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

[Ceridwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 185742

Carol:
> 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. 

Ceridwen:
Then why not a spell to keep anyone but a Pureblood out?  Why the
Half-bloods like Riddle actually was, and Snape?  Why half-humans like
some of the narration *implies* about Millicent Bullstrode?  I know an
implication isn't a bald statement, but nothing ever contradicts it. 
And for Muggleborns, how many generations before all trace of
Wizardness is gone?  

Carol:
> 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. 

Ceridwen:
I take it you mean the Muggleborns who would discuss their placement
with the hat.  Why would the hat know a Muggle-born when it sees one,
though?  Riddle was born and raised in an orphanage.  He could do
magic, but so could Harry, so could Lily - in fact, the magic we see
Lily do was impressive - flying or levitating herself to the ground,
making a flower flap its petals like butterfly wings - *at will.* 
None of this "accidental" magic for her, any more than for Tom Riddle.

How long before the WW relation is diluted out of the equation?  It
could be that one of Lily's great- (or great-great-)grandparents was a
witch or wizard, or a Squib carrying only one allele or set of
alleles, part of a whole set of magical genes.  The hat wouldn't know
since a child born in 1960 would not necessarily know its more distant
antecedents.  After seeing the dregs that were the Gaunts, I can
imagine quite a few things about them and their ilk that would have
had a Wizarding ancestor quite recently without even the parents knowing.

Tom Riddle's background was purely Muggle.  His memories would all be
of the Muggle matrons and staff, and even if the hat could access his
earliest awareness, the woman dying on the table was not clearly a
witch, probably not even clearly seen by the infant Tom.

Carol:
> 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).

Ceridwen:
I can buy Lily being an obvious misfit for Slytherin, but based on her
recent experience on the train with James and Sirius and the emotions
that probably invoked in her, not on any clues to her birth.  Those
emotions, if they were of the protective sort, would have marked her
for Gryffindor.  I don't think the hat needed to listen to what she
had to say to see Gryffindor in her.  I doubt if the hat even
considered Ravenclaw.  Then there was that certain disregard for the
rules she evidenced when making the flower flap and floating out of
the swing - Petunia says their mother told her to be careful with
things like that, but she does them anyway.  Gryffindor to the core.

Carol:
> 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. 

Ceridwen:
Yes, and somehow he ended up his own grandfather.  ;)

Talking to snakes had to crop up some natural way in the first place,
some mutation, even among wizards.  This is not an absolute and a hat
that seems to be sentient (only, where does it keep its brain? ;) )
and living for a thousand years, dealing with all sorts and Sortings,
would know that the assured is most definitely not assured.  Why even
listen to Harry, then, if that incident of Parseltongue meant
Slytherin and only Slytherin to the hat?  "There it is, you talk to
snakes, you're...  SLYTHERIN!"  But that didn't happen.  Tom Riddle
was Sorted because of the other things you mentioned, I think - his
attraction to the Dark Arts or attraction to what he would learn to
call Dark Arts, and his ambition, both of which were evident from the
minute we first see him at the orphanage.  He may or may not have been
Slytherin's blood kin as far as anybody knew for sure - he was most
certainly his spiritual descendant.

Ceridwen.