Uncle Tom?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 166949

fireflyseason2 wrote:
> > What if Harry and Tom are related? I'm thinking that perhaps
Harry's muggle mother's family and Tom's muggle father's side of the
family could be connected. Does anyone recall if the books mention the
color of Tom's father's eyes? A large point is made of the fact that
Harry has his mothers brilliant green eyes and even JKR has said that
is important. I'm thinking that if they were related by blood that
could also explain why Tom's curse on Harry back fired so badly. <snip>

Geoff replied:
> I would tend to disagree with your suggestion that Tom and Harry 
are related. Largely because of what we are told - or not told - in canon.
<snip canon support and Mark Evans reference>
>So it is possible that Harry and Tom could be related very distantly
but I doubt that any such close link exists.

Carol responds:
I agree with Geoff. JKR has made it clear in canon that Harry has no
living relatives, particularly on his mother's side, where the blood
protection is important. And JKR has stated in interviews that Harry's
being related to Voldemort would be too much like "Star Wars." (No
doubt the Gaunts and Peverells are related to the Potters [and Blacks]
somewhere in the distant past if Ron's assertion that all the
Pure-Blood families are related is true, but Tom Riddle has explored
his wizarding ancestry and surely would have remarked on it if there
were a close connection.) 
> 
Geoff:
> Again, I think that the physical likenesses we are given are very
few. In the similarities which Riddle draws between them in COS, most
of them are to do with background:
<snip>
> Even the physical likeness is thrown in almost as an aside.

Carol:
I would add that Voldemort drew a parallel between Harry and himself
before he even saw Baby!Harry, before he killed Harry's parents, based
solely on his being a Half-Blood. That's the reason he chose to attack
Harry rather than Neville (though I don't doubt that he would have
killed Neville, as well, for good measure). I agree with Geoff that
the similarity that Diary!Tom sees between himself and Harry has to do
primarily with background--both are Half-blood orphans raised by
Muggles--not appearance. "We even look something alike" is, as Geoff
notes, an afterthought. ("Something alike" appears to mean black hair
and possibly a slim build or pale skin.)

Geoff:
> I find no reference to green eyes in descriptions of Riddle but I
haven't looked exhaustively. 

Carol responds:
Tom's eyes are dark like his hair:

"Harry thought he saw a red gleam in [Tom Riddle's] dark eyes" as he
examined Hufflepuff's cup in the Pensieve memory (HBP am ed. 436).

Even Harry would have noticed if Riddle's eyes were green.

Geoff:
Finally, on this point, the only link seems to be dark hair. 
<snip persuasive canon evidence>

Carol responds:
On a sidenote, Tom Riddle's black hair comes from his Muggle father;
Harry's comes from his Pure-Blood father. An unusual number of
wizards, most of them Pure-Bloods or Half-Bloods, seem to have black
hair: Sirius Black, his cousin Bellatrix Lestrange, Igor Karkaroff,
Severus Snape, James and Harry Potter, even the Baby-Headed Death
Eater in OoP. Like pale skin and long fingers, black hair seems to be
a common wizarding trait rather than an indication of a blood
relationship. If similar hair color means that people are related,
then Muggle-born Lily must be related to the Pure-Blood Weasleys.
(Well, of course, all Europeans are distantly related, but I mean
within the last nine or ten generations, not going back to Paleolithic
times.) 

Frankly, I think we can dismiss a *blood* connection between Harry and
Voldemort (before Wormtail used Harry's blood in the restorative
potion). If they were already related, the use of Harry's blood in the
restorative potion would not have caused that mysterious gleam in
Dumbledore's (blue) eyes.

Geoff:
> My personal interpretation of the evidence is that, unless JKR
specifically reveals a link in DH, I see no substantive suggestion of
a blood-line link between Harry and Voldemort in what we can glean
from existing canon. 

Carol:
Again, I agree with Geoff. The link between Harry and Voldemort
relates, IMO, to Harry's scar and to the Prophecy: ". . . And the Dark
Lord will mark him as equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord
knows not. . . ." 

Whatever happened at Godric's Hollow, we know that Voldemort created
his own enemy by acting to thwart the Prophecy. Had LV not "marked
Harry as his equal," giving him powers he never intended him to have,
there would be no mind link. And the curse backfired because of Lily's
sacrifice, not a blood connection with Voldemort. Any other
explanation diminishes Lily's significance, and I don't think that's
where JKR is going.

As for Lily's eyes, I agree with the poster who said that we've
already seen their significance in HBP. The resemblance of Harry's
eyes to Lily's made Slughorn see Lily in Harry all year long,
resulting not only in his delusion that Harry's supposed gifts as a
potion-maker came from his mother's genes (how would Slughorn know
about genes, a Muggle concept?) rather than from the HBP's notes, but,
much more important, in Slughorn's giving Harry the unaltered Horcrux
memory. I think and hope we've seen the last reference to "your
mother's eyes." (I fully realize that the Snape/Lily theorists think
differently on this question.)

Carol, optimistically attributing her absent-mindedness relating to
mundane matters like dates to sensory overload from the DH covers and
hoping that she hasn't made any numb-brained blunders in this post