Tom Riddle

Tom Riddle belongs to Hogwarts history half a century before Harry's time, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets introduces him through the objects he left behind. A tarnished shield in the school trophy room records that Tom Marvolo Riddle received a Special Award for Services to the School fifty years ago, a name Ron Weasley recognises chiefly because detention once had him polishing it. There is also a slim black diary with the same name on the flyleaf and a fifty-year-old date, its pages entirely blank. School records make him a student of that distant era and a decorated one, and that is all the early chapters offer: a name from another generation, attached to an honour whose occasion nobody thinks to explain.