He who must not be named. Which is, of course, exactly what we are going to do.
Tom Marvolo Riddle was born on 31 December 1926 in a Muggle orphanage in London — the son of a witch who died in childbirth and a Muggle father who had already left. He arrived in the world with nothing and left it having come closer to destroying it than any Dark wizard before him. What Rowling understood in constructing Voldemort — and what separates him from lesser fictional villains — is that his evil is entirely explicable without being excusable. A frightened, isolated child who discovered he was special and decided that specialness was the same thing as superiority. A brilliant student who pursued power because power was the only thing that made abandonment feel temporary. A man so afraid of death that he tore his soul into seven pieces and scattered it across the world, and became, in doing so, something that was no longer entirely a man.
He is the Dark Lord, the greatest dark wizard of the age, the one who left a scar on Harry Potter's forehead on the night his parents died and returned, seventeen years later, to finish what he started. He is also, in Rowling's most careful authorial move, the clearest possible demonstration of what happens when a person decides that love is weakness. It was, in the end, the only thing that defeated him. He never understood why. That is exactly the point.
Ralph Fiennes' portrayal — noseless, pale, sibilant, utterly committed to the character's aristocratic menace and his moments of genuine fury — gave Voldemort the physical reality the films required, and then some.
Our Voldemort collection brings together officially licensed figures, accessories and gifts for fans of the wizarding world's most formidable villain — for those who find the antagonist as fascinating as the hero, and for the collectors whose shelf requires the full cast.
He is back. He has always been back. Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.
