LV last descendant of Slytherin ? (was : Re: Harry stepping up to the plate.)

[delwynmarch]

No: HPFGUIDX 98044


Hawk said :
> I do not believe DD is out and out lying to him. To tell Harry 
> that Riddle is the "last remaining ancestor of Slytherin" and have 
> it not be so would be just such a lie. So, yes, I trust that 
> statement as truth.

Del replies :
Apart from the fact that the right word should have 
been "descendant" and not "ancestor", I still don't trust that 
statement too much. My main concern is : how does DD know that ?

* Slytherin lived several centuries ago, I doubt there are genealogy 
books going back all that time. 

* Salazar Slytherin was a famous wizard, so maybe there are indeed 
records of his descendants. But in that case, why wasn't Tom Marvolo 
Riddle identified as SS's last remaining descendant right from the 
beginning, and treated as such ? He was left in a Muggle orphanage 
for 11 years, without nobody in the WW caring about him.

* Even worse : when the Monster of Slytherin started roaming the 
corridors of Hogwarts, how come nobody was able to identify Tom 
Riddle as the most obvious possibility for the Heir of Slytherin ? 
Unless of course, nobody knew that the monster was SS's Basilisk. 
But somehow I doubt that Tom would have freed it and sent it to kill 
Muggle-borns without making publicity about it. That's what he did 
in CoS, and I believe he did it the first time too.

So it seems to me that there's no way to prove that LV is indeed the 
last descendant of SS. In fact, I would be very surprised if that 
were true : it would mean that SS's family always had a restricted 
number of kids, who always married within the same circle. Possible, 
but very improbable, no matter how noble they thought themselves to 
be. Even the Blacks, who obviously thought a lot of themselves, had 
many white sheep. And after all, Tom's mother married a *Muggle* : 
if Tom had been non-magical, he would have disappeared from the WW's 
radar. And then if later on one of his kids or grand-kids had turned 
out to be magical, that kid would have been a non-identified 
descendant of Slytherin...

Del