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Revision Date: August 24, 2008

Disclaimer: This article had to be split even before the last book in the series came out. This particular section has comparatively little alteration. Mostly because so much of it turned out to be wrong that it seemed more appropriate to leave it stand as an indication of what I had expected to have happened. There is some expansion and adjustment, however. And there IS some annotation in light of DHs.

So: to continue:

****

By the end of HBP there was some question as to whether Voldemort had already figured out what, or rather, who his final Horcrux was. I rather thought that he may have by that point in the series.

He knew that he succeeded in losing another piece of his soul, anyway.

For despite all of his statements in the graveyard about being willing enough to get his “old” body back — until he could manage a truly immortal one (a statement that Rowling was determinedly ignoring all through HBP, but I suspected that we may not have heard the end of), he had not yet gotten a look at that regenerated body.

But Riddle must have realized that he had, after all, lost a soul fragment since Godric’s Hollow, despite the monumental screw-up which had destroyed his original body there. The first thing he did after rising from the cauldron and dressing himself was a detailed self-examination. Harry watched him run his hands over himself, arms, chest, face, he would have been able to tell from the changes to his physiognomy that — despite the spell having gone awry 13 years earlier — he had still split off a soul fragment since the night of his defeat. This was not the first time he had gone through this procedure, remember? He knew the kind of changes to expect.

It belatedly occurred to me that this may have been the purpose of Rowling’s having him create a Horcrux from the snake. To mask any physical changes attendant upon having created one after all. Or of having not created one. Because the soul fragment in Harry had never been properly split off. In this I think I was giving her far too much credit. She never has managed to keep proper track of random details, and she certainly wasn’t likely to start then.

The fact that he had allegedly gone to the Potters’ intending to create a Horcrux also suggests that he took an artifact of significance with him (Rowling failed to show us one, in her flashback, but that does not mean that it wasn’t there. He just wasn’t thinking about the artifact). Therefore, I thought his first assumption might have been that the designated artifact was now his 6th Horcrux. Or that there wasn’t a Horcrux at all. That the soul fragment had simply been lost when his spell was derailed.

If he had not paid a visit to Godric’s Hollow since that discovery — and he may not have (ETA: well, he did, but apparently just to set and bait the Bagshot trap), it isn’t exactly the scene of one of his triumphs — I thought he may have decided to leave the artifact in place, or had simply assumed that it had already been found and removed.

I speculated that Harry and his friends might very well find it there. It may have a curse on it, although that was far from certain, but it would not be a Horcrux. Harry is the Horcrux. And that even if they did find it, Harry and his friends were primed to believe that it couldn’t be a Horcrux, since the last one was the snake.

In any case, I thought this artifact might turn out to be the as yet unspecified Ravenclaw or Gryffindor artifact — assuming there was any such thing. Or that it might be just something otherwise old and impressive.

Conversely, Voldemort might have already retrieved the artifact. Which raised the question of whether Voldemort can tell by touch or sight whether or not an artifact actually has become a Horcrux. (Given that his Horcruxes tend to reach back, I suspect he might.) Still, Harry had no reaction from handling the Diary, apart from a vague feeling of familiarity when he read the name written on it. Voldemort may have thought he had taken possession of his final Horcrux, and had only recovered an artifact.

Swythyv, who is the theorist who pointed out the possibility that Reggie may have faked his death and gotten the Horcrux out of the cave after Voldemort’s first defeat also floated the suggestion that Tom Riddle may have lifted his mystery artifact from Borgin & Burkes’ shop before his disappearance, obliviating his employers’ memories of having ever had it, and falsifying the shop’s records. This is certainly a viable possibility. It would be in character, too. Tom was already a thief long before he became a murderer. And I would suspect that, given long enough, just about any magical artifact of significance might well cross the threshold of B&B. That’s probably why Tom chose to work there in the first place.

However, when Lord Voldemort took physical and psychic possession of Harry Potter in the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic at the end of Year 5, the way he had possessed Quirrell a few years earlier, he got a nasty surprise, and probably now realizes that there is something that he had totally not anticipated about the Potter boy’s scar. Dumbledore claims that Voldemort found the attempt at possession so painful that he has taken steps to close off the connection from the other end. Harry can hardly confirm or deny this since he was in such agony at the time himself that he was aware of nothing else.

But Voldemort certainly hit something he absolutely DID NOT expect, and he is (or once was) quite clever enough to have put 2+2 together, if it had occurred to him to try. But we didn’t know whether that was the case.

But he certainly didn’t hold off from creating his final Horcrux for some 20 years on the off chance that there might someday be a Prophecy out there with his name on it. I think that he had been reserving that last Horcrux for a particular murder. One that up to 1981 he still had not yet figured out a workable, risk-free way to accomplish.

He was saving up that one for the death of Albus Dumbledore.

****

I still believe that, you know.

I think that Riddle returned to the ww from his first exile to discover that his long-range plans had suffered an unexpected set-back. Actually he may have had a couple of plans regarding the school already in train, and neither had materialized. The first showed no signs of materializing at all. His back-up plan was also a washout.

This following may have been his back-up plan:

He had expected Professor Dippett to still be Headmaster.

He had expected Professor Dippett to give him the DADA position when he asked for it.

Once established at Hogwarts as the DADA instructor, he would have set up one of his Byzantine plots to murder Dumbledore and create a Horcrux from his death. (Having kept at least one slot open, the last one, in reserve for that purpose.) He would then have either kept the whole set with him, or eventually hidden that Horcrux — and possibly all the others — in the castle. He would have jockeyed his way into replacing Dumbledore as Deputy Headmaster and simply waited for Dippett to die. And then he would be in charge of Hogwarts castle. As he had intended to be for years.

Instead, he found that Dippett had already died, and that Dumbledore was now Headmaster.

He knows that there is No Way that he is ever going to be given a teaching position in Dumbledore’s school.

He has to revise his plans.

Completely.

But he doesn’t necessarily give them up.

****

Well, now that we are finally managing to scramble out of the crater left in the wake of DHs, I think I am going to have to revise that scenario, slightly.

There appear to be any number of legends circulating throughout Hogwarts regarding the Founders. Rowling didn’t bother to fill us in on them unless the plot du jure needed her to, and she didn’t really tell us much even when she did. I don’t think Rowling herself is much interested in the legends of Hogwarts. She’s left those alone for us to play with.

But we needed to be told about the legend of the Salazar Slytherin’s chamber of secrets. We also needed eventually to be told about the lost diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw. And even though Albus never came out and told us there was an actual legend involved, it is obvious that there is bound to be one concerning the sword of Godric Gryffindor as well. I very much doubt that Harry is the first student in history to have ever pulled that sword out of Godric’s hat. I’m sure there is a legend pertaining to Helga Hufflepuff floating about too, but we were never in a position to need to know about that one.

(It doesn’t concern a cup, at any rate. Helga’s family had taken the cup away with them. There is no legend concerning Salazar’s locket either, for the same reason. The founder legends of the school only concern things that the founders were known to have left — or lost — at Hogwarts.)

Albus, as we know, placed a great deal of stock in legends. So, I think did Tom. Even if Tom never bothered to read Beedle the Bard or managed to draw a connection between the legendary Elder Wand and the story of Death and the three brothers, he would have learned all that he could about the legends pertaining to Hogwarts, while he was at Hogwarts.

As a student Sorted into Slytherin it stands to reason that he would have quickly learned about Salazar’s chamber. I think he heard about Godric’s sword as well. In fact there is probably some story circulating about that the sword only shows up when Hogwarts is in danger.

And by now I don’t think he managed to sweet-talk the secret of what happened to the Ravenclaw Diadem out of the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw by accident, either. He was following the trail of exactly that information.

So he knew that he was going to have to leave Hogwarts eventually in order to retrieve the diadem, but he was going to have to stay there to get a crack at the sword. And of the two, he wanted a chance to get hold of the sword first. After all, once the sword became a Horcrux, it would disappear back into wherever it stayed between its appearances, and you couldn’t ask for better security for a Horcrux than that.

I really don’t think that he had a lot of expectation of actually being given the DADA position when he first applied for it from Headmaster Dippett. He was only 18, after all. But it was worth asking. He certainly didn’t retaliate back then by jinxing the position when he didn’t get it. And he had every intention of coming back later and asking for it again.

His interlude at Borgin & Burke I still believe took place before rather than after any trip he made to Albania. If, as I have postulated, he had been in the habit of working at B&B during his summer breaks, he would have already searched the shop records for anything that resembled an entry regarding a locket in the year prior to his own birth, after speaking with his uncle Morfin Gaunt, and he would have certainly found at least one such. And also discovered who had purchased it.

Collectors always come back.

The wait paid dividends, too. Because by waiting for Hepzibah Smith to show up, he managed to get a crack at an undocumented artifact of Helga Hufflepuff’s as well.

And then it was off to Albania to collect the diadem!

I think he hit a snag at that point. I’ve come round to the view that it took him most of the missing decade to find the diadem. If it was hidden in a hollow tree back in the 11th or 12th century, the likelihood is that by the 1950s it was buried in so many centuries of forest compost that retrieving it was more than just a matter of wandering through the forest casting “Accio diadem” at random intervals. It may have taken him every bit of that decade in order to get a line on the proper place to dig.

But he manage eventually, and then it was time to return to Britain, take up a post at Hogwarts and create a situation which would assure that the sword would make a reappearance.

Well, we all saw how well that went.

He found he needed to come up with a Plan B.

****

So, what would this Plan B need to consist of?

First; he needed to devise some way of reaching the children he intended to enlist into his service. He had already discovered that somehow his message seems to be less... compelling to the older generation. Besides, the older generation was inclined to question his authority, and he wasn’t having any of that. He had, so far, enlisted only a couple of followers who were more than a year or three older than himself. And his rhetoric’s greatest appeal was to adolescents and post-adolescents.

Since he now was not going to be at the school to set up his own little club of “Riddlers” he needs to devise some other approach. Some sort of selection criteria which will get his target demographic all into a place where his prospective candidates can be approached by his existing followers. Or, rather, by their children.

(i.e., Just because Rowling tells us the Sorting Hat is not a Horcrux, it does not mean that it has not been tampered with.)

Second; he needs to actually get into the castle. There is at least one important matter that he wants to take care of “on site”. And now he is going to need to do it under Dumbledore’s crooked nose.

He also decides he’d best give the old coot a diversion so he won’t catch on to what the real purpose of this trip was.

So Tom makes an appointment and pretends to ask for the DADA position. He doesn’t expect to get it, but he’s still miffed when he doesn’t. When refused, he stalks out of the Headmaster’s office and takes care of his real agenda, jinxing the DADA position as a distraction. Which has the helpful side effect of assuring that every year there will be a vacant position into which he might be able to insert an (expendable) agent. But that wasn’t his main objective.

As Albus says, Tom must have had some reason for making a long journey on a nasty night other than to ask for a position he knew he wouldn’t get. And Albus is quite right. We just had no idea what that reason was at the time. Nor any blatant clues to Tom’s real purpose either.

We now know that he swung by the Room of Hidden Things on his way back to the main staircase and pitched the Ravenclaw Diadem, which he had already turned into a Horcrux in amongst 1000 years of Hogwarts rubbish.

I do still tend to think that Tom tampered with the Sorting Hat. But now that I’d been balked of my nice tidy Sorting Hat=Horcrux theory, I had to accept that Tom did not go to Hogwarts to create a Horcrux.

I did think that he may have gone to hide one.

But by the end of HBP and the indications that he only started parceling out Horcruxes to followers after he learned about the Prophecy, I was no longer altogether convinced that he would have been hiding a Horcrux as early as that. Rowling has certainly given us no reason to explain such a decision.

****

Which brings us back to the question: what was Tom’s original plan regarding the castle? The one that didn’t materialize at all?

Well, I’m no longer convinced that there ever was one. Although there is still a hint of one in canon. Once again, I have a correspondent to thank. As well as Swythyv. My correspondent pointed out the following passage from CoS, which had escaped me:

“I knew it wouldn’t be safe to open the Chamber again while I was at school. But I wasn’t going to waste those long years I’d spent searching for it. I decided to leave behind a diary, preserving my sixteen-year-old self in its pages, so that one day, with luck, I would be able to lead another in my footsteps, and finish Salazar Slytherin’s noble work.”

Er... leave behind a diary?

Perhaps he didn’t make that appointment in order to get access to the castle just in order to hide the Diadem. Perhaps he also made that trip in order to retrieve his diary!

It was Swythyv who pointed out to me the interesting “coincidence” (which I am sure was no coincidence) that when Harry and Ron found the Diary in Moaning Myrtle’s loo, Ron immediately started burbling on about book traps, such as the book one *could not* stop reading, or ‘Sonnets of a Sorcerer’ which would force you to speak in limericks for the rest of your life.

We can’t really know for sure, but from the Diary revenant’s claim, it does certainly sound like the diary always was intended to serve as a weapon. It may not have been a Horcrux (and probably wasn’t) at that early point, but it was certainly a trap.

We don’t really have any clue to how it might have originally been set up to work. But it is at least possible that if a book can make you talk in limericks ever after, one could make you hiss a set phrase in Parseltongue to water taps. That’s all it would have taken to set the Basilisk running amok (which was the whole point). And the kid with the book would be the first one to die.

I daresay that Tom might have been quite happy to have let the Diary take some child over in his absence and to have returned to the ww to find the school closed and the Basilisk in residence, making it possible for him to simply move in without much fanfare. But since it hadn’t happened, he decided to make sure that when it did, it would be at his convenience.

I did find myself suddenly wondering whether he might even have left it tucked into Dippett’s office when he asked for the DADA post the first time, hoping that Dippett would be caught by it. It’s not a very likely playscript, but he definitely would not have wanted to leave something like that lying about for Albus to find!

But, now, I just think the Diary revenant was boasting. We can probably dismiss the thread of Tom’s having left the diary as a booby trap for the unwary.

Although it might have been a fun thread to follow.

****

For example: once he learned that Albus was now Head, he may have decided to retrieve it so he would have greater control over when it got deployed. And also, probably, to improve upon it. His magic had advanced since he was 16. (Unlike Harry, whose magic seems to have peaked at 14.)

Whatever enchantments he had put upon it at 16 or so might do the trick, but to ultimately reinforce it with a fragment of his own soul would ensure that it would. I don’t know whether it could have actually possessed the reader originally. Certainly not with the control the revenant had. And no, it certainly wouldn’t have been able to generate a corporeal replica of 16-year-old Tom Riddle. That capability is now looking a lot more like part of the final plan if it was part of the reason he gave the spell a Horcrux “engine”.

And we do not know how long he had been back in Britain when he learned that Dippet was dead and Albus promoted, either. Presumably long enough to have begun reeling his old school friends back into his train, but probably not more than a few months.

We don’t know whether he did any wandering about the castle, once he left Albus’s office. He would have been under observation by the Hogwarts Art Collection if he had, but we do not know what they reported to Albus, since Albus didn’t tell us.

Besides, I’ve long suspected that Albus wasn’t the only wizard who didn’t need a cloak in order to become invisible.

But Tom could have poked his head into the library and performed a brief “Accio diary” without taking much time. Even paying another visit to the Chamber of Secrets itself wouldn’t have taken long.

And then; mission (whatever it was) accomplished, since Riddle hadn’t anything else that he particularly wanted to do, he threw a tantrum for over 20 years, and embarked on a life of crime, trailing his enthralled followers after him, like the pied piper.

****

And then the ruddy Prophecy turned up, and he decided that killing the infant Harry Potter and using his murder for his last Horcrux was an even better idea than trying to figure out a risk-free way of murdering Albus Dumbledore and making his final Horcrux from that. He would arrange for Dumbledore’s death by some other means. And never mind making a Horcrux from it. That was no longer necessary.

Which is the real reason why I think that Severus Snape was sent to Hogwarts, and expected to take the DADA position (that he had originally asked for) — which would assure that he would be out of the school within the year. He wasn’t sent to do long-term spying. He went in with a specific mission that was supposed to be completed within one academic year. Because that was all the time he would get. In fact, literally, I suspect.

And I suspect that specific job was one of assassin.

****

Which now raises the question of whether Tom did create the Diary in ’81, and what he had intended to do with it.

We cannot say for certain that the Diary was only made into a Horcrux just before he entrusted it to Lucius Malfoy. Just that it now seems likely that he may have only created that Horcrux once he knew about the Prophecy.

And we know that Tom likes to plan ahead.

By Halloween, 1979, the earliest date at which the Prophecy might have been made, Tom had just about everyone where he wanted them. The average wizard-in-the-street believed he was winning. The Ministry was in disarray. The DMLE had made itself over in his image and was preying on its own constituency. Practically the only uncompromised bastion of resistance appears to be Albus Dumbledore and Hogwarts castle.

Which we know wasn’t uncompromised at all. It was Tom’s recruitment center. But the public didn’t stop to consider that.

And Tom wants that castle.

He needs to close the school, so he can take it. I rather suspect that at that point it wasn’t the School that he wanted at all, it was the castle. He wanted it for his own stronghold. He seems to have changed his mind about closing the school by the time he went ahead and let his followers take over the Ministry. But that wasn’t for another 16 years. Even Tom Riddle can change his mind over 16 years.

But, back in ’81 I think he did want the castle. He wanted it for himself.

Well, hey, he had nearly closed the school when he was back in 5th year, hadn’t h