My shocking idea - the case for Tom Riddle

[Wanda Sherratt]

No: HPFGUIDX 73037

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Kelly Grosskreutz" 
<ivanova at i...> wrote:
> For some reason, I keep thinking the bit with the basilisk and 
Myrtle took place before this, though.  Didn't it say that Tom was 
in his fifth year when he finally figured out how to set the basilisk 
free, resulting in Myrtle's death?  The way he acts about this event 
indicates he's already started down the road to darkness, that he 
already knows he's a Parseltongue, and perhaps that he's related to 
Salazar Slytherin in some way.  I'm also pretty sure it says that Tom 
is sixteen when he killed his father and grandparents.  If he was in 
his fifth year when he set the basilisk free, and he was sixteen years 
old, he must have turned sixteen in the latter part of the year, since 
the expulsion of Hagrid happened in June.
> It would've been that very summer, then, that he went to the 
Riddle house if he was sixteen at that time as well. >>>

You're quite right, this is the weak point of the theory.  If the 
basilisk episode took place first, then it means that Tom was 
already a killer when he went to seek his father.  I believe that 
the killing of the Riddles happened first, in the summer between his 
fourth and fifth year, and the basilisk happened when he went back 
to school, but I can't prove it.  Both incidents are described as 
taking place 50 years ago (or 'half a century ago'); if we take that 
literally, then the basilisk happened first, and the Riddle incident 
2 years later, in the order in which we read about them.  If Rowling 
means "50 years ago" in the way people often say it, meaning 
anywhere from 47 to 53 years ago, it could be the other way around.  
Dumbledore uses the term in this vague way when he says "I taught 
him 50 years ago."  That doesn't mean exactly 50 years ago - 
Dumbledore taught Tom Riddle over several years, but it's the way 
someone would talk.  

So I don't know.  If it didn't happen this way, then we're back where 
we started with Tom Riddle, and I really think that Rowling is trying 
to do more with him.  As it is, he seems like a motiveless force of 
nature, doing evil just for the sake of evil.  And that would be a 
step backwards from where she's taken the story so far; we're finding 
out that everything has a cause, and everyone comes from somewhere, even 
Snape and Kreacher.  But there could be some other reason why he went 
bad, just as when one is doing magic tricks there's often more than one 
way of achieving the same effect. I like this one because it offers such 
a good parallel with Harry's life.  If I find that Tom Riddle turned to 
evil because some girl wouldn't go out with him because he had bad breath 
when he was 14, well, I'll be disappointed!

Wanda