Nowhere and Back Again: The Dead Marshes (ii: Gollum) (Patreon)

A historical portrait of the life of Gollum follows.

The Dead Marshes serve as much as an introduction to the nature of Gollum as they do to the geographic and ontological contours of Mordor and its surrounding lands. In many ways, Gollum embodies the zeitgeist of Middle-earth more completely than any other character in The Lord of the Rings. Gollum is a pauper of paradox; he’s one of the trilogy’s few truly autonomous characters, having few loyalties (and no staid ones) and little deference to the passing of time, and yet he is powerless. Throughout The Lord of the Rings Gollum is a pawn for both the Free Peoples of Middle-earth and Mordor’s forces; his demise is inadvertently caused by the decisions of both factions, and he experiences degrading and at times sadistic treatment from all of his captors. Gollum’s relationship with free will is inconsistent, evincing the paradox of Tolkien’s fervent Catholicism and racial-cultural essentialism. In short, he’s Tolkien’s entire creation in one character, embodying The Lord of the Rings’s ethos each time he materializes.

When he first appears in The Hobbit, Gollum is the fairy tale monster that fairy tale monsters fear. Living under the Misty Mountains, Gollum, “a small slimy creature,” rules the literal underworld from his perch by an underground lake aided by his magic ring. An unknowable yet strangely charismatic horror, he gets described with something nearing reverence:

Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.

A creature of ravenous hunger (and atypically for a menacing fantasy creature, very small), Gollum’s rule under the Misty Mountain is pervaded by his appetites. Living in his lake, he “paddle[s]” around searching for “blind fish” to eat, sometimes capturing the odd helpless goblin who ventures into his domain, “throttl[ing] them from behind,” with “his long fingers” whenever they come down. Based on the evidence, Gollum appears to live quite a satisfying life by the time of The Hobbit. He gets to eat as many goblins as he likes, and the threat of disappearance keeps the goblins from coming down to figure out who ate Bob the goblin or Jerry the orc this week. There’s a strange English middle class quality to this; Gollum is a Weird corruption of an English gentleman, keeping to himself and owning his hole in the ground like a respectable halfling would.

Certain staples of Gollum are already in place in “Riddles in the Dark,” the classic chapter Gollum first appears in; his ravenous hunger, willingness to eat anything that movies, and predilection for hunger are fully formed in The Hobbit, while backed by a confidence Gollum has long since lost in The Lord of the Rings. Gollum’s tendency of addressing himself as “precious” is intact, although referring to the Ring that way is not yet in place (he instead calls it “my birthday present”). He swerves between referring to Bilbo as “he” and “it,” suggesting a fluidity in Gollum’s use of language. Gollum has enough semblance of his old self, a Stoor, left (it says a lot that Sméagol was a cousin of hobbits rather than one himself) that he has pockets in which he stores “fish-bones, goblins’ teeth, wet shells, a bit of bat-wing, a sharp stone to sharpen his fangs on, and other nasty things.” There’s even some biographical detail indicating Gollum’s past associations with civilization, when Gollum remembers a day “ages and ages before when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river.” Others changes come from Tolkien’s revision of The Hobbit in preparation for The Lord of the Rings, where the original ending of “Riddles in the Dark” which featured Gollum surrendering the Ring to Bilbo is replaced by an “authentic” ending where a ring-crazed Gollum tries to murder Bilbo in a fit of rage, having deduced that Bilbo stole his Ring. Gollum’s dual personality, a subtle factor in the first edition, is made explicit to mirror Gollum’s characterization in The Two Towers and The Return of the King (Tolkien provided an in-universe explanation for the discrepancies between versions, namely that Bilbo lied about Gollum gifting him the Ring. Your move, George Lucas).

Gollum and Bilbo’s subsequent riddle game is a sort of bonding ritual for the two of them. Two halflings in fractally opposed states of existence engage in a battle of wits, one for his own survival, the other in a clever play for time. One gets the impression Gollum is desperate for company after centuries alone in the dark; goblins’ worst nightmares need company as well. Indeed, Gandalf speculates in The Fellowship of the Ring that when Gollum met Bilbo “there was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it,” in that “it was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again.” Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the scene in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey emphasizes this, having the Sméagol half of Gollum excitedly shout “we love games!” at Bilbo, while a consternated Gollum pushes back at him. The Jackson version in particular plays up the aspect of this being a potential friendship in another lifetime, where Sméagol might enjoy a game of riddles with Bilbo at Bag-End. So when he realizes Bilbo has stolen his “Precious,” the betrayal is all the greater. The Ring is the heart of Gollum’s existence; when it leaves him, he loses everything he lived for, his security against goblins, and the unnatural force literally keeping him alive. While Bilbo seems unaware of the sheer agony this causes Gollum (to an extent — Jackson and company play this up in the movie, giving Bilbo a selfish edge, possibly influenced by the Ring, where he figures out fairly quickly that Gollum causes the Ring), in order to escape from the goblins and the Misty Mountains he disrupts the ecosystem of Gollum’s life. Even in the moment where he shows a murderous Gollum mercy, a powerful and truly Catholic moment that evinces all of Tolkien’s most redeeming aspects, the fact is he takes away the last vestige of consistency and desire in Gollum’s life. The Ring ultimately disrupts Bilbo’s existence as well, but this act of burglary is the core moment that eventually drives The Lord of the Rings, with Gollum’s loss motivating the plot and themes of that work. And while Bilbo is ultimately able to escape the power of the Ring through his own strength of character, Gollum is forever bound up with it. From the moment he wrestles it from Deagol’s dead hands, his life is fixed around it forever, until the moment of his death.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gollum is offstage yet vital to the Ring quest’s impetus. We get some more detail about Gollum’s past and the Stoor people than we previously had; Gandalf informs Frodo of “the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors” who were “of hobbit-kind” and “loved the [Anduin] River, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reeds.” Gollum’s distant relations to hobbits, a fact only hinted at in The Hobbit, is concretely iterated, much to the horror of Frodo, who expresses his disbelief “that Gollum was connected with hobbits, however distantly.” In a surprising beat, Gandalf, Tolkien’s voice of authorial wisdom, discourages Frodo from refusing to identify with Gollum, observing that Gollum’s corruption “might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known” (and indeed, partially happens to Frodo at the end of his journey to Mordor). This sets off an arc where Frodo slowly develops a subtle kinship with Gollum, falling for some of the same traps he did, and ultimately making the near-fatal error of allowing himself to be consumed by the Ring. For once, weakness isn’t something bound to a few “races,” and little is made of the difference between Stoor ancestors and hobbits, but is a vice all peoples are bound to, although Frodo’s virtues preserve him throughout the quest and save him in the end. Gandalf makes the observation that Bilbo and Gollum “suggests the kinship,” in that “there was a great deal in the background of their minds and memories that was very similar.”

Character-wise, descriptions of Gollum match and amplify his characterization in The Hobbit. When speaking of his past life as Sméagol, it becomes clear Gollum was dysfunctional and inquisitive long before the Ring came along (once again showing that the One Ring’s power over its wearer is partially determined by its wearer’s character). In his youth Gollum was “interested in roots and beginnings,” and known for digging tunnels and burrows while neglecting the sky, as “his head and his eyes were downward.” It’s likely that Gollum’s dysfunctionality is rooted in inherent antisocial and anti-authoritarian tendencies; his family was headed by his matriarchal grandmother, “stern and wise in old lore,” mentioned in passing in The Hobbit while Gollum recalls his old babushka whom he taught to suck “eggses” (perhaps the most disturbing sentence in Tolkien’s bibliography). Gollum’s self-serving tendencies reached their apex in his wholly pointless and avaricious Cain-like murder of his friend Déagol, perhaps a hint of the Ring’s immediate power over his mind, and also a suggestion of his ingrained antisociality. The One Ring’s powers of invisibility immediately help Gollum in his connivances and schemes, but win him the scorn of his family, who gradually shun him and name him Gollum. Eventually Gollum’s grandmother, “desiring peace,” disowns him and casts him out of her family’s hole, sending Gollum into exile as he begins a life of eating raw fish (not sushi), hating the sun, rejecting social company, and mastering the COVID-19 lifestyle. When Gollum eventually finds the sun a punishment, he discovers the Misty Mountains and decides “it would be cool and shady under those mountains. The Sun could not watch me there. The roots of those mountains must be roots indeed: there must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning.”

Ultimately Bilbo’s theft of the One Ring motivates Gollum out of hiding; he’s a ruined figure consumed by guilt over Déagol’s murder and the corrosive effects of the One Ring, although as Gandalf puts it, he has “never ‘faded.” Gollum’s attempts to elude his enemies is a failure, however, and reinforces what social trauma he retained from his family’s expulsion. At various points he’s apprehended and tortured by Mordor, captured by Gandalf and Aragorn, the former of whom threatens him with torture (“I put the fear of fire on him”), and imprisoned by the Silvan Elves of Mirkwood. While Frodo wrestles with the ethics of capturing Gollum, others of his ideological persuasion seem to view their treatment of Gollum as a morally acceptable last resort, viewing humane captures and threats as noble in service of the greater good.

This all happens offstage, and Gollums spends The Fellowship of the Ring and early chapters of The Two Towers in the dark, stalking the Fellowship as they pass through Moria, Lórien, and eventually Emyn Muil. When he eventually catches up with Frodo and Sam in the latter, the drama of The Lord of the Rings changes. Until this point, Tolkien has kept his villains mostly offstage, only bringing them into scenes where the protagonists directly interact with them. Saruman and Gríma are offstage for the most of the action — Saruman only appears in three chapters in the whole of The Lord of the Rings, a literary decision that works on the page but inevitably had to be changed in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which wisely includes several appearances of Saruman and Orthanc. This absence of evil characters serves two major functions: one is that it keeps the drama centered around the heroes, a stylistic decision paralleling the mono-plot narrative structure of myths and sagas, which generally followed the adventures of one character or faction at a time. This sagaesque approach demarcates The Lord of the Rings from the often cutaway-driven narrative techniques of the modern novel, a medium Tolkien proclaimed to have “no interest at all in” (he called Rings a “heroic romance”). The other factor keeping Tolkien’s villains offstage is that he seems ambivalent towards them; the overwhelming majority of his work centers around the challenged or the falling; those who’ve fallen present no conflict for him. Their souls are lost, and Tolkien’s work lands on moral and historical complexity more often than glib “good versus evil” parables. Sauron and Saruman can’t be characters in their own right because they’re already fallen; their story is ended, and belongs to those who their tyranny now impacts. The Lord of the Rings may be the foundational novel of the fantasy genre, but the genre’s fixation on edifying villainy has little provenance in Tolkien.

When Gollum appears in The Two Towers, villainy gains a face and a personality and an agenda. Gollum is id, avarice, fear, despair, and unbridled survival. Tolkien sometimes describes his movements as canine (“At once Gollum got up and began prancing about, like a whipped cur whose master has petted it”, “Gollum watched every morsel from hand to mouth, like an expectant dog by a diner’s chair”). He ruthlessly hates himself and lives in service of himself. In short, Gollum is an icon, a ruined wreck of neuroses and trauma. Having followed Frodo and Sam for several days, Gollum then fails to kill the hobbits, who prepare for his attack and seize him when he accosts them. For once, Gollum is in the company of people without tremendous power over him, and have some moral justification in keeping him as their prisoner due to his “fucking homicidal” gig. There’s some proper moral wrestling with the treatment of Gollum throughout Book IV — at least by Frodo; Sam would rather hurl Gollum into the Cracks of Doom (the class dynamics of Frodo and Sam’s relationship ring out loudly in their views of Gollum; the rustic Sam is understandably suspicious of the malingering trickster, if a genuine cognizance of Gollum’s psychological changes — “there is a change in him” — while Frodo’s suspicion towards Gollum is balanced by compassion for his plight). And while the dynamic reveals things about Gollum’s twisted and capricious nature, it betrays some quiet nobility in him as well.

At his first meeting with Gollum, Frodo, influenced by his past conversation with Gandalf, declares “now that I see him, I do pity him.” His pity does not extend to letting Gollum free — somewhat understandably, again — using Gollum as a guide through Emyn Muil and the Dead Marshes becomes a practical necessity. Yet Frodo takes Gollum’s redemption as something of a project — while recognizing the astronomical improbability of it, Frodo treats Gollum with compassion and mercy that’s most likely novel to the latter. Tolkien’s Catholic conception of grace is embodied by Frodo — he offers Gollum the kindness he sorely needs, and Gollum has the option of either accepting or rejecting it. A scene where Frodo offers Gollum lembas, the replenishing Elvish bread, exemplifies this relationship with grace and mercy.

‘[Gollum] took a corner of the lembas and nibbled it. He spat, and a fit of coughing shook him.‘Ach! No!’ he spluttered. ‘You try to choke poor Sméagol. Dust and ashes, he can’t eat that. He must starve. But Sméagol doesn’t mind. Nice hobbits! Sméagol has promised. He will starve. He can’t eat hobbits’ food. He will starve. Poor thin Sméagol!’‘I’m sorry,’ said Frodo; ‘but I can’t help you, I’m afraid. I think this food would do you good, if you would try. But perhaps you can’t even try, not yet anyway.’

He has not fallen as of yet — anyone still clinging to life has a choice and a path forward. Frodo gives him autonomy, letting him go off at will, being wise enough to understand that Gollum will return (“he won’t leave his Precious, anyway”). When the hobbits’ Elvish rope torments Gollum, they remove it from his ankle (although only when “At last Frodo was convinced that he was really in pain”). His case is helped greatly by the fact that the book recognizes Gollum’s pain several times over:

‘It hurts us, it hurts us,’ hissed Gollum. ‘It freezes, it bites! Elves twisted it, curse them! Nasty cruel hobbits! That’s why we tries to escape, of course it is, precious. We guessed they were cruel hobbits. They visits Elves, fierce Elves with bright eyes. Take if off us! It hurts us.’

Frodo even works with Gollum to convince him they have a common cause, assuring him that helping the hobbits means the end of Sauron’s torment of Gollum. He also gives him an ultimatum, and tells him that Gollum only needs to accompany the hobbits on part of their journey, while offering him some spiritual comfort:

‘[Sauron] will not go away or sleep at your command, Sméagol,’ said Frodo. ‘But if you really wish to be free of him again, then you must help me. And that I fear means finding us a path towards him. But you need not go all the way, not beyond the gates of his land.’ Gollum sat up and looked at him under his eyelids. ‘He’s over there,’ he cackled. ‘Always there. Orcs will take you all the way. Easy to find Orcs east of the River. Don’t ask Sméagol. Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago. They took his Precious, and he’s lost now.’‘Perhaps we’ll find him again, if you come with us,’ said Frodo.

Not that Frodo doesn’t sneer at the notion of Gollum having multiple sides to his identity; he approaches Gollum on his terms. And this does help — Gollum becomes friendly at times, endeavoring to help his guides. But always he retains an autonomous soul, interacting meticulous with his captors but switching between good will and conspiring against them, depending on whether Sméagol or Gollum has the upper hand. Sméagol often is the one with the upper hand, and the friendlier side of Gollum, but his fear and mendacity remain. The infamous scene in The Two Towers where Sam eavesdrops on Gollum and Sméagol — adapted and improved in a scene Fran Walsh writes and directs in the Peter Jackson film — wholly reveals this.

Sméagol was holding a debate with some other thought that used the same voice but made it squeak and hiss. A pale light and a green light alternated as he spoke.‘Sméagol promised,’ said the first thought.‘Yes, yes, my precious, came the answer, ‘we promised: to save our Precious, not to let Him have it—never. But it’s going to Him, yes, nearer every step. What’s the hobbit going to do with it, we wonders, yes we wonders.’

Gollum still serves the Ring, and seeks to preserve it, as he seeks to preserve himself. And despite Frodo’s noble intentions and relatively human treatment of his captor, Gollum fears him. Surely this can’t just be because of some refusal of grace; in part it must be due to the authoritarian tendencies of those offering Gollum grace. If redemption is conditional, can free will factor in? Gollum does not know. He has yet to decide.

Later in The Two Towers when Frodo and Sam are captured by Faramir, Gollum exits the book for a bit, leaving the hobbits to develop an initially shaky but eventually sturdy rapport with the Gondorian captain (as opposed to the sequence’s controversial counterpart in Jackson’s adaptation, which radically departs from Tolkien by introducing overt political intrigue, paranoia on Faramir’s part, and an outing in Osgiliath where the Ring is nearly lost). Shortly Gollum discovers their location, Henneth Annûn, a secret outpost in a cave behind a waterfall, where he proceeds to engage in some early morning fishing by hand, likely the most contented he’s been in some time (“now we can eat fish in peace”). Faramir, wishing to test the hobbits’ trustworthiness, informs Frodo and Sam that “fish from the pool of Henneth Annûn may cost [Gollum] all he has to give” as “for coming unbidden to this place death is our law.” Frodo defends Gollum, saying “the creature is wretched and hungry,” but heeding Faramir’s command that Gollum “must be slain or taken,” opts to lure Gollum into Faramir’s custody.

The subsequent events are truly weird and disturbing. In the novel, Frodo tells Gollum that his life is in danger, somewhat exaggerating the risks (which in Frodo’s view “was too much like trickery”). Gollum is immediately seized by Faramir’s men and the green light in his eyes returns: “ ‘Masster, Masster!’ he hissed. ‘Wicked! Tricksy! False!’ Gollum is then subjected to some stark cruelty by Faramir, who responds to Gollum’s protestations of his innocence with “Have you never done anything worthy of binding or of worse punishment?,” then adding a moralizing “however, that is not for me to judge happily.” Disturbingly, the book seems to side with Faramir’s abject torment of Gollum, as Faramir offers bits of perceived wisdom such as “a malice eats it like a canker, and the evil is growing,” as if his actions aren’t directly contributing to Gollum’s hostility. Worse still is how Frodo seems to mainly defend bringing Gollum as his guide as a matter of practical necessity, and fails to reprimand Faramir for his cruelty. Jackson handles this somewhat better, although he does have Frodo looking worse for it — Elijah Wood’s Frodo doesn’t warn Gollum of the presence of Men before luring him away from the waterfall. The subsequent events are depicted as traumatic for Gollum, as Andy Serkis lets out an agonized and betrayed “Master!” before being subjected to a beating by Faramir’s rangers. He has a breakdown in front of them, with Evil!Gollum resurfacing (Sméagol has been in control for much of the movie), and at this point essentially defeating the better nature of Sméagol. As he’s dragged through a wartorn Osgiliath, he’s forgotten, particularly as Sam redresses Frodo on the nature of good and evil and companionship. In an amazing collaboration of Andy Serkis and Weta Digital, Gollum looks away sadly, knowing that the kindness of hobbits and Men and Elves do not apply to him.

Is it any wonder, then, that Sméagol turns on the hobbits so shortly afterward? Who amongst us would not lead our hypocritical captors into a cave where a giant spider lives? Gollum’s soul has been lost, leading them through Cirith Ungol with a coy “Yes, we must go this way now.” As Shelob besets Gollum with her webs and pointy legs, Gollum accosts his tormenter Sam, gleefully hollering “At last, my precious, we’ve got him, yes, the nassty hobbit. We takes this one. She’ll get the other. O yes, Shelob will get him, not Sméagol: he promised; he won’t hurt Master at all. But he’s got you, you nassty filthy ltitle sneak!” Even in wickedness Gollum abides by codes and rules, semantically holding to his vow not to harm Frodo but leaping on an attempt to murder Sam. In the end, Shelob takes Frodo, Sam leaves him for dead, and the Orcs find Frodo, realize he’s alive, and capture him. The Two Towers ends with Gollum’s victory; he has avenged himself against the Baggins dynasty, those who vowed to protect him and then hurt him worst of all. In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum is the voice of the repressed and subaltern; his villainy is a type of restorative heroism. And in the end, The Two Towers is the battle he fights and wins.

When Gollum surfaces again in The Return of the King, the hollowness of his victory is laid bare. Upon Frodo and Sam’s arrival at Mount Doom, Gollum’s only thought is violent rage and self-preservation, wrestling the hobbits in a last ditch effort for the Ring. The quest to destroy the Ring has become an inadvertent quest to kill Gollum. He pleads with Sam, imploring him “Don’t kill us,” saying “Let us live, yes, live just a little longer. Lost lost! We’re lost. And when Precious goes we’ll die, yes, die into the dust.” Sam’s clemency in the moment, in which he lets Gollum go, is the mistake that saves the day. Gollum of course bounds into Sammath Naur, wrestles with the invisible corrupted Frodo, bites off his finger, and takes the One Ring. In his glee, he engages in a giddy victory dance, slips, and falls into the fires below. Gollum is gone. The quest for the Ring has been resolved. At his expense. Gollum is a sacrifice, a weak and vulnerable person always destined for doom. When Gandalf speaks of Gollum’s part to play in the Matter of Middle-earth, he of course means that Gollum is a useful tool, not a person in his own right. And yet Gollum constantly seeks liberation, sometimes on the terms of his captors, but ultimately falling from grace and into doom. His doom is Middle-earth’s salvation, and an indictment of all Middle-earth.

Mordor is hot and pungent. Let us venture to the outskirts. “Let us forgive him,” says Frodo of Gollum. And so we shall, by revisiting where Gollum laid his final footsteps. It is all we must ask of Tolkien’s Iscariot, the true protagonist of The Lord of the Rings.