Gollum

The creature later known as Gollum was not, by nature, a thing of the dark places in which he was found. According to the account Gandalf gives Frodo, he belonged to a clever, riverside folk of hobbit-kind, akin to the remote ancestors of the Stoors — that branch of the hobbits which, as the Prologue notes, was broader-built than the others and unusually friendly to water, boats, and swimming. His people dwelt on the banks of the Great River Anduin, near the Gladden Fields, where they were a family of some standing, governed by a matriarch, his grandmother. In body he was originally much like a hobbit, and even after long deformation Gandalf insisted that the two kinds remained close enough in mind for each to understand the other better than either could understand dwarves, orcs, or elves.

His birth-name was Sméagol. The name Gollum was no name at all in origin, but a mockery: after the Ring came to him he took to making a horrible swallowing sound in his throat, and his kin called him after the noise. In The Hobbit he appears under this name alone, a slimy creature of uncertain kind paddling his small boat on a cold lake deep under the mountains, speaking to himself and addressing himself as his own 'precious' — a habit of self-address that would later blur into his talk of the Ring.

Appendix F treats even these familiar forms as translations. There Tolkien explains that Sméagol, like the name of his kinsman Déagol, is an invented equivalent in an Old English style for a genuine name of the Northern Mannish tongue: Trahald, glossed as meaning something like 'burrowing' or 'worming in', matched by Nahald, 'secret', for Déagol. The English rendering deliberately echoes the word-family behind smial, the hobbit term for their tunnelled dwellings, so that the burrowing sense survives in translation. To these recorded names Sam Gamgee added two informal ones during the journey through the Dead Marshes, distinguishing the creature's fawning and treacherous moods as 'Slinker' and 'Stinker'.

The decisive turn of Sméagol's life came in about the year 2463 of the Third Age. As Gandalf later reconstructed the event, he was fishing on the Anduin with his kinsman Déagol when the latter was pulled into the water and came up clutching a golden ring from the river-bed. It was Sméagol's birthday, and he demanded the ring as a present; refused, he strangled his friend and hid the body, and the murder was never traced to him. The ring — the One, lost in those same waters at Isildur's death long before — gave him invisibility, which he turned to theft and eavesdropping, and he grew malicious and shunned. At last his grandmother put him out of the family, and around 2470 he wandered up into the Misty Mountains and crept beneath them, fleeing the sun.

For nearly five centuries the Ring both preserved and consumed him: his life stretched far beyond the span of his kind while his mind narrowed to hunger, grievance, and the guarding of the treasure he kept hidden on an island in his lake. In 2941 the long hoarding ended abruptly. The Ring had slipped from him in the tunnels — abandoning him, as Gandalf afterwards judged, in answer to its master's stirring — and was picked up in the dark by Bilbo Baggins, lost underground after the goblins waylaid Thorin's company. The two met at the lake's edge and played a contest of riddles, Bilbo's life staked against a promise of guidance out of the mountain. Defeated, Gollum went to fetch his ring meaning to kill his guest, discovered the loss, and pursued him in fury; Bilbo, who by chance had slipped the ring on, followed him unseen to the back-door of the goblin realm and, moved by sudden pity, leapt over him rather than strike.

The loss undid the habits of centuries. In 2944 Gollum left the mountains to hunt the thief, and his search drew him gradually southward, until by about 2980 he reached the confines of Mordor and there became acquainted with the great spider Shelob, whom he alone approached and survived. In the years after 3009, while Gandalf and Aragorn renewed their own intermittent hunt for him, he ventured into Mordor itself and was captured; under torment Sauron drew from him the two words that tied the Ring to its new country and keeper, Shire and Baggins, and released him in 3017 to serve his purposes. Almost at once Aragorn took him in the Dead Marshes and brought him to Thranduil's realm, where Gandalf questioned him and completed his account of the Ring's history. Held under guard in Mirkwood, Gollum escaped in June 3018 during an orc-raid that, as Legolas reported to the Council of Elrond, appeared to have been mounted for his sake.

Passing through Moria, he struck the trail of the Fellowship there in January 3019 and padded after the company down the Anduin, at times riding a log behind their boats. When the Fellowship broke, he followed the Ring-bearer, and on 29 February Frodo and Sam seized him in the Emyn Muil as he climbed down the rocks toward their camp. Frodo mastered him and accepted his oath of service, sworn on the Precious itself, and for a while something of the old Sméagol re-emerged: he guided the hobbits by safe paths through the Dead Marshes to the Black Gate, and when that entrance proved hopeless he offered another way into Mordor, over the pass of Cirith Ungol, whose peril he left unnamed. In Ithilien the hobbits fell in with Faramir's rangers, and at Henneth Annûn Frodo saved Gollum's life by luring him from the forbidden pool into captivity — a rescue the creature could only read as betrayal.

On the great stair climbing toward the pass, the division within him came nearest to healing. Returning from a visit to Shelob to find the hobbits asleep, he reached out and touched Frodo's knee; Sam woke, took the gesture for sneaking, and spoke harshly, and the moment — by the narrative's own suggestion his last chance of turning back — was gone. On 12 March he led Frodo and Sam into Shelob's tunnel, intending that the spider should kill them and cast aside the Ring for him to recover. The plan miscarried: he attacked Sam at the far end, was beaten off, and fled, while Frodo, though stung, lived and was carried into Mordor.

Within the larger design of the legendarium Gollum serves chiefly as the measure of what the One Ring does to a bearer of small stature. Gandalf argues in his account to Frodo that the Ring grants power in proportion to its owner: in the hands of a creature of hobbit-kind it produced no dark lord but a mean, secretive thief, its gifts shrunk to petty spying and hidden malice. He thus stands in the narrative as a warning double to Bilbo and Frodo — the same kind, the same temptation, a different outcome — and as the standing test of the pity that Gandalf defends as wiser than justice.

His actual abilities were considerable but narrow, most of them adaptations to long life in darkness. His great pale eyes let him see where hobbits were blind, and his hearing and sense of smell were sharp enough to track quarry over long distances and after long intervals. He was an expert swimmer and fisher, catching food with his hands, and a climber of unsettling skill, able to descend sheer rock face-downward like a crawling insect. He moved almost soundlessly, endured hunger and hardship that would have broken others, and his thin fingers held a grip of surprising, throttling strength. To these bodily gifts the Ring had added centuries of life far beyond the natural span of his people.

The limits of that power were as marked as its extent. His prolonged life brought no vigour, only weariness and an ever-narrowing mind, and he could not bear the light of sun or moon, cursing both and travelling by night. Things of elvish virtue were actively painful to him: the rope of Lórien seemed to burn his skin, and he could not stomach lembas, gagging on the waybread the hobbits offered. Against any greater will he was helpless — he dreaded Sauron, obeyed under torment, and could neither master the Ring nor free himself from it; his one binding oath he swore upon the very object that owned him.

Nearly every bond in Gollum's long life was reshaped by the vocabulary of ownership. His kinship with Déagol, the nearest thing to friendship he is recorded to have had, ended at the instant the Ring entered it, and Gandalf observed that he afterwards defended the deed to himself by insisting the ring had been owed to him as a birthday gift — a claim he went on repeating until he half believed the thing had always been his. The same possessive logic governed his hatred of Bilbo: what he nursed for decades was not simple enmity toward a rival but the grievance of a dispossessed owner against a thief, fixed so firmly on the surname the riddle-game had given him that the name itself became a curse in his mouth.

His service to Frodo was the one relationship that worked against this pattern. Frodo insisted on the name Sméagol, spoke to him with courtesy, and answered for him before Faramir, and under that treatment a buried self began to answer back. Sam, lying awake in the Dead Marshes, overheard the two halves of the creature arguing aloud in different voices — the cringing Sméagol pleading his promise to the master, the other voice hungering for the Precious and whispering of revenge — a divided allegiance made audible. Sam's own relation to Gollum ran opposite to his master's: unsleeping suspicion, largely justified in the event, yet the narrative lets it carry a cost, for it was his sharpness that closed the door on the creature's last softening.

Toward beings stronger than himself he knew only dread or calculation. Sauron he served under compulsion and remembered with terror, naming him only obliquely; Gandalf and Aragorn he endured as captors, biting the one who caught him. His single voluntary allegiance was to Shelob, whom he approached almost as a devotee approaches a power, promising her food and planning to profit from what she left uneaten — the one alliance he chose freely, and characteristically one founded on the death of others.

The published account of how the Ring came to Sméagol was reached only by stages. In the earliest draft of the chapter that became 'The Shadow of the Past', written as 'Ancient History', the creature's original name was Dígol, and there was no murdered companion: he found the Ring himself at the river's edge. Only in later revision did Tolkien divide the episode between two persons, transferring a form of the old name to the invented kinsman Déagol and introducing the killing that darkens the finished story. The early drafts also show Gandalf still bound by the text of The Hobbit as it then stood, in which Gollum had honestly wagered the ring as a stake in the riddle-game and, unable to produce it, had shown Bilbo the way out instead; the draft account accepts that gentler behaviour at face value, and only afterwards did Tolkien recast the friendly version as a falsehood of Bilbo's own telling.

Gollum has appeared in nearly every dramatisation of the books. In the Rankin/Bass animated television film of The Hobbit (1977) he was voiced by Brother Theodore, who returned for the same studio's The Return of the King (1980), where the character was drawn as a distinctly frog-like, greenish creature. In Ralph Bakshi's animated The Lord of the Rings (1978) the voice was supplied by Peter Woodthorpe, who played the part again in the BBC's 1981 radio serial of the novel.