CHAPTER DISCUSSION: Chamber of Secrets Chapter 17: The Heir of Slytherin

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 189246

Megan askws:
> > 
> > I believe this came up in earlier discussions in this forum, or perhaps I read it elsewhere - but why do you think that Riddle wasn't wearing the ring?
> 
Mike responded:
<snip>
> IMO, this Tom memory was modeled after the Tom that had just framed Hagrid for opening the Chamber. It was here that he realized that opening the Chamber again, after killing Myrtle and framing Hagrid would not only exonerate Hagrid, it would probably close the school. Tom didn't want either of those to happen. So he made this memory to capture his version - his lie - of what happened.
> 
> So why wasn't he wearing the ring? Because he hadn't yet stolen it from his uncle and killed his father when he made the memory. And it was after he killed his father that he made his first horcrux and put it inside the diary, which of course gave the diary those extra features that Ginny found so enticing. <snip>

Carol responds:
I agree except for one small point (and I may be misunderstanding what you're saying). Riddle didn't "make" the memory. He must have removed it from his own head using the same spell that DD and Snape use when they're putting memories in the Pensieve (only this memory was in permanent storage). If the diary was meant to prove that he was the Heir of Slytherin, the Hagrid memory can't have been the only one in the diary--it was simply the one that he could use to entice Harry. I suspect that the diary also showed his opening the CoS and his killing of Moaning Myrtle. (The Hagrid memory must have been put in there to show his cleverness in escaping blame for the murder--unless Horcrux!Tom added it later specifically for Harry's benefit.) 

Nevertheless, the framing of Hagrid, like the opening of the CoS, must also be a real memory, not a manufactured one, considering that Riddle did win an award for services to the school and Hagrid was expelled. It's only a "lie" in the sense that Hagrid didn't open the CoS, not in the sense that he "made" the memory. (We see with Slughorn what happens when you try to alter a memory; manufacturing a realistic one would be harder still. Even Riddle, when he's planting memories in people's minds, uses real memories. The lie is that they're his memories, not Morfin's or Hokey's.

My apologies if I've misunderstood you and you only meant inserting the memory in the diary rather than creating it.

But, yes, both the opening of the CoS and the framing of Hagrid (not to mention the murder of Moaning Myrtle, which I suspect was also in the diary) occurred near the end of Tom's fifth year at Hogwarts, before the school closed for the summer. He didn't kill his father until a month or two later. (JKR says that it was in his sixteenth year, but she means seventeenth; he was sixteen at the time.) When he talks to Slughorn, he's wearing the ring, which means that he has killed his father but the ring is not yet a Horcrux. Whether the diary was a Horcrux or not, it had already been made using memories that predate the second, third, and fourth murders.

Carol, who had to struggle with her own thoughts regarding why the Hagrid memory was in the diary at all