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In the question Why is Harry Potter a half-blood? Anthony's answer notes that:

Families like the Malfoys were more than willing to serve Lord Voldemort, whose father was a Muggle (not even a Muggle-born wizard).

In the books was there ever any indication that the Malfoys, or any of Voldemort's most loyal followers, were aware of his half-blood status?

I believe Voldemort went to great lengths to hide that information from others. I'm not even sure Snape was aware, though Dumbledore, Harry, Hermione, and Ron knew through their hunting of the Horcruxes.

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  • This has been asked recently. I will try to find it. The answer is yes, at least some he was at school with.
    – BoBTFish
    Feb 7, 2014 at 16:58
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    You should probably reread that bold sentence. I think you dropped a rather important word.
    – Patrick M
    Feb 7, 2014 at 16:58
  • @BoBTFish - good memory!
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Feb 7, 2014 at 17:00
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    I keep finding things that I think are relevant, then looking more closely and deciding they aren't, or don't have good answers...
    – BoBTFish
    Feb 7, 2014 at 17:03
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    @BoBTFish - there are 2 criteria for duplicatensess: one is that an existing answer elsewhere answers the question; another is identicalness of the question itself. In this case, it's the latter, even if the answers are lacking: this
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Feb 8, 2014 at 15:01

1 Answer 1

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Wizards and witches knew that Tom Riddle became Voldemort, and knew that Riddle was a Muggle name. Voldemort was ashamed, not only of his Muggle father, but that his mother had placed a spell on his father, who was never actually in love with her, and had married and seduced him. He wanted to be rid of this surname and wanted in invoke fear in people, thus changed his name to the alias Voldemort, but people still knew where he'd come from.

He said 'There's no such thing as good and evil, only power, and those too afraid to use it'. People might have known his heritage, but as someone who was so at ease with murder and domination, he had no hesitations throwing himself in the limelight and gathering followers, because people were either attracted to the power, or too afraid to say no, on fear of death.

So really, he was a hypocrite, but it didn't matter, because he was rarely disobeyed. He made out as if it was all about pure bloods etc but really, the dude had issues and just wanted to dominate everyone else.

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    Where was it stated that the general wizarding population knew that Tom Riddle and Voldemort were the same person?
    – Monty129
    Feb 7, 2014 at 19:13
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    They didn't, according to Dumbledore at least: scifi.stackexchange.com/q/26741/21599
    – BoBTFish
    Feb 8, 2014 at 0:02

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