Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books/Half-Blood Prince/Chapter 13
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Chapter 13 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: The Secret Riddle
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[edit] Synopsis
Katie Bell is moved to St. Mungo's Hospital in London. With the exception of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Leanne, students are unaware that someone other than Katie was the intended target. Ron and Hermione ignore Harry's comment that Malfoy knows.
Though Dumbledore has remained unseen all day, Harry reports to his office for his second lesson. Dumbledore is there and reassures Harry that Snape, who has more experience with the Dark Arts than Madam Pomfrey, has done all he can to help Katie. Dumbledore also says that Mundungus Fletcher has apparently gone into hiding, but nothing else will be taken from Grimmauld Place. Dumbledore tells Harry that Draco's involvement will be investigated, but their lesson is more important now.
In the last memory they viewed, Merope Riddle, who was abandoned by her Muggle husband, was pregnant and alone. Lacking the will to perform magic to care for herself, she needed money. She sold a gold locket once belonging to Salazar Slytherin to Caractacus Burke, one of the founders of Borgin & Burkes. Watching Burke's reminiscence of the sale in the Pensieve, Harry is outraged that Burke only gave Merope ten galleons for the priceless relic.
In this lesson, Harry enters Dumbledore's memories. The younger Dumbledore had auburn hair and beard, just as long as they are now. Dumbledore visits the eleven-year-old Tom Riddle in a Muggle orphanage. After speaking with the matron, who says Riddle is a strange boy and leaves the impression that she is hoping someone will take him well away, Dumbledore talks to Tom. Initially, Tom thinks Professor Dumbledore is a doctor, come to take him to a sanatorium. Believing that Dumbledore's term, "special" means he should be in an asylum, Riddle prepares to prevent Dumbledore from taking him anywhere. However, when Dumbledore explains that Hogwarts is a school of magic, Tom asks if what he does is magic. Even at the tender age of 11, Riddle manipulated and terrified other children, strangled a pet rabbit, hurt people, and spoke in Parseltongue. Riddle demands proof that Dumbledore is a wizard; Dumbledore reproaches him, saying he must address Hogwarts teachers with respect. Tom respectfully asks, and Dumbledore conjures flames on Tom's wardrobe, and as suddenly extinguishes them. Dumbledore retrieves Tom's small cache of stolen items and demands he return them to their owners. The young Dumbledore worried about the boy's ambition, his cruelty, his thieving, and his reaction to learning he is a wizard; he resolves to keep a close eye on him.
Back in the office, Dumbledore says he was unaware then that the young boy would become the most feared Dark Wizard in centuries, Lord Voldemort. He then draws Harry's attention to several traits about the young Tom Riddle: he disliked the common name Tom and wanted to be separate from everyone else. He was already very self-sufficient, secretive, apparently friendless, and he liked to keep trophies.
As he is leaving, Harry notices the ring is gone. Harry comments that he would have expected to see one of Voldemort's trophies there, perhaps the mouth organ? Dumbledore comments that the mouth organ was always only a mouth organ.
[edit] Analysis
By sharing his and others' memories, Dumbledore shows Harry how Voldemort crafted himself from an abandoned, insecure boy into a notorious, Dark wizard. While readers may be sympathetic to Riddle's difficult early life, it can be seen that he was a naturally unpleasant person from an early age. Even the orphanage caretakers came to fear him. And despite growing up without knowing his family, young Tom Riddle inherited many Gaunt family characteristics. He was: egotistical, secretive, aloof, and lacked empathy for others. As a child, Riddle isolated himself from other orphan children, who he considered inferior and frequently stole objects from, saving the items as trophies. He also physically and/or emotionally threatened or harmed them, and later learned to manipulate people to obtain what he wanted. When Dumbledore reprimanded Tom for being disrespectful, Riddle's sudden good behavior seemed insincere and designed to appease the strange professor only to ensure his attending Hogwarts. Young Riddle feared being ordinary in any way and needed to feel superior to everyone. However, being introduced to the Wizarding world may have had the opposite effect. Though he learned he possessed special powers the other orphans lacked, when he arrived at Hogwarts, he was no longer unique, but just one among many talented wizard children. Even here, he needed to rise above his peers and worked hard to learn as much as possible, which eventually led him into Dark magic.
Riddle also shares many similarities to Harry. Both were orphans raised in a loveless environment, they are half-blood wizards, each learned they had magical powers only when they were old enough to attend Hogwarts, and both could perform magic at an early age without any training. However, even if both boys had been raised by their respective parents, their outcomes would probably still have been very different from one another. And unlike Harry, Riddle hated Muggles, even though he is half, a fact Riddle loathed about himself and was deeply rooted in his Muggle father's abandonment. Harry would probably be much the same good-hearted person he is now, only more confident and self-assured, while Tom Riddle's Gaunt heritage likely would still have despised his Muggle origins, even if his father had raised him. Riddle felt forever tainted by this "blood impurity", and it had an adverse effect on his pysche. Learning that he was a wizard inflated his sense of superiority, while his connection to Salazar Slytherin later fueled this egotism, gradually manifesting itself into his new persona as Lord Voldemort and diminishing, in his mind, his sullied Muggle bloodline.
[edit] Questions
[edit] Review
- Why did Merope Riddle sell the Locket? Who did she sell it to, and why was she willing to accept so little money for such a valuable object?
- What did the staff at the orphanage think about Tom Riddle? Why?
- Why would Tom Riddle believe that Dumbledore arrived at the orphanage to take him to an asylum? What was Riddle planning to do if that was true?
- What is Dumbledore's initial opinion of Tom Riddle at the orphanage? What did he resolve to do? What does he tell Harry about Riddle?
[edit] Extra Study
- Why might Slytherin's locket be gold - Gryffindor's colour - and not silver like Slytherin's House colour?
- Why wouldn't Merope Riddle use magic to support herself?
- Why do Ron and Hermione continually dismiss Harry's suspicions about Draco, despite credible circumstantial evidence against him? What does Dumbledore tell Harry?
[edit] Greater Picture
Dumbledore's comment, that the mouth organ (harmonica) was only ever a mouth organ, is enigmatic to Harry, and to the reader. In the last novel, the ring is revealed to be a Horcrux, and it is to this that Dumbledore was probably alluding. That the ring's stone is also one of the three Deathly Hallows probably is not what Dumbledore is thinking about. While that part of the ring's nature is probably predominant in Dumbledore's mind, given the previous summer's events, Dumbledore already believes that Voldemort fails to grasp the Hallows' nature. As such, the ring's stone being a Hallow is irrelevant to his and Harry's discussion here, and instead centers on Voldemort.
