Horcrux Deaths
Today we\u2019re going to talk Horcruxes. Specifically, how they\u2019re made. I started thinking about this subject when I read a particularly interesting passage from Half-Blood Prince. Here\u2019s what caught my eye:
\nDumbledore says that Voldemort \u201cseems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. \u2026 After an interval of some years, however, he used Nagini to kill an old Muggle man, and it might then have occurred to him to turn her into his last Horcrux.\u201d\xa0 (HBP23)
\nThe reason this struck me is that Dumbledore is actually wrong here. For the most part, Voldemort didn\u2019t use important or significant deaths for making his Horcruxes. He may have intended to originally, but that certainly wasn\u2019t how it worked out.\xa0
\nLet\u2019s take a look at all the murders he chose:
\nThe first Horcrux he made was the ring, created with the murders of his father and grandparents. These victims were certainly important as they represented his Muggle blood. By murdering the Riddles he symbolically murdered his own Muggle identity. After that point he thought and spoke as if that part of his background didn\u2019t exist. This happened in July or August of 1942.\xa0
\nThe next murder, a year later, was that of Myrtle Warren, the Mudblood student who died in the bathroom where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was located. Myrtle\u2019s death doesn\u2019t seem to have any huge importance, except maybe in the fact that she was a Mudblood. Perhaps Riddle saw this as emphasizing the destruction of his Muggle side, but I would argue that her death was almost accidental. She was a target of opportunity who just happened to be in the bathroom where the Basilisk would exit the pipes into the school. I may be wrong about that — perhaps Riddle stalked the girls\u2019 bathroom with his Basilisk for hours, waiting for a suitable victim to come in, but that seems not only really creepy but also a huge waste of time. Myrtle was killed in June of 1943.
\nEither in his last year of school or shortly after leaving, Tom Riddle followed the directions of Helena Ravenclaw to find the hiding place of Ravenclaw\u2019s diadem in Albania. According to Rowling, he used the murder of an Albanian peasant to turn the diadem into his third Horcrux. This would have happened in 1945 or 1946.
\nTom Riddle created his next Horcrux using Hufflepuff\u2019s Cup after he murdered Hepzibah Smith. The date for this event is not known, but canon suggests that it was no earlier than the mid-1950s. Hepzibah claims that her family is distantly related to Helga Hufflepuff.