"Fled from the Company" -- Frodo and Sam not looking back

At the beginning of Book 4, in the chapter called "The Taming of Sméagol," there's a beautifully subtle little touch, a single word that I've read countless times without catching its implications. Since the last time we saw Frodo and Sam is 200 very eventful pages ago, we can easily lose track of how little time has passed since Boromir tried to take the Ring and Frodo and Sam left all their companions behind. The drama of "The Breaking of the Fellowship" no longer stands out quite so prominently. For us. That is, for the readers. It's easy to find ourselves looking ahead, as Frodo and Sam do, as they stare out from the top of the Emyn Muil across the plain beyond which lies Mordor: 

‘What a fix!’ said Sam. ‘That’s the one place in all the lands we’ve ever heard of that we don’t want to see any closer; and that’s the one place we’re trying to get to! And that’s just where we can’t get, nohow.' (TT 4.i.603)

Gollum, too, has been following them, as they know. There may also be orcs about. And the bare hills of the Emyn Muil, which they haven't been able to find their way out of despite several days of trying, leave them feeling terribly exposed. A fix indeed. All of this draws our attention in to where they are and what they are doing. Frodo and Sam are so focused on where they are trying to go that they are no longer entirely sure of how long they've been wandering around the Emyn Muil.  

"It was the third evening since they had fled from the Company, as far as they could tell" (TT 4.i.603).

That word, fled, compresses all the drama of "The Breaking of the Fellowship"--Frodo's indecision, Boromir's attempt to compel Frodo to give him the Ring, Frodo's escape from him, his even more dangerous brush with the Eye of Sauron, the panic of the Company, the attack of the orcs--all this and more that Frodo and Sam don't know about. Of Boromir's recovery, his courageous attempt to save Merry and Pippin, and his death, they are entirely ignorant. For all they know, Boromir might be hunting them as well.

Let's look back, though, for just a moment at what Frodo had fled from:

Frodo rose to his feet. A great weariness was on him, but his will was firm and his heart lighter. He spoke aloud to himself. "I will do now what I must," he said. "This at least is plain: the evil of the Ring is already at work even in the Company, and the Ring must leave them before it does more harm. I will go alone. Some I cannot trust, and those I can trust are too dear to me: poor old Sam, and Merry and Pippin. Strider, too: his heart yearns for Minas Tirith, and he will be needed there, now Boromir has fallen into evil. I will go alone. At once."

(FR 2.x.401)

These are Frodo's thoughts as he thinks through the choice he must make. The Ring is not just a danger to him, but to his companions. We can even, I believe, see the Ring at work on him. He says "some I cannot trust." If he had said "one I cannot trust," it would have been perfectly clear whom he meant. But "some" is more than "one." Does he not trust Legolas and Gimli? They are the only members of the Company he does not name. "None" or "almost none" would have been more accurate and more honest. And it's the Company he is said to have "fled," not simply Boromir (or even "some" of his companions), which again would have been completely understandable. 

Not also that it could have said "left the Company," "(de)parted from the Company," "separated from the Company," "exited the Company," "abandoned the Company," or many other words with connotations that have nothing to do with escape. But the text doesn't choose a different word. No. It chooses fled.

Quite a fix indeed.

 

As if the Story of Túrin Weren't Already Tragic Enough

While analyzing the death scenes of Nienor Níniel and Túrin in the chapter "Turambar and the Foalókë" in The Book of Lost Tales, I noticed that parts of the last words of each character seemed to be iambic verse. 

Before leaping to her death in a waterfall, Níniel addresses the river with a statement that begins and ends with the same sentence: "O waters of the forest whither do ye go?" I believe the text in between also scans as iambic with slight variations like an extra unstressed syllable or a very brief switch to trochees. 

For reference, an iamb or an iambic foot is two syllables long, the first unstressed, the second stressed. In the following example, I have indicated the stressed syllable with an acute accent:

Tomórrow ánd tomórrow ánd tomórrow

A trochee or a trochaic foot, which we'll also be looking at today, is the opposite of an iamb, a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Trochees go fast. The word trochee derives from the Greek verb τρέχω, meaning run. Iambs walk; trochees run. Here's another example from Macbeth, but this time trochees:

Doúble, doúble toíl, and troúble

Fíre búrn and caúldron búbble

The prose text "Turambar and the Foalókë" reads :

“O waters of the forest whither do ye go? Wilt thou take Nienóri, Nienóri daughter of Úrin, child of woe? O ye white foams, would that ye might lave me clean—but deep, deep must be the waters that would wash my memory of this nameless curse. O bear me hence, far far away, where are the waters of the unremembering sea. O waters of the forest whither do ye go?” (LT II.109) 

Recast as verse, it might read: 

"O waters of the forest whither do ye go?
Wilt thou take Nienóri, Nienóri, daughter
of Úrin, child of woe? O ye white foams,
would that ye might lave me clean—but deep, deep must be
the waters that would wash my memory of this (5)
nameless curse. O bear me hence, far far away,
where are the waters of the unrememb'ring sea.
O waters of the forest whither do ye go?”

To begin with, I thought it was just the opening sentence, but the repetition of the same phrase in the closing sentence made me wonder about the words in between. After studying the scansion for a while I noticed that structuring it with six beats per line yielded eight full lines of what we might call iambic hexameter. Now in English we are far more used to iambic pentameter, which is thought to best reproduce the rhythm of the spoken language. The ancient Greeks, however, felt that what they called iambic trimeter accomplished this end. And? So? We count iambic feet differently than the Greeks did. For us it's one iamb per foot, and a line of verse composed of five iambs is iambic pentameter. The Greeks thought of an iambic foot as having two iambs. So a line of Greek iambic trimeter has the same number of beats as a line of English iambic hexameter. 

Iambic trimeter, as Tolkien well knew, is the standard form of verse for dialogue in Greek Tragedy. Since schoolboys were often required to translate English poetry into Greek or Latin verse, Tolkien had very likely translated lines of Shakespeare into Greek and set them in iambic trimeter. The story of Túrin and his family owes much to the story of Oedipus and his family. Tolkien said so himself, and his opinion of Greek Tragedy was clearly quite high (Letters² #131 p. 210; #156 p. 297). In this same section of "Turambar and the Foalókë" the character Tamar (Brandir) reproaches Túrin with the suicide of Nienor Níniel, saying that she died "blind with horror and with woe, desiring never to see thee again" (LT II.111). This very Sophoclean line recalls Oedipus who blinded himself so he would not have to see his children who were also his siblings in this world, or his wife who was also his mother in the next. 

Just because I can make the scansion work does not completely persuade me, however. Certain parts work better than others. What most inclines me to think that Tolkien was consciously mimicking Greek Tragic Trimeters in Nienor Níniel's final words is that Túrin's final words seem to be doing the same thing. First the prose: 

“Thee only have I now—slay me therefore and be swift, for life is a curse, and all my days are creeping foul, and all my deeds are vile, and all I love is dead."

The last twelve beats of this sentence can easily be seen as two lines of iambic trimeter:

"life ís a cúrse, and áll my dáys are creéping foúl,
and áll my deéds are víle, and áll I lóve is deád."

It does not surprise me in the least to think that Tolkien embraced this tragic form to enhance the last words of his most tragic characters. If he can draw inspiration from the tragedy of Oedipus Tyrannos, he can also draw inspiration from one of its most characteristic forms of verse.

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."*

________________________________

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).