Naughty, Guilty! DD ( was Connecting the dots

[annemehr]

Anne jumps up in excitement, seeing a sprig of flame which is Talisman
theorising onlist.  Anne runs to get twigs, dry leaves, kerosene --
anything.

All right, this is the best I can do this morning:

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Talisman" <talisman22457 at y...>
wrote:
<snip things including a couple of posts I must look up>
 
> Back to Kneasy, who wrote:
> >Tom and Harry.
> >Parallels. How far do you want to go?
> >Both sets of parents have one from an old wizarding family, one not.
> >Harry for sure, Tom perhaps, is born when an evil wizard is rising 
> and
> >certainly one is looming large while both are at Hogwarts.
> >Mothers die. Orphanage/fostering in the Muggle world ensues - until
> >Hogwarts.
> >Both are outsiders.
> >Both have greatness dangled under their noses.
> >Both get wands with Fawkes's feathers as cores.
> 
> Talisman encourages:
> Don't stop there.  Tom and Harry are just two out of three.  
> Remember that Hagrid also tells Harry:  "Yeh know wha' Harry?
When I 
> firs' met you, you reminded me o' me a bit
.(GoF 456)  So that makes 
> at least three little half-blood orphan boys who have passed under 
> DD's wing.

Anne pipes up:

Not to mention, DD is responsible for Hagrid's wand as well.  I really
don't think it is even broken anymore, though it may not be quite what
it was.  But back to the orphan theme:

You could say there are even more, although not on the same level as
these three.  There's Neville, who is for all intents and purposes an
orphan. He does have that grandmother, though, the "formidable" one. 
Does that take him right out of the category?  Still, gran is solidly
in DD's camp, and female, and leaves the field wide open for a nice
father-figure.  If Neville is just any other student to DD, I'll eat
my posts.  Too bad there's not much canon to play with - yet.  But
even though we see nothing of DD's interaction with him, we know he's
important, so the interaction must exist.

What about James and Lily?  Sirius lived with James' parents until
Sirius was of age, and by the time Harry was orphaned, apparently so
were James and Lily.  Harry never mentions seeing any grandparents in
wedding photos and the like, either.  How grandparents died is not so
important to the story, perhaps, but the fact they were dead certainly
is.  And young Order proteges, though not orphaned until their upper
teens or thereabouts, are still going to turn very gratefully to the
wise and sympathetic Leader.

Then, of course, there *is* Sirius, another all-intents-and-purposes
orphan, since the age of sixteen...

And half-orphan Dean Thomas, whose story was left on the cutting-room
floor, but who was supposed to discover his true heritage right there
at Hogwarts.  Okay, I'm reaching here, but I couldn't resist; I
thought of him right away.

Talisman (after big snip): 
> Forget who  directed little Tom to the loveless orphanage. Let's 
> say, just for argument, that he arrives at Hogwarts --an emotionally 
> starved but magically ignorant 11-year-old. <snip>  Any way, who
tells him all 
> about his Slytherin roots?  We see that he starts hunting for Great-
> to-the-nth-power  Grandpappy Sal's hideout right form his first year 
> (CoS  312).  So, who downloaded all this information?
> 
> Well, DD is the only canon source for establishing Riddle as 
> Voldemort's sole remaining heir (332-333). Rowling makes a point of 
> having Hermione emphasize how difficult it would be to trace back a 
> thousand years identifying  Slytherin`s descendants.  (196)  This 
> should dissuade us from cavalierly inventing other handy informants. 
> Only Riddle and DD assert this ancestry, (313-314) and first source 
> must be DD.
>   
> The fact that Riddle talks about his lineage, and family history, 
> and also discusses DD, but doesn't indicate that DD ever had 
> friendly little chats with him, indicates to me that he got his 411 
> in an envelope.

Anne:
Don't forget we have one more canon lead for Tom to get some
information: that name, Marvolo.  He was given a wizard grandfather's
name, one unusual enough to stick in the reader's mind, and if it was
the name of a Riddle, I'll eat *Kneasy's* posts.  Once arrived at
Hogwarts, he must have met some people who recognised it, there, at
Hogsmeade, or even Diagon Alley.  Dumbledore must surely have known
the name, and the person behind it.

Who was his head of house, now?  Someone very Slytherinly?  A Dark
wizard?  Someone who'd known his grandfather?  I pursue this line of
inquiry curiously, but it does tend to dead-end -- there is simply no
reference to this shadowy person anywhere.  The only possibility that
might bear any fruit is that he or she had a connection to
Grindelwald.  The only inferences are that this person is unimportant,
or it's a bit of informaion that Jo has held back as giving too much
away.  But if it's the latter, it's unusual for Jo to have been
absolutely silent about him so far.  All right, leave it for a moment,
and go back to Marvolo  family ties.

How *does* the heir of Slytherin know of his heritage, though as
Hermione says, the passage of time makes tracing family trees that far
difficult?  And, if Dumbledore is the one who fed the information to
Tom, where did he himself get it?

Take a cue from the house of a family who cared very much about
lineage: 12 Grimmauld Place.  There was a certain tapestry, and a
book.  Much care was taken to preserve the history of "worthy" family
members, though the unworthy were blasted into oblivion.  Now think,
isn't it highly possible that the primary Slytherin line kept a
record?  Passed something down from generation to generation?  Ancient
scrolls, or a certain object? Though all the lesser lines forgot their
heritage, one preserves it.

Old Marvolo probably had a house.  Some possessions, at least.
Something among them that was passed down from Salazar, proudly, from
generation to generation. Something that was passed to Tom, and there
is every chance he found something in it.  And yes, it may well have
been passed via Dumbledore.
<snip>

Talisman:
>  Slight digression: How do you like this for symmetry? Frank Bryce 
> and Hagrid: both falsely accused of Riddle's murders, both kept on 
> as groundskeepers.  And speaking of Bryce, who would employ  the 
> Muggle? Not LV, not Malfoy, either.  Who would bother paying Muggle 
> wages for ~50 years? Especially for an old coot who 1) was allowing 
> the place to fall apart (GoF 5);  and, 2 ) would get nosey if Dark 
> Wizards wanted to drop by for a bit of evil fun?  No one but DD, who 
> also "just happened" to be reading the Little Hangleton papers the 
> summer after Wormtail's trip to Albania. He knew LV would be showing 
> up for his quarter cup of daddy dust. 

Anne:
Oh, I *like* symmetry -- it's all over the series.  Carbon copies and
mirror images.  Things writ small in one book, and in all caps in the
next.  But not the facile ones (Neville is *so* not Pettigrew) You
know, I just read a scene in GoF, in The Madness of Mr. Crouch, of Ron
and Hermione arguing (over House Elves in this particular instance),
and Harry withdrawing to the owlery - for hours - to escape their
bickering, that could have come straight out of OoP.  And people think
OoP is disjointed from the rest of the series...

But anyway, back to Frank: you're right, it points to DD.  I'm sure I
must have read DD as a possible owner of the Riddle house before,
thrown in as a possibility among the others, but when you put all that
canon together...ooooOOOOOoooooo!

One last thing:
Talisman:
> Moreover, unless he is "much 
> mistaken" DD knows LV transferred some of his own powers to [Harry] 
> the night he gave [him] that scar." ( CoS 333)  Why? Okay 
> Parseltongues are rare, notwithstanding Herpo the Foul, and others, 
> implied by reference in FBWTFT, at p3.  But, why is it *powers* 
> plural?  What other power is Harry evincing by the end of Book 2? 
> Sort of a strange thing for DD to be so sure about.

Anne:
*jumps up and down*
My possession theory! Buried somewhere in HPfGU, but can be easily
accessed here (public archives, you know):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Hogs_Head/message/3231

Just in case anyone's interested...     

That's all I can contribute this morning (such as it is).  Kneasy, can
I buy you a pint or two for starting this thread?

Anne