Tommy Riddle's birth (was:Re: No Sex, Please, We're British)

[jwcpgh]

No: HPFGUIDX 83840

<gbannister10 at a...> wrote:
> 
> 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?

Laura:

Nice one, Geoff!  Lots of juicy stuff here for chewing over...

Tom before Hogwarts:
I would think that Tom learned early on how to charm and manipulate 
people, skills that he had honed well by the time of the CoS incident 
(see CoS p. 311-312 US).  Hogwarts would be easy compared to a more 
impersonal institution like an orphanage.  Tom, a very bright boy 
with more than the usual amount of survival skills, would have 
figured out very fast that the adults in charge were the ones to 
cultivate.  As a young boy he may not even have had much of a goal in 
doing this other than to take ccare of himself the best way he 
could.  As he grew older, though, he would see that adults who were 
powerful and fond of him could be used in more subtle ways.  This is 
a kid who came to believe early on (I think) that he has been ill-
treated by the world in general and his parents in particular, and 
intended to make the guilty parties pay.  In contrast with Harry, 
whose deepest desire was to belong to some group who cared about him, 
Tom's deepest desire was to dominate those who rejected him as an 
infant.  By extension, this came to include the entire world-wizard 
and muggle, because they had all, to his mind, played a part in 
abandoning him.


Attending Hogwarts:
Again, I think young Tom would have taken his Hogwarts letter 
straight to his favorite (read: most malleable) adult and made sure 
that that person would arrange for him to go to school.  As someone 
else pointed out on this thread, it would be one less mouth to feed 
at the orphanage anyhow-a win all around.  

Showing his magical powers:
Again, Tom is a contrast with Harry (at least in my theory-we have no 
canon on this point).  Harry made things happen, but we have no 
evidence that he ever tried to repeat something he had done.  Nor do 
we have evidence that he saw a pattern in the strange things he did, 
or that seemed to happen around him on occasion.  He just tried to 
keep his head down and avoid getting into trouble when these things 
took place.  Moreover, even after Harry learned about his powers, he 
didn't see them as means to an end.  He just added them to his 
personal inventory of traits, abilities and talents.  Tom, on the 
other hand, was very self-aware (we know this because we know he 
consciously created "Tom-the-model-student" when he got to Hogwarts), 
and I think he would have realized quickly that he could do things 
under stress that were out of the ordinary.  Once he figured out that 
he could create these effects volitionally, it was off to the races.  
I doubt that he identified it as magic before he got his letter, but 
it wouldn't matter to him so much why he could do it as that he 
could.  (It would matter a lot more why when he found out about his 
mother.)  He'd know to be discreet about his powers at the orphanage, 
but you can bet that the other kids knew not to mess with him.  

Finding out about his parents: 

The suggestion elsewhere on this thread that he could have learned 
about his mother and her family at school makes a lot of sense.  
Goodness knows that in Harry's time there are plenty of gossips in 
and around Hogwarts, and I assume the same was true in Tom's era.  
As for his dad's side, we know that Tom went back to the orphanage 
during the summers and school vacations (CoS p. 244 US) So I'm sure 
he used every opportunity to sweet-talk his adult mentors there into 
giving him information about his family.  And anything the adults 
wouldn't tell him he could find out for himself-magic does have its 
uses, doesn't it?