Yo-Yo, Thimble, Mouth-organ

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 152893

Megan wrote: 
> Didn't Dumbledore (and I am quoting from memory here), that these
> objects were unimportant to the present time and that he had already
> looked into these things?

Carol responds:
You may be thinking of DD's response to Harry, who expects to se the
mouthorgan or one of the other confiscated objects where the ring had
been after a previous Pensieve excursion: "The mouthorgan was only
ever a mouthorgan."
> 
Megan:
> In a way, I think we are trying too hard to read into what these
simple objects mean. <snip> In an orphanage, and to other children,
simple objects are meaningful. <snip> These objects were important in
some way to the children from whom Tom took them. Maybe it was the
only thing the child owned that was not stipened out by the Orphanage,
or maybe the objects were the only peice they had left from the
family. Whatever they were, they were meaningful AT THE TIME only.

Carol responds:
I agree essentially with this view. Tom was taking "trophies" that
were valuable only to their possessors, probably for the reasons you
cited, but he was not merely stealing the objects to add emotional
pain to the physical pain he had already inflicted. To him the objects
were souvenirs of his victories over his powerless fellow orphans. I
think DD says something to this effect though I don't recall the exact
quotation.

Megan:
> He was also told to return the objects to the people whom they
belonged to. I do believe, however, that these were the precursers to
the Horicruxes. Tom/Voldy realized then that taking personal objects
from people gave you a certain power over them. Then, when Tom became
Voldermort, he realized by associating a bit of his soul to a
maningful object through a murder, gave it any more power.
> 
><snip> Has anyone realized that, in the memories, the horocruxes he
made and the people he killed to form said Horicrux, were all the
OWNERS of the objects. 

Carol:
Yes and no. The known Horcruxes (except the diary and Nagini) are all
valuable objects in themselves, made of incorruptable gold and
possessing magical powers of their own and/or a connection either to
Voldemort's own Slytherin ancestry or to the history of Hogwarts. So,
yes, the ring, the locket, and the cup did have personal meaning to
the people he stole them from, but they had meaning to him, too.

Also, Tom didn't kill Morfin or use his murder to make the ring
Horcrux. He must have used the most important recent murder, that of
his father, who was a Muggle and had no connection with Marvolo
Gaunt's ring. And he killed Hepzibah Smith to acquire two potential
Horcruxes, the locket and the cup. Even if he considered her death
important enough to use for the making of a Horcrux (probably the cup
because of Hepzibah's descent from Helga Hufflepuff), the other
Horcrux still required another murder.

As for the diary, he bought it himself from a Muggle shop. He didn't
steal it from a victim. I think, and I know I'm in the minority here,
that he used Moaning Myrtle's murder to create it. (The Basilisk was
his weapon or instrument, just as the poisoned mead was Draco's
instrument. If someone set a venomous snake loose in a classroom and
that snake killed someone, whether or not that person was the intended
victim, surely the person who set the snake loose would be guilty of
murder?) At any rate, if I'm right, Myrtle would be important not in
herself but because she was Tom's very first murder. Having killed
her, IMO, helped him get up the "nerve" to kill his father and
grandparents. And having killed them made any further murders a piece
of cake.

Anyway, I've strayed from the point, which is that Hepzibah Smith is
the only murder victim who actually owned a Horcrux (which may or may
not have been made from her murder). 

There's a lot we don't know, including how long after a murder is
committed the Horcrux can be made and how Voldemort, having committed
three murders at one time (the Riddles), could choose which one to use
for a particular Horcrux. (Surely he didn't know which soul piece
resulted from his father's murder as opposed to his grandfather's or
grandmother's.) We don't know when he made the diary into a Horcrux.
(It was apparently intended originally as an instrument for killing
Muggleborns at Hogwarts and "continuing Salazar Slytherin's noble
work." When was the "mere memory" reinforced by a soul bit?)

We do know that he killed Myrtle near the end of his fifth year and
the Riddles the following summer, when he was still sixteen. We know
that he had not yet learned about Horcruxes (he's wearing the ring he
stole from Morfin when he asks Slughorn how they're made). He can have
made at most two Horcruxes when he shows up at Hepzibah Smith's house
looking thinner and paler but still strikingly handsome. Perhaps he
had not yet made any, though he has certainly split his soul often
enough to make three or four. (Her murder makes the fourth or fifth.)
And he has almost certainly made at least four Horcruxes (diary, ring,
cup, and locket) when he shows up ten years later to apply for the
DADA post at Hogwarts looking blurred and red-eyed. If we accept JKR's
math here and assume that a soul can somehow be divided into equal
sevenths even before seven murders have been committed and that
unimportant murders have no effect on the size of the soul pieces
placed in the Horcruxes, he has at this point lost at least 4/7 of his
soul, and, judging from appearances, 4/7 of whatever humanity he had
to begin with along with it.

At that point, he disappears, apparently leaving England to consort
with the Darkest of wizards. (Grindelvold is already dead.) When he
returns in the early 1970s, at about the time that MWPP/S are starting
school at Hogwarts, he apparently has made at least one more Horcrux,
perhaps two if DD is mistaken about his intending to make his last
Horcrux with Harry's murder. If I'm reading the evidence correctly, he
already has the snakelike appearance that we see in GoF. He seems to
regard his resurrected body as his own body restored; there's no
indication of shock on the part of the DEs at his snakelike features;
and his face is snakelike when it appears out the back of Quirrell's
head. This final alteration in his appearance seems too extreme to be
the result of only one Horcrux. IMO, DD is wrong and LV has already
made all six of his Horcruxes at this point, and one of them is
Nagini, which accounts both for his appearance and his extremely
strong affinity with her. It also accounts for her ability to
withstand possession without dying like Quirrell and the rats and
snakes that Vapor!mort possessed before his restoration.

Megan:
What if, and this is off the wall, that the INVISIBILITY cloak was an
object of GRIFFENDOR??? I know this is a CRAZY idea but it is a
semi-reasonable one. We all have been searching our brains to figure
out what object could be Griffendor's.

Carol:
It's possible. But how would LV know about James Potter's Invisibility
Cloak, much less that it was an heirloom of Gryffindor? (We've been
told that Harry isn't the Heir of Gryffindor, so James couldn't be,
either. Dumbledore is a more likely candidate, and LV would have
wanted the Sword of Gryffindor, which he failed to obtain, both for
its associations with the fourth founder and because of its value and
magical powers. The Invisibility Cloak would be less suitable simply
because it's so insubstantial even if it had proven Gryffindor
associations.

I think that many posters are operating on a misconception. The
Horcrux does not need to be directly associated with the murder or
present at the murder scene. Hepzibah's murder could not have been
used for both the cup and locket Horcruxes, so whichever soul bit was
chosen for the locket Horcrux must have been the result of the murder
of a person not present when the locket was stolen. Possibly it was
the bit that was split off when Tom killed his grandfather three or
four years previously. Certainly, the cup was not present at that murder.

Another point, too, that I don't think has been sufficiently
considered. Tom did not kill his family with the intention of using
their murders to create Horcruxes. He may not even have known what
Horcruxes were at that point. He killed them for revenge. And he was
not even planning to do that much when he went to Little Hangleton
looking for Marvolo Gaunt. It was only through Morfin's babbling about
Tom's resemblance to "that Muggle" who ran away with his sister that
he learned where his father lived. At that point, he stunned Morfin,
stole his ring, borrowed his wand to commit the murder (which turned
into three murders), then returned the wand and implanted the false
memory. The ring was a souvenir of his crime and a family heirloom
that he no doubt considered rightfully his despite Morfin's prior
claim, but it could not have been, at that point, an intended Horcrux
since he didn't have a clear idea of what a Horcrux was or how to make
one.

So I don't think that LV was after any particular object, Invisibility
Cloak or otherwise, at Godric's Hollow. He had, IMO, one purpose:
thwarting the Prophecy by killing Harry. If he also intended to make a
Horcrux from Harry's death, that would only be icing on the cake. Kill
the Prophecy boy and he's immortal, with or without a sixth Horcrux.
Or so he would have thought.

Carol