Hagrid's innocence

[jodel at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 44068

Denise writes;

<< My explaination is that Hagrid really was the scapegoat only because the 
MoM

had no idea who really opened the Chamber. Only Dumbledore suspected Riddle.

It seems even then the MoM wasn't up to listening to Dumbledore's counsel. >>

*sigh* Hagrid was the scapegoat because he was known to be always trying to 
raise monsters and because it was obvious to anyone who laid eyes on him that 
he was probably half-giant. (Which would be immediately confirmed as soon as 
anyone looked into his school records.) I should expect that having landed in 
Slytherin as a half-blood, Riddle was VERY well aware of the prejudices that 
were shared by those in positions of authority within the ww and was prepared 
to make use of them whenever he could turn them to his own advantage.

Riddle is clever, but he isn't very subtle. Neither is Hagrid. As a prefect 
Riddle stumbled across the fact that Hagrid was trying to hide one of his 
"pets". Other students were probably trying to hide things too, but Hagrid 
already had two counts against him and Riddle knew that anyone with the 
typical wizarding attitude towards giants would automatically be disposed to 
believe Hagrid capable of anything. Where Riddle was concerned, Hagrid was 
simply begging to be framed, and had probably always been a part of Riddle's 
fall-back plan. 

For the record, I think that no one at the time (not even Dumbledore) was 
altogether convinced that the Chamber had actually BEEN opened. 

I very much doubt that Riddle went around writing his intentions on the walls 
in chickens' blood when he was taking the risks himself. And if the roosters 
of that time had also been slaughtered, the significance never was evident to 
anyone on staff at the time. That was the kind of thing that Dumbledore was 
able to note when the Chanber was opened in Harry's time, confirming his 
suspicions that, yes, there had been something in the rumors that were 
floating about fifty years earlier.

And here we have another major piece of missing information. We don't know 
how long the situation went on fifty years ago. We don't know whether there 
was a similar series of close-calls back then. We can assume that whatever 
form of "death to mudbloods" terror campaign he was running the Chamber was 
not openly mentioned in it, or the rumors of the chamber having been opened 
previously would have been far more widely known by people other than the 
Slytherins with presumed DE connections. 

Riddle already had followers when he was a fifth-year, but he did not confide 
in them about his having found the Chamber. (That, only a select few were 
told of years later.) What was known at the time is that *something* was 
attacking people, and that rumors of the "Heir of Slytherin" were flying 
around the castle. Mostly from Slytherin House itself, and were taken with a 
grain of salt by the Hogwarts staff. 

In fact, given that Diary!Riddle claims that it took him 5 years to find the 
Chamber, he may have just intitated his reign of terror at Hogwarts before 
Myrtle's death and the threat that the school was to be closed and himself 
sent back to the orphanage. (Note; I've always been of the opinion that the 
scene in the diary of his having gone to ask to stay at Hogwarts over the 
summer break was actually a fact-finding expedition to discover what Dippet 
and the staff intended to do after the death of a student, rather than a just 
simple request to not be sent back to the orphanage. The request, much as he 
would have liked the idea, was primarily a cover story.

I also am not convinced that Dumbledore suspected Riddle at the time. He did 
NOT believe Hagrid was responsible for the attacks. But suspecting Riddle 
isn't necessarily an automatic given. While he wasn't as blinded by Riddle's 
charm as the rest of the staff, he may very well have thought that Riddle had 
made an honest mistake. There is no question that Hagrid having brought an 
acromantula into the castle was extremely dangerous mischief on a high enough 
level that an inexperienced 5th year might quite reasonably have concluded 
that he had found the source of the present danger. And that there was no 
further trouble after Hagrid was no longer living in the castle would have 
gone a long way toward adding uncertainty to his understanding as to just 
what had been going on. It would have also gone some way among the people who 
kept the records toward the impression that perhaps it wasn't Hagrid's 
monsters which had made the attacks, but Hagrid himself. Which came back to 
haunt him when the chamber was opened a second time. 

As for Hagrid's "secret" ancestry; two generations of Hogwarts sudents have 
grown up aware of the gamekeeper's overgrown assistant, or, later, the 
overgrown gamekeeper. Some of them no doubt later concluded that he had 
giant's blood. But he was the gamekeeper, not a part of the staff that the 
students needed to deal with on any kind of regular basis. They thought 
nothing much about it. It was only when the fellow became a teaching member 
of the staff that this became an issue. And it was only when the suspicions 
were confirmed in the most blatantly sensational way that the ww seemed to 
have felt it needed to kick up a fuss. And that the fuss, wasn't nearly as 
big or even as long-lasting as the vilification over Hermione's "treachery" 
toward their hero Harry Potter would tend to indicate that it was no more 
than an eight-days' wonder for anyone who remembered him. 

-JOdel