LV & room of requirement

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187223

Susan Curcio wrote:
> >
> > Tried to find this question answered, haven't had any luck:
> > 
> > When LV found the room of requirement, how could he have thought only he knew of it, with the thousands of things already hidden in it?

bboyminn responded:
> 
> Remember that Tom Riddle went to Hogwart's and indeed did find more of its secrets than any other students; consider the 'Chamber of Secrets'. 
> 
> I think on one hand, it was sheer arrogance. He believed the room sense his immense magical power and reveal itself to him. He, the greatest wizard of all, has learned another of Hogwarts secrets. 
> 
> Now, when he actually went into the room, it became clear the centuries of 'someone or other' has been hiding junk there. 
> 
> So, it wasn't so much that he believed no one else knew of the room, but more the fact that Hogwarts has given him what he needed when he needed it. In his mind, it was Hogwarts working with him to fulfill his destiny. 
> 
> The second part, is that the room with centuries of what was clearly forgotten junk, was the prefect place to hide his object. It was probably clear to him that people added stuff to the room, but never removed anything. It wasn't a storage space, it was a dumping ground. 
<snip>

Carol responds:

I'm not so sure. It seems clear from his thoughts when he discovers that at least one Horcrux is missing that Voldemort thought and still thinks that he's the only one who found the room.

Harry, who desperately needs to hide the HBP's Potions book from Snape (delicious little irony there) instinctively knows that many others have done the same thing before him (one or two students hiding something per year would add up to 1,000 or 2,000 objects, and, of course, the House Elves knew about it). Voldemort, OTOH, doesn't identify anyone and can't imagine anyone in the same predicament as himself--having to hide a Horcrux--so, he interprets the room as having assembled itself for his sole benefit, perhaps magically accumulating all the old and broken junk in Hogwarts and conjuring the rest--not for anyone who needs it but only for him because he alone has been clever enough to find it. That a House Elf or several thousand ordinary students over the years might have found this wonderful room is beyond his comprehension.

*We* know that the room has been used for a millennium as Harry thinks it has because we also see Trelawney using it in the same form for the same purpose, and Draco has summoned the room in the same form for a different purpose, perhaps because the House Elves hid the Vanishing Cabinet there after the Twins stuffed Montague in it. (Too bad they didn't hide it after Peeves first broke it in CoS!) We also know that it appears in other forms for other people, even the Squib Filch, for other purposes. But Voldemort, thinking himself more brilliant than other people (a fault he shares with Dumbledore) and unable to empathize with others (he's not the first or last person to want to hide a valuable or incriminating object) thinks he's the only one who has discovered it. He may or may not realize that the room holds the accumulated junk of a thousand years rather than specially conjured junk, but he doesn't realize that it was placed there item by item by  people or creatures whose magical abilities and intelligence he would consider vastly inferior to his own.

His view is hard to understand at first since we know how the junk got there and Harry easily figured it out, but Voldemort, whose mind works differently from Harry's, would not necessarily have arrived at the correct conclusion in this instance. (Draco, needing a place to repair the broken Vanishing Cabinet, may or may not have thought about how everything got there. It would be interesting to know whether he thought it had appeared solely for his benefit--until Trelawney came along and destroyed that illusion.)

Carol, figuring that at least two or three students a year would have needed to discover the place for it to contain as much junk as the narrator describes (but, of course, JKR could be exaggerating again)