Harry's moral core vs. Voldie's

[ginnysthe1]

No: HPFGUIDX 118002


Snow wrote:
>I personally believe that Tom's mother lived, and may still be 
living, but was forced to choose between her son and his rejecting 
father or her wizarding world connection with the last of the pure 
royalty line of Slytherin.<

Bookworm replied:
>Snow, are you saying that Tom's mother went back to her wizarding 
family?  Then why not take Tom with her - because he was half-blood?<

Kim chimes in here:
Seems a likely scenario, her rejection of her half-blood baby, if in 
fact she didn't die but went back to her own snobby, racist family.  
What a rejection that would have been, one that would have fed the 
fires of the future Lord Voldemort's wrath.  He never really fit into 
either world and was rejected by both at the tenderest of ages.  
Clearly too, though LV has claimed a "preference" for pure-bloods, 
he's also never been averse to torturing or killing pure-bloods (e.g. 
James Potter, et al.) when they don't follow slavishly along with his 
schemes.

Kim wrote:
>Ditto to Snow's ideas! I read her post after posting 117924 to Geoff 
on the same topic. I agree though that it's nice to think of Tom's 
mother loving her husband and son so much, but there's nothing in 
canon to say yay or nay to that idea.<

Bookworm responded:
>We do have an indication that she didn't go back to her husband. 
When the Riddles were killed, the family included the parents and a 
grown son.  Nothing was said about the son's wife escaping or being 
away at the time.<

Now Kim responds to Bookworm:
I think it's also possible that Mrs. Riddle (the young witch) might 
have tried to go with her husband to live with the Riddles, and maybe 
they did take her in at first, but then she died in the interim, so 
that when teenage Tom Riddle (Voldemort) went to the house in Little 
Hangleton, she wasn't there with his father and grandparents.  And 
since we still don't know what might have been said between Tom and 
his father and grandparents before he did them in with AKs, it could 
be that he killed them *after* they told him his mother too had 
abandoned him in an attempt to become part of a Muggle family.  Nah, 
it seems like too outlandish a theory, now that I read it 
through...    Of course these theories leave a lot of holes that are 
hard to fill...  If she had gone back with her husband to Little 
Hangleton, where was he while she was having the baby (that is, if 
she didn't actually die after giving birth)?  Why would the Muggle 
Riddles accept a witch for a daughter-in-law but then reject the 
*offspring* of their son and that daughter-in-law?  There are way too 
many holes and no way of knowing what really happened, since canon 
(the trustworthy part of canon, that is, if you can trust any of the 
canon...) doesn't say one way or another.  Hopefully HBP will remedy 
the matter.   ...It's amazing how much your head can spin when 
thinking about just one little unexplained aspect of the whole 
story :-)  

Kim wrote (in post 117924): 
>I agree with you [Geoff] that it's not likely for a birth attendant 
to know the name Marvolo, but it was still quite possible.<

Bookworm responded:
>It is not unusual for someone to ask an expectant mother what names 
she has picked out for her child.  Mrs. Riddle could have told the 
birth attendant about the family names.  Does a witch know the gender 
of the child she is carrying?  Or did Mrs. Riddle also pick a girl's 
name that we wouldn't have heard about?<

Kim responds:
I think I suggested something similar in post 117924 or perhaps in 
another post in the same thread.  Sometimes the threads get a tad 
mixed up in my mind, so I'm not sure where I said what!  Anyway 
there's no reason (and it doesn't make sense anyway) for Mrs. Riddle 
to have kept the names for her baby secret, since she (supposedly) 
died but the names still stuck with baby Tom.  So somebody was there 
to hear what he had been named or to do the naming after his mother 
died.  In any case, your last two questions are worth considering.  I 
too wondered about the possibility of there having been a pre-picked 
name for a girl just in case.

I've also wondered about the origin of the name Marvolo.  Sure 
doesn't sound British.  Italian? Spanish? Portuguese?  Hmmm...  I 
just did a search in a source that contains lots of names from all 
over the world, and there wasn't a single Marvolo.  Doesn't mean it's 
not a real name someplace, but it could be a pure creation of JKR.

Cheers, Kim (who, as always, hopes her ideas don't duplicate those of 
previous posters, but if they do, she hopes those posters will chime 
in with some more)