HBP is Riddle (plus some reasons why)

[Paul Smith]

No: HPFGUIDX 106179

Okay, I've read back about 500 posts looking for a similar idea to 
mine and have found nothing, so now with time running short on my 
internet usage for the day hopefully my suggestion won't have been 
heard before.  It is that Tom Riddle is the Half-Blood Prince.  I 
even have a couple of reasons to back this up.

The first is that JKR said she considered HBP as the title for the 
second book, which says to me the HBP is in CoS.  After briefly 
trying to find ways to justify Hagrid being the HBP, I realised my 
second reason.
Whilst JKR has explicitly informed us that the HBP is not Harry or 
Voldemort, is she making use of something clever she did in CoS to 
throw us off the track?  I'm talking of Dobby telling Harry that the 
plot at Hogwarts had nothing to do with Voldemort.  Of course he 
meant that it was to do with Tom Riddle, apparently a completely 
different person before his transformations.  Is JKR using the same 
trick?  I think it very possible.
The royalty thing had me befuddled too (well done to those who 
noticed the book Sirius used on the spider creature), and the only 
ideas I have on that are Voldemort calling himself a Lord, and the 
Riddle family owning the large, stately house that they do.  I'd 
always assumed that they had it through money, but perhaps it was 
theirs through a title...

Thanks for reading if you have, knowing JKR she'll have made that 
comment to make us think she's using the same trick as Dobby, but 
I'd love it to be true, then we might be learning lots more about 
Riddle's childhood and background, which I'm very interested in, 
especially the transformations he underwent.  Let me know your 
thoughts, Suze. 
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