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I have come up with two analogues to Romeo and Juliet: Hero and Leander and Pyramus and Thisbe.
Now that I have more examples, I really can state the difference between this story and the Tristan and Isolde one. There is a physical barrier that prevents the lovers from uniting in this story. Hero is in her tower; Pyramus and Thisbe are separated by a wall; Romeo and Juliet, while they don't have a concrete barrier, are separated by the enmity of their families. They can't get together. In Tristan and Isolde, or Dido and Aeneas, or any similar, the barrier is moral. They can get together, but they shouldn't.
Something else that I've noticed: many of the big stories involve a trip down to the Underworld. Odysseus goes; Aeneas goes, Orpheus, Theseus, Dante… Even Beowulf goes down into the lair of Grendel's Mother. In Tolkien, Aragorn has to take the Paths of the Dead (and he doesn't look back!) as part of his story. So will Harry? He really should. And death is such an important theme in the series: his parent's deaths, Voldemort's fear of death and need to conquer it, Dumbledore's not being afraid of death, the Death Eaters, the ghosts, who weren't brave enough to go on, the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. But how will he have time when he has all of the horcruxes to find and a Dark Lord to defeat all in one book?
Now that I have more examples, I really can state the difference between this story and the Tristan and Isolde one. There is a physical barrier that prevents the lovers from uniting in this story. Hero is in her tower; Pyramus and Thisbe are separated by a wall; Romeo and Juliet, while they don't have a concrete barrier, are separated by the enmity of their families. They can't get together. In Tristan and Isolde, or Dido and Aeneas, or any similar, the barrier is moral. They can get together, but they shouldn't.
Something else that I've noticed: many of the big stories involve a trip down to the Underworld. Odysseus goes; Aeneas goes, Orpheus, Theseus, Dante… Even Beowulf goes down into the lair of Grendel's Mother. In Tolkien, Aragorn has to take the Paths of the Dead (and he doesn't look back!) as part of his story. So will Harry? He really should. And death is such an important theme in the series: his parent's deaths, Voldemort's fear of death and need to conquer it, Dumbledore's not being afraid of death, the Death Eaters, the ghosts, who weren't brave enough to go on, the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. But how will he have time when he has all of the horcruxes to find and a Dark Lord to defeat all in one book?
