No Sex, Please, We're British

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 83770

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "grannybat84112" 
<grannybat at h...> wrote:

grannybat:
> Geoff corrected me:
> 	
> > >--it's always bothered me that Tom 
> > > Riddle's mother died in the Muggle world.... Why didn't
> > > she return to the Magical world after being rejected by her 
> > > child's father? She was a witch. She shouldn't have had to put 
up 
> > > with the fate of a "fallen woman...."
> > >
> > > Unless the Magical world's attitude toward out-of-wedlock 
births  
> > > is even more archaic and vicious than the Muggle world's.
> 


Geoff:
> > Perhaps I should point out that your argument is not upheld by 
> > evidence in canon:
> > 
> > "'You think I was going to use my filthy Muggle father's name for 
> > ever? I, in whose veins runs the blood of Salazar Slytherin  
> > himself, through my mother's side? I, keep the name of a foul, 
> > common, Muggle  who abandoned me even before I was born, just 
> > because he found out his /wife/ was a witch? (my emphasis)'"
> > 
> > Tom Riddle to Harry  (COS UK edition p.231)
> 

Grannybat:
> Blast. That's what I get for theorizing on the one book I don't 
have 
> in my possession right now. Thank you for catching that so quickly.
> 
> All right, I'll leave the fate of unwed mothers in the Magical 
world 
> to fanfic until JKR gives me reason to take it up again. The 
question 
> remains: Why didn't Tom Riddle's mother return to the Magical world 
> before giving birth?
> 
> Did she not even try? Did she try and was rejected? Was she 
> physically unable to go back? 

<snipped>
 

Geoff:
I'm thinking aloud on my feet. Tom's mother died in childbirth. That 
is a good deal less common than it was in, say up to Edwardian times 
as Riddle would have been born round about 1926. Tom tells us that 
his father abandoned her when he discovered the WW connection, which 
implies at that time she was already pregnant.

OK. As Grannybat has suggested, was she physically unable to go back? 
Had she been estranged from her family because she had married a 
Muggle? The Riddles were presumably living as Muggles. Perhaps the 
mother had a bad pregnancy and was ill? (My paternal grandmother died 
after the birth of my father's much younger brother in 1928 from 
septicaemia.) Perhaps, his father injured her physically. There are 
several possibilities here.

Tom must have found out the details about his parents afterwards, 
because we are told in GOF that his father had been living with his 
parents at the Riddle house in Little Hangleton when TR was a 
teenager. I am assuming that he was the "teenage boy, a stranger, 
dark-haired and pale" (GOF p.9 UK edition). It must also have been 
round about the time of the COS incident because we are old that the 
mysterious deaths occurred half a century ago before Voldemort 
reoccupied it in 1992. 

This opens up several cans of worms. I am surprised that the Muggle 
orphanage allowed him to attend Hogwarts when he got his letter. How 
did he manage to trace his father in a time when information about 
true parents was usually held secret? When did he start to show 
magical powers?

Right, I've provided my two pennyworth plus a whole row of coathooks 
for people to hang their theories on.... Over to you guys.

Geoff