Horcrux Deaths

What this episode covers

Today we’re going to talk Horcruxes. Specifically, how they’re made. I started thinking about this subject when I read a particularly interesting passage from Half-Blood Prince. Here’s what caught my eye: Dumbledore says that Voldemort “seems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. … 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.”  (HBP23) The reason this struck me is that Dumbledore is actually wrong here. For the most part, Voldemort didn’t use important or significant deaths for making his Horcruxes. He may have intended to originally, but that certainly wasn’t how it worked out.  Let’s take a look at all the murders he chose: The 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’t exist. This happened in July or August of 1942.  The 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’s death doesn’t 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’ 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. Either 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’s 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. Tom Riddle created his next Horcrux using Hufflepuff’s 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.