Explain This Passage

[rlevatter]

No: HPFGUIDX 180631

Susan, responding to a question of mine, notes:

> Lord Voldemort saw Harry as "just like him" because Harry was NOT a
> pure blood. The definition of half blood as defined by JKR is that if
> you have ONE grandparent who is NOT a witch or wizard then you are a
> half-blood. And, therefore, lesser.
...
> So Lord Voldemort DID see Harry as like him.....note the quote from
> Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets ..he's speaking to Harry:
> 
> "...There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must
> have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles.."
> 
> Tom Riddle/LV knows that Lily Evans Potter was a witch, and that her
> parents were Muggles. He knows that his father was not a wizard and
> his mother was a witch. Yet he calls himself AND Harry half bloods,
> because at least ONE of Harry's grandparents (actually two) were
> Muggles.

The CoS passage is VERY helpful in clarifying Dumbledore's words to Harry in OotP. Apparently 
Voldemort and Dumbledore think alike on this issue, or at least Dumbledore knows how 
Voldemort thinks on this issue. (Possible, I guess, that Harry told Dumbledore what Riddle 
said.)

Two questions to Susan:

1. Do you have specific textural support for the statement "The definition of half blood as 
defined by JKR is that if you have ONE grandparent who is NOT a witch or wizard then you are 
a half-blood." Is there something in the novel that talks of grandparents in the definition, or 
are you quoting JKR's public commentary?

or

2. Is your support of this claim Tom Riddle's very statement, as quoted. The Riddle statement is 
interesting, in that he is seeing "strange likenesses" between himself and Harry that are not 
exactly incidental to his own actions: Both orphans, because Riddle himself killed Harry's 
parents. Both raised by Muggles, because Riddle killed Harry's magical parents. (It would be 
like taking someone, forcibly commit plastic surgery on him so he looks like you, and then 
commenting on the "strange likeness" between the two of you. Strange.) So the only specific 
likeness mentioned by Riddle that he himself did not cause is the very issue under contention: 
whether Harry is, like Voldemort, a half-blood, even though Voldemort had a muggle parent 
and Harry didn't.

Now, it may be the case that (one can argue) the Riddle in the diary didn't know these strange 
likenesses were caused by him because they were done by his later self (though he seems to 
know things that he hadn't learned in his first 16 years--how could he know, for example, that 
Harry WAS an orphan without knowing WHY Harry was an orphan?). And the CoS passage 
certainly makes the point, stressed later in the books, that Voldemort himself marked Harry as 
the one like him, capable of defeating him.

RL