Gollum said, Sméagol said

Recently I was asked to present a 30 minute talk on the first five chapters of Book 4 of The Lord of the Rings. (When? Later in the summer. Where? That would be telling.) So, last night I was reading "The Taming of Sméagol" and "The Passage of the Marshes" and giving the matter some thought. I've thought about these chapters a lot over the years. In addition to being just so good they are essential for understanding Gollum, since Book IV is the reader's longest exposure to him.

A thought struck me as I was looking at the moment when Frodo starts calling Gollum Sméagol, after which Gollum begins using it to refer to himself. Even Sam uses it a few times. I wondered whether the narrator ever called him Sméagol when telling the story in his own voice. So, not in the speech or thoughts of the characters. Since Frodo is supposed to be the main writer of this story, what he does here might be revealing. 

I first searched for "Sméagol" plain and simple, and discovered 155 instances, not counting appendices, tables of contents, indices, etc. Scanning through these I didn't see a single instance where the narrator calls him Sméagol in direct narration. (The debate Sam overhears between Sméagol and Gollum not only represents Sam's thoughts, but also helps to distinguish for the reader which of them is speaking at a given moment.)

Without going too far down this rabbit hole, I conducted four more searches I thought could be useful. I searched:

• "said Gollum"
• "Gollum said"
• "Sméagol said"
• "said Sméagol"

The first, "said Gollum," appears forty-five times, all in Book IV. There's nothing unusual here. It's exactly what we might expect. 

The second, "Gollum said," is a bit trickier, since the search ignores punctuation. Of six results, only two represent the voice of the narrator.

• 1.i.33: "Even if Gollum said the same once," said Bilbo
• 3.iii.456: "Gollum, gollum!" said Pippin
• 4.ii.624: Gollum said nothing to them -- spoken by the narrator
• 4.iv.652: "Gollum!" said Sam
• 4.ix.717: As Gollum said -- spoken by the narrator
• 5.iv.815: "Gollum," said Pippin

The third, "Sméagol said" is much the same as the second and for the same reason. Of twelve occurrences, all in Book IV, the voice we hear is always Frodo's, Sam's, or Gollum's.

• 4.i.616 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.i.618 "Sméagol," said Gollum
• 4.ii.633 "But Sméagol said..." spoken by Gollum
• 4.iii.637 "Sméagol said so" -- spoken by Gollum
• 4.iv.655 "A present from Sméagol," said Sam
• 4.vi.687 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.vi.687 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.vi.689 "Sméagol!" said Frodo
• 4.viii.715 "Sméagol," said Gollum
• 4.viii.715 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.ix.717 "Sméagol?" said Frodo
• 4.ix.719 "Sméagol!" said Frodo

The fourth and last, "said Sméagol," is found just three times, all on 1.ii.53, when Gandalf is recounting for Frodo the conversation Sméagol had with Déagol just before he murdered him. It worth noting that Gandalf will call Gollum "Sméagol" six more times in this chapter of the The Lord of the Rings (1.ii.53, 56). Everywhere else he calls him Gollum. In this chapter, "The Shadow of the Past," Gandalf is trying to get Frodo to pity Sméagol before Frodo learns that Sméagol is Gollum.

Now I believe that, since the story of The Lord of the Rings claims to be written largely by Frodo, we should take that seriously enough to consider the implications of that assertion. This is not to say that we should think that no changes were made in later years long after Frodo and Sam were gone. But the pervasiveness of "said Gollum" versus the rarity of "said Sméagol," together with the narrator's exclusive use "Gollum" when speaking of this character, makes clear where the narrator stands on him. And this fits perfectly with the fact that Frodo may address him as "Sméagol" but, with only one exception, never speaks of him to others by any name but "Gollum."*

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The sole exception is when Frodo in Ithilien formally pledges to Faramir to take "this Sméagol" under his protection (TT 4.vi.690). The alternative was Gollum's execution.

Once again I am indebted to the indispensable James Tauber and The Digital Tolkien Project for their expertise and labor in the fields of Arda

The Second Tolkien Conference Switzerland -- Announcement

The 2026 Tolkien Conference Switzerland, organized by the University of Zurich, the University of Lausanne, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, will take place on Saturday, March 14, 2026, once again at the University of Zurich as a hybrid conference.

Sign up here

The 2026 topic is: 'Leadership in Tolkien's Middle-earth'. We have already confirmed several international high-profile speakers: 

• Matthew T. Dickerson,  
• Judith Klinger, 
• Christine Lötscher,  
• José María Miranda Boto,  
• Annika Röttinger and 
• Claudio Testi.

As part of the supporting program, the two podcasters from 'Typisch Ravenclaw' will analyze and compare political systems in Middle-earth based on The Economist's Democracy Index in a live podcast (tbc).

 

A Ghostly Link between Tolkien and Charles Williams?

I was reading Charles Williams' 1945 novel All Hallows' Eve yesterday morning. It's a rather spooky story, the first chapter of which is told from the point of view of a ghost, a young woman named Lester Furnival. At first she doesn't realize that she's dead, that she's been killed by a plane that crashed on the streets of London in the last days of the Second World War. She walks the streets of a ghostly version of London. She encounters her husband, who is still alive, and for a moment they are able to see each other. But he vanishes, as if the living are as ghostly to the dead as the dead are to the living. She then meets a friend, also dead, whom she had been on her way to meet when she had been killed. 

In the second chapter, Lester's husband, Richard, is walking through London several months after the war has ended. His wife has been dead and buried for a while now. Then suddenly he sees her.

She was [there]. It was along Holborn that he was walking, for he had half-thought of going that night to look for Simon’s hall or house or whatever it was. And there, on the very pavement [i.e., sidewalk], the other side of a crossing, she stood. He thought for the first second that there was someone with her.... They stood on either side that Holborn by-way, and gazed [across the street at each other].

I then recalled a letter from 3 April 1944 in which Tolkien recounted a visit he made to his hometown of Birmingham and his old school, King Edward's, two days earlier. Unhappy about the damage done to the city by Nazi bombs and (even worse) by the modern architecture of (too many) new buildings, he writes, "I couldn't stand much of that or the ghosts that rose from the pavements" (Letters #58 p. 101). 

Now it's nothing new or surprising that someone who survived the Great War should speak of ghosts, or even write about seeing the ghosts of the dead on the streets of London, and its well-known that Tolkien lost two extremely close friends to the Somme, both of whom he knew from King Edward's School. They were not all, of course. Over 1,400 students and masters served, and over 250 died. Tolkien will have known a good many of these. 

What I found interesting is that on 10 November 1943, Williams had read two chapters of his new novel All Hallows' Eve to Tolkien (Letters #51b p. 89). By the middle of October, according to his biographer, Grevel Lindop, Williams thought he had about twenty-five percent of the novel done (Lindop p. 379). So the first two chapters (out of ten) sounds about right for what Williams read to Tolkien. Years later Tolkien would claim that he had been "in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of All Hallows Eve, read aloud to us [i.e., Tolkien, C. S. Lewis & other Inklings] as it was composed" (Letters #259 p. 489). Tolkien and Lewis both provided feedback, but, Tolkien avers, that Lewis was the greater influence. Still, Tolkien seems to remember himself as quite engaged with the book. 

So, we have Tolkien speaking figuratively about ghosts rising from the pavement in war damaged Birmingham just under six months after Williams had read to him about a ghost appearing on the pavement of war damaged London. This could just be a coincidence, and it probably is, but it might also be a recollection, conscious or not, of some strange and striking writing by Charles Williams.

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Grevel Lindop. Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Oxford University Press 2015.

"I will bear Frodo, though I do not know the way."

So I was reading Tolkien et la mémoire de l'antiquité, or Tolkien and the Memory of Antiquity. It's a recent very interesting book by Isabelle Pantin and Sandra Provini on Tolkien's reception of Greek and Latin sources like Vergil's Aeneid. 

"il s'agisse ... pour Frodo d'accepter le fardeau de l'Anneau plutot que de jouire d'une existence paisable dans le Comte."

"for Frodo ... it is a question of accepting the burden of the Ring rather than enjoying a peaceful existence in the Shire."

The word fardeau means burden. That's what caught my eye. It made me think of a line in the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1. Hamlet asks "who would fardels bear?" That is, "who would bear burdens?" (if they didn't have to).

Me being me, I immediately began reimagining crucial moments in The Lord of the Rings. 

At Rivendell:

"I will bear fardels," [Frodo] said, "though I do not know the way."

And on the slopes of Mt Doom:

"Come, Mr. Frodo!" he cried. ‘I can’t bear fardels for you, but I can bear you."

 

Foalókë & The Digital Tolkien Project -- How it Helps my Work, part 2

At the end of last year I shared a post on how The Digital Tolkien Project helps my work, in particular in studying the story of Túrin as told in The Book of Lost Tales. I now have a little more to show on the same subject, picking up more or less where I left off.

Parallel to this use of Turambar is that of Foalókë, the other name in the title. Tolkien employs Foalókë eighteen times in this story (Tauber, “‘Foalókë’ in The Book of Lost Tales. ”). The first two times come when the narrator is giving the title at the beginning (LT II.70). The last sixteen all occur after Túrin has met the dragon and the dragon has won his hoard (91, 94-99, 103-04, 105-06, 108, 108). Significantly, for according to the “Qenya Lexicon” Foalókë designates a lókë, a dragon, who guards a foa, a hoard (“The Qenya Lexicon” 38).[1] The single use of just lókë, moreover, is found precisely at the narrator’s transition from characterizing lust for gold as a trait common to all dragons to identifying and explaining the actions taken by Glaurung in pursuit of his lust: “Thus it was that this lókë….” (LT II.85). Túrin becomes Turambar and Glaurung becomes Foalókë in the same scene.

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[1] With foalókë Tolkien is likely thinking of OE hordweard, “guardian of the hoard,” a poetical word used several times of dragons in Beowulf (Fulk et al. 2293, 2302, 2554, 2593; “DOE: Hord-Weard”). It’s not impossible that Tolkien intends lókë to remind the reader of the treacherous and deceptive Norse god, Loki. He thus implies to the reader the untrustworthiness of a dragon through the similarity of the sounds.