Tom Riddle A.K.A Lord Voldemort Ancestry and life story Part 1

                          

Young Tom Riddle (11 years)

Hey Guys,

Welcome to another installment of Harry Potter. In my last post I discussed the history of dementors. In this post I will talk about Tome Riddle A.K.A Lord Voldemort and his life story.  Starting with his heritage all the way to his death, which spans over the course of 76 years!! So what are we waiting for, let's dive right in. 

Ancestry and History:

He comes from the gaunt family who are the last living relatives of Salazar Slytherin himself (one of the founders of Hogwarts, who famously had the rare ability to speak to snakes) and the family was 100% pure blood over the course of their entire history. Merope Gaunt, Voldemort's mother was physically and mentally abused on a regular basis by her father Marvolo Gaunt and her brother Morfin Gaunt. The family had a lot of gold but it was squandered several generations before Marvel was born and all they owned now was Salazar Slytherin's locket and a ring which were the Gaunt's family heirloom. (Which was actually the resurrection stone in the Deathly Hallows).

Salazar Slytherin

 

Merope was taken by a rich and handsome muggle boy named Tom Riddle from the village. One day Morfin shot a spell at him, when Merope was admiring him. Of course, he broke the law for not using magic in front of a muggle, a ministry employee was sent to see Morfin and give him information on his hearing because he had broken the law. Everything went wrong and it turned out that the Ministry employee had to call for backup and there was a duel between Morfin and his father Marvolo and the ministry officials. Marvolo and Morfin lost and Morfin was sentenced to three years in Azkaban and Marvolo was sentenced to six months. Finally free from her awful family and without the constant abuse from her father and brother her magical abilities manifested and Merope fled the house taking nothing but Slytherin's locket. She started giving Tom Riddle love potion eventually they got married and Merope became pregnant with the person we would later know to be Lord Voldemort. Merope thought that since she and Tom had spent so much time together that he might actually love her or he would at least stay for the baby. So she stopped giving him the love potion (the reason being that she didn't want to enslave the love of her life anymore) unfortunately she was wrong and Tom left her. She was heartbroken and she was driven mad that she was never able to use magic again. Merope sold Slytherin's locket to Borgin the owner of Borgin and Burkes. Merope becomes ill and she went to an orphanage where she gave birth to Tom on the 31st of December 1926 and died one hour later. However, she had a last wish being that the child'd name must be Tom Marvolo Riddle. He was named Tom for his father; Marvolo for her father and with the surname of Riddle. It was clear that he was the mirror image of his handsome muggle father. He never had any family visitors and he scared the other children at the orphanage although there was never any proof that he did. His magical abilities were very developed for his age (though he did not know that he possessed any magical abilities) and he used them for his own gain and to bully other people. Tom collected trophies by stealing things from the kids that he had bullied as a sort of a reward for his acts of unkindness. When Tom was 11, he got a visit from Albus Dumbledore at the orphanage (his first ever visitor) Dumbledore explains to him what he is and what Hogwarts is.

Gaunt house- Merope Gaunt on the left; Marvolo Gaunt in the middle and Morfin Gaunt on the right

Hogwarts and later years:

Before we move onto Tom's Hogwarts life let's discuss some important (and dark) qualities that he possessed, that are revealed when Dumbledore visits him and in his later years. So, he was a Parselmouth and we see that as a kid he is highly sufficient of being secretive and he is also friendless. He preferred to operate on his alone and on his own traits. We also see that he showed contempt for anything that tied him to other people or anything that made him ordinary, he wished to be different, separate and notorious. He also did not like his own name because it was a nasty common name. After Dumbledore met Tom his initial thoughts were as follows "His ability to speak to serpents did not make me nearly as uneasy as his obvious instinct for cruelty, secrecy and domination." Now let's talk about Tom's Hogwarts life. Tom came to Hogwarts and was placed in Slytherin the moment the sorting hat touched his head. While at school he used his charm (to make other people do what he wanted them to do) and never showed signs of outward arrogance or aggression that he had shown Dumbledore the day he had visited him. According to Dumbledore he drew the attention and sympathy of almost all the staff as soon as he arrived because he was an unusually talented and very good-looking. He was polite, quiet and thirsty for knowledge, he was one of the top students of the school and became a prefect in his fifth year. While at school Tom was obsessed with his parentage and he searched for evidence if his father went to Hogwarts in every way he could think of but didn't find anything, he of course thought that his father was a wizard because his mother had come to the shameful human weakness of death. This is showing the first signs that he despised death. When he couldn't find anything on his father he assumed that he was a muggle and that's when he dropped his name Tom Riddle and took on the name Lord Voldemort. He started to search for evidence of his mother side of the family and found Marvolo gaunt (his grandfather) whom he was named after. While at school he got a group of dedicated friends (friends that would eventually become the first generation of Death Eaters (Lord Voldemort's followers)). These friends were rigidly controlled by Tom and they were never detected in open wrongdoing although in their seven years of Hogwarts marked a number of nasty incidents. In his fifth year he went on summer holiday and took a visit to the old family house, he found his uncle Morfin in there. Morfin was wearing the Gaunt family ring, and he tried to attack Voldemort thinking he was Tom Riddle (the man his sister had run off with) until Voldemort spoke in Parseltongue and Morfin realized he wasn't Tom Riddle senior. Voldemort asked Morfin who he was referring to and Morfin told him about the muggle family that lived in the mansion and how Tom Riddle senior had abandoned his mother while she was pregnant. Voldemort stupefied Morfin took his wand and went up to the riddle mansion there he found his father and his muggle grandparents at the dinner table and killed them all with Morfin’s wand. He then returned to the Gaunt house and using extremely advanced magic (especially for a 16-year old) to modify Morfin’s memory and make him think that he was the one who had murdered the riddles and was proud of it. Then he stole the ring from his uncle, placed Morfin’s wand there and unstupefied him and left before the ministry came. When the ministry came Morfin bragged that he had killed the riddles (which was exactly Lord Voldemort's plan) and the ministry saw that Morfin’s wand was the one that killed the family. They never did any more digging into it because it looked like a closed case. Morfin spent the rest of his life in Azkaban, the only words he ever spoke for the rest of his life were “He'll kill me for losing the ring”. During his sixth year Voldemort starts to research about Horcruxes a way to make himself immortal, he goes to Professor Slughorn (his favorite professor) and asks him how it works.

Professor Slughorn: “The Horcrux is an object in which a person has concealed a part of their soul and by doing so you are protected, if attacked and your body gets destroyed, part of your soul that is hidden, lives on, in other words you cannot die.

Tom: “But how does one separate his soul?

 

Professor Sulghorn: Killing rips the soul apart. It is a violation against nature.

During his sixth year he opens the Chamber of Secrets (since he is the heir to Slytherin), the led to the death of a muggle-born girl named Myrtle. This is when he made his first Horcrux. He used Myrtle’s death to split his soul for the first time and placed that part hi soul in his diary. During his remaining years at Hogwarts (it's unknown exactly when) but he used the death of his father to make the second Horcrux and places that part of his soul in the Gaunt ring. In his remaining years he also talked to the Gray Lady (the ghost of Ravenclaw), who also happened to be Rowena Ravenclaw's daughter and uses his charm to get the information he wants out of her. The grey lady tells him about how she stole a diadem from her mother and hid it in a hollow tree in a forest in Albania.

                          Gray Lady

To be continued in part 2...

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