Gollum

Origins by the Gladden

The creature the world knew as Gollum began life as Sméagol, a hobbit of the Stoor folk who had returned east over the mountains around T.A. 1356 and settled beside the Gladden Fields on the Anduin. His family was one of the more prosperous of that small, clannish people, ruled by his grandmother, a formidable matriarch who kept many relations under her authority in holes along the riverbank. Sméagol himself was curious in a downward-looking way: he burrowed under trees and into mounds, dived into deep pools, hunted for roots and secrets, and cared nothing for flowers or sky. He was not yet wicked, but he was the sort of hobbit in whom the Ring would find little to resist it.

The murder of Déagol

On his birthday in T.A. 2463 Sméagol went boating on the river with his friend Déagol. Déagol, dragged into the water by a great fish, came up out of the mud with a gold ring in his fist. Sméagol asked for it as a birthday present. When Déagol refused, Sméagol strangled him, hid the body, and put on the ring. Nobody ever found Déagol. Sméagol discovered that the ring made him invisible, used it to spy and steal and to work small cruelties, and gained a habit of swallowing and gurgling in his throat that earned him the nickname Gollum. His family came to loathe him. In the end his grandmother put him out of the hole and the community drove him off, and he wandered up the Gladden alone, weeping, until he found the caves under the Misty Mountains and went in.

Under the mountains

For nearly five hundred years Gollum lived on an island in a black lake far beneath the mountains, not far from the tunnels the Orcs of Goblin-town later dug. He ate raw fish and, when he could catch one, a stray goblin. The Ring stretched his life without lengthening it, thinned and blackened him, gave him eyes like pale lamps and a hatred of sun and moon, and split his mind: he spoke of himself in the plural, addressed the Ring as his Precious and his birthday-present, and argued aloud with the small remnant of Sméagol that survived. Yet the Ring did not devour him entirely. Its maker had begun to stir again in the world, and it was ready to leave him.

In T.A. 2941 it did. It slipped from Gollum's finger in the tunnels and was found by Bilbo Baggins, who had been lost there in the confusion of the Dwarves' escape from the goblins. Gollum, not yet knowing his loss, met the hobbit at the lakeside and proposed a riddle-game, meaning to eat him if he won. Bilbo won with a question about the contents of his pocket. Gollum went to fetch the Ring to make his guest easy prey, found it gone, and came to the truth in a screaming rage. He pursued Bilbo to the back door of the goblin tunnels, guided, without knowing it, by the invisible hobbit behind him, and at the exit he crouched, torn between fear of the goblins and hunger for his Precious, while Bilbo weighed killing him and chose not to. Bilbo leapt over him and was gone. Gollum's wail of hatred against the thief Baggins followed him out into the sunlight.

The long hunt

In 2944 Gollum left the mountains for the first time in centuries and began to hunt for Bilbo. He had learned the name Baggins and the word Shire, and he crept slowly east and then south, drawn by the pull of the Ring's master, through Mirkwood, where he acquired a taste for the young of anything he could catch, and down the vale of Anduin. Around 2951 he turned towards Mordor, and by 2980 he had reached its western borders, where he found the pass of Cirith Ungol and made a kind of worship of Shelob, bringing her food in exchange for his life. Gandalf and Aragorn sought him over many years and lost his trail. At last the servants of Sauron took him, and in the dungeons of Barad-dûr he was questioned until he gave up the two words the Enemy needed: Shire and Baggins. He was then released in 3017, since he might yet lead them to the Ring.

Aragorn caught him in the Dead Marshes on 1 February 3018 and dragged him north to Thranduil's halls, where Gandalf questioned him and learned the tale of Déagol. The Wood-elves kept him gently and let him climb trees; in June 3018 Orcs attacked his guards and Gollum escaped in the confusion, into Mirkwood and then south.

Guide to the Ring-bearer

He picked up the trail of the Fellowship at Moria, where Frodo heard his feet padding behind them in the dark, followed them through Lothlórien on a log down the river, and shadowed the two hobbits into the Emyn Muil after the Fellowship broke. There, on the night of 29 February 3019, Frodo and Sam caught him as he climbed down a cliff towards their camp. Sam wanted him bound with the Elven rope, which burned him; Frodo instead made him swear an oath on the Precious itself to serve its bearer, and Gollum swore. For a while Sméagol came uppermost. He guided them faithfully across the Dead Marshes and up to the Black Gate, and when that proved shut he led them south through Ithilien towards the secret way he knew. He caught rabbits for Sam, laughed, played, and called Frodo master with something like love.

But he was also plotting. Sam overheard him debating with himself in two voices, Sméagol loyal to the master who had been kind, Gollum reminding him that She might help them get the Precious. At the Forbidden Pool of Henneth Annûn Frodo saved his life from Faramir's archers by luring him into capture, and Gollum understood only that he had been betrayed. Faramir warned Frodo that Gollum was leading him to something evil. On the stair of Cirith Ungol, at the very edge of the pass, Gollum came back from a visit to Shelob to find the hobbits asleep, and for a moment, looking at Frodo's face, he was almost Sméagol again: he touched Frodo's knee, weeping, an old starved hobbit who had once had friends. Sam woke, took the gesture for pawing, and spoke harshly. The moment passed and did not come again.

Betrayal and the end

Gollum led the hobbits into Shelob's tunnel and vanished. When Sam came out fighting to save Frodo, Gollum leapt on his back from behind and nearly strangled him; Sam threw him off and he fled down the passage, and Shelob, left to Sam, was wounded and driven away. He tracked the hobbits across Mordor, hungry and desperate, and on the slopes of Mount Doom on 25 March he attacked Frodo openly, begging and threatening by turns. Frodo, terrible in that hour, told him that if he touched the Ring again he would be cast into the fire himself. Sam held him at sword-point and could not kill him, seeing the ruin the Ring had made and pitying it.

He followed them into the Sammath Naur. When Frodo stood at the Cracks of Doom and claimed the Ring as his own, Gollum fell upon the invisible hobbit, wrestled him, and bit the Ring from his hand, finger and all. Dancing with joy on the brink and holding the Precious aloft, he lost his footing and fell into the fire, and the Ring was unmade with him. Bilbo's mercy, Frodo's, and Sam's had all been needed to bring him to that place, and Gandalf's judgement that Gollum still had a part to play was fulfilled in the strangest way possible. The Ring-bearer himself could not have finished the quest; the creature who had loved and hated the Ring longest did it for him, and neither knew it was coming.

Fell into the fire of Mount Doom with the Ring on 25 March T.A. 3019, ending both.