When, why and how did Tom Riddle anagram his name?

Question

I am curious to know this. It must not have been easy. Did he use magic for this purpose?

And why did he anagram it? Just keeping a new name would have been enough. Why did he need to maintain a link between the two names?

Is such type of magic possible?

What can be the limits to such things doable by magic?

Edit:

For those wondering where the clause of magic came in to make an anagram, I thought, maybe just how he waved Harry's wand to rearrange letters, at the time of making the anagram as well, he used something similar... But yes, I almost forgot about the point that Mr. Riddle must be a very genius wizard. Such things would be a very simple work for him.

Answer 1

Tom Riddle changed his named from Tom Marvolo Riddle to Lord Voldemort during his Hogwarts years; canon doesn't say exactly which year.

‘Those whom I could persuade to talk told me that Riddle was obsessed with his parentage. This is understandable, of course; he had grown up in an orphanage and naturally wished to know how he came to be there. It seems that he searched in vain for some trace of Tom Riddle Senior on the shields in the trophy room, on the lists of prefects in the old school records, even in the books of wizarding history. Finally he was forced to accept that his father had never set foot in Hogwarts. I believe that it was then that he dropped the name for ever, assumed the identity of Lord Voldemort, and began his investigations into his previously despised mother’s family – the woman whom, you will remember, he had thought could not be a witch if she had succumbed to the shameful human weakness of death.'

_{Half-Blood Prince - page 339 - Bloomsbury - chapter 17, A Sluggish Memory - Albus Dumbledore}

Technically, I suppose he would have been between the ages of eleven, when he first learned he was a wizard, and sixteen, when he reveals I am Lord Voldemort to Harry in Chamber of Secrets, via his sixteen-year-old self's memory from the diary Horcrux:

He pulled Harry’s wand from his pocket and began to trace it through the air, writing three shimmering words:

TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE

Then he waved the wand once, and the letters of his name rearranged themselves:

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

‘You see?’ he whispered. ‘It was a name I was already using at Hogwarts, to my most intimate friends only, of course.'

_{Chamber of Secrets - page 231 - Bloomsbury - chapter 17, The Heir of Slytherin - Tom Riddle}

Canon doesn't indicate that there was any magic involved in the anagram; Tom Riddle uses only letters from the name Merope Gaunt gave to him to create "Lord Voldemort". But note that he doesn't adopt the name "I am Lord Voldemort", which uses all of the letters of his full name. He adopts the name "Lord Voldemort" -- the other letters are left over. So, is "Lord Voldemort" truly an anagram in the purist sense?

Answer 2

There is no reason to suppose Tom Riddle used magic to work out anagrams of his name. All he would need was time, patience and skill at word games.

It's worth mentioning that cryptic crosswords are very popular in the UK and require a great deal of skill at anagrams. They have been around since the 1920s so they would have been well known when Tom was growing up, and perhaps he enjoyed doing them after a hard day's evil.

I'm not aware of any explicit canon answers for why Tom specifically wanted an anagram. But we know that Tom was both arrogant about his abilities, and insecure about his humble origins and half-Muggle heritage.

It seems likely the anagram was a subtle challenge on Tom's part to the rest of the wizarding world. Wizards everywhere would hate and fear Lord Voldemort, without making the connection to Tom Riddle... but they could have done so, if only they were clever enough to spot the anagram. So it was a way for Tom/Voldemort to "prove" he had a superior intellect to other wizards.

Answer 3

There is the following interesting line from Pottermore, on the page about Owls:

The mystical association between the name and the human who bears it has long been understood by witches and wizards of all cultures.

Now, this is in the context of owls being able to find people just by knowing their names, and I'm not suggesting that Voldemort kept all the letters in his name so that the mail addressed to him wouldn't go astray. Still, there is the implication that there are further magical applications of names in magic. Perhaps, for the purposes of some spell or curse, Voldemort could not change his name entirely. Thus, he preserved the essence of his name -- the letters that formed it.