A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - V Is For Voldemort

 

Voldemort, known to his followers as the Dark Lord, is the main villain of the Harry Potter series. The people of the wizarding community call him “You know who”. In the last book, he has made sure to find anyone who uses his name.

We can think of him as the Hitler of the wizarding world. His followers are called Death Eaters, tattooed with the Dark Mark that will let them know when he wants them.

Voldemort was born Tom Riddle, a member of a family that is descended from Salazar Slytherin,  one of the founders of the wizarding school, Hogwarts, the one who believed those not born to pure Wizarding families shouldn’t be allowed to study magic, but they are poverty-stricken and when we see them in a flashback, they are basically the poor, unpleasant Ewells from To Kill A Mockingbird. Merope, Tom’s mother, falls in love with the local squire’s son and wins him using a love potion. When the effects run out, he leaves her to give birth and die in an orphanage, where Tom is brought up.

It would be easy to feel some sympathy for this orphan, due to his sad background, but when Professor Dumbledore comes to the orphanage to invite him to Hogwarts, he is uncomfortable to realise that this child has already done some very nasty things to his fellow orphans. Still, he accepts him for the school, though, as Voldemort says later, he never trusts him, unlike the other staff, who think Tom is lovely. They consider him a hardworking student who has made the best of his life. But Tom uses this to get the gentle Hagrid, then a third year student, accused of opening the Chamber of Secrets, where a basilisk lives. The problem for Hagrid is that he loves animals any animals, including even giant spiders. He has his wand taken and snapped, though he later gets a job as groundskeeper.

Tom leaves a diary with the voice of his sixteen year old self. Later, his Death Eater follower Lucius Malfoy, father of Harry’s enemy Draco Malfoy, slips it into the cauldron of Ron Weasley’s younger sister, Ginny, getting her nearly killed.

When Voldemort has unsuccessfully tried to kill Harry Potter as a baby, his spell rebounds on him, leaving him alive, but without a body. He is brought back properly in the fourth novel, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, when his minion Peter Pettigrew manages to get Harry within reach. 

Later, when the Death Eaters(read Nazis) have taken over the wizarding world, he makes sure Muggleborn, ie not pureblood wizards, are arrested and tried. 

Eventually he is killed in a final duel with Harry. There are some mixups over the Elder Wand, which is supposed to make its user invincible. He had killed double agent Severus Snape because he assumed Snape had been the “master of the wand.” He hadn’t. 

A couple of things: Voldemort had created “Horcruxes” to keep himself safe, killing people to insert a bit of his soul into different objects - a bit like Koschei the Undying(See my post about Koschei). 

He had tried unsuccessfully to get a job teaching Defence Against The Dark Arts at Hogwarts, so created a spell that ensured nobody else ever got the job for more than a year. An interesting explanation for why every novel had a different teacher of that subject! 

Also interestingly, the author seems to have at least a small amount of sympathy for him, describing him and Harry as the two orphans for whom Hogwarts was home. 

Tomorrow, W Is For Wanda Maximoff!