco. It's even explicitly called tobacco in The Hobbit, which was written before the decision to tie it all in to his Middle-Earth mythology. Tolkien changed the name to pipe-weed because tobacco is a non-English loanword, so he felt it would be inappropriate to use with characters not speaking English.
  • The fortress where King Théoden and the Rohirrim fought the armies of Isengard is called Helm's Deep, right? Actually, it's called the Hornburg. Helm's Deep is the name of the valley where it was built. The film uses the phrase "Helm's Deep" far more often.
  • Contrary to how he's often imagined (and how he's often depicted in illustrations and adaptations), Gandalf is explicitly noted to be not particularly tall. In fact Tolkien described him as "a figure strongly built and with broad shoulder, though shorter than the average of men and now stooped with age." This misconception may have something to do with the fact that he's often around hobbits and dwarfs, which makes him seem tall in comparison.
  • It's often said that Saruman has a Compelling Voice. While this is somewhat true, the actual extent of this is often exaggerated, with many fans claiming that Saruman's voice was literally hypnotic. Tolkien explicitly stated in one of his letters that Saruman's voice was merely persuasive, not hypnotic. Some variants of hypnosis do occur in Tolkien's works, such as the dragon enchantments and, possibly, Luthien's song in front of Morgoth, but not in Lord of The Rings. Rejecting Saruman's voice was possible with free will and reason (emphasis Tolkien's), as Gimli does in the book. This is poked fun at in the second movie, when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli encounter who they think is Saruman, Aragon warns, "Do not let him speak. He will put a spell on us."
  • Talking of wizardry, it's common for people to claim that Gandalf rarely ever uses magic, and it's justified that he doesn't do so because he isn't allowed to use his full strength as one of the Maiar. In point of fact, Gandalf uses magic quite regularly in both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Aside from more subtle magic like craftsmanship or unusual presence, he also demonstrates the ability to control and enhance fire on multiple occasions, wards a door enough to hold back a balrog, heals Théoden from a long period of physical and mental poisoning, cracks solid stone at least twice, and creates bursts of light powerful enough to ward off Ringwraiths or outright kill goblins. Though it is true that Gandalf is rarely-if-ever swinging with his full strength over the course of the story, and his abilities are a long way from unlimited, he is still clearly a being of great magical power.
  • It's commonly claimed that Gimli was a comic relief-type character, but this is only true in the movies. In the book, he was an honourable, wise and stalwart warrior, though he did have a short temper which led to a few difficult situations, and some Deadpan Snarker moments.
  • The Lord of the Rings is not a genuine trilogy. It's one single novel, which was initially published in three volumes because the publishers couldn't afford to publish it all at once at the time due to paper shortages that lingered after World War II. The only internal division intended by Tolkien is the division into six "books".
  • Everyone "knows" that Middle-earth is the name of the world the series is set in. Actually, the world is called Arda; Middle-earth is the name of the continent where most of the events take place.
  • Common knowledge says that Arda is a Constructed World. It's not. The books are set on Earth in the distant past (about 6,000 years ago, by Tolkien's reckoning) and purport to detail heroic deeds from Germanic mythology, a la the Poetic and Prose Eddas or Beowulf.
  • It's true that Christopher Lee was the only cast member of the films to have actually met Tolkien, but not that Tolkien told him that he should play Gandalf in a film adaptation of the story. In reality, he merely ran into him at a bar briefly and was too star-struck to say anything to him. Indeed, Lee was a relatively youthful 51 when Tolkien died, and would have only been in his late 20s or 30s when the two met, so it is unlikely that Tolkien would have thought of Gandalf when he saw the actor.
  • Frodo is not the standard-issue "young" hero out of his depth who reluctantly comes along because only he can complete the quest. Quite the opposite. At the start of the novel, he is 33, which to a Hobbit is more like our 18, but there is a 17-year gap between the farewell party and Frodo's departure from the Shire, making him 50, not 33, for a bulk of the story. While he appears young due to the power of the Ring preventing him from physically aging, Frodo is the oldest, not youngest, among the Hobbits, the most classically educated, and the one with the most skill for survival outside of the Shire. He is the most pro-active of them all, being the first to actually physically engage the enemy in the Mines of Moria, and the reason he, Sam and Pippin aren't caught by the Ringwraiths much earlier. And there is nothing reluctant about his participation. He is the first to volunteer. Although he becomes worn-down over the course of the story and encounters uncertainties about the safest routes and who to trust, he's never dubious about his overall goal or how to achieve it.
    • Many of these misconceptions stem from Peter Jackson's film adaptations, which, despite being about 75% faithful, do leave out the time gap, making Frodo appear to be a teenager throughout (and Elijah Wood was the youngest actor among the Hobbits), as well as leaving out most of Frodo's heroism. When he volunteers at Elrond's council to be the one to take the Ring to Mordor, he seemingly does it because the film adds a squabble where none of the other council members can agree on who it should be. In the book, he is the first to speak up at all.
  • No, Tolkien didn't portray spiders as evil and scary because he had arachnophobia from being bitten by a venomous spider as a child in South Africa. That incident really did happen, but he never had any dislike of spiders at all, and would even go out of his way to save ones he found in the bathtub. It was one of his sons who was the arachnophobe.
  • The Eagles rescuing Frodo and Sam from the lava of Mount Doom is often cited as a famous example of modern Deus ex Machina. What with the eagles never appearing being mentioned beforehand. Only it isn't really an example, as the eagles are repeatedly mentioned beforehand, notably saving Gandalf from Orthanc. They actually first appear in The Hobbit too, so it's not like Tolkien created them to save Sam and Frodo.
  • While we're on the topic of the Eagles, a common criticism is that the Fellowship should have just rode the Eagles into Mordor, dropped the Ring into the mountain from the air, and thus saved themselves a good deal of trouble. This is wrong on a number of levels. First, Sauron's servants were looking everywhere for the Ring, and even not counting the Ringwraiths (who had yet to mount the fell beasts at this point in the story), Sauron had numerous airborne spies, including Saruman's crebain birds, and the idea that they should fly through the air, highly visible to anyone in the region who happened to look up, is ludicrous. The Eagles also did not have the sort of power to deal with Sauron's forces, and were just as vulnerable to arrows or other projectile weapons, and would never have made it over Mordor's border in one piece. This is to say nothing of the fact that the Eagles are not just horses. They are a proud, ancient, sapient race that only help out Gandalf on occasion because they owe him for past favors. They would not be willing to undertake such a suicidal quest. They rescued Frodo and Sam only after Mordor's fall.
    • It should be noted though, that none of those reasons are actually presented in the book; in fact, the topic of eagles is not discussed at all, even in a section where the heroes are explicitly bringing up and shooting down plans to deal with the Ring. Tolkien himself only brought up the idea in a letter regarding a potential film adaptation (the treatment he was sent had the Fellowship use the Eagles to expedite the journey to the Misty Mountains), and rejected it not for reasons of practicality, but drama: he thought it would ruin the impact of when they appear in the climax, and therefore they should be used sparingly.
    • Speaking of which, though the argument has been around since the books were released, the films also contributed enormously to the misconception that the Eagles could have solved everything due to giving them a hefty dose of Adaptational Badass. The original text underlines their limitations several times and makes the idea of them being able to accomplish such a task even if they wanted to highly doubtful. For example, in The Hobbit, it's said that the Lord of Eagles would not let his followers fly near the lands of Men, because "They would shoot at us with their great bows of yew, for they would think we were after their sheep. And at other times they would be right. No! we are glad to cheat the goblins of their sport, and glad to repay our thanks to you, but we will not risk ourselves for dwarves in the southward plains." In other words, Eagles are not keen on their chances against local shepherds, much less an industrialized military force. Their leader, the second greatest Eagle to ever exist, also notes that he owes Gandalf because the wizard saved him from a mundane arrow wound, and later in The Lord of the Rings, he comments that he'd be unable to carry Gandalf long distances ("[I can carry you] many leagues, but not to the ends of the earth."). This image◊ painted by Tolkien depicts said Eagle as 3 meters in length, which scaled to the proportions of a 1 meter, 6 kg golden eagle would equate to a creature some 216 kilograms in mass. His regular Eagles should all be considerably smaller than this.
  • Everyone "knows" that Mordor is a volcanic wasteland. This is only partly correct. It's an accurate description of the region of Gorgoroth and some other parts of northwestern Mordor, but the rest is not like this. In fact, the whole southern half of Mordor has an enormous lake and great amounts of farmland to keep itself running, and the land is extremely fertile owing to the properties of volcanic soil. Sauron had to feed Mordor's inhabitants somehow, after all.
  • A commonly stated fact about The Silmarillion is the size of Ancalagon the Black, noted to be the most powerful dragon to ever exist in Middle-Earth. One of the first pictures one finds when Googling him is a size comparison chart showing him as larger than pretty much every other pop-culture dragon you can think of, and several miles long at least, a full-on Kaiju. One might expect from this that Ancalagon is some great, almighty threat and his size is a well-known fact. In reality, Ancalagon's role in The Silmarillion consists of a single sentence where he is mentioned as having been slain by Eärendil, at which he fell and broke the towers of Thangorodrim. Combine that with a one-sentence mention in Fellowship of the Ring, and that's Ancalagon's entire history in Tolkien. He was the most powerful dragon, but he only ever fought as part of a single campaign, which ultimately failed. The size commonly associated with him comes solely from people attempting to scale Ancalagon's size with the mountain peaks under the assumption that he physically crushed them with his body, but as the balrog Durin's Bane destroyed a mountainside in its own death throes and Smaug wrecked what was left of Laketown when he fell, there's precedent for smaller creatures being able to cause massive destruction, and the language in general is so vague and the context so nakedly mythical that trying to scale anything from it is difficult at best.
  • More moderate fans tend to make very significant claims about the elf Glorfindel, proclaiming him to be one of the most important characters in the legendarium who slew a balrog and returned from Aman because he was just that amazing, and often lamenting for this reason that he was Adapted Out of both film versions of Fellowship. The thing is, the story of Glorfindel's return (as well as the idea that such a return was highly abnormal for elves, and that it was all the same guy rather than two elves who shared a name) was only something Tolkien ever worked out in an essay (unpublished in his life), which he conceived of long after he wrote both The Fall of Gondolin and The Lord of the Rings. In both stories, Glorfindel's role is actually very minor, and he isn't portrayed as doing anything beyond the capabilities of an experienced elven lord (even the infamous balrog-slaying happened at a point when they were far weaker and more common). Essentially, while Glorfindel does have an impressive rap sheet, much of it is only retroactive, and he was never treated in canon as nearly as important as fanon often makes him out to be.
  • A criticism of elves in Tolkien is that you Can't Argue with Elves because they're universally portrayed as the most beautiful, capable of improbable physical feats, immortal, and the wisest of all beings (that last is a line that Galadriel, who may be a little biased, is given in the opening narration of the first film). Some of this is a fair description of how they appear in Lord of the Rings, the part of the Legendarium most are familiar with, although it elides the hints elves always drop about the psychological cost of immortality. However, the elves who are alive in Lord of the Rings were either born after the most cataclysmic events of the previous Ages or they are the survivors of those times. Any First- or Second-Age elf who failed to be wise and temperate got themselves killed in various hubristic ways and dragged scores of others to the grave. Even discounting the parts of the Legendarium that only attract intense fans, elves in The Hobbit are considerably less ethereal, behaving like The Fair Folk, squabbling over chores, and engaging in Alcohol-Induced Idiocy—not exactly the paragons of perfection they're accused of being.
  • Frodo and Bilbo are the classic fantasy humble heroes, coming from a simple peasant livelihood to unwillingly embark on great adventures, right? Well, most of that is correct, except the Baggins are actually hobbit nobility and are quite wealthy by the standards of the Shire. In fact, part of why Sam is so loyal to Frodo is because his family is sworn to serve Frodo's as feudal subjects.
• Vatsayana's Kama Sutra is a Hindu philosophical text about the spiritual components of pleasure, the challenges of balancing pleasurable living with virtuous behavior, and the elements of healthy sexual relationships. Despite what you may have heard, it's not a "sex manual" or a guide to having better sex. Also, while it may be heavily associated with tantric sex in the popular imagination, it has nothing to do with it.
• Land of Oz:
  • In the Land of Oz books, not all Munchkinlanders are short. While it is common for them to be below average height, more than a few are of typical height.
  • The Wicked Witch of the West has green skin. Except she doesn't in the books. Official art gives her a standard human skin colour and it's implied her signature colour is yellow (the color of Winkie Country, that land that she rules), not black or green.
  • Ozma as a Tomboy Princess or at least a Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak is commonplace to the point it is even featured in adaptations and derivative works. It's not in the original books, though. Tip is reluctant to turn back into Ozma—but once the change happens, Ozma is nothing but feminine.
  • Due to Judy Garland's portrayal in The Wizard of Oz, many people think Dorothy is around 14-17 years old. In the books, Dorothy is half that age—and even in the MGM film, she's supposed to be pre-adolescent (with some sources citing her as 12).^note  Judy Garland was 17 at the time, but she was supposed to be much younger than that; she wore chest bindings to make herself look younger. This can be seen in earlier adaptations like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) (where Dorothy is played by a 9-year-old), as well as later Truer to the Text adaptations like Return to Oz.
  • Oz is commonly assumed to be an imaginary wonderland dreamt up by a lonely girl who wants to escape her unhappy life. While the MGM film leaves it ambiguous whether Oz is real or imaginary, the books make it clear that it's a real country—it's just really hard to get to. Later books also establish that Oz is just one of several countries located on a faraway continent, which also includes numerous other countries such as "Ev".
  • Numerous adaptations and derivatives of the series are themed around Dorothy "returning" to Oz, as if this is a novel idea. In fact, this was already done all the way back in 1907: Dorothy returned to Oz in the third book, (Ozma of Oz), and became a permanent resident of Oz, alongside her aunt and uncle, in the sixth book (The Emerald City of Oz). She spends the majority of the series as an Honorary Princess of Oz.
  • Due to Adaptation Displacement, it's commonly cited that Dorothy has Small Town Boredom. This doesn't apply to the books: Dorothy never talks poorly of her home in Kansas.
  • Everyone knows the iconic scene where Dorothy lands in Oz and says "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." That quote comes from the movie. In the book version, she never actually says this or anything similar.
  • Some sources, complaining about the movie's portrayal of Dorothy as more of a Damsel in Distress than the original book's Plucky Girl, will claim that Dorothy "only cries once" in the book, as opposed to the screen Dorothy's frequent crying. Actually, while she might be spunkier in general, Baum's Dorothy is just as Prone to Tears as the screen Dorothy, crying a total of eight times over the course of the story.
  • Everybody knows that the witches of the West and the East are evil, while the witches of the North and the South are good. Except not really: it's eventually revealed that Mombi (another evil witch introduced in the second book) was previously known as the Wicked Witch of the North, and that Quadling Country was previously ruled by an (unnamed) Wicked Witch of the South before Glinda overthrew her.
  • There's literally zero evidence that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is secretly a political allegory arguing in favor of the gold standard.^Explanation In the original book, it's eventually revealed that the Emerald City isn't really built of emeralds: the Wizard just forces visitors to wear green glasses to fool them into thinking that it is. Some literary critics have interpreted this as a subtle dig at the illusory value of "greenback" paper currency in the American fiat money system, which isn't backed by gold. L. Frank Baum was very clear and explicit about his reasons for writing the book: he wanted to create a contemporary American fairy tale tailored to the sensibilities of American children of the 1900s. Advocating financial policy to children wasn't one of those reasons.
• The wonderlands of Lewis Carroll:
  • Many people are still under the impression that Carroll was a drug user and/or child molester. Carroll was in fact an incredibly stuffy cleric who didn't even drink, let alone do recreational drugs. The madcap imagery was not drug-inspired, and a good deal of it is meant to be symbolic and/or metaphorical. Also, while he did enjoy the company of children — including painting and photographing them — that wasn't considered especially odd, 19th-century England being positively obsessed with children and childhood.
  • Also, many people who have never read the book or watched adaptations of it assume that the story is about Alice is having a drug trip instead of simply dreaming. Others assume that the book was written in an attempt to advertise psychedelic drugs and/or alcohol to children, but it's just a nonsensical fantasy story. The former comes from the time and space displacement that Alice undergoes during Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (as well as the general nuttiness). In fact, the growing and shrinking, like the frequent presence of magical food and drink, are just because children like that kind of thing. (And possibly as a math joke.) The general nuttiness comes from the fact that Alice in Wonderland was actually parodying just about everything Carroll could think of. In fact, the idea that the story is random wackiness for nonsense's sake completely overlooks the vast amount of cultural context and parody that went into Alice's experiences in the story.
  • He didn't have Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, either; it was just named for his books. He did suffer from migraines, but not until later in life, long after both Alice books were written.
  • Contrary to popular belief, Carroll never actually referred to the Hatter as the Mad Hatter, only the Hatter. And the Queen of Hearts and Red Queen are not the same person (though film adaptations frequently merge them). Referring to the Hatter as the Mad Hatter would be redundant, as the Cheshire Cat points out that everyone in Wonderland, including Alice herself, is mad.
  • She fell down a rabbit hole, talked to a doorknob and some sentient flowers in the garden, met Tweedledum and Tweedledee...wait, you mean she didn't? Well yes, of course she fell down the rabbit hole, but the talking doorknob was from the Disney animated film, while the talking flowers and Tweedledum and Tweedledee were both from Through the Looking-Glass.
  • Common knowledge even gets the title wrong — it was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although "Alice in Wonderland" can be used as the series title, referring to the book and its sequel together. Not to mention that common knowledge also screws up the sequel's title, as it is correctly Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.
  • The creature from Jabberwocky isn't called "the Jabberwocky". It's called the Jabberwock (no "y"). The title was likely intended to mean (in Carroll's entirely made-up nonsense language) something like "The Story of the Jabberwock"—in much the same vein as "Nibelungenlied" meaning "The Story of the Nibelungs", or "Iliad" meaning "The Story of Ilium". (The poem is a parody of epic poems)
  • The Cheshire Cat is often believed to be a Trickster Archetype and Wild Card with Reality Warper powers just as likely to screw Alice as help her. In actuality, the cat is one of the few unironically helpful characters Alice encounters in either book, and perhaps the only one she seems to genuinely enjoy talking to. He's also not an independent character, but the pet cat of the Duchess, and his Reality Warper powers are only ever shown to concern making parts of his body vanish or teleport, never once does he manipulate any of his surroundings or other people.
  • The books don't revolve around Alice learning to be more rational and responsible by seeing just how nightmarish a world of nonsense would really be. (Though Disney's animated version might create that impression.) Nor do they revolve around teaching her to embrace weirdness and rebellion against convention. (That's more the Tim Burton version.) The books are pure satire, nonsense and fantasy, with no Aesop, and they constantly make fun of the moralizing children's stories and poems that were popular and the time.
• Little House on the Prairie is not the first book in the Little House series—just the most famous. Little House in the Big Woods is the first, and Little House on the Prairie is a sequel. The title refers to the Ingalls family moving westward to the Kansas prairie from the "Big Woods" of Wisconsin, where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born.
  • Despite the title of the TV series coming from the aforementioned second book in the Little House books, the setting used in the series — the town of Walnut Grove — is actually the location of the fourth book^note third if you don't count Farmer Boy, which is the third book by series order but takes place pretty much outside the main series chronology, On The Banks of Plum Creek.
• "The Little Mermaid":
  • It's a commonly held belief that the story is set in Denmark due to the author, Hans Christian Andersen, being Danish and The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen. The truth is that the story never actually states where it takes place, and the statue has almost nothing to do with Andersen: it was commissioned in 1909 (decades after the author's death in 1875) by Carl Jacobsen, who had been fascinated by a ballet adaptation of Andersen's 1837 story, with Ellen Price, the lead ballerina, serving as the model for the statue's face. In fact, a careful examination indicates the story isn't set in Denmark: when the mermaid pulls the prince to shore, she sees orange, lemon, and tall palm trees (implying a tropical or subtropical climate) and snow-capped blue mountains (Denmark's highest point of elevation is a hill only 171m tall). Moreover, other descriptions used in the story mention vineyard-covered hills, crystal-clear cornflower blue seas, and marble statues and pillars reminiscent of Greco-Roman architecture, all of which accurately describe a Mediterranean setting (and particularly the Italian coast and countryside). Hans Christian Andersen even visited Italy in 1833 and wrote extensively about his travels and what he saw in The Improvisatore, a book published in 1835, about a year before he started writing "The Little Mermaid." The prince in the 1837 story is also described as having coal-black eyes and dancing slave girls in gold and silk, which an illustration by Edmund Dulac from a 1911 publication interpreted to mean the prince was Middle-Eastern.
  • The ending to is frequently cited as a Downer Ending where the mermaid dies. That only happens in the original ending. Anderson's revised ending is a Bittersweet Ending where she dies but is revived as a "daughter of the air" and given a chance to get into Heaven if she can do many good deeds.
• Little Women:
  • This book is sometimes remembered as an idyllic, idealized portrait of sisters' relationships, with only love and no Sibling Rivalry. (For example, in Cora's quote from Downton Abbey about raising daughters: "You think it’ll be like Little Women, and instead they’re at each other's throats from dawn til dusk.") But while Meg, Jo and Beth get along well, as do Meg and Beth with Amy, Jo and Amy have a serious Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry. Although this fact probably isn't too widely forgotten, as Amy burning Jo's nearly-finished book manuscript out of anger that Jo wouldn't take her to the theatre is one of the book's more famous episodes.
  • Beth tends to be remembered as a completely angelic, Too Good for This Sinful Earth character. But while she is the sweetest and gentlest of the sisters, she also has flaws that she struggles with, most prominently her overwhelming shyness, and at one point in Part 1 she carelessly forgets to feed her pet canary for a week, learning a lesson in responsibility when he starves to death. Alcott clearly meant her to be more human than other sweet, doomed young girls in literature of the era (e.g. little Eva from Uncle Tom's Cabin).
  • Everyone knows that Laurie asks Jo to marry him, but Jo refuses, and Laurie eventually marries Amy while Jo marries Professor Bhaer. But fans of the Jo/Laurie pairing tend to misremember Jo as being in love with Laurie, only turning him down because she's afraid of losing her independence, and imagine that Laurie is still in love with Jo even after marrying Amy, only settling for the younger sister instead. But the book makes it clear that Jo never loves Laurie romantically, that she always sees him as a brother figure and wants him to marry one of her sisters, and that Laurie falls truly in love with Amy and realizes that Jo was right that they're Better as Friends.
  • Professor Bhaer is often disliked by fans of Jo/Laurie shippers because he "criticizes Jo's writing." But it's only in the adaptations that he reads Jo's writing and directly finds fault with it. In the book, he just criticizes the immorality of "sensation stories" in general, not even knowing that Jo writes them (although he suspects it), and this makes Jo realize on her own that she's been selling out her talent and writing "trash" for money.
  • Also thanks to the various screen and stage adaptations, Jo is often misremembered as Coping By Creating after Beth's death by writing a novel that preserves the memory of her youth with her sisters: her own version of Little Women. But in the book, what she writes to comfort herself after Beth's death are short stories and poems. She doesn't write her own Little Women novel until many years later, in Jo's Boys, where, like Louisa May Alcott in real life, she writes it purely for money, only to gain more fame from it than from all her passion projects.
• Lolita is considered the iconic example of a young girl with seductive traits. The actual book, despite its Unreliable Narrator, makes it fairly clear that Humbert, Dolores's pedophilic abuser, is trying to justify his actions and projecting the idea onto her, with her actual described actions showing her doing everything in her power to escape him. Dolores is physically characterized (outside of Humbert's rose-tinted view of her as a nymphet) as a rather scruffy, smelly, borderline-tomboy who Humbert has to coerce into wearing the frilly things he buys for her during their road trip — in short, much more of a typical kid than the beguiling beauty frequently depicted on the book's covers.
  • While most people know that Dolores is twelve at the beginning of the story, most are surprised to learn that Humbert Humbert is only in his mid-thirties. They're usually picturing James Mason or Jeremy Irons, who both played the role in their fifties.
• Madeline:
  • Miss Clavel is usually assumed to be a nun, but this may or may not be true. Yes, she dresses the part, but she's never once been referred to as 'Sister', and secular nurses and governesses in the early 20th century sometimes wore nunlike uniforms too. The Filipino dub refers to her as "Sister Clavel", though, and she's portrayed as a nun in the 1998 film too. She may belong to St. Madeleine Sophie Barat's Society of the Sacred Heart, which is known for its schools for girls and whose nuns in France did go by "Madame" instead of "Sister".
  • The place the girls are staying at isn't an orphanage, it's a boarding school. Most, if not all the girls have families whom they go home to during the holidays. Madeline herself is an orphan in two adaptations, but not all.
  • Ludwig Bemelmans actually intended for Madeline to be an American girl studying abroad in Paris. Tell that to all the animated adaptations that invariably portray her with an exaggerated French accent. To be fair, her nationality was only revealed by Madeline in America, which was only published after the cartoon franchise had already been running for a long time.
• Matilda: The villainous Miss Trunchbull isn't Matilda's teacher. She's the headmistress/principal of the school. Matilda's actual teacher is the kindly Miss Honey, who becomes her adoptive mother in the end.
• The Metamorphosis is "the one where the guy turns into a giant cockroach" to most people, but that may or may not be accurate. In German, Gregor is described as an "Ungeziefer," a term similar in connotation to "vermin" but specific to insects. At least one English translation does specifically identify him as a cockroach, but most try to maintain the original ambiguity by calling him a vermin, an insect, or a verminous insect.
• Les Misérables:
  • The book is not about The French Revolution, although the climax involves a French revolution — a less successful one, more than 40 years after the capital-R French Revolution.
  • Some people don't realise that Valjean wasn't falsely accused of being a thief — he really did steal that loaf of bread. For those crimes he got five years, later extended due to four separate escape attempts. In fact, the whole point of his story is that his 19-year jail term was perfectly in line with the law, thus proving that the system was broken. Also, his initial sentence (which was actually five years, not 19; the latter was after four escape attempts) was not just for stealing bread, but also because he smashed a window and trespassed in the bakery to do so then tried to flee arrest. Even today breaking and entering is a fairly serious crime while stealing such a small value of goods from an open business is a mere misdemeanor.
  • Popular imagination has Javert relentlessly pursue Valjean across France for twenty years. In the novel, while Javert certainly wants to find and arrest Valjean, their meetings tend to be Contrived Coincidences, not the result of active pursuing or searching, and they happen over the course of 17 years, not 20.
  • Ask people to name a Signature Scene from the novel and they'll probably mention "the scene where Javert chases Valjean through the sewers as he carries the wounded Marius." But while this does happen in some of the film versions, Javert never chases Valjean through the sewers in the novel. Valjean encounters Javert after he emerges from the sewers, and Javert isn't even looking for him at the time, but for Thénardier.
  • It's commonly assumed that Fantine was abandoned by her lover Tholomyés while (or even because) she was pregnant with Cosette, or else before Fantine even knew she was pregnant. But the truth is worse — Tholomyés left when Cosette was already a toddler. The confusion comes from the fact that Cosette's existence is only revealed in a Wham Line after he leaves, and the line in question is "...and [Fantine] had his child," which in French can only mean that she literally had the child with her, but which English-speakers often misinterpret to mean "she gave birth to his child soon afterward." This was further exacerbated by the musical, where Fantine's song "I Dreamed a Dream" mentions that he "slept a summer by [her] side" but then was "gone when autumn came," meaning (unless the lyrics are metaphorical) that they were only together a few months.
  • Thanks to the popularity of the musical with its Alternative Character Interpretation, the character of Éponine is often thought of as a purely heroic, romantic figure — the quintessential Unrequited Tragic Maiden whose love for Marius is selfless and all-sacrificing. The novel's Éponine is The Ophelia and a Clingy Jealous Girl whose love for Marius veers between I Want My Beloved to Be Happy and If I Can't Have You… and whose main dramatic purpose is to be a harrowing portrait of a child in poverty, not a romantic heroine.
• We all know the part in The Odyssey where the witch Circe turns Odysseus' crew into pigs. In fact, Circe is never referred as a witch in the poem but as a goddess (albeit a minor one). It's only later that Circe has been associated with witchcraft.
• Nonfiction example: Everyone knows Charles Darwin's famous book On The Origin Of Species is about human evolution, right? Wrong, the book is mainly about animals evolving and how different species formed. The final chapter does contain the much-quoted line "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" but that one sentence is all the book has to say on the matter. It wasn't until he wrote The Descent Of Man 12 years later that he brought up the idea of human evolution.
  • In addition, many believe Darwin proposed the idea of the man evolving from ape. In reality, with the level of science by then, the similarities already made the relationship between the two as obvious as French language being related to Spanish. In fact, two years before Origin came out, a very prominent paleonthologist already made an attempt to disprove the relationship by pointing out an absence of certain brain parts in other primates... and then it turned out he simply didn't dissect the brains carefully enough.
• It has become very common for people to believe that Paddington Bear is a spectacled bear, but he's never identified as such in canon. In real life, spectacled bears are the only species native to Paddington's home country of Peru, and the common belief seems to stem from well-meaning efforts to raise awareness of spectacled bear conservation by linking them to fiction's most famous Peruvian bear. But it's unlikely that Michael Bond actually had any particular species in mind, considering that Paddington was originally going to hail from Africa (which doesn't have native bears at all) and changing it to Peru was a compromise — even then, there seems to be no particular reason why he picked Peru except that it simply sounded good. Paddington's appearance (which is mainly down to original illustrator Peggy Fortnum, but approved by Bond) more closely resembles a juvenile brown bear. He's not canonically a brown bear either, though...he's just a bear.
• People often believe that Paradise Lost uses the name "Lucifer" to refer to Satan. In fact, he is never called "Lucifer" once in the poem, though he is depicted as the kind of handsome, heroic-looking figure we tend to associate with that name. The avoidance of the name Lucifer may be a kind of Fridge Brilliance: all the fallen angels once had "good" names, which are now blotted out in Heaven and never mentioned in the poem; "Bringer of Light" would presumably be one of them.
• Peter Pan: "Peter is in love with Wendy" — while Wendy seemed to have a crush on Peter, it was probably unrequited. The only thing he really liked about her was the stories she told, and he kind of viewed her as a mother figure.
• It's sometimes claimed that in Petrosinella, an early Italian version of Rapunzel that predates the familiar tale by The Brothers Grimm, the heroine's pregnant mother steals the ogress's parsley because parsley is an abortifacient and she wants to abort her illegitimate child. Hence when the ogress catches her, she solves the problem by agreeing to take the child off her hands instead. But while it's true that parsley tea has sometimes been used as an abortifacient (although its effectiveness is debatable), and while it's true that there's no father mentioned in Petrosinella, there's no hint in the text that the mother steals the parsley for that reason. She just has a wild craving in her pregnancy for the parsley, just like the mother in Rapunzel craves the rampion, and the ogress makes her promise to give her child to her in exchange for sparing her life, just like the witch does to the father in the Grimm's tale.
• The Phantom of the Opera:
  • It's commonly known that the Phantom was a normal-looking, and probably handsome, man until he was horrifically disfigured in a fire, driving him insane and causing him to run from society to live underground and "haunt" the opera house. This actually comes from later film adaptations.^note Though in some other adaptations, his disfigurements were caused by something else, like acid. In the original book, the Phantom was a man who was born with a disfigured face and had never lived a normal life.
  • Another common misconception is that Christine was only 15 in the original book. This stems from a mistranslation of a line saying that her heart was as pure as a 15-year-old's. Textual evidence points to her real age being about 20.
• Robinson Crusoe: Most people who haven't read the original book seem to think Friday, a Carib Indian, is black. A famous example is Toni Morrison's essay "Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality." This also extends to several adaptations, including the NBC series, Crusoe, which starred Philip Winchester and Tongayi Chirisa, who is from Zimbabwe.
  • Also, the book's original title is actually The Life and strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Many editions shorten it to the more accurate The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
• The Satanic Verses is mostly about Islam — both main characters are lapsed Muslims, and Muhammad is a central character. It also features a plane hijacking. It's easy for people to put two and two together and assume the hijackers were Muslim fundamentalists (especially after 9/11), but they were actually Sikh.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • Everyone knows that he always wore a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape, and smoked a curved meerschaum pipe. Actually, the hat and cape were never explicitly described as an Inverness and a deerstalker in the text, and only sporadically appeared as such in a few of Sidney Paget's illustrations. The pipe is a type that did not arrive in Britain until after the Boer War, later in Holmes' career. William Gillette, who portrayed Holmes on stage more than 1000 times, found that particular pipe easier to use and see on stage, which is why it became a symbol of Holmes himself.
  • Relatedly, while a few of the original illustrations did have Holmes wearing the deerstalker, it wasn't his only headgear. He only really wore it in stories set in the English countryside, with stories set in London proper often depicting him wearing a black top hat instead.
  • Sherlock also never said "Elementary, my dear Watson". He used the word "elementary", and the phrase "dear Watson", on a few occasions, but never together. Of course, in screen adaptations, he says it all the time.
  • Speaking of Watson, most people generally picture him as an older, plumper man than Holmes, unattractive, boorish, clumsy and doltish. This is partly due to how many films portrayed him (the BBC versions from the '80s and '90s were the first to break this mold, and even they depicted Watson as significantly older than Holmes) and partly because Holmes usually had to explain how he deduced things to Watson. In reality, Watson was an Army surgeon of above-average intelligence who simply, like most other characters, was not Sherlock Holmes. He also was of an age with Holmes, and was probably the more attractive of the two. Oddly enough, Guy Ritchie's films with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law probably come closest to accurately portraying the pair as written by Doyle. Some will argue for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, of course.
  • Though Holmes' drug use tends to get a lot more focus today than it ever did in Doyle's day, the fact that his drug of choice is cocaine is actually common knowledge. Watson specifically says that Holmes frequently uses both cocaine and morphine ^note His first mention of Holmes' drug use comes when he asks Holmes "What is it to-day, morphine or cocaine?", but his 7% cocaine solution is the only drug that we actually see him using in-story.
  • Though Holmes greatly admired Irene Adler's intellect, he was never in love with her, and they never had any kind of romantic relationship. He is noted at the opening of her debut story to be somewhat obsessed with her, but that is due to being highly impressed by his defeat at her hands, which is explicitly stated to be free of any romantic implications. "A Scandal in Bohemia", the only story that she appears in, actually ended with her running off to marry another man. However, because Adler is one of the most pervasive cases of Promoted to Love Interest in literature, people tend to forget this.
  • The dramatic scene of Holmes plummeting to his supposed death at Reichenbach Falls, while one of the series' most iconic images, never really happened in Canon. In the original story, "The Final Problem", Watson arrived on the scene after Holmes supposedly fell, and put two and two together from a note that Holmes left. It was later revealed in "The Empty House" that Holmes survived his encounter with Moriarty by throwing him down the falls, then chose not to tell Watson that he'd survived so that he could spend some time dealing with his enemies incognito.
  • Most people "know" that Holmes's greatest nemesis is Professor Moriarty. If you've never read the original stories, it's natural to assume that Moriarty turns up often, either being faced directly or chessmastering the scenarios Holmes finds himself in. In fact, he is featured in exactly two stories, and the first story in which he appeared was also the one in which he died. A full-length novel, The Valley of Fear, was set prior to The Final Problem and is Moriarty's only other appearance. While Holmes does describe him as "the Napoleon of crime" and it's implied that he's at least as brilliant as Holmes is, at no point do any of the characters describe him as Holmes's greatest nemesis. In fact, a vast majority of their conflict is entirely implied, with their actual confrontation coming after a significant amount of time trying to outmaneuver each other behind the scenes before the story even begins. In fairness, though, "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" does heavily imply that he was behind many more crimes that Holmes never found out about, fueling much speculation.
  • Also, nearly all adaptations (even the otherwise very faithful Granada series) portray Holmes and Watson as middle-aged or older. When in fact, all four novels, all 24 stories written before The Final Problem (and a few that were published later but chronologically take place before that case) take place during a 10-year period during which both characters were in their late 20s to late 30s. Most of the remaining stories take place when they were in their early 40s, however Holmes retires at the age of 60 in "His Last Bow", showing where this conception of an older Holmes may have come from.
  • Mrs. Hudson is sometimes seen as Holmes's housekeeper. She wasn't any kind of servant, she owned 221 Baker Street, and rented 221B to Holmes and Watson. She was however, often portrayed as cooking for them, since obviously two Victorian bachelors couldn't fend for themselves in such matters. Because housework was so labour-intensive, single men commonly lived in furnished lodgings.
  • In a recent twist, the urge to dismantle the common knowledge about Sherlock Holmes has led to the creation of an entirely new piece of common knowledge — the portrayal of Sherlock Holmes as a mentally-disturbed, emotionally crippled loner, solely devoted to the solving of puzzles — the portrayal seen in the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock TV series, the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes film series, and to a certain degree the Hugh Laurie series House, which was acknowledged by its creators to be heavily influenced by Sherlock Holmes. This is, however, an exaggeration of the books where Holmes is seen as being solitary, subject to occasional dark moods and tactlessness, but is in fact warm-hearted and sympathetic (even in the first adventure he takes his time to listen and understand Watson's horror over the murders) and absolutely hates any sort of cruelty or evil and fights tooth and nail for all of his clients.
• Among English-readers, everyone knows "The Snow Queen" is Hans Christian Andersen's longest story. But a better way of putting it would be "longest story that's commonly read in the English-speaking world." He wrote at least three longer stories that aren't as popular: "The Marsh King's Daughter," "A Story from the Dunes" and "The Ice Maiden."
• A Song of Ice and Fire is that fantasy series that's basically The Lord of the Rings but with a death every other page and a sex scene every other opposite page. Pretty much all the main characters are dead at this point. Except:
  • Literally the only thing it has in common with The Lord of the Rings is that they take place in a medieval-esque fantasy setting^note  Though there are a few deliberate Shout Outs: Khal Drogo is named after Frodo's father Drogo Baggins, and Samwell "Sam" Tarley is at least partially based on Samwise "Sam" Gamgee.. The series does not feature elves, dwarves, orcs, a Dark Lord or anything akin to them (just ice demons who raise zombies). It also does not feature an epic quest, it uses minimal magic, its few genuine magic users are regarded with extreme suspicion and have limited powers, and its dragons are essentially animals. The series's primary inspiration is real European history, not pre-existing fantasy: the War of the Five Kings is based on the Wars of the Roses (with the Starks, Lannisters and Targaryens standing in for the Yorks, Lancasters and Plantagenets), several major characters are based on Real Life figures who featured prominently in the War^note  Cersei Lannister is based loosely on Margaret of Anjou, Tyrion Lannister is based loosely on Richard III, Robb Stark is based loosely on King Edward IV, Littlefinger is based loosely on Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and Sansa Stark is based loosely on Elizabeth of York., the Wall is based on Hadrian's Wall, the Doom of Valyria is based on the Fall of Rome, and the First Men, Andals and Valyrians are based on the Celtic Britons, Anglo-Saxons and Normans.
  • The amount of death is greatly exaggerated. Yes, there's lots of it, but no more than any other war-themed novel, really. What sets the series apart is the major-seeming characters who die in unexpected ways at unexpected times and in making secondary characters' deaths still mean something to the reader. But even there, it's hardly every character; the majority of protagonists have survived since the first book and regularly display common Plot Armor like remarkable recoveries and improbable escapes, death reports turning out to be false, and so on. In fact, only three POV-chapter protagonists have died as of this writing (Ned, Catelyn, and Quentyn), and of those the first was a Decoy Protagonist, the second Came Back Wrong, and the third actually deconstructed Plot Armor. Even the infamous Red Wedding only amounts to one protagonist (who later Came Back Wrong, making it the mid-point of her story), one Ensemble Dark Horse^note Robb's an important character but not a POV holder., and a handful of well-developed Mauve Shirts and Spear Carriers.
  • The amount of sex in the series has also been greatly exaggerated. It's present, but far from the level of "fantasy porn" the series is sometimes described as. It doesn't help that the TV adaptation really played up the sex scenes and added several that weren't present in the novels, including the infamous "Sexposition" scenes where TV characters told their partner things the audience needed to know about their backstory and/or culture while having sex. The first book alone only mentions what little of sex in past tense and while some characters did go to a brothel, no sex was ever mentioned on their visit.
  • It is often claimed that the first episode of Game of Thrones turned Daenerys's wedding night to Drogo into a rape scene while in the book, it was a completely consensual encounter and that Drogo and Daenerys were Happily Married from the start. In actuality, while Drogo did earn Daenerys's consent after arousing her first in the corresponding scene, she was 13 at the time, was forced into the wedding by her abusive brother and the narrative stresses how terrified she is of her new husband. After the wedding night however, Drogo unambigously does repeatedly and brutally rape Daenerys to the point she becomes suicidal.
  • Thinking that referring to oneself as "a man", "a girl", etc. is the way the Faceless Men talk. It's actually the way highborn Lorathi talk, which is what one Faceless Man's false guise of "Jaqen H'ghar" was supposed to be, so it's specific to that identity.
  • Ned Stark was defeated and ultimately killed because he was just too honorable to be in charge, right? Well, although he is known to be an honorable man, the point of honor comes up in only two places: 1. The discussion about whether to assassinate Daenerys, and 2. Tyrion in the second book thinks that Ned Stark must have been outsmarted because he was too honorable. In regards to the first point, Ser Barristan sides with Ned and it turns out that the assassination attempt was a bad idea.^note In-universe, it's because it makes Daenerys' husband declare war on Westeros, when he previously didn't care about it. Out-of-universe, it's because (contrary to what several characters claim) the Dothraki that Daenerys' husband leads are zero threat to Westeros, regardless of motivation, because they're an all-cavalry force with no ships on another continent that has no land connection. As far as the second point, Tyrion has no special knowledge and is only making assumptions, and is seen through the course of the second book to having too high of an opinion of his own abilities. Ned Stark's weakness that led to his defeat (beyond bad luck) was explicitly mercy and his refusal to treat Cersei as a legitimate threat. In fact, had he been more honorable, he would have informed his liege immediately instead of giving Cersei time to escape with her children (something that Robert might have viewed as treason had he known) and/or he would have refused to confess to falsely conspiring against the rightful king Joffrey, and either or both of these steps would likely have saved his life.
  • Many fans will state that one of Robb's worst decisions was to choose to execute Rickard Karstark, which loses him the loyalty of his largest regiment in his army. This seems to be the case in the show. In the book, however, the Karstark forces have already abandoned Robb's army by the time he made this decision. When Rickard Karstark was busy murdering the Lannister hostages (and additional members of Robb's army), he had given orders for all able-bodied Karstark men to desert and track down Jaime Lannister while committing war crimes in the Riverlands (so keeping score, he has committed treason at least 4 or 5 different ways by this point). There are the other Karstark footmen at Harrenhall, but many are sent to their deaths at Duskendale by Roose's treachery, with the remaining men accompanying Roose (described as just a small portion of his forces) to the Twins for what is later termed the "Red Wedding", and little further mention of them is made. So, it's presumable that some of the Karstark forces with Roose joined in on the slaughter at the Red Wedding in anger at Rickard's execution, but their presence almost certainly made no difference either way due to the one-sided slaughter that commenced. If Roose had NOT been sure of their loyalty, they would have not come with him to the Twins. In summary, Rickard Karstark's execution likely made no difference at all to Robb's fate as he would almost certainly have died at the Red Wedding even had he spared Karstark.
• Everyone knows that Soseki Natsume had his students translate the English phrase "I love you" into the far more indirect 月が綺麗ですね, or "The moon is beautiful", due to believing that the Japanese would never say something so bluntly. Expect that never happened. The first reference to Natsume ever having done that was from a biography in 1970, published 54 years after he had died, and no evidence exists to remotely suggest it was actually ever something he really did. The phrase is a simply a stock romantic statement playing off how the Japanese words for "moon" (tsuki) and "like/love" (suki) are homophones, and was further pushed by Western scholars in order to exoticize Japan and its culture.
• Starship Troopers: Military service isn't required to gain voting rights in the United Citizens Federation. Federal service is, of which the military is only a subset (although it's noted that some occupations like Asteroid Miners qualify and others like Merchant Marine service don't). This misconception probably has two sources: one, it's Military Science Fiction so naturally the UCF military gets almost all of the screentime, and two, Paul Verhoeven's film adaptation simplified it to just the military in service to its satire of the original Heinlein novel.
• Stephen King:
  • Probably the most widely believed Common Knowledge concerning King's books is that he only writes horror, to the point where those who know him only through reputation assumes he writes cheap "jump-scare" horror, or slashers, or stuff heavy on gore and monsters. While King himself has embraced the "King of Horror" label, the actual truth of the matter is that he's written in multiple genres, and while he frequently involves the supernatural or strange in his stories, it's not always intended to frighten the reader, and in fact, is often not there at all. His non-horror books include The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Different Seasons, The Eyes of The Dragon, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, The Colorado Kid and numerous others while The Stand and The Dark Tower are primarily fantasy though they do include elements of horror. But even some of the books you can easily label as "horror" are less about scaring you and more about just moving you.
  • The title character of Carrie is telekinetic, not pyrokinetic. She never created fire using only her mind, she just managed to start a fire at her school by telekinetically turning on the sprinklers in the gym and ripping apart the wiring in some nearby machinery. The confusion likely stems from people confusing Carrie with Charlie, the little girl from Firestarter, whose pyrokinesis is her main psychic power. Both books were by Stephen King, and both were about young psychic girls blamelessly victimized by others.
  • Despite what the Ramones would have you believe, being buried in the titular location of Pet Sematary will not result in resurrection. It’s the Indian Burial Ground beyond said location that will bring you back wrong.
  • It: Everyone "knows" the titular Eldritch Abomination's true form is that of a Giant Spider. But in reality, that's just the closest approximation a human being is able to comprehend. And that's only IT's true form in the Losers Club's universe. In its home universe, the true form of IT is something far more brain-melting that humans generally perceived as a pulsating mass of orange light.
  • Most people who have not read the book assume that From a Buick 8 is another "killer car" story akin to Christine. If only it were that simple.
  • Stephen King hates religion and God! Except he doesn't. In fact, several stories of his, including The Stand, The Green Mile and Desperation are strongly in favor of belief in God, and feature characters with prescience or other abilities stated directly to be from God. King is not a fan of modern organized religion, believing it to be corrupted by man, but he believes in God himself, and in fact credits God for helping him kick his drug and drinking problems, as well as his survival of an accident which should have killed him. He is not at all anti-faith or anti-God.
  • Contrary to popular belief, King didn't buy the van that ran him over in 1999 so that he could smash it: his lawyer bought the van to prevent someone else from trying to sell it to capitalize on its notoriety (i.e. "Buy the van that nearly killed Stephen King!"). It wasn't until after it was destroyed in a junkyard that he commented (perhaps jokingly) that he'd fantasized about smashing the van with a hammer.
• The Story of Little Black Sambo is not about an ethnically black boy, but a South Indian boy named Black Sambo. However, various illustrators and adaptations have made him black, including some counterfeit copies. The Overshadowed by Controversy nature of the book and its title have made this mistake more difficult to correct.
• Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
  • Hyde was Jekyll's evil, unrestrained side, yes, but Jekyll was not his own good side. It is specifically pointed out in the book that Jekyll is both good and evil, a fact nearly every single story, parody, or adaptation based on it forgets. Moreover, Hyde was not a hulking giant. He was actually smaller and younger-looking than Jekyll, though he was growing taller and stronger, representing Jekyll's slow descent into evil. Alan Moore correctly recognizes the fact in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, along with the possibility of the hulking monster as a further stage.
  • Oddly enough, in the almost universally panned Jekyll-and-Hyde film Mary Reilly, John Malkovich performs the two characters the way they're portrayed in Stevenson's novella. Ironically, some critics of the film blasted Malkovich for that performance.
  • Most people think Jekyll is the protagonist of the story. While adaptations almost always focus on Jekyll himself, the protagonist of the original story was Jekyll's friend Gabriel John Utterson, who was investigating the connection between his friend Jekyll and the mysterious Mr. Hyde.
  • The novella is not called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or even The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is actually called Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the "The" left out. This is common enough that even some newer editions put "the" in front of the title.
  • Everyone "knows" that Edward Hyde is a distinct personality from Henry Jekyll. While this is the case in most adaptations, things aren't so clear in the book. The possibility is actually brought up that Hyde is just an alias Jekyll takes on when he drinks the potion, which allows him the anonymity he needs to indulge in his darker urges. Moreover, unlike in many adaptations, Jekyll has no Alternate Identity Amnesia, and both he and Hyde are at least somewhat aware of what the other persona does.
  • Everyone "knows" that the titular doctor's surname is pronounced "Jeck-ul". Tell that to a reader from Scotland—where the author Robert Louis Stevenson was born and where "Jekyll" is a real surname—and they will be quick to inform you that you have been wrong your entire life. The correct pronunciation is "Jee-kyll", not "Jeck-ul". "Jeck-ul" was popularized by the 1941 film adaptation, and MGM bought the rights to the 1931 adaptation and destroyed every print they could find to avoid competition. This did not help matters at all; the 1931 film uses the correct pronunciation. The 1931 film was believed to be lost for several decades because of MGM's decision, and pretty much every post-1941 adaptation pronounces the titular doctor's surname as "Jeck-ul" to the point that hardly anybody outside of Scotland or the The Angry Video Game Nerd fanbase knows about "Jee-kyll".
• Everyone "knows" that Tarzan was raised by gorillas. While this is the case in some adaptations, they're explicitly not gorillas in the original books. They're actually a fictitious type of ape called Mangani.
• The Three Musketeers is often described as the story of four musketeers...while it indeed is the story of a group of four men, this forgets that d'Artagnan only becomes a musketeer at the very end of the novel. Except that that's also common knowledge, and d'Artagnan becomes a musketeer very early in the story, just assigned to a different company than the main three.
• The Morlocks of The Time Machine are generally assumed to be large, powerful, predatory monsters. Except the book actually presents them as rather small, weak and feeble creatures — the Time Traveller is able to wound or even kill several of them with little more than his bare hands. However, they are stronger than the more humanoid-looking Eloi — who are actually not so much prey hunted by the Morlocks as livestock farmed by them.
• Tom Swift novels are commonly thought to be filled to the brim with Tom Swifties, puns where an adverb gratuitously matches the theme sentence, as in particularly painful Said Bookisms. The truth is, Tom Swifties are a parody of the adverb-heavy style of the original books, and are nowhere to be found on them. It's also worthy of note that Tom Swift wasn't the Trope Maker of the Edisonade-style of teenage inventor stories, or even the Trope Codifier. Those stories started out 50 years earlier as dime novels, with the Tom Swift books being closer to a renaissance.
• Because many of the most famous adaptations of Treasure Island chose to make the relationship between the protagonist, Jim Hawkins, and the antagonist, Long John Silver, the emotional core of the story and have Jim view Silver as a sort of father figure, despite everything the latter does, it leads many people to believe it's the same dynamic in the book. This is not the case: While Jim gets along fairly well with Silver before he reveals his true colors, feels hurt by his betrayal, but later gains some respect for him for being more honorable than his cohorts, he at no point views Silver as a replacement for his recently deceased father or as a mentor figure, and all the crap Jim went through as a result of his actions ends up giving him trauma after all is said and done. If any of the adults in the book were a father figure to Jim, it would be Dr. Livesey. As for Silver, instead of seeing Jim like a son, he grows fond of the boy because he reminds him of himself when he was younger, or so he says.
• The tale of the Trojan Horse is usually attributed to Homer's The Iliad (or at least assumed to be related therein). In fact, the Trojan Horse incident appears in neither The Iliad nor its sequel The Odyssey — it merits only a brief mention in the latter, occurring between the events of the two poems. The lesson the story teaches us, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts," which is also usually attributed to Homer, is actually a paraphrase of a quote (original quote was more like "I distrust Greeks, even when they do bring gifts") from Virgil's The Aeneid, making this the mythological equivalent of Fanon. Of course, Oral Tradition doesn't really have any "true" authority, but The Aeneid was written quite a while later and by a Roman.
  • The legend of the Achilles' Heel is also not in The Iliad, which implies that Achilles has ordinary vulnerabilities.
  • There used to be more poems in the series, several ancient sources include plot summaries of the others that include the wooden horse and Achilles' famous heel weak point.
  • Some people tend to assume that Achilles and Patroclus were depicted as Lover and Beloved and that this was bowdlerized out by later translations and adaptations. While there is certainly a long history of reading their relationship as erotic (starting as early as some ancient Greek writers, such as Plato, who was post-Homer), the Iliad (or, at least, the version we have) only ever depicts them as very close friends. Achilles is also shown in the original story to be attracted to women—while this hardly precludes the idea of being interested in men, especially in Ancient Greece, it would still make him bi or pan rather than exclusively gay.
• Ulysses:
  • Ulysses is the one where every chapter is named after a corresponding chapter in Homer's The Odyssey, right? No, actually. The book is a loose retelling of The Odyssey, but it doesn't have chapters; it's a loose series of "episodes", which don't have numbers or titles. While most reading guides to the novel name the episodes after chapters in The Odyssey (based on James Joyce's personal notes), the novel itself does not. It's just divided into a "Part I", "Part II" and "Part III", which are the only parts of the book explicitly labeled as such. ^note  Part I narrates the first few hours of the day from Stephen Dedalus' perspective, while Part II shows the same timeframe from Leopold Bloom's perspective, continuing on until Bloom and Dedalus finally meet, and Part III follows their journey through Dublin together.
  • Leopold Bloom is often called one of the most notable Jewish characters in Western literature, but that's only partly true. He's actually half-Jewish on his father's side, which would traditionally make him a Gentile.^note Judaism is inherited matrilineally. His father, Rudolf Virag, is also said to have converted to Christianity soon after he emigrated to Ireland, and Leopold himself is repeatedly shown to be non-observant: he's uncircumcised, and one of the first scenes shows him buying meat from a non-kosher butcher shop.
  • Everybody knows that Ulysses is the quintessential stream-of-consciousness novel, known for its spontaneous and disjointed style that parallels the actual process of human thought. In truth, most of the novel is written this way, but not all of it. Part of the book's central conceit is that every episode is written in a radically different tone and form, with the writing style never staying quite the same. So while some episodes (e.g. "Proteus", "The Lotus Eaters" and "Penelope") are classic examples of stream-of-consciousness writing, others (e.g. "Telemachus", "Calypso" and "Eumaeus") are fairly conventional narrative fiction about the minutiae of ordinary life, and others are one-off experiments with various literary genres and styles. Case in point: "Cyclops" is a satire with an Unreliable Narrator, "Circe" is a surrealist drama, and "Ithaca" is written like an academic text.
• The War of the Worlds: Everyone knows that the Martian invasion was stopped when the Martians contracted the common cold and died. Except they didn't; it's made very clear that they died from bacterial infections. Viruses, such as that which cause the common cold, were unknown to science at the time.
• Warrior Cats: Bluestar is a Russian Blue...except she's not. Despite this, her being a Russian Blue is commonly cited amongst fans. Bluestar is a feral cat whose family has been feral for generations. She can't (without breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief past its breaking point) be a Russian Blue, which is a pure breed. She also has the incorrect eye color. Russian Blues have green eyes and only green eyes (barring mutations). Bluestar has blue eyes. Word of God is that Bluestar has Russian Blue ancestry, however, she herself is just a blue-furred mixed breed.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • If you know a lover of fantasy fiction who hasn't read the series, they will likely tell you two reasons; One, that the series will "never end" and Two, that the plot never advances despite the length of the books: The first is explicitly untrue; the series has already reached its conclusion. The second isn't strictly true either; a great deal of advancement occurs in the first six books. It is only around the seventh that author Robert Jordan seemed to prefer to move the plot forward very slowly, but even then he included at least one major event per novel, the only real exception being Crossroads of Twilight. The last four novels in the series are quite kinetic and move the plot forward significantly.
  • Also, a common complaint is just how long each book is. And long they are, but not really any longer than most epic fantasy novels from its time, and in fact, significantly shorter than novels in other series such as The Sword of Truth, The Malazan Book of the Fallen or even the more popular A Song of Ice and Fire.
• Everybody knows that Gregory Maguire's Wicked is a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West is a heroic revolutionary. Yes, if you're talking about the Broadway musical—but in the original novel, Elphaba is more of a Tragic Villain. She starts out as an idealistic revolutionary, but undergoes a nasty moral decline over the course of the story (partly thanks to a long succession of tragic events) that culminates in her gleefully trying to murder Dorothy and her friends even after Dorothy makes it clear that she has no intention of hurting her. It's easy to sympathize with her, but she's far from a hero.
• Everybody knows that William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is the ultimate love poem, addressed by a man to his female lover. Actually, it's much more likely that the poem was addressed to a man, and intended to describe platonic friendship. The first 126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are generally believed to be part of a cycle, intended to be addressed to a nameless young man known only as "The Fair Youth". It's the remaining 28 sonnets (127-154, addressed to a nameless woman generally known as "The Dark Lady") that are explicitly romantic and sexual in nature.^note  Values Dissonance likely has a lot to do with this misconception: up until fairly recently, it was considered normal in most of the Western Hemisphere for (straight) male friends to express platonic affection to one another in terms that can come across as homoerotic by today's standards.
• Winnie the Pooh:
  • Everyone "knows" that Pooh and friends live in the Hundred Acre Wood — except that they don't. "The Hundred Acre Woods" is actually just a small section of a much larger, nameless forest (based on and clearly meant to be Ashdown Forest in Sussex, but in the books just called "the Forest"). The only character who actually lived in the Hundred Acre Wood is Owl; the rest of them live in other parts of the Forest. Though this misconception is probably another result of Adaptation Displacement: in the Disney version, "The Hundred Acre Wood" is the name for the entire Forest.
  • Truly everyone knows what Pooh Bear’s voice sounds like; Sterling Holloway’s soft, sleepy tenor. The fact is that in the original stories he’s described as having a “growly” voice. Like, you know, a bear. At least Jim Cummings' Pooh voice has a slight hint of a growl (as most Cummings voices do) mixed in with his soft Holloway-like tone.
  • Rabbit, of course, has a vegetable garden, which is constantly threatened by crows, insects, and his friends' blundering, right? Well, no, not in the books. (Understandably, since Milne's Rabbit is implied to be a real rabbit, not a living toy like most of the other characters, and real rabbits don't grow their own food.) His garden is an invention of the Disney version.
• Wuthering Heights:
  • This novel is known as the tragic love story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw –- except that Catherine dies less than halfway through the book, while the rest of the story details the rest of Heathcliff's life and the experiences of Catherine and Edgar's daughter Cathy, Heathcliff and Isabella's son Linton, and Hindley's son Hareton. Pop culture tends to forget this because most screen and stage adaptations cut the second generation and only cover the novel's more "romantic" first part.
  • Two of the novel's "most famous scenes" never actually happen in it: (1) Catherine wandering across the moors calling, "Heathcliff! Heathcliff!" and (2) Heathcliff digging up and embracing her dead body. In the actual novel, when Heathcliff goes missing, Catherine does wait outside for him for hours but doesn't wander the moors, and while it's later implied (but not shown) that her ghost roams the moors, she never calls Heathcliff's name. And after her death, Heathcliff tries to dig up her body, but doesn't actually go through with it, and years later, when the grave is opened for her husband Edgar's burial, he has the sexton expose her coffin and opens it so he can look at her, but doesn't embrace her. The misremembered versions of the scenes have appeared in screen adaptations, though.
  • Possibly the most famous image associated with the story is of Heathcliff and Catherine wandering and frolicking on the moors together as young adult lovers. But this image actually comes from screen adaptations. In the first place, Heathcliff and Catherine are never shown frolicking on the moors together in the book –- they love to do it, but we only hear about it second-hand, since the Unreliable Narrator Nelly Dean never joins them. Despite the book's association with the Yorkshire moors, most of its actual scenes take place indoors. Secondly, they don't do it as young adults, but only as children –- unlike in the film versions, they're only 12 and 13 when Catherine is transformed by the Lintons into a Proper Lady. The young adult lovers who wander the moors together are the younger Cathy and Hareton in the end.

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