Tom Riddle's Birth (Re: JKR Chat "The Crucial ...")

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 93012

> Jen Reese:
 JKR's comment on the chat indicates there are additional 
> circumstances about Tom Riddle's birth that we haven't heard. 
> Perhaps even *Tom* wasn't privvy to this information either? Diary!
> Tom in COS and LV at the graveyard are the two instances where we 
> get information about Tom's past. Assuming Tom was told much of his 
> history at the Muggle orphanage, then pieced together his own 
> version of events from digging around once he got to Hogwarts (where 
> he discovered he was Heir of Slytherin), I'd say there's a lot of 
> room for unintentional error and omission in his self-reported 
> history. 
> 
> Could there have been events around his birth that led to Memory 
> charms on the Muggle orphanage personnel? Did the mid-wife exclude 
> certain pertinent facts? Were there inexplicable events that the 
> Muggles chose to overlook, much like the Dursleys with Harry?
> 
> It's not that I reject the psychological model when examining 
> Harry's and Tom's childhoods, I'm just curious if what we know about 
> Tom is accurate.


I really, really hope that his mother (or the midwife) didn't cast any
sort of charm. It's one thing to have Harry owe his life to his
mother's love. He grew up essentially good and decent without knowing
that. (He doesn't know about the charm, if there was one, even now;
only about the "ancient magic" involving his mother's self-sacrifice.)
It's a completely different thing for Tom/Voldemort's evil nature to
be in any way traceable to his mother, who also in a sense died for
him, since if it weren't for his birth, she'd be alive.

Nor does his father's behavior, however harsh and irresponsible and
generally reprehensible, excuse Tom's choice to murder Myrtle, taking
out his hatred of his Muggle father on an innocent girl because her
parents, too, were Muggles. The murder of his father and grandparents,
though he had a motive for one of the three killings, was also an act
of pure choice and pure evil. Even if his father had murdered his
mother and left him in a field to die he would not be justified in
taking the law into his own hands and murdering him. And the
grandparents, so far as we know, had done nothing worse than having
Tom's father as a son.

Yes, Tom had a difficult life, but many children throughout history
have been abandoned by their fathers (or mothers). Many children have
been rejected and placed in orphanages. But the majority of those
children don't become murderers. Nor do they make the conscious choice
to carry out the "noble work" of some dead predecessor whose goal was
genocide.

Whatever the circumstances of Tom's birth (which I also will find
interesting), they can't take away his responsibility for the deaths
he caused as a boy or as a man. He knew good from evil and consciously
chose evil. And that, not the details of his birth and childhood, is
what distinguishes him from Harry, who will not, I think we can safely
state, be murdering Vernon or Petunia in Book 6 or 7.

Carol