(The Lack of) Horcrux-Hunting
Aug. 24th, 2011 05:36 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslockBack in my essay “The Keeper of the Keys,” I argued that Dumbledore didn’t start hunting Riddle’s Horcruxes until about 1995 because it took him until after Harry’s report of Tom’s boasts in the graveyard to realize that Tom had more Horcruxes than just Harry.
But there’s an even more fundamental problem. Why wasn’t Dumbledore hunting for Tom’s (presumably singular) Horcrux in, say, 1948? Or at least, after Tom’s return from the continent as “Lord Voldemort,” master of the Death Eaters?
I mean, you have a monster who likes to kill and who covets personal immortality—why wouldn’t he make a Horcrux? Or rather, why would Dumbledore assume that he had not?
What follows is, of course, pure speculation.
Tom Riddle made up a name for himself that indicated his interest in immortality (or more precisely, his fear of death) back when he was in his teens. At the same age, he showed a taste for grandiosity and an interest in wizarding legends. (He billed himself, after all, as the Heir of Slytherin when he killed Myrtle.)
Tom showed up wearing an ancient ring engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows about the same time Morfinn Gaunt, admitted murderer of one Tom Riddle and his parents, complained of losing his family’s heirloom ring.
A Muggle killing by a previously-convicted Muggle-hexer (the last scion of a degenerate, impoverished family) would hardly rate front page coverage in the Prophet, and it’s wildly unlikely the tiny article reporting the sordid little crime would bother to list anything as insignificant as the Muggle victims’ names. And no one outside Hogwarts knew young Tom Marvolo Riddle’s name anyhow; he had no intention, ever, of becoming famous under that sobriquet.
But the victims’ names must surely have been mentioned at Morfinn’s trial and in his files. (Um, surely they must? Although Bob Ogden’s official paperwork, seventeen years earlier, referred to Morfin’s victim only as “said Muggle.” Maybe Muggles’ names are rarely recorded. When a this-universe human is arrested for cruelty to an animal, after all, the animal is not necessarily named—just the species given and offense against it noted.)
Was Albus Dumbledore already on the Wizengamot then? He’d already been asked at least once to stand for Minister of Magic, so I think he must have been. And how many other Hogwarts staff and students could say the same?
If he saw the names, Dumbledore might have guessed at once some version of what really happened.
He might, however, have misinterpreted young Tom’s motive.
One of the results of Tom’s crime spree was the theft of his uncle’s ring. Set with a black stone, not a gem, engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, and claimed by Gaunt family legend to date back to the Peverells.
Or if Albus didn’t learn at the time about Tom’s other crimes and just thought Tom came by his newest trophy through simple theft, Albus might still have misinterpreted Tom’s motive.
Remind me, what was it that Albus and Gellert were hell-bent on finding when THEY were sixteen?
Albus might have jumped to the conclusion that Tom sought to master death the same way he and Gellert had: by finding and uniting the Deathly Hallows. And have been smugly confident that even though Tom might possibly have gained one of them, he’d never attain at least one of the other two. Since Albus happened to know where it was, and to believe that young Tom could not defeat the Deathstick’s master (neither Gellert nor later, Albus). Tom’s inexplicable-to-other-teachers decision to go work at a mere shop (which happened to trade in antiquities and Dark objects) would then make perfect sense to Albus, and so would Tom’s sudden decision to decamp to the continent, where the Deathstick had last been seen…. But by then it wasn’t there any more.
If Albus had also had the overweening vanity to imagine that his attempt to purge Hogwarts of information about Horcruxes had actually prevented Tom from finding out about that means of trying to cheat death, he might have believed young Tom’s aspirations to immortality doomed to ultimate failure. (Tom was not, after all, of the spiritual purity even to think about creating a Philosopher’s Stone.) So Albus might not have worried much about them (while still worrying, perhaps, about Tom’s other known interests).
In which case, Albus probably went for years smugly thinking that the problem posed to the WW by the newest Dark Lord was fundamentally temporary. (Which would, of course, somewhat mitigate Albus’s culpability in allowing Tom to become Lord Voldemort.) And so on Halloween 1981, the discovery that Tom’s body had been destroyed without effecting Tom’s actual death must have come as a considerable shock to Albus.
No wonder Albus never even considered that Tom must have created at least one Horcrux before the Harrycrux. It was an overwhelming blow to Albus’s vanity to learn that Tom had made ANY.
But there’s an even more fundamental problem. Why wasn’t Dumbledore hunting for Tom’s (presumably singular) Horcrux in, say, 1948? Or at least, after Tom’s return from the continent as “Lord Voldemort,” master of the Death Eaters?
I mean, you have a monster who likes to kill and who covets personal immortality—why wouldn’t he make a Horcrux? Or rather, why would Dumbledore assume that he had not?
What follows is, of course, pure speculation.
Tom Riddle made up a name for himself that indicated his interest in immortality (or more precisely, his fear of death) back when he was in his teens. At the same age, he showed a taste for grandiosity and an interest in wizarding legends. (He billed himself, after all, as the Heir of Slytherin when he killed Myrtle.)
Tom showed up wearing an ancient ring engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows about the same time Morfinn Gaunt, admitted murderer of one Tom Riddle and his parents, complained of losing his family’s heirloom ring.
A Muggle killing by a previously-convicted Muggle-hexer (the last scion of a degenerate, impoverished family) would hardly rate front page coverage in the Prophet, and it’s wildly unlikely the tiny article reporting the sordid little crime would bother to list anything as insignificant as the Muggle victims’ names. And no one outside Hogwarts knew young Tom Marvolo Riddle’s name anyhow; he had no intention, ever, of becoming famous under that sobriquet.
But the victims’ names must surely have been mentioned at Morfinn’s trial and in his files. (Um, surely they must? Although Bob Ogden’s official paperwork, seventeen years earlier, referred to Morfin’s victim only as “said Muggle.” Maybe Muggles’ names are rarely recorded. When a this-universe human is arrested for cruelty to an animal, after all, the animal is not necessarily named—just the species given and offense against it noted.)
Was Albus Dumbledore already on the Wizengamot then? He’d already been asked at least once to stand for Minister of Magic, so I think he must have been. And how many other Hogwarts staff and students could say the same?
If he saw the names, Dumbledore might have guessed at once some version of what really happened.
He might, however, have misinterpreted young Tom’s motive.
One of the results of Tom’s crime spree was the theft of his uncle’s ring. Set with a black stone, not a gem, engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, and claimed by Gaunt family legend to date back to the Peverells.
Or if Albus didn’t learn at the time about Tom’s other crimes and just thought Tom came by his newest trophy through simple theft, Albus might still have misinterpreted Tom’s motive.
Remind me, what was it that Albus and Gellert were hell-bent on finding when THEY were sixteen?
Albus might have jumped to the conclusion that Tom sought to master death the same way he and Gellert had: by finding and uniting the Deathly Hallows. And have been smugly confident that even though Tom might possibly have gained one of them, he’d never attain at least one of the other two. Since Albus happened to know where it was, and to believe that young Tom could not defeat the Deathstick’s master (neither Gellert nor later, Albus). Tom’s inexplicable-to-other-teachers decision to go work at a mere shop (which happened to trade in antiquities and Dark objects) would then make perfect sense to Albus, and so would Tom’s sudden decision to decamp to the continent, where the Deathstick had last been seen…. But by then it wasn’t there any more.
If Albus had also had the overweening vanity to imagine that his attempt to purge Hogwarts of information about Horcruxes had actually prevented Tom from finding out about that means of trying to cheat death, he might have believed young Tom’s aspirations to immortality doomed to ultimate failure. (Tom was not, after all, of the spiritual purity even to think about creating a Philosopher’s Stone.) So Albus might not have worried much about them (while still worrying, perhaps, about Tom’s other known interests).
In which case, Albus probably went for years smugly thinking that the problem posed to the WW by the newest Dark Lord was fundamentally temporary. (Which would, of course, somewhat mitigate Albus’s culpability in allowing Tom to become Lord Voldemort.) And so on Halloween 1981, the discovery that Tom’s body had been destroyed without effecting Tom’s actual death must have come as a considerable shock to Albus.
No wonder Albus never even considered that Tom must have created at least one Horcrux before the Harrycrux. It was an overwhelming blow to Albus’s vanity to learn that Tom had made ANY.
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Vanity
Date: 2011-08-31 06:40 pm (UTC)Consider what Albus did when James and Severus conclusively demonstrated that Albus's precautions to isolate Lupin during "that time of the month" were inadequate: nothing. Albus really doesn't want to register when he's been fallible and someone else has outsmarted him.
Moreover, for as long as Albus thinks Tom is using the Stone as a Hallow, he'd expect Tom to keep it on him at all times.
Maybe Albus had gone scrabbling through the rubble at Godric's Hollow looking for it, and concluded that both Riddle's wand and the Stone had somehow been destroyed in the blast. Or that the Stone had somehow gone immaterial to stay with its true master (still alive, if immaterial). Or maybe Albus kept going back to the ruins of the Potter cottage to look periodically--if the Stone were impervious to magical revealing and summoning spells, he'd have to hand-sift the rubble. And he's usused to archeological procedures, and can't use them there without making it obvious to the rest of the WW that someone's looking for something.... So can he ever be quite, quite sure that it isn't there, somewhere? Or been taken by a jackdaw before he had time to search?
My current guess is that something in the battle between them at the Ministry alerted Albus that Tom was not currently holding the ring, and quite possibly that he had never used it as a Hallow. He saw, of course, that Tom wasn't openly wearing the ring--well, he could have seen that in Severus's memories before. Nothing to keep Tom from spelling it invisible, or wearing it on a chain around his neck. But maybe something in the behavior of either the Deathstick or that Veil.... maybe something should have happened if the Resurrection Stone or its user was so close....
Harry had always had the impression that the Deathstick's master could see right through that cloak, hadn't he? Maybe the holder of one Hallow has privileges over the others?
And if Albus subsequently realized that Tom also hadn't been wearing or carrying the thing way back at his DADA job interview, that would immediately send Albus's mind to contemplating that it might have been hidden long ago. In a hiding place associated with Tom's past.
Because it's, what, six weeks after that that Albus suddenly decided to hightail it over to that hovel to check.
Re: Vanity
Date: 2011-09-03 01:50 am (UTC)Both ways? Hierarchically? Or rock-paper-scissors style?
We see that Wand beats Cloak. But apparently did not help Albus with the Stone. In fact, I can imagine that if the owner of the Stone were to face the Master of the Elder Wand - situations where the Stone Master might be able to summon shades that would either tempt or threaten or otherwise manipulate the Wand Master to cede it. Maybe Albus was very lucky Tom had no idea what the stone in the ring was. I'm not sure about the outcome of Cloak vs Stone.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-19 03:32 pm (UTC)Rock,paper,scissors.
Stone, cloak, wand.
Scissors cuts paper. The Cloak is transparent to the Deathstick's master.
Rock smashes scissors. What happened when the Deathstick's master found the Resurrection Stone?
Paper wraps rock. Harry sees his dead parents, but they don't compel him. He had already planned to suicide; they didn't put the idea in his head. (They were quite convincing; but then the power of the cloak may have been broken or lessened by incorrect transmission of the artefact.)
So only the Cloak's master COULD safely master the Stone. And the Stone's master could easily overpower the Wand's. You're supposed to collect them in reverse order. Or, at least, so Albus would have come to believe. And if his plans had all worked, the Master of Cloak and Stone would (at worst) have faced the Master of the Wand. Assuming the Wand had had a Master at that time, not just a holder.
Which actually would be a mitigation of Albus's offence in practicing Necromancy upon Harry: if he believed Harry to be the Cloak's true master and the Cloak's powers intact, he might have thought Harry to be the one person who could safely use the Stone.
But if the Cloak's powers had been broken, no one would be safe. And he did give Harry that snitch "to be opened at the close," so he expected Harry to use it assist his suicide....
no subject
Date: 2013-09-21 03:06 am (UTC)Yes, unless the Stone Shades would have decided on their own to attack the Wand's Master (with the assumption that the Master of the EW is exceptionally vulnerable to the Stone).
no subject
Date: 2013-09-22 04:24 pm (UTC)The Master of the Elder Wand is immune to the cloak - can see through it. The Master of the cloak is immune to the power of the Resurrection Stone - Harry only suicided because he already chose to prior to activating the Stone. So the Master of the Stone should be immune to the Elder Wand. Does that mean Harry would have been able to beat the Master of the EW in a fair duel? Or he would have been able to resist bragging about the Wand if he hadn't lost the Stone in the forest?
Did Harry become the Master of the EW when he took Draco's wand? Or when Tom attempted to use the EW against him in the forest and the Wand recognized Harry as its master? Did the Wand do anything Harry would have disapproved of from the moment Tom took it until the forest? Because if only the latter is true then Harry never was the Master of all three Hallows at once.
Re: Vanity
Date: 2011-09-03 03:42 am (UTC)There was that mystery spell Albus sent at Tom, the spell that made a clanking noise when it hit Tom's shield. Did Albus expect Tom to respond differently if he had the stone on him? Was that spell intended to interact with the stone?
Eureka!
Date: 2011-09-03 05:15 am (UTC)Albus didn't need to "see through" the cloak to know someone wearing it was present (and knowing for sure someone invisible is near, one could use auditory or olfactory cues--or Hagrid's gaze--to guess where).
That may, as much as the Peverell family connection, be what led Albus to suspect that James Potter's cloak was The Cloak. He'd guessed from the Marauders' exploits that they had some means of turning invisible--either James had bullied his parents into buying such an expensive and inappropriate present as "an" invisibility cloak, or one of them was extremely precocious in learning the Disillusionment Charm, or something.
But then Albus also noticed some odd reaction in his wand--either a time or two he was around James Potter (when Jamie happened to have the cloak in his pocket--either because he was just planning to, or had just finished, using it), or a time or two that Albus was out wandering the apparently empty castle at night. If the latter, eventually Albus put two and two together, and realized from subsequent reports that the Marauders might well have been out wandering at the same time he was.
And then he remembered Potter's ancestry and realized the Potters might not have BOUGHT their heir an invisibility cloak....
When he took the cloak from James, he tested the effect carefully, including the range.
He might or might not have registered at that point that he HADN'T felt such an effect back at Tom's DADA job interview.
And he might have consciously established to his own satisfaction (not necessarily accurately) that he'd feel the same effect were he close enough to the Stone, or he might have just assumed that he would.
If he did think about the matter consciously--well, it mskes sense that Tom woulddn't wear his greatest treasure to that interview. Tom was going into the heart of enemy territory and facing his dearest enemy, and he didn't expect the Stone to be useful there--among other considerations, Tom didn't plan on an open fight where an army of the dead might come in handy. He couldn't exactly kill Albus into giving him the DADA post, after all.
But if Tom WAS going into an open, possibly desperate fight, of course he'd bring it with! Wouldn't he?
So when the Deathstick didn't quiver a jot in Tom's presence in the Ministry Atriusm, Albus "knew" immediately that Tom didn't have the Stone on him, in a situation where instant Inferi-creation might give Tom an advantage.
(Again, I remind you that we don't know whether Albus's inference that the Deathstick would respond to the Stone as to the Cloak is accurate. Although if it were true, Albus's positive identification of the Stone at the Gaunt hovel becomes trivial. But what matters HERE is that ALBUS thought it would.)
So Albus thought, What's the meaning of that?
And mulling it over in the weeks afterwards, the penny FINALLY dropped: there are other ways to make Inferi, after all. One at a time, rather than a Dragon's Teeth army at once as Gellert had dreamed of doing. Moreover, idiot Marvolo, and so presumably his idiot son Morfin, hadn't had a clue what they'd really possessed in that ring. So maybe neither did Marvolo's idiot grandson, if he'd lifted his original information, with the ring itself, from his uncle.
And in that case, the idiot grandson (all right, bright enough, but no match for the genius of Albus!) might have left the symbolic but otherwise (Tom thought) unimportant trophy somewhere. Somewhere symbolic that he thought safe, free for the plucking!
Onward to Yorkshire!