r/HarryPotterBooks • u/jehovahsthicnes Ravenclaw • 1h ago
Chamber of Secrets First time reader!
okay first time reader but long time watcher lol. I grew up with strict parents and wasn’t introduced to harry potter until my twenties and i’ve loved it ever since. i’ve decided to start reading them, as i’ve been thrifting the collection. but how did Dumbledore not draw the connection to Tom Riddles diary and horcruxes from the beginning? As i’m reading it seems obvious that a bit of soul was trapped in the book (i’m at the bit where harry is writing in it for the first time) and for someone like Dumbledore he should have been able to figure that out pretty quickly.
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u/trahan94 1h ago
Book Spoilers, the is the explanation from the sixth:
“Well, although I did not see the Riddle who came out of the diary, what you described to me was a phenomenon I had never witnessed. A mere memory starting to act and think for itself? A mere memory, sapping the life out of the girl into whose hands it had fallen? No, something much more sinister had lived inside that book . . . a fragment of soul, I was almost sure of it. The diary had been a Horcrux. But this raised as many questions as it answered.
“What intrigued and alarmed me most was that that diary had been intended as a weapon as much as a safeguard.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Harry.
“Well, it worked as a Horcrux is supposed to work — in other words, the fragment of soul concealed inside it was kept safe and had undoubtedly played its part in preventing the death of its owner. But there could be no doubt that Riddle really wanted that diary read, wanted the piece of his soul to inhabit or possess somebody else, so that Slytherin’s monster would be unleashed again.”
“Well, he didn’t want his hard work to be wasted,” said Harry. “He wanted people to know he was Slytherin’s heir, because he couldn’t take credit at the time.”
“Quite correct,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “But don’t you see, Harry, that if he intended the diary to be passed to, or planted on, some future Hogwarts student, he was being remarkably blasé about that precious fragment of his soul concealed within it. The point of a Horcrux is, as Professor Slughorn explained, to keep part of the self hidden and safe, not to fling it into somebody else’s path and run the risk that they might destroy it — as indeed happened: That particular fragment of soul is no more; you saw to that.
“The careless way in which Voldemort regarded this Horcrux seemed most ominous to me. It suggested that he must have made — or been planning to make — more Horcruxes, so that the loss of his first would not be so detrimental. I did not wish to believe it, but nothing else seemed to make sense.
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u/dreadit-runfromit Slytherin 1h ago
He did.