Voldemort
main antagonist of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
Lord Voldemort ( VOHL-də-mor, -mort in the films) is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling. He first appears in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) and returns either in person or in flashbacks in each novel in the series except the third, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which he is only mentioned.
Lord Voldemort—where "I am Lord Voldemort" is an anagrammatic sobriquet for his birth name Tom Marvolo Riddle—is the archenemy of Harry Potter, who according to a prophecy has "the power to vanquish the Dark Lord". After killing Harry's parents, Lily and James Potter, he attempts to murder the boy, but instead leaves him with a scar on his forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt. Nearly every witch or wizard dares not utter his name and refers to him instead with such monikers as "You-Know-Who", "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named", or The Dark Lord. Voldemort's obsession with blood purity signifies his aim to rid the wizarding world of Muggle (non-magical) heritage and to conquer both worlds, Muggle and wizarding, to achieve pure-blood dominance. Through his mother's family, he is the last descendant of the wizard Salazar Slytherin, one of the four founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He is the leader of the Death Eaters, a group of wizards and witches dedicated to ridding the Wizarding World of Muggles and establishing Voldemort as its supreme ruler.
Character development
In a 1999 interview, Rowling claimed Voldemort was invented as a nemesis for Harry Potter, and she intentionally did not flesh out Voldemort's backstory at first. "The basic idea [was that Harry] didn't know he was a wizard ...
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This entry incorporates text from “Voldemort” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.