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The one time Harry Potter admired Voldemort

By Joseph Hayes

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Do you remember the moment? Mad as it might seem, but there was a moment where Harry Potter admired the Dark Lord.

Voldemort being a murderous, sadistic monster isn’t someone you would typically expect anyone to admire, fear most definitely, but not admire. And one might think that it would be least of all Harry Potter, whose parent’s Voldemort murdered, but in book 6 this is what happens, albeit just once.

The time was long ago, while Riddle was still at Hogwarts and was yet to be known by his more sinister title of Lord Voldemort. He had shortly opened the Chamber of Secrets by this time but not yet learnt about Horcruxes. It was Summer 1943 and Tom Riddle was at the Gaunt Shack.

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Riddle’s desires here were unholy. Although he didn’t know about Horcruxes yet, he was obsessed with finding family heirlooms to assert his pure blood supremacy. He had already unleashed the Basilisk by this time and taken a life.

Riddle’s intentions and actions here were certainly not noble. So why is it? That Harry watching through the Pensive, would he admire Riddle? The answer was that the Gaunt Shack, where such horrors and abuse occurred, failed to have any impact on Riddle.

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Instead, as Riddle’s demented uncle Morfin Gaunt confronted him with a knife and Riddle refused to be intimidated, ‘Harry could not help but feel a resentful admiration for Voldemort’s complete lack of fear’. Indeed, as the Half Blood prince notes “His face merely expressed disgust or perhaps disappointment”. The Gaunt’s might terrify their neighbourhood with their sadistic ways but they were outmatched by Riddle.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers

A similar nerve had been displayed once before at the Gaunt Shack, in the 1920’s when magical inspector Bob Ogden had investigated the hexing of Tom Riddle by Morfin. Likewise, Ogden had also earnt Harry’s respect for different reasons, when he dismissed notions of pure blood supremacy and after a struggle summoned reinforcements and arrested both Morfin and his cunning father Marvelo, who would both be sent to Azkaban.

The difference of course was that whereas Ogden had been somewhat intimidated by the Gaunts, although determined to do his job still, Riddle dominated his encounter with Morfin and eventually cast a memory charm on him and then framed him for the murders of Tom Riddle Snr and his parents.

While both may have confronted the Gaunt’s it goes without saying that Ogden was a vastly different character to Riddle.

For a reformist like Ogden, the Gaunts were propping up a caste system that would seek to allow pure bloods to get away with anything and viewed themselves as superior. Whereas, for Riddle it was the opposite, he felt disgusted by the degradation that the Gaunts had allowed themselves to lapse into. They may have been pure blood, but their inbreeding had caused such chaotic madness in Morfin, no doubt exacerbated by his time at Azkaban and the death of both his father and sister while imprisoned, that he might as well have been a ‘Mudblood’ to Riddle.

It may be that Voldemort’s psychopathy resulted in him having little feelings and thus fear towards the Gaunts and the abuse they had inflicted on his mother. However, it is interesting that for a very brief flicker of time, Harry felt a slight ‘admiration’ for Voldemort.

Next: The Dursleys: The deleted scenes were the perfect end

What did you make of the moment? Where you taken back when you realised Harry was admiring Voldemort? Drop a comment below with your thoughts.

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