Gollum: Victim or Villain?

RACHEL GREENLEAF

Tolkien is renowned for creating complex characters that capture the attention of his readers. Gandalf has become iconic as an image of what a wizard should like, Hobbits are recognized almost universally, and Elves and Dwarves have been completely redefined in the fantasy genre. One of the most striking characters that Tolkien created was the creature Gollum, or Smeagol. Typically Gollum is considered a villain – after all, the first thing we know about him is that he murders his cousin over a piece of jewelry, and when Bilbo meets him in the goblin caves, Gollum makes him play a riddle game for Bilbo’s very life!

But is Gollum a true villain, or is a victim of circumstance?

It is best to begin by looking at where Gollum originated with Tolkien. Before The Lord of the Rings was written, The Hobbit was intended as a standalone novel, with no relation to the rest of Middle-earth or Tolkien's pet mythology that would later grow into The Silmarillion. When LOTR was finally published, Tolkien actually went back to The Hobbit and revised sections of it so that it would fit more seamlessly into the Middle-earth narrative - and one of the main things he changed was the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter.

In the original version of The Hobbit, Gollum was more of a mystery than anything else. Tolkien describes him by saying, “I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was. He was Gollum, as dark as darkness except for two big round pale eyes.” 1 Whatever Gollum was, it is clear that he doesn’t necessarily have a murderous past in this version! But what is really interesting is the stakes of the riddle game – if Gollum wins, Bilbo will be eaten, but if Bilbo wins, Gollum “gives it a present” 2 : and that present is none other than the ring itself! When Gollum is unable to find the ring to give Bilbo, he is most distressed and “begged Bilbo’s pardon. And he offered him fish caught fresh to eat instead.” 3 Ultimately Gollum shows Bilbo out in order to not cheat at the game, and that is the end of their encounter. Ironically, Bilbo is a worse person than Gollum in this scenario (apart from Gollum’s desire to eat him). Gollum is bound by the rules of the riddle game, but Bilbo technically cheats by hiding the ring, and asking a final question instead of a riddle. In the updated version, Gollum is much more sinister and slimy due to the biggest change – the influence of the ring. But here we come to a conundrum: is Gollum really evil, or is the Ring the true villain? Another place to look at Tolkien’s mindset about Gollum is in the meaning behind the name Smeagol. According to Peter Gulliver in The Ring of Words:

“It seems that Tolkien especially liked [smugan]. From it comes also another Old English verb smeagan, meaning ‘to scrutinize, investigate’, and from that Tolkien created Gollums true name Smeagol, which has the shape of an Old English adjective ending in -ol; an example of this kind survives in fickle, Old English ficol, from a root meaning ‘deceive’. Another example of an adjective formed this way in Old English is deagol ‘secret’, which Tolkien borrowed for the name of Smeagol’s best friend… It is highly appropriate that this unpleasant pair are named ‘inquisitive’ and ‘secretive’.” 4

So if Smeagol essentially means ‘inquisitive’ and comes from the root word meaning ‘burrow’ or ‘tunnel’, perhaps he is not really a wicked character, though he may be an unpleasant one. The Ring seems to have taken advantage of his inquisitiveness, turning curiosity to into spying and tunneling into sneaking around unseen. Gollum’s Smeagolness, his inquisitiveness, is his hamartia or fatal flaw that brings about his downfall. Like a magpie cannot resist shiny things, Gollum cannot resist the pull of the Ring and is obsessed and overcome by it. The Ring takes a person’s best quality and subverts it. Even Sam is tempted by the image of Mordor becoming a vast garden of flowers and trees and fruit – but “deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense…the one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm.” 5 Sam was not immune to the power of the Ring, but his servant heart never considered it as something he could own. Smeagol, and to some extent Frodo, came to consider the Ring as his own, and once he had claimed the Ring, the Ring had really claimed him.

Interestingly, when The Two Towers movie came out Andy Serkis, who played Smeagol/Gollum, received a large amount of fan mail from people who struggled with addictions, depression, and schizophrenia. The wretchedness of Gollum fighting himself, fighting against the Ring which had so deep a hold in his life, was extremely relatable to other people who suffered from either mental health issues or substance addictions. The Christian, or more specifically Catholic, way of looking at the Ring is as an embodiment of sin and temptation, and Gollum as the incarnation of Romans 7:23, where Paul says, “I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me” (NIV). Gollum is a prisoner to the power of the Ring and cannot free himself. For a short time, he turns to Frodo as his master instead of the Ring; however, he cannot contain his corrupted inquisitive nature, and ultimately it leads him to his death.

In the end, then, Gollum is both villain and victim. He is not necessarily evil from the start, and is taken advantage of by the Ring. In this way, he is a victim, a slave to the power and allure of the Ring. Bilbo and Frodo both see the wretchedness of Gollum’s state and pity him because of it, and Frodo even tries to help him come back. However, Gollum’s conniving nature cannot be undone, and he nearly succeeds in killing both Frodo and Sam to get to the Ring, as he did to Deagol once. His secret cannot be buried. This is the Gollum that Sam sees clearly, since Sam has a servant heart and fierce loyalty to Frodo that Gollum simply does not have. The best way to view Gollum as Tolkien intended is as Bilbo does in the updated version of The Hobbit: “A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart.” 6 If we see Gollum with a mixture of pity and horror, then we truly understand him.

FOOTNOTES

1 The History of The Hobbit, ed. John D. Rateliff. HarperCollins, London: 2011. p. 155

2 ibid., p. 157

3 ibid., p. 161

4 The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, Peter Gilliver, et al. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2006. p. 191

5 The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien. HarperCollins, London: 2002. p. 911

6 The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. Random House Inc., New York, 1966. p. 93