I know Voldemort is Tom Riddle. The scene as written (as Harry remembers it) seems to me to mean that the “strange word” was something baby Harry actually heard. Of course it might have been spoken “directly into his mind” via Legilemency or via Voldemort’s consciousness or horcrux being installed in Harry’s mind.
Either way, why would Harry think of it as a “strange word”? Why not just have him think that he heard the word “riddle”? It makes more sense that he heard a word he cannot recognize, namely “horcrux”, and so labels it strange.
See also: first few sentences of Chapter 1. If that is the same scene, it’s far more likely the word Horcrux was screamed by Voldemort (casting the Horcrux spell) than the world Riddle.
Chapters 43 and 45 don’t seem to me to imply that baby-Harry actually heard the “strange word”, only that for whatever reason Harry found himself thinking it. It was strange because he had (so far as he knew) no particular reason to be thinking that word.
I don’t have any very convincing theory for why he had that word in his brain at that point, though. Evidently he interprets it as a message from his subconscious that he should think of Dementors as a riddle, or something like that, but probably something more is meant to be going on.
I know Voldemort is Tom Riddle. The scene as written (as Harry remembers it) seems to me to mean that the “strange word” was something baby Harry actually heard. Of course it might have been spoken “directly into his mind” via Legilemency or via Voldemort’s consciousness or horcrux being installed in Harry’s mind.
Either way, why would Harry think of it as a “strange word”? Why not just have him think that he heard the word “riddle”? It makes more sense that he heard a word he cannot recognize, namely “horcrux”, and so labels it strange.
See also: first few sentences of Chapter 1. If that is the same scene, it’s far more likely the word Horcrux was screamed by Voldemort (casting the Horcrux spell) than the world Riddle.
Chapters 43 and 45 don’t seem to me to imply that baby-Harry actually heard the “strange word”, only that for whatever reason Harry found himself thinking it. It was strange because he had (so far as he knew) no particular reason to be thinking that word.
I don’t have any very convincing theory for why he had that word in his brain at that point, though. Evidently he interprets it as a message from his subconscious that he should think of Dementors as a riddle, or something like that, but probably something more is meant to be going on.