Harry Potter: You've Been Wrong About The Baby-Like Thing From The Finale

Summary:

• In the Limbo, Harry Potter met Dumbledore and a weird creature that resembled a mutilated baby.
• Most fans believe that the creature was the piece of Voldemort’s soul that was destroyed in Harry, but that’s not true.
• According to J.K. Rowling, the baby-like thing was what was left of Voldemort’s original soul as he, too, ventured to the Limbo alongside Harry.

Harry Potter’s meeting with Dumbledore in Limbo was the turning point of the entire series. Struck down by Voldemort’s Killing Curse, Harry went to the in-between; there, he met Albus Dumbledore who finally answered the boy’s numerous questions — and a weird creature that resembled a mutilated baby with Voldemort’s face.

Most fans firmly believe that thing was the piece of Voldemort’s soul that had lived in Harry’s body and was finally ripped from it by the Killing Curse… But that’s not true.

The Creature From The Limbo Was Voldemort Himself

The true nature of the mutilated baby-like thing Harry saw in the Limbo has been haunting Potterheads since the release of The Deathly Hallows, and J.K. Rowling was understandably bombarded with questions and assumptions about it. Curiously enough, most of those were wrong: it wasn’t the Voldemort-destroyed Horcrux.

“It is the last piece of soul Voldemort possesses. When Voldemort attacks Harry, they both fall temporarily unconscious, and both their souls – Harry’s undamaged and healthy, Voldemort’s stunted and maimed – appear in the limbo where Harry meets Dumbledore,” Rowling explained on her website back in the day.

As you can remember, both Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort passed out when the latter used the Killing Curse on The Boy Who Lived in the Forbidden Forest. That was because they both went to the Limbo, and even met each other. It’s just that what was left of Voldemort’s soul was too pathetic for any chance at redemption.

Voldemort Reduced His Soul Into Nothingness

For Harry, the journey to the Limbo was a much more…civilized experience than for Lord Voldemort. He got to meet his mentor and make a choice about returning; Voldemort just lied under a bench for a while, pathetic and terrified, with no one to talk to. He had no choice but to return, and that was all because of his soul’s state.

As we once calculated, by the time of the Battle of Hogwarts, Lord Voldemort had reduced the piece of soul left in his body to — take a deep breath — 0.0078125 of its original state. That’s less than 1% of a normal human soul; Tom Riddle did a number on himself. That shredded shard of nothingness didn’t have a chance of moving on, unlike Harry’s complete soul, and that’s also why it looked so…special in the Limbo.

Source: J.K. Rowling via Edmund Kern