Mister Tom-Marvolo-Riddle's Diary

> The diary. My diary. Little Ginny's been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes… So Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted… I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets.
>
> Tom Riddle's soul regarding Ginny Weasley's emotional dependency on the diary, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

**T. M. Riddle's Diary** was a simple blank diary belonging to Tom Riddle, who also transformed it into a Horcrux in 1943, during Riddle's ***sixth year*** at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It was the first Horcrux he ever made and was used as a weapon.Template:HorcruxTemplate:Object Before Lord Voldemort's first defeat in 1981 the diary was passed to ***Death Eater*** Lucius Malfoy. In secret, Malfoy kept the diary before he slipped it, unnoticed, into Ginny Weasley's cauldron of school supplies at ***Flourish and Blotts*** in 1992.
The diary used its dark magical influence to bewitch and force Ginny to re-open the Chamber of Secrets, but it was destroyed by Harry Potter in 1993 with a Basilisk's fang. This diary served as proof that Lord Voldemort was indeed using Horcruxes.

## History

This diary was originally purchased by Riddle in a Muggle shop called Winstanley's Bookstore & Stationers on Vauxhall Road in London, sometime before or during 1943.

### Creation of the diary as a Horcrux

> The diary was proof that he was the Heir of Slytherin; I am sure that Voldemort considered it of stupendous importance.
>
> The diary's importance to Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

When Tom Marvolo Riddle was in his fifth year at Hogwarts, he achieved his goal of locating Salazar Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets and used his ability to speak Parseltongue to open it. He further used this language ability to order the Chamber's Basilisk to terrorise the school and hunt down the Muggle-born students. Eventually one of the Muggle-borns, a Ravenclaw girl named Myrtle Wararisma and believing his own wisdom was being admired, Slughorn told Riddle what little he knew on the subject, though he expressed the worry that Riddle was iren, was killed by the Basilisk. Riddle would later use this murder to infuse the journal with a piece of his soul, and transformed it into his first Horcrux.

After Myrtle's death, Albus Dumbledore, then Professor of Transfiguration, began suspecting Riddle. Knowing it was no longer safe to open the Chamber, and that the school might be shut down if the perpetrator was not caught, Riddle framed Rubeus Hagrid and his pet Acromantula Aragog for the crimes, and earned himself an award for Special Services to the school. He imbued the diary with other powers, so that the Chamber could be opened again in the future.
In the following years, Riddle also questioned Potions Master, Horace Slughorn about the properties of a Horcrux and how one might create multiple ones. Influenced by Riddle's chntending to create Horcruxes rather than simply discuss them. Based from Slughorn's information, Riddle became positive on the possibility of creating more than one Horcrux, and became confident of using the diary as a weapon instead of the intended safeguard.

### Re-opening of the Chamber of Secrets

> I was patient. I wrote back. I was sympathetic, I was kind. Ginny simply loved me... No one's ever understood me like you, Tom... I'm so glad I've got this diary to confide in... It's like a friend I can carry around in my pocket... If I say it myself, Harry, I've always been able to charm the people I needed.
>
> Tom Riddle's manipulation of Ginny Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

 File:Harry-potter2-movie-screencaps.com-9236.jpg  Some time during the First Wizarding War, Lord Voldemort entrusted the diary to Death Eater, Lucius Malfoy. The plan was to use the diary to reopen the Chamber, but Voldemort fell before that plan came to fruition, although Voldemort never told Lucius that the diary contained a fragment of his soul, instead simply making it appear to be cleverly charmed. In his weakened state, Voldemort had believed that Lucius would simply continue to safeguard the diary. However, the Dark Lord was relying too much on Malfoy's fear of him, but Malfoy believed him to be dead. Malfoy still possessed the diary and, in 1992, he planted it on Ginny Weasley, hoping to kill three birds with one stone by sabotaging Ginny's father, purge the school of Muggle-borns, and eliminate an incriminating Dark artefact.
Because Lucius was unaware that the diary was actually a container for his master's soul fragment, he treated it with such light-handedness. When the Weasleys and Harry left to King's Cross Station, Ginny accidentally left the diary behind at the Burrow. Just before they got to the motorway, she remembered the diary and demanded to be allowed to go back and get it. She soon learned how to use the diary to communicate with Tom Riddle, though she was unaware that he was Lord Voldemort, or if he was even real. Ginny wrote all of her deepest feelings and secrets in the diary, including her feelings of infatuation toward Harry Potter.

   Her emotional vulnerability allowed the fragment of Voldemort's soul within the diary to gain partial control of her mind. Once the diary had partial control of her he forced her to re-open the Chamber of Secrets. Ginny was forced not only to paint terrifying threats in the school corridors using blood, but she released the Basilisk within the Chamber as well. She also strangled the school roosters to protect the Basilisk. She did all this while in a sort of trance, never knowing what she had done.

 File:B2C14M1 Petrified students in the Hospital Wing.jpg
The Basilisk attacked several members of the Hogwarts community, including Mrs Norris, Colin Creevey, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Nearly-Headless Nick, Hermione Granger. These individuals were not murdered by the Basilisk, but Petrified, due to them never seeing the Basilisk directly through a series of fortunate events, ranging from seeing a reflection to seeing it through a camera to the viewer being dead already.
When the attacks began, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger began to investigate the matter. They initially suspected Draco Malfoy, who was openly prejudiced against Muggle-borns, but after using ***Polyjuice Potion*** to spy on him, they discovered that, other than him knowing that the Chamber of Secrets had previously been opened fifty years ago, he knew as little about the attacks as they did.
Hermione eventually deduced that the monster had to be a Basilisk, due to Harry's ability to hear it and the nature of the attacks, but she was petrified before she could inform Harry or Ron, though she managed to leave them a relatively straightforward clue, a clipping from a ***Magizoology*** book *Most Macabre Monstrosities*.

Harry heard strange voices in the walls of Hogwarts, which exhorted the urge to kill. Harry followed the voices through the Hogwarts corridors until he came upon the second floor girls' lavatory. It was here that he discovered the water-logged diary, which Ginny had discarded when she suspected that it was she who had petrified the Muggle-borns and finally realised that the diary was the cause.
Soon enough, Harry was communicating with Tom Riddle, who showed him a memory within the diary, in which Riddle confronted Rubeus Hagrid about the keeping of a dangerous pet. This implied to Harry that Hagrid had opened the Chamber of Secrets, but Riddle was merely using Hagrid's pet Acromantula, Aragog, as a scapegoat so Hogwarts would not be closed down, and had in fact been using a monster that was infinitely more dangerous himself, showing that his actions (though done to eliminate suspicion) were also shallow hypocrisy.
Later, Ginny, having seen the diary amongst Harry's books, stole the diary from among Harry's room in the Gryffindor Boys' Dormitory. She feared that Riddle would tell Harry about her feelings toward him, and shortly thereafter went missing. She was forced to paint a threat against her life on the walls of a hallway and sealed herself inside the Chamber. Hogwarts was again under threat of being closed down.

### Destruction

> When Voldemort discovered that the diary had been mutilated and robbed of all its power, I am told that his anger was terrible to behold.
>
> The Horcrux diary's destruction, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

    On the evening of 29 May 1993, Harry returned to the girls' lavatory and successfully discovered and opened the Chamber of Secrets. He, Ron, and Professor Gilderoy Lockhart made their way into the Chamber. Lockhart, who had no plans to actually fight the Basilisk, attacked the students with Ron's own broken wand, which backfired on him, and wiped his memory.
Harry continued into the Chamber, where he discovered an unconscious Ginny next to Tom Riddle, who was gaining strength and form. Concealing his true nature as a Horcrux, Riddle claimed to be a memory of his younger self, and revealed the truth of his identity and plans to Harry and unleashed the Basilisk.

 File:Diary fang.jpg  Harry slayed the Basilisk with the assistance of Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes and the Sword of Gryffindor, which appeared from the Sorting Hat. Harry stabbed the Basilisk through the roof of its mouth, but was bitten in the process. Harry then took one of the Basilisk's fangs and stabbed the diary with it. This successfully destroyed the Horcrux, as basilisk venom was ironically one of the few substances that could destroy it beyond magical repair. After the diary was destroyed, Fawkes mended Harry's arm with his tears. This healed him instantly, saving his life.

    When he later explained about the diary's true nature to Dumbledore, the latter was privately concerned, as no mere memory could just possess a girl and eventually take physical form, and he suspected the diary was a Horcrux. Because of how careless this Horcrux was treated (after all, its purpose was to keep its owner immortal), Dumbledore theorised that Riddle had created more Horcruxes, something that had never been done before.

Lord Voldemort was unaware that this Horcrux had been destroyed, until he forced the truth out of Lucius Malfoy (who did not know the diary was a Horcrux) shortly after his return to power in June of 1995, due to the portion of the soul being separated from his body for such a long time.

Despite the known risks of using the diary as a weapon instead of a safeguard, Voldemort was nevertheless furious to learn of its destruction, due to Lucius implementing the plan without Voldemort's say-so in order to dispose of the diary for his own benefit while also attempting to destroy the Weasley family and Dumbledore's reputation, as well as getting rid of an incriminating Dark Arts artefact (the Ministry was conducting a search at the time); this was one of the many reasons that he lost trust in the Malfoy family and why Lucius was punished and demoted.

Although Voldemort was unaware of the diary's destruction until Malfoy reported it to him, he attributed this to his non-corporeal status at the time of its loss; as a result, he took no additional precautions to safeguard the remaining Horcruxes, and assumed that they were safe and undamaged until the break-in to Gringotts confirmed to him that Harry was hunting them.

## Powers

> While the magical container is still intact, the bit of soul inside it can flit in and out of someone if they get too close to the object. I don't mean holding it for too long... I mean close emotionally. Ginny poured her heart out into that diary, she made herself incredibly vulnerable. You're in trouble if you get too fond of or dependent on the Horcrux.
>
> A Horcrux's ability to influence a person, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

    As a Horcrux, the diary allowed a writer to communicate with the memory of the sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle, merely through writing on the journal's blank pages. The diary could transport the reader into a realm of memories, much like the Pensieve. The diary was also able to siphon the life force from a reader and transfer it to Riddle's stored memory. This act was an endeavour to create a physical body for the sixteen-year-old Soul of Tom Riddle.
The closer a writer became to the memory of Tom Riddle emotionally, the more power the diary would acquire over him or her. For example, Ginny poured her fears and desires into the diary, thus it was easy for Tom to possess her. As this diary contained Riddle's soul, it also housed his magical powers. This included his ability to speak Parseltongue. He could even cause the diary writer to speak it while possessing them, which was instrumental in reopening the Chamber of Secrets.

    It was unclear whether other Horcruxes include any of these same abilities; however, Salazar Slytherin's Locket had a negative physical and emotional effect on those who wore it, and Marvolo Gaunt's Ring fatally cursed Albus Dumbledore. Also, it was unknown if Riddle had placed powerful enchantments to protect the diary from being destroyed by conventional means, as he did with all of his other Horcruxes, but it was highly likely that this was indeed the case. Ginny Weasley tried to flush it down the toilet, but it came back perfect as new. When Harry's ink bottles shattered and drenched all of his other textbooks, the diary alone remained dry and unmarked.

## Behind the scenes

* The diary was originally purchased from a ***Muggle*** Shop on ***Vauxhall Road*** in ***London***. Therefore, the diary was the only one out of Voldemort's artificial Horcruxes that he acquired legally.
* Considering Draco Malfoy's reaction to finding the diary with Harry, Lucius apparently never showed the diary to his son.
* This Horcrux revealed to Harry Potter that Lord Voldemort is only an alias; his true name was Tom Marvolo Riddle. Voldemort himself decided that he did not want this name, however.
* In an interview with J. K. Rowling, she stated that: "My sister used to commit her innermost thoughts to her diary. Her great fear was that someone would read it. That's how the idea came to me of a diary that is itself against you. You would be confiding everything to pages that aren't inanimate."
	+ J. K. Rowling has also stated: "Now, the diary to me is a very scary object, a really, really frightening object. This manipulative little book, the temptation particularly for a young girl to pour out her heart to a diary, which is never something I was prone to, but my sister was. The power of something that answers you back, and at the time that I wrote that I'd never been in an Internet chat room. But I've since thought "Well it's very similar." Just typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back, and you don't know who is answering you. And so that was always a very scary image to me, in the book, and I thought it worked very well in the film. You could understand when he started writing to see these things coming back to him, and the power of that, that secret friend in your pocket."
* In the Second Book and Video Game adaptation of it (the Game Boy Color version for the latter), Harry stuffed the diary in his sock. In the film adaptation, Harry put the sock in the diary.
* In the book and film versions of *Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets*, Harry destroyed the diary with the Basilisk's Fang. In the Game Boy Color version of the game, Harry stabbed it with Godric Gryffindor's Sword. In the PC version of the game, the Basilisk landed on the diary while in the 6th gen console versions its fang flew out of its mouth upon its impacting the ground and landed on the diary that way.
* In the book, Harry Potter only destroyed the diary with the Basilisk fang after he was healed by Fawkes. In the film adaptation, Harry destroyed the diary with the fang *before* he was healed. In addition, the book only mentioned that Riddle's memory writhed and then faded away after the diary was destroyed, while in the film, it was shown that Riddle's memory's chest cavity ripped open with light, then destroyed his eyes and caused damage to his face, before eventually caused gaping holes throughout his body upon exploding. Lastly, Harry Potter only stabbed the diary once in the book, while in the film, he stabbed the diary three times, two being in two different sections of the book, and the last from the outside.
* According to Dumbledore, Voldemort tended to use extremely valuable trophies or sentimentally important artefacts to create his Horcruxes, and that the reason for this diary was chosen was due to it proving him to be the Heir of Slytherin. Otherwise, the fact that the diary was a common artefact made it very ironic to be considered valuable in Voldemort's eyes, especially when it was manufactured by his hated enemies: Muggles. However, the diary was also likely a different case given that it also was intended as a weapon and looked innocent enough to lure its victims to write in it.
* This diary was used as a weapon, so as to unleash the Basilisk once again in Hogwarts, rather than keeping the portion of the soul safe, which was what Horcruxes were meant for. It shared this attribute with a fellow Horcrux of Voldemort, ***Nagini***, who was often sent on missions from time to time, though she was more difficult to slay as she was constantly on the move for this very reason.
	+ Also in the same game, Ginny Weasley, after the death of the basilisk, played with the book (as it was tied to Riddle's soul in a physical sense which allowed her to fling Riddle himself around in accordance to its movements), though she ignored Harry by hitting him in the ribs as she was too into fiddling around with it.
* The Noble Collection released a replica of the diary.
* The diary was Bonnie Wright's favourite prop from the films.
* At the end of Template:COS, the diary had a small hole on the front of it and a dent coming out of the back from the Basilisk fang, but in *The Film Adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince*, when Dumbledore showed it to Harry again, it was shown to have a much larger and completely different-sized hole, which created a potential consistency error. The first of two possibilities was that the venom ate away at the diary over time, and caused the hole to widen. The second was that the filmmakers knowingly or unknowingly made a mistake.
* In the original script for the *film* of *Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince*, Ginny stated that she hid the diary in the Room of Hidden Things, which she learned about from Fred and George Weasley, and said that she wished that she had just left it there. Even if this line had been included in the final film, however, it cannot be considered canon, as in the books Fred and George Weasley only knew of the room as a Broom-cupboard they once hid in and were never aware that it could be used at any time until the revelation of the room and Dumbledore's Army's use of it in *Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix* (film).
* Interestingly, the book could be compared to Snape's Potions Book. Both were used by their respective owners as an outlet to use Dark Magic: Tom Riddle used his diary to create his first Horcrux, while Snape used his textbook to create original magic. Both books were used by other people without the knowledge of the owner's true identity until later. This further highlighted the personal similarities between Riddle and Snape. Whether this was intentional on Rowling's part or merely a coincidence was unknown. It was because of Ginny's experience with the diary that she resented Harry's choice of following Snape's textbook instructions.
* In a deleted scene from the film adaptation of *Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets*, Lucius Malfoy sells a box full of dark artefacts to Mr Borgin. Borgin is particularly intrigued by one item (which is never shown on screen), and Lucius informs him that the item is not for sale. It is speculated by fans that this item was the diary, which Lucius later planted on Ginny Weasley.

## Appearances

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## Notes and references

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1. ↑ Pottermore
2. ↑ Template:COS
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Template:COS
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Template:COS
5. ↑ Template:COS
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8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Template:COS
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11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Template:COS
12. ↑ Template:COS
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15. ↑ Template:COS
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17. ↑ Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `HBP23`
18. ↑ The Noble Collection - Tom Riddle Diary
19. ↑ See this YouTube video
20. ↑ *Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Script*, available via Web Archive