The Problems with the DH movie.

[Carol]

Miles wrote:
> I know it's a bit unfair to shout "it happened offpage", but I think in this case we can be quite sure that Voldemort has read many books about wizardry, and quite certainly about wandlore as well. He was supposed to be the most brilliant student Hogwarts ever saw (at least since Dumbledore), and we all know that pure talent is not enough even in the magical world.
> 
> Unlike Harry, who wouldn't touch a book unless he is forced to do by a teacher, and even then would try to skip parts of it and ask someone to tell him the essentials (Hermione), Voldemort does not need to ask Ollivander for what is written in books, but for the kind of knowledge only the Loremasters have.

Carol:
It's clear to me that he's never heard of Beedle the Bard. Grindelwald sneers at him for his ignorance. At most, he may have heard rumors of the Elder Wand under its nicknames (e.g., the Death Stick) and asked Ollivander about it.

Miles: 
> Voldemorts main problem is not knowledge, it is his impression that magic will always work in his favour, and his arrogance towards all possible outcomes of magic that would work for his enemies: Lily's sacrifice, priore incantatum, wand ownership... I think if he would have been asked in a (very theoretical) examination, he would have been able to describe and explain it thoroughly.

Carol responds:

We know from CoS that Tom Riddle spent his school years researching exactly two things--the location of the Chamber of Secrets and learning how to make Horcruxes. All he cared about was being the Heir of Slytherin, attracting followers, and immortality. I don't deny that he was naturally brilliant, but I doubt that he was a swot like Hermione (or, to all appearances, the young Snape). Somehow, I can't picture him sitting in a book-lined room studying, in contrast to Snape, who must have spent a lot of time reading in Spinner's End. Those books weren't his father's, and probably not his mother's, either. When Tom Riddle had the chance, he simply used his natural brilliance and power to kill people and transplant memories to frame others for his crimes. (He could already do controlled wandless magic, such as moving objects and making animals obey him and hurting people when he was eleven years old. The brilliant Tom Riddle study other people's magic? Not unless it was how to create, say, an Inferius.) And once he'd murdered Hepzibah Smith and stolen the future Horcruxes from her, he disappeared, not to read but to "consort with the Darkest of our kind," as DD put it.

Carol:
He seems to have run across some particular kinds of Dark Magic as he was trying to find out how to make a Horcrux. Consequently, he knew about the Philosopher's Stone and the ancient potion, with the accompanying unusually long incantations, that Wormtail makes in the graveyard. But the potion that created the rudimentary body that we see in GoF, Nagini's venom combined with unicorn blood, seems to be his own invention, as were the spells he invented to supplement it.

It's true that we know very little about what Voldemort did during his lost years, but what we do know points to active experimentation rather than reading and study.

Carol, suspecting that Tom Riddle, despite his natural brilliance, was not an intellectual