Déagol

The finding of the Ring

Déagol belonged to the small folk of Stoor hobbits who lived in holes along the banks of the Anduin near the Gladden Fields, the descendants of those who had come back east over the mountains around T.A. 1356. He was a friend of Sméagol, of the same inquisitive kind, and Gandalf, who told the story to Frodo, thought he may also have been some kind of kinsman. On Sméagol's birthday in T.A. 2463 the two went out in a boat to fish. Déagol was jerked into the water by a great fish, let go of his line, and groping in the mud of the river-bed found something bright: a gold ring, the One Ring of Sauron, lost there by Isildur more than two thousand years before.

He came up onto the bank with it in his hand, and Sméagol, watching from behind a tree, asked for it as a birthday present. Déagol, who had already given his friend a present that year and had no intention of giving up so fine a thing, refused. Sméagol strangled him, hid the body, and put the ring on his own finger. Déagol's people never found him, and never knew what had happened; the Ring had claimed its first victim among the hobbits before it had even been worn by one.

Legacy

Déagol is a figure of a single moment, but the moment is one of the hinges of the Third Age. Gandalf's account of his death at the Gladden was the proof that convinced Frodo of what the Ring did to its owners, and the name Déagol was among the things the wizard drew out of Gollum by patience and threat in the halls of Thranduil. His Westron name was a translation of the true Stoorish Nahald, which meant something like 'secret', a fitting name for the finder of a hidden thing.

Strangled by Sméagol on the day he found the Ring; his body was hidden and never found.