Hey brother! Shoot dang y'all. Earlier this week we went on a deep dive on items from the Wizarding

world. We discovered that so many magical objects and creatures are actually sourced from English folklore and not necessarily like from the Potter Saga itself

We hit on stuff like Bogarts house selves Vila's red caps hunks, the philosopher's stone itself, and so much more.

And one find in particular stood out because it's arguably the central villain of an entire book.

It's The Basilisk.

It turns out that this existed in the mythos long before any of us ever met the boy in the

cupboard under the stairs.

But no I'm just kidding, the Basilisk isn't truly even the villain of that story.

It's the Basilisk's master.

I mean, who knows?

Maybe a basselisk could be quite friendly if it was just always wore a pair of sunglasses

and had a master who wanted to do good in the world.

But in this particular case, the basselisk master is the subject in question, the one and only Mr Big Bad himself,

Voldemort, aka Tom Riddle.

Now, to be fair, you certainly can't nail down

his source material perfectly, as there are at least a few

different avenues you could draw inspiration from which we'll aim to cover today

but Baltimore has a few critical unique traits that make the inspiration for his character crystal clear.

So today we will discuss where did Voldemort come from. Hey brother!

So first things first let's just look at the names themselves, Tom Riddle and Voldemort.

The name Tom Riddle does have a reasonably interesting backstory

in that it was actually taken from a tombstone

...