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

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 114090

Hannah wrote: 
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. <snip>> 
>> 
> 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? 

Carol responds:
I agree that the diary was a brilliant idea, both as a means of
reopening the chamber since Tom himself could not have come back to do
it and as a means of preserving his own memory just in case his search
for immortality failed.

You're right, of course, that Lucius could not have had the diary all
those years considering that he wasn't even born till about 1954, but
it could easily have belonged to his father. Tom Riddle is about
twenty-seven years older than Lucius, so Lucius's father could well
have been one of the few close friends who knew that Tom was starting
to call himself Lord Voldemort.

Tom had no home after he left Hogwarts--at seventeen he was too old to
go back to the hated orphanage and he obviously had not inherited the
Riddle mansion from the father he murdered (the police didn't believe
Frank Bryce's story of a teenage boy sneaking around; if they'd known
of Tom's existence, they'd have sought him out as the obvious
suspect). With neither the house nor the orphanage accessible to him,
Tom had no place to store his old school possessions (other than his
wand, which he kept), so it's plausible that he placed the diary and
whatever else Tom no longer had an immediate use for in Malfoy's
(future) father's keeping, and they came to Lucius on his father's
death. (I think we'd know about the older Malfoy if he were still alive.)

I like your idea that Tom wrote down some instructions for using the
diary, which Lucius would have read carefully before passing it on to
Ginny. And if Lucius knew about Quirrell!mort, he'd know that
Voldemort was out there trying to come back, and he might well think
it was the perfect time to bring him back in whatever way he could and
receive some reward for his faithful service (with some side benefits
as well). I realize that Voldemort seems not to know about the events
of CoS when he relates the story of his comeback in the graveyard
scene in GoF, but as I said in another post, there's no way Lucius
could have informed him before that point even if he wanted to--and
since the attempt failed spectacularly, he probably didn't want to.

Carol