Riddle family

> "*Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular.*"
> ― The town of Little Hangleton's reaction to the murders[source]
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**Riddle** was the surname of a wealthy Muggle family that lived in a manor house overlooking the village of Little Hangleton, of which they owned a great deal of. They lived fairly close to the wizarding House of Gaunt. They were murdered in 1943 by Tom Marvolo Riddle.

## Family history

The Riddle family was a very old Muggle family who had been established in the area around the Hangleton villages for quite some time. The family was very wealthy and owned much of the village of Little Hangleton, ruling over their lands from the handsome and large Riddle House. However, later members were known to be snobbish, arrogant and rude. By 1943, the members of the Riddle family were generally disliked if not outright hated by the villagers that lived in the area. They were also hated by the members of the House of Gaunt, an ancient pure-blood wizarding family; the Gaunts loathed Muggles on principle, but the Riddles didn't endear themselves to the Gaunts by constantly mocking their poverty and mental instability.

### Tom and Merope elope

> "*The village of Little Hangleton enjoyed a tremendous scandal. You can imagine the gossip it caused when the squire's son ran off with the tramp's daughter, Merope.*"
> ― Explanation on how Merope was able to bewitch Tom Riddle[source]
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Around 1925, Tom Riddle Snr had a possible lover by the name of Cecilia. Also around this time, Merope Gaunt began to have obsessive romantic feelings for him. When Morfin Gaunt discovered this, he cursed Tom with hives. He did this in order to make him less appealing to his sister, as well as the general hatred of Muggles that he had.

The Gaunt men were arrested by the Ministry and were sentenced to a period in Azkaban. Afterwards, Merope either dosed Tom with Love Potion or cast the Imperius Curse on him, thereby forcing him to marry her (Albus Dumbledore speculated that the former method was more likely). The scandal that erupted in the area was quite humiliating for the Riddles, though presumably delighted the villagers who despised them. When Merope became pregnant, she ceased bewitching Tom, believing that he had come to genuinely love her, or would at least stay with her for the benefit of their child. Unfortunately, neither proved true; upon regaining his free will, Tom, having felt like he awoke from a nightmare, fled from Merope and returned to his family home. What reception he received was unknown, though his parents at least seemed to believe his tales that he'd been hoodwinked by Merope. Tom never spoke of the truthful circumstances for fear of being thought mad. Merope, alone in London, managed to find Wool's Orphanage, where she gave birth to a son. Shortly thereafter, Merope died due to childbirth complications, having lost the will to live. Before her death, she asked that the baby be named Tom Marvolo Riddle, for his father and grandfather.>

The younger Tom then spent the first eleven years of his life in the orphanage, completely unaware of the existence of the Wizarding world, although unusually aware of his magical ability for a child not born in it. In 1938, Riddle's future enemy Albus Dumbledore visited the orphanage to inform Riddle of the latter's acceptance into Hogwarts. Immediately after this, Riddle became convinced that his father was a Wizard and that his mother was a Muggle out of the belief that the latter could not have died if she was a witch.

Upon entering the school, Riddle became concerned with learning about his heritage and began painstaking research on his father's name before eventually realising that he had never set foot in Hogwarts. After being forced to accept that his father was a Muggle and his mother a witch, Voldemort began to detest his given name. With only his middle name "Marvolo" to go on, which he knew from the orphanage was his maternal grandfather's name, Tom began researching through old book of wizarding families and learned of the surviving Gaunt line. After learning of his descent from Hogwarts co-founder Salazar Slytherin, Riddle became interested in pure-blood supremacy and the Dark Arts. In particular, Riddle became obsessed with immortality and the creation of Horcruxes. In the summer of his sixteenth year, set out for Little Hangleton to find his relatives.

This would provide an unstable mixture for Riddle's adult personality and led to terrible events that would shape the history of the wizarding world for decades to come.

### Family's Murder

*Main article: Murder of the Riddle family*

> "*Meanwhile, in the village of Little Hangleton, a maid was running along the High Street, screaming that there were three bodies lying in the drawing room of the big house: Tom Riddle Senior and his mother and father.*"
> ― A maid finds the bodies of the Riddle family[source]
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In the summer of 1943, Tom Riddle visited the village of Little Hangleton after tracing the source of his middle name. He first stopped at the Gaunt Shack, finding his maternal uncle Morfin Gaunt, who had long been released from Azkaban. Morfin, upon seeing his nephew, threatened him with a knife and wand, believing the boy to be his father. Riddle did not disclose his identity during this meeting, but spoke Parseltongue to convince Morfin that he was not a Muggle. The two then discussed the whereabouts of Marvolo Gaunt (who had died years before), the elder Riddle, and Merope Gaunt. When Morfin revealed to Riddle who Riddle's paternal family was, Riddle Stupefied his uncle and stole his wand and the Gaunt ring.

Riddle then proceeded to the Riddle House and found his father, grandfather, and grandmother in the drawing room. It is unknown if there were any words exchanged with the Riddles, but the youngest Riddle used his uncle's wand to cast the Killing Curse on his father and grandparents. Riddle then returned to the Gaunt Shack and altered Morfin's memory, causing Gaunt to believe *himself* to be the murderer. He confessed as much to the investigating Ministry, who did not bother to investigate further since Morfin had a previous history of assaulting Muggles, including the late Tom, and Morfin's wand had committed the murders. Morfin was carted off to serve a life sentence in Azkaban.

The murdered Riddles were discovered the next day by a maid in their employ, who ran screaming from the premises and roused the entire village. The Riddle gardener and subsequent caretaker, Frank Bryce, was accused of the murders since the house showed no sign of forced entry and he was the only one with a key. However, the postmortem on the Riddles was unable to determine the cause of death (the Killing Curse leaving no discernible effect) and the police were forced to release Frank, though the villagers remained convinced of his guilt from then on. As for the Riddles themselves, they were laid to rest in the Little Hangleton graveyard, though nobody bothered to even feign sadness at their demise since they had been most unpopular, and the Riddle House was passed through a succession of ownerships before being abandoned, the murders having left a stain on the property's history.

Tom Marvolo Riddle soon abandoned the name of his "filthy Muggle father", instead using an anagram to declare himself Lord Voldemort.

## Family members

 Merope Riddle (née Gaunt)
 Tom Marvolo Riddle | 31 December, 1926-2 May, 1998 | The half-blood son of Tom Riddle Snr and Merope Gaunt. He later became the most feared Dark Wizard in history under the pseudonym of Lord Voldemort. Died in his final duel with Harry Potter in 1998.

## Etymology

A Template:Wplink is a statement or question with a double or veiled meaning, and they were very common to Old English literature and poetry. This may also be in reference due to the fact that the Riddle family died in inexplicable circumstances for the Muggles living in Little Hangelton. Riddle games also appear frequently in folklore and mythology as a matter of life and death, such as in the tale of Oedipus Template:Wplink and the Sphinx and in the opera Template:Wplink. The term "Template:Wplink" was also used by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche to encompass the idea of the meaning of life. This could all allude to the mysterious and hidden origins of Lord Voldemort, who disliked and hid his Muggle ancestry, and who was obsessed with life and death.