Riddle (was Re: Slytherin House / MALcolm BADdock / Eileen / Sorting Lily

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 185735

Potioncat wrote:
> > The Sorting Hat would know that he was a half-blood, but no one
else would. (Unless the magic quill gives the child's parents' names
and teachers have access to it.) He doesn't know it himself
> 
Ceridwen replied:
> How would the Sorting Hat know?  In the only exchange we have
between the hat and a student, ancestry isn't discussed.  That could
be because the hat knows and it just doesn't matter in Harry's case,
being as he has proper Wizarding antecedents, but it could just as
well mean the hat doesn't know, it isn't part of its job to know. <snip>

Carol responds:

First, a digression before I get back to Tom Riddle. The Sorting Hat
knows that Salazar Slytherin wanted no one but Pure-Bloods in his
House. It's possible that he put some sort of spell on the hat to
enable it to identify and reject Muggle-borns. Certainly, no
Muggle-born who knew about the Pure-Blood supremacist views of most
Slytherins would choose to be Sorted there, and the Hat almost
certainly knows a Muggle-born when it sees one because it can see into
the child's mind and would see a child with a Muggle background and no
magical experience. Lily, for example, would have been an obvious
misfit for Slytherin from the outset. Why it put her in Gryffindor
rather than Ravenclaw, and quickly, too, I can't say. it obviously
didn't consider her inclinations, probably because, as a Muggle-born,
she'd be uninformed or ill-informed. At any rate, there was no long
conversation with her as with Harry (and, apparently, Seamus).

With Harry, the Hat must have either have known who he was or sensed
his ability to speak Parseltongue, which would have prompted it to
consider Slytherin and only Harry's resistance and equal qualification
for Gryffindor convinced it to place him there.

With Tom Riddle (told you I'd get back on topic eventually!) I think
that the Hat sensed not only an affinity for Dark Magic but his
ability as a Parselmouth, which would have been much more evident in
his memories than in Harry's one encounter with a snake. Given the
rarity of Parselmouths, he would have had to be a descendant (I almost
said "ancestor"!) of Salazar Slytherin. If the Sorting Hat knew about
the Chamber of Secrets, it might have guessed that Tom Riddle was
Salazar's true heir. But just as the yew wand with the phoenix feather
core knew that Tom Riddle was its rightful master and chose him, the
Sorting Hat would immediately recognize an ambitious, powerful,
Dark-Magic-practicing Parselmouth who clearly had Wizarding ancestry
and must have been descended from Slytherin himself. Even if it saw
the Muggle orphanage in that quick glimpse of Tom's mind, the
Salazar-Slytherinish aura that this child gave off would be sufficient
to show that this boy was no Muggle-born. After all, it had some of
Salazar's "brains" and would immediately sense the affinity.

Carol, who thinks that just seeing Tom talking to snakes might have
been sufficient reason to place him in Slytherin and certainly
sufficient evidence that he had Wizarding ancestry