A tunnel, a diary and a memory.....

[Hannah]

No: HPFGUIDX 113596

Geoff wrote:
> Now to the diary which produces another whole crop of questions. 
To begin with, why did Tom Riddle decide to create the diary? His 
logic in COS seems odd:
> 
> `"I knew it wouldn't be safe to open the Chamber again while I was 
> still at school. But I wasn't going to waste those long years I'd 
> spent searching for it. I decided to leave behind a diary, 
preserving my sixteen-year-old self in its pages so that one day, 
with luck, I would be able to lead another in my footsteps and 
finish Salazar Slytherin's noble work.'
(COS "The Heir of Slytherin" p.230 UK edition)
> 
> Why create the diary at all? Does he think he is going to suffer 
> amnesia when he walks out of the Hogwarts gates? He is not going 
to waste those years; he has the information safely locked up in his 
>head.
> 
Hannah now: The diary is actually a pretty good idea.  He was 
Slytherin's last remaining heir.  He had probably decided he wasn't 
likely to have children - and even if he did, they may be suspected 
if they were to open the chamber.  Instead, he creates a way that he 
can use another child, at some point in the future, to open the 
chamber, without that child having to have any contact with adult 
LV.  

It's an insurance policy - if anything should happen to him (which 
of course it does) the diary exists as a means to carry on his work, 
and even to allow him to live again.  For someone obsessed with 
immortality, it's a logical step.  If things go wrong in the future, 
he's got another chance.

Geoff continued:
> Where has the diary been in the intervening 50 years? Has Lucius 
had it (how old was he in 1942?)? If so, why has it apparently not 
been used? Did he know how to access it? Or want to? Perhaps after 
> Voldemort's unscheduled exit in 1980, Lucius felt that the less 
known about the diary the better. But.... When the wretched book 
reappears in 1992, why didn't Lucius try to get to the Chamber 
himself or why not give it to Draco and get him to create mayhem and 
mischief rather than  give it to Ginny who might not even get as far 
as trying to use it? I wonder whether Lucius knew precisely what it 
was or whether he dumped it onto Ginny in the hope that she might be 
a vehicle for it to lead to the undermining of Dumbledore's 
influence and the possible end of Hogwarts.
> 
Hannah again: We're back to the tricky question of what Lucius hoped 
to achieve with the diary, which we're discussing in another thread, 
so I won't go into now.  Why not give it to Draco? Well, it's 
dangerous for a start - both for Draco personally, and for Lucius in 
terms of disgrace/ it being traced back to him.  And by giving it to 
Ginny he gets the added bonus of the possibility of disgracing 
Arthur Weasley.

Lucius can't have had it for the entire 50 years.  In OoP (or is it 
GoF?) a newspaper article gives his age as 41.  He might be fibbing 
a bit, but I doubt he's much older than 45.  Even if he's old enough 
to have been alive when Riddle made the diary, he would only have 
been a baby/ small child, and not to be entrusted with it.  Could 
Riddle have given it to Lucius' father?
     
I have often wondered if Lucius wrote in the diary, and how much he 
knew about it.  I always thought that cagey old Lucius would have 
been very wary of writing in the diary - I don't imagine he would 
want to be possessed by Tom Riddle.  But he must have had some idea 
of what it was capable of, presumably from being told by LV or 
whoever had the diary before him, or perhaps by written instructions 
kept with the diary? 

Hannah