Isn't his real name Tom Riddle?(was Precious little to celebrate)

[M.Clifford]

No: HPFGUIDX 128848


> Marianne:
> 
> I've also started re-reading the whole series in preparation for HBP, 
> and this is exactly one of the questions that occurred to me.  
> Everyone is scared to death of saying Voldemort, which I think lends 
> too much power to him in everyone's mind.  Why, then, didn't DD or the 
> Order or the Ministry simply start calling him Tom Riddle?  It's 
> rather a pleasant name, and not at all scary.  Did they really go 
> through the entire 11 years not knowing his real identity?  
> 
> Marianne

Valky:

I think the quote Huntergreen added to her post leads us to the answer
to that one.

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> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "huntergreen_3" 

> [Dumbledore] when he says 
> "for eleven years I have been trying to persuade people to call him 
> by his proper name: /Voldemort/."

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I think it's fair to say that a great deal of what the Order knows
about Voldemort is what Dumbledore and his cohort of Magical Sages
have discovered slowly through contemplation and study of the
evidence. And it is canon that Dumbledore doesn't like to jump to
conclusions. If DD had been trying to get the WW to call him Voldemort
it may have been because he hadn't yet discovered that he was Tom Riddle.

In the quote from COS that Sophierom posted -

'Very few people know that Lord Voldemort was once called Tom Riddle.
I taught him myself, fifty years ago, at Hogwarts. He disappeared
after leaving the school ...traveled far and wide...sand so deeply
into the Dark Arts, consorted with the very worst of our kind,
underwent so many dangerous, magical transformations, that when he
resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognizable. Hardly
anyone connected Lord Voldemort with the clever, handsome boy who was
once Head Boy here'" 

- Note that Dumbledore says very few people **know**... not very few
people **knew**, and he says that hardly anyone **connected**
Voldemort to Tom Riddle, not that this group of 'hardly anyone' had
come to a conclusion that he **was** Tom Riddle. So I see JKR has left
the gap there for us to discover that DD didn't figure out the whole
Tom = Voldemort equation until after VWI or until close to the end of
it, by which time the WW was probably in no fit state to make it known.

Looking at it this way sheds a new light on the Showdown in the MOM
now doesn't it? When Dumbledore directly names Voldemort Tom Riddle,
it might be the first time he had been addressed that way in a loooong
time. There may have been more power in those words than we knew? 

"Secret Dumbledore's Business" makes a comeback.. ;D

Valky