Gollum

• 1. Introduction

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  Gollum is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth, and he may be the most pitiable monster in the history of English literature. He began life as Sméagol, a Stoor Hobbit of the River-folk who lived near the Gladden Fields. On his birthday, he went fishing with his relative Déagol. Déagol was pulled into the water by a fish and found a golden ring in the riverbed. Sméagol demanded it as a birthday present. When Déagol refused, Sméagol strangled him and took it.

  From that moment, the creature called Gollum was being made. The Ring extended his life far beyond natural limits, twisted his body, and split his mind. By the time Tolkien introduced him to readers in the 1937 novel The Hobbit, he was a pale, lamp-eyed thing living alone in a cave under the Misty Mountains. His name came from the horrible swallowing noise he made in his throat. He referred to the Ring as "my precious". He survived on cave fish and the occasional goblin.

  The questions his story raises are not simple ones. Is Gollum a monster, a victim, a shadow self, or something stranger still? What does it mean that the destruction of evil at the Cracks of Doom was accomplished not by a hero but by a wretched creature in the grip of obsession? Tolkien himself called Gollum "not altogether wicked", and scholars have never stopped arguing about what that means.

• 2. The Name and Its Roots

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  The Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson, editor of The Annotated Hobbit, proposes that Tolkien derived the name Gollum from the Old Norse word gull or goll, meaning "gold, treasure, something precious", and that the dative form of that word is gollum. A second hypothesis connects the name to golem, the creature of Jewish folklore.

  The name Sméagol has its own etymology. In Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien frames it as a translation of the Middle-earth name Trahald, which means "burrowing, worming in". He rendered Trahald with a name rooted in the Old English verb smēagan, meaning "to scrutinize, investigate". The cousin Déagol gets a rhyming name drawn from Old English dēagol, meaning "secretive, hidden", itself a translation of the Middle-earth name Nahald.

  These etymologies are not decorative. They embed each character in a web of meaning before either one speaks a word. Sméagol is the investigator, the one who pries into things. Déagol is the hidden one, the secretive one who found a hidden ring in a river. The names encode what each character is, and what each character's fate will be.

• 3. From Hobbit to Creature

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  A span of 556 years separates Gollum's finding of the Ring and its destruction in the fires of Mount Doom, by which time he was almost 600 years old. A typical hobbit lifespan runs over 100 years. The Ring was keeping him alive, but it was not keeping him whole.

  In The Hobbit, Tolkien described him as a "small, slimy creature" living on an island in an underground lake at the roots of the Misty Mountains. His eyes had adapted to the dark and become "lamp-like", shining with a pale light. He caught cavefish from a small boat and preyed on stray goblins. The original 1937 edition of The Hobbit does not specify his size, which led illustrators including Tove Jansson, the artist and author, to portray him as very large. Tolkien later added the description "small" to correct that impression.

  By the time of The Two Towers, rangers of Ithilien wonder aloud whether he is a tailless black squirrel. Sam describes his feet as "paddle-feet, like a swan's almost, only they seemed bigger" when Gollum follows their boat by paddling a log down the River Anduin. An Orc compares him to "a starved frog". In a manuscript written to guide illustrators, Tolkien specified that Gollum had pale skin but wore dark clothes and was usually seen in poor light. Aragorn, in The Fellowship of the Ring, states that Gollum's "malice is great and gives him a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered."

• 4. Two Voices, One Body

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  Sam identifies two distinct personalities in Gollum: the sinister "Stinker" and the submissive "Slinker". A green glint in Gollum's eyes marks the shift between them. In the chapter "The Passage of the Marshes", Sam overhears an argument between the two, with Stinker winning out. The chapter "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol" shows Gollum oscillating between the two.

  The pivot point that Tolkien himself called the story's most tragic moment comes when Gollum stumbles upon Frodo and Sam sleeping outside Shelob's Lair. He is briefly overcome and nearly repents. Then Sam wakes and speaks harshly to him. The opportunity is lost. Tolkien wrote of it directly: "Sam failed to note the complete change in Gollum's tone and aspect. Gollum's repentance was blighted, Frodo's pity was wasted, and Shelob's Lair became inevitable."

  Tolkien also left a precise record of what Gollum was like in his better moments, after being taken in by Frodo and Sam: "He spoke with less hissing and whining, and he spoke to his companions direct, not to his precious self. He would cringe and flinch, if they stepped near him or made any sudden movement, and he avoided the touch of their elven-cloaks; but he was friendly, and indeed pitifully anxious to please. He would cackle with laughter and caper if any jest was made, or even if Frodo spoke kindly to him, and weep if Frodo rebuked him."

  Gollum's speech reinforced his fractured sense of self. He referred to himself in the third person, spoke in the plural as "we", and only rarely said "I" - which Frodo interpreted as a sign that Sméagol's better nature had the upper hand. His idiosyncratic grammar, with endings like "hobbitses" and constructions like "we hates it", extended to a persistent emphasis on sibilant sounds.

• 5. Monster and Mirror

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  The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that Gollum is Tolkien's central monster-figure, likening him to both Grendel and the dragon in Beowulf: "the twisted, broken, outcast hobbit whose manlike shape and dragonlike greed combine both the Beowulf kinds of monster in one figure." Tolkien was a famed scholar of Beowulf and acknowledged it as a major source of his fiction.

  Commentators including the theologian Ralph C. Wood and the critics Brent Nelson, Kathleen Gilligan, and Susan and Woody Wendling have noted that Sméagol's murder of Déagol echoes Cain's killing of Abel in Genesis 4:1-18. Cain kills out of jealousy and becomes a restless wanderer; Sméagol kills out of jealousy and is exiled by his family, wandering in loneliness. Nelson observes that the two names even rhyme, suggesting they are figuratively brothers.

  The English literature scholars William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood compare Gollum to Gagool, the ancient hag in Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines. Tolkien acknowledged Haggard, and especially his novel She, as a major influence. Haggard describes Gagool as "a withered-up monkey that crept on all fours", no larger than a year-old child, with large black eyes "still full of fire and intelligence", a bare yellow skull, and a scalp that moved "like the hood of a cobra." Gagool and Gollum share monstrous but human-like form, extreme age, distinctive eyes and speech, and a wholly materialistic character.

  Dale Nelson, writing in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, proposes a parallel with H. G. Wells's Morlocks in the 1895 novel The Time Machine. The Morlocks have "dull white" skin with a "bleached look", "strange large grayish-red eyes" capable of reflecting light, and move in a low posture close to all fours through having lived underground for generations. Tom Birkett, writing in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, adds a connection to the Völsunga saga, specifically Hreiðmarr's son who took the form of an otter to catch fish in a mountain pool - a semi-aquatic creature greedily devouring fish, just as Gollum does.

  A variety of scholars have also described Gollum as a psychological shadow figure for Frodo, his dark alter ego in the Jungian sense. The Tolkien scholar Charles W. Nelson called Gollum an evil guide, contrasted with Gandalf as the good guide, and pointed out that both function as servants of Eru Ilúvatar in the struggle against darkness.

• 6. A Role in Providence

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  David Callaway, writing in Mythlore, describes the theological architecture behind Gollum's role. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and Middle-earth is a place where good and evil struggle under an omnipotent god, Eru Ilúvatar. Callaway describes Gollum as fitting this framework as a being not wholly evil, capable of moral choice.

  The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge notes that at the Council of Elrond, Frodo angrily resists the idea that Gollum was a hobbit like himself. Gandalf calls Gollum's story "a sad story" rather than Frodo's word for it, "loathsome". Gandalf says Gollum "had no will left in the matter" - "the Ring itself decided things."

  Callaway argues that Gollum is partially manipulated by Eru in what he calls "this cosmic chess game", citing Gandalf's statement that Gollum "has some part to play yet, for good or ill". When Frodo stood at the edge of the Crack of Doom and claimed the Ring for himself, it was Gollum who wrestled the invisible Frodo, bit off his finger, seized the Ring, danced in triumph, stepped over the edge, and fell into the fire. The quest succeeded at the precise moment its designated bearer failed. Frodo urged Sam to forgive Gollum, saying that without him the quest would have failed.

  Callaway calls this moment "the ultimate heroic self-sacrifice", arguing that Gollum acted consciously, with the good fraction of his mind finally overpowering the Ring's evil. Elizabeth Arthur, writing in Mythlore, goes further, calling Gollum the "most fully-rounded character" in the novel and arguing that his final act "frees the world from the Great Darkness." Arthur quotes Ursula Le Guin's observation that the composite character made up of Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Sméagol is the genuinely interesting one.

• 7. Voices and Faces on Screen

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  Gollum's first known screen appearance was in Gene Deitch's 1967 short film The Hobbit, where his role was reduced to a single scene showing him sitting in his boat. In the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit and its 1980 sequel The Return of the King, he was voiced by Brother Theodore and appeared somewhat froglike.

  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings gave the role to Peter Woodthorpe, who also voiced Gollum in the BBC's 1981 radio dramatisation. Austin Gilkeson, writing on TOR.com, praised the prologue in the Bakshi film, calling the depiction of Gollum's transformation "beautifully rendered as black shadows cast against a red canvas" like a shadow play or a medieval tapestry.

  A Soviet-era television film from 1985 gave a green-faced Gollum to Igor Dmitriev. A different Russian interpretation came in Leningrad Television's 1991 two-part TV play Khraniteli, rediscovered in 2021: the trade publication Variety reported that this Gollum spoke Russian, wore orange eye-shadow, and had what appeared to be bright green cabbage leaves pasted to his head. Kari Väänänen portrayed Gollum, named Klonkku in the Finnish translation, in the 1993 live-action miniseries Hobitit, produced by the Finnish network Yle.

  Peter Jackson's trilogy gave the role to Andy Serkis through motion capture and CGI. The digital character was built by Jason Schleifer and Bay Raitt at Weta Digital around Serkis's facial features, voice, and acting. Serkis based the iconic throat noise on the sound of his cat coughing up hairballs. Animators combined motion capture data, traditional keyframe animation, and a technique they called rotoanimation, digitally replacing Serkis's image with the digital character. Wizard magazine rated this Gollum 62nd among the hundred greatest villains in visual media; Empire magazine placed Serkis as Gollum 13th on its list of the hundred greatest movie characters of all time.

  For The Return of the King, Serkis appeared in a flashback as the young Sméagol before his degeneration. That scene was originally planned for The Two Towers but was held back to let audiences bond with the CGI Gollum first. The delay required Bay Raitt and Jamie Beswarick to redesign Gollum's face for the second and third films to bring it closer to Serkis's own features.

• 8. A Scene Unlike Any Other

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  Scene 29 of The Two Towers, known as "the Gollum and Sméagol scene", directly represents Gollum's split personality as two separate entities in conversation. Screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens shaped it as an argument between the childlike Sméagol and the evil Gollum.

  Film scholar Kristin Thompson called it "perhaps the most celebrated scene in the entire film", noting that it drew gasps from audiences at the first cut to Sméagol as an apparently separate character facing himself as Gollum. The scene opens not with cuts between the two sides but by arcing the camera continuously around Gollum to Sméagol and back, without a single cut. Then the argument proceeds with nineteen shot/reverse shots - the long-established convention for dialogue between two people, applied here to one.

  Thompson observed that fully understanding the scene requires frame-by-frame analysis of how Walsh's direction manages "to suggest the conflict between Gollum's two sides" through "the subtle combination of framing, camera movement, editing, and character glances." The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey described Jackson's handling of Gollum as "masterful all through" and called the arguing-with-himself scene "especially good and original."

  At the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, Serkis appeared as Gollum to accept the "Best Virtual Performance" award with an obscenity-laden acceptance speech in character. That performance went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. In Canada, Michael Therriault played Gollum in the three-hour stage production of The Lord of the Rings, which opened in Toronto in 2006, winning a Dora Award for the role.