Chris Abraham

Yesterday, author J.K. Rowling unveiled the title of the series’ seventh and final book through a puzzle on her Web site, sending her vast Internet fan infrastructure into paroxysms of joy and speculation about the meaning of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Ms. Rowling posted the complicated game on www.jkrowling.com without warning, at noon London time. Just as she had done with her last novel, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” she led her readers through a complicated set of riddles and visual cues. But it didn’t take long for directions for solving the mystery to be posted on fan sites. MuggleNet.com noted that fans should start by clicking on an eraser on Ms. Rowling’s desk. They then had to work their way through a variety of steps to reach the final level. There, they were invited to play a game of hangman that revealed the book’s name.

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Although the word “hallows” has never appeared in any of the six published Harry Potter novels, some diehard Potter fans were familiar with it. Some fan Web sites had reported that “Harry Potter and the Hallows of Hogwarts” and “Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Hallows,” as well as a variety of other titles, were trademarked in the U.S. and Britain by Seabottom Productions of the U.K. in the past several years.

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There are also many theories about the meaning of the new title. Some fans think that “Deathly Hallows” refers to horcruxes, says Mr. Spartz. Horcruxes are objects that contain pieces of a wizard’s soul. When a wizard kills somebody, he can split his own soul and put a piece of it into an object. This makes the murderous wizard more difficult to kill: Not only does he have to die, but the remnants of his soul must be destroyed as well.

“Harry thinks Voldemort split his soul into seven pieces, which means that in order to defeat Voldemort, Harry has to hunt down and destroy all of the remaining horcruxes and then take on Voldemort in a final battle,” says Mr. Spartz.

Horcruxes have to do with death, hence the reference to “Deathly Hallows,” he adds. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word hallow as a noun can mean “a loud shout or cry” or “a saint.” In the Potter canon, nothing is holier than a wizard’s soul. It would make sense, says Mr. Spartz, to link the two words. “The new book will be about Harry hunting down and destroying Voldemort’s remaining horcruxes,” he says. A spokeswoman for Scholastic declined to comment on the book’s content. It isn’t known when Ms. Rowling will deliver the manuscript.

Meanwhile, Mr. Spartz concedes he is only speculating, and there are other interpretations. Melissa Anelli, who owns The Leaky Cauldron (the-leaky-cauldron.org), another popular Harry Potter Web site, notes that another theory holds that the title refers to All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, when Harry’s parents died. The book should help clear up some of the mystery about what really happened, says Ms. Anelli, who is a general assignment reporter at the Staten Island Advance newspaper in New York.