“Something of Ravenclaw’s or Gryffindor’s”

[felicitys_mind]

“Something of Ravenclaw’s or Gryffindor’s”

We saw in HBP that Hepzibah Smith was distantly related to Helga Hufflepuff and that Hufflepuff’s gold cup was in her possession. We also saw that Salazar Slytherin’s line ends with T.M. Riddle/Lord Voldemort through the Gaunt family, which was in possession of Slytherin’s gold locket and a Slytherin

Comments

[felicitys_mind]

That was a typo that I just corrected; it should have read Gryffindor relics, not Gryffindor Horcruxes (thanks for catching it!). I don't believe the Gryffindor relics in Dumbledore's office are Horcruxes. As you noted, Rowling took the Hat off the table in an interview, and Dumbledore seems confident that the sword couldn't have been made into one.

Harry entered Dumbledore's office for the first time in CS12; he saw the Sorting Hat on the shelf behind Dumbledore's desk, but didn't mention seeing a sword in a glass case. That doesn't mean it wasn't there, but we have no evidence that it was. So where was the ruby-encrusted sword before Harry took it from the Sorting Hat? I don't know. Dumbledore may have known where it was; at least, I don't recall Dumbledore hedging at all when he told Harry it could not have been made into a Horcrux. So for me, the ruby-encrusted sword is off the table as a Horcrux suspect.

I've never heard about an everyday Gryffindor sword, but I do know that Rowling is playing by the rules with regard to the mystery/detective aspect of her story, and that means that she has to give us enough clues to be able to solve the mystery. Books 6 and 7 work as a unit, so we don't have all the clues yet to make an airtight case for any at-large Horcruxes, but I am personally convinced that we've seen all the Horcruxes somewhere in the first six books. They will be so buried that we won't easily spot them (like the heavy gold locket at 12 Grimmauld Place that will likely turn out to be the AWOL Slytherin locket), but we have seen them all, even the mystery Horcrux.

I don't recall reading about an everyday-use sword previously owned by Godric Gryffindor. If an object is mentioned somewhere in the series, then it's a Horcrux candidate, but if it's not mentioned anywhere in the first six books, then it's not going to lead to a Horcrux IMHO. It's not enough to presume that Gryffindor had a sword for everyday use (we can think of hundreds of things that the founders may have owned, after all); Rowling has to let us either see it (like the tarnished tiara Harry picked up in the RoR) or hear about it from one of the characters (like Great-Auntie Muriel's goblin-made tiara) if she's playing by the rules. She hasn't cheated in the books to date, and I can't see her starting now. So for me, the only viable theories for the mystery Horcrux will be based on an object that has already been mentioned in one of the books. That's why I zoomed in on the goblin-made tiara since the implication is that it's a valuable old heirloom connected to a pure-blood family.