Tom Riddle and the RoR (Was: Dumbledore, Grindelwald, and the Deathstick)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 181688

levatter wrote:  
>  
> > And yet Harry believes, and we are supposed to believe with him,
that on entering--and this is as an adult, having traveled the world
and become very powerful--the Room of Requirement to hide the diadem,
that Voldemort believes he's the only one in the many centuries
history of Hogwartswho has figured out how to enter the Room.
> 
zanooda responded:
> 
> I believe that LV discovered ROR when he was at school, not as an 
adult. He hid the diadem there later, yes, but he found it when he was
still a student, IMO.
> 

Carol notes:

True, he was probably a student. But that doesn't explain why he would
think he was the only one who had found the room. How could he thin
that, if it was already full of other people's hidden treasures and
contraband? Harry realized that people had been hiding things there
for centuries. Even Trelawney, with her cooking sherry bottles, found
the same room that Draco was in (though Draco must have used a
different request ("I need the room with the Vanishing Cabinet" rather
than "I need a place to hide my book" (or "bottles"). It seems that
even Filch could get into the Room of Requirement to hide or store the
broken Vanishing Cabinet. (Dumbledore certainly didn't put it there or
he'd have known about that version of the room.) What I'm saying is,
when Tom Riddle (and I agree that he was a student at the time)
thought, "I need a place to hide my Horcrux"), he would have found the
same room where everyone else had hidden things. Maybe he thought that
he was the only person who had found it in recent years, but he
couldn't have thought that he was the only one who'd ever found it,
with all that evidence to the contrary--rows and rows of it.

Maybe Harry is just wrong about Voldemort's thinking he was the only
one who'd ever found that room, but, still, Voldemort seems to think
that the Horcrux is safe, even after he finds that Harry is at
Hogwarts (and correctly expects Harry to go to the Ravenclaw common
room). That thought jumped out at me as ridiculous when I read it, and
I still think it's ridiculous. Not even Voldemort is that illogical. 

 
> zanooda:
> 
> Again, don't expect LV to be reasonable :-). But there is another 
> thing - we don't know how LV got into the Room and what was his
need. You see, the Room's functions can sometimes overlap, IMO. For
example (and *only* for example :-)), if someone went looking for the
Room of Broken Things, LOL, he would find the same room that Harry
found to hide things, because the broken things are also hidden in there.

Carol:
But Harry didn't go looking for the room of broken things. In DH, he
thinks, "I need the place where everything is hidden" because he knows
about the room where he went before and what's in it. But in HBP, he
thought, "I need a place to hide my book," and the place he was shown
was the same place that hundreds or thousands of other people,
including Tom Riddle, had used over the centuries, with "alleyways and
roads of tottering rubbish" (HBP Am. ed. 526). The narrator doesn't
describe where Harry found the tarnished tiara that he put on top of
the bust of the old warlock to mark the place where the book was, but
it must have been on a shelf or on top of a pile of rubbish like
everything else.

zanooda:
> Maybe he thought it was just a magic Room where the house-elves or
even the castle itself kept all broken, lost or other unwanted things
- no students involved. It's stupid anyway, of course :-).

Carol:
Granted, therre were probably no Fanged Frisbees in Tom Riddle's time,
but there must have been similar forbidden objects, not to mention the
thousands of graffitied books of the type that students might have
been forbidden to read. So, yes, it's stupid. and not even Tom Riddle
could be that stupid. *Maybe* he thought it was a place where the
castle itself kept broken things, but since *he* wanted to use it to
hide something, surely he would have realized that other people,
mostly students, had used it over the centuries for exactly that purpose?

zanooda:
> <snip> In short - LV didn't think the things in ROR were *hidden*
things, he thought they were something else :-). This theory is not
very convincing, but at least it's something ... :-).

Carol:
I agree with you that it's not very convincing. :-)

Carol, who thinks that Tom must have thought that, with all the junk
in the room, no one would pay any attention to a tarnished tiara,
whose true nature as a Horcrux they would never guess