In Dwimordene, In Lórien (TT 3.vi.514)

'Then it is true, as Éomer reported, that you are in league with the Sorceress of the Golden Wood?' said Wormtongue. 'It is not to be wondered at: webs of deceit were ever woven in Dwimordene.' 

Gimli strode a pace forward, but felt suddenly the hand of Gandalf clutch him by the shoulder, and he halted, standing stiff as stone. 

     In Dwimordene, in Lórien
     Seldom have walked the feet of Men,
     Few mortal eyes have seen the light
     That lies there ever, long and bright.
     Galadriel! Galadriel!
     Clear is the water of your well;
     White is the star in your white hand;
     Unmarred, unstained is leaf and land
     In Dwimordene, in Lórien
     More fair than thoughts of Mortal Men.

Thus Gandalf softly sang....

(TT 3.vi.514)

This post had its start in a conversation with some friends, one of whom, +simon cook, wondered if Gandalf's use of the word 'Dwimordene' indicated that these verses might be of Rohirric origin. It is an excellent question, since Dwimordene is clearly what the Rohirrim call Lothlórien. The context suggests it, since it is Wormtongue who first uses the word, and Wormtongue's suspicions of Dwimordene echo Éomer's (TT 3.ii.432). (We take it as axiomatic, that if Wormtongue and Éomer agree on something, it must be a true reflection of Rohan.) The Old English etymology of the word indicates it. Dwimordene is the 'valley' (dene) of  'illusion, delusion, apparition; phantom; error, fallācia, phantasms' (dwimor), or, 'phantom vale' as glossed in the index of Unfinished Tales. And, as +Benita Prins rightly pointed out, Eorl himself used this very word to describe Lothlórien (UT 298, 307). That Eorl did so five hundred years earlier not only tells us that he and his people had this view of the Golden Wood even from afar, but it also suggests that perhaps the name Dwimordene had been handed down from their ancestors who dwelt much closer to Lothlórien before migrating into the North (RK App A 1063-64).

The poem itself, however, argues against an origin in Rohan, except in the sense that, as I think, Gandalf is composing it there ex tempore in answer to Wormtongue's sneering hostility. In the first place the poem is in iambic tetrameter and rhymes (AA BB CC DD EE AA), whereas every other example of Rohirric verse is alliterative (TT 3.vi.508; RK 5.iii.803; v.838; vi.843-44, 847, 849; 6.vi.976).  The structure and substance of the poem also emphasize not only that few men have ever been there, not only that few have ever seen the light of Galadriel, who is the center of the poem, but also that Mortal Men could not even imagine the beauty of Lórien and its Lady. It is quite simply beyond them.

To call Lothlórien Dwimordene is, therefore, a mark of ignorance, and Gandalf weaves in other mysterious details that underscore such ignorance. The 'star' refers to Galadriel's ring, but it is a reference detectable by only a few, just as Sam could only see 'a star through [her] fingers' (FR 2.vii.366).  '[U]nmarred, unstained' both recall an older age of the world, a time that Galadriel preserves in Lothlórien (FR 2.vi.347, 350-51, 352; vii.365; viii.377; ix.388-89). Finally Gandalf's apostrophe to Galadriel evokes Beren's 'Tinúviel! Tinúviel!' in The Lay of Leithian (FR 1.xi.192), creating a whole metrically complete line from the repetition of a single name used in the same way syntactically; and the last line also alludes to Lúthien and the lay with its echo of 'more fair than mortal tongue can tell' (Silm. 178).  Gandalf's response to Wormtongue, therefore, is, quite literally, a poetry slam, in which he uses Wormtongue's insult to point out how little he knows, how little he can imagine, and, as if that weren't enough, he conjures the beauty, power, and poetry of Galadriel through allusions that none of the Rohirrim could possibly understand.

Nor is Dwimordene the only word in which the Rohirrim use the root 'dwimor'. We encounter it again in 'the black Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain, in which was the Door of the Dead' (RK 5.ii.785)'. Every reader will recall also Éowyn's defiance of the Witch-king, 'Begone, foul dwimmerlaik' (RK 5.vi.841), a word Tolkien himself glosses (RK 1151) as meaning: 'work of necromancy, spectre', and which derives from the Middle English dweomerlac, that is, 'magic art, witchcraft'. Éomer, finally, calls Saruman 'a wizard both cunning and dwimmer-crafty, having many guises' (TT 3.ii.437), which comes from Middle English dweomercræft, 'witchcraft' or 'sorcery'. Tolkien's orthography here is curious. The latter two of these words clearly descend from Middle English, and first two from Old English. This makes me wonder if dwimmerlaik and dwimmer-crafty are meant to reflect 'modern' coinages, while Dwimordene and Dwimorberg come from an older form of the language of the Rohirrim. No one would have been more aware than Tolkien that in five hundred years the tongue must have changed and developed new words with altered spellings.

So twice now we have seen the suggestion that 'Dwimordene' expresses an attitude towards the uncanny nature of Lothlórien that has existed over quite a long time, for at least the five hundred years since Eorl the Young led the Éothéod out of the North to the Field of Celebrant. The relevant passage in Unfinished Tales is also revealing:

For when at last the host drew near to Dol Guldur, Eorl turned away westward for fear of the dark shadow and cloud that flowed out from it, and then he rode on within sight of the Anduin. Many of the riders turned their eyes thither, half in fear and half in hope to glimpse from afar the shimmer of the Dwimordene, the perilous land that in legends of their people was said to shine like gold in the springtime.

(UT 298)

While Dol Guldur and the Dwimordene each stir up fear in the riders, they turn away from the darkness of the one and towards the shimmer of the other in hope. Their hope is equal to their fear. This suggests, that like Sam Gamgee centuries later, these mortals see both similarities and differences in 'elf magic' and 'the devices of the enemy' (FR 2.vii.362).  Dwimmerlaik and dwimmer-crafty exist along the same continuum of meaning. Yet by the end of the Third Age the eyes of Rohan had ceased to look towards Lórien with hope, and, as it seems, dwimor/dwimmer no longer admitted any positive connotations. The Rohirrim of these years are more like most of Sam Gamgee's fellow hobbits, who through ignorance and insularity had grown suspicious and fearful of the Elves. Just as the riders of Eorl had turned their eyes towards the Elves in hope against the darkness, the hobbits -- and the Eorlingas -- of Sam's day had turned theirs away:

And as the days of the Shire lengthened they spoke less and less with the Elves, and grew afraid of them, and distrustful of those that had dealings with them; and the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death, and they turned their faces away from the hills in the west.

(FR Pr. 7)

Finally, note also that it was the Dwimordene, not a Dwimordene. That is, it was a definite and famous place, as its establishment in 'the legends of their people' indicates. And being 'perilous' is a defining attribute of Faërie throughout Tolkien. Unlike the peril of Dol Guldur, however, it is a peril that visitors bring with them.

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Works Consulted

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'Radagast The Bird-Tamer!' and the Characterization of Saruman (FR 2.ii.238-39)

Radagast's Cunning © Lucas Graciano 

At the Council of Elrond Gandalf describes Radagast as 'a master of shapes and changes of hue; and he has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends' (FR 2.ii.257), and then says that he had asked him to tell 'all the beasts and birds that are [his] friends' to bring word of the Nine to Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard (2.ii.257).  Gandalf then tells of Saruman's reaction to the mention of Radagast:

'Radagast the Brown!' laughed Saruman, and he no longer concealed his scorn. 'Radagast the Bird-tamer! Radagast the Simple! Radagast the Fool! Yet he had just the wit to play the part that I set him. For you have come, and that was all the purpose of my message. And here you will stay, Gandalf the Grey, and rest from journeys. For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!'

...

'I liked white better,' I said.

(2.ii.238-39)

Note the chiastic word order of the repeated Radagasts and Sarumans. Saruman begins with Radagast's color and ends with his own; ends with Radagast's simplicity and foolishness and begins with his own wisdom; and in the middle, further accentuated by capital letters and hyphenated compound words, are the characteristics on which he heaps the greatest scorn and in which he takes the greatest pride: Bird-tamer and Ring-maker. Chiasmus is of course an ancient rhetorical device, long a part of the arts of persuasion for which Saruman was justly renowned (TT 3.ix.567). Yet Gandalf wryly punctures all his rhetoric with a few pointed words.

The subtlest and best touch of all, however, is 'Bird-tamer' itself, which reveals far more about Saruman than Radagast. For Saruman can only see Radagast's relationship with the birds as one of power and mastery. In Saruman's eyes he has tamed rather than befriended them.  Seeing no possibility but power, he parallels and contrasts Radagast's Bird-taming with his own Ring-making. Thus his own rhetoric betrays him, revealing that mastery, not friendship, now characterize him and his relations with others. 

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Galadriel and the Fall of Gandalf

It's that woman again

My last post looked at Celeborn's famously poor showing as the wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth. Here I want to take a quick look at Galadriel in the same scene.

When all the guests were seated before his chair the Lord looked at them again. 'Here there are eight,' he said. 'Nine were to set out: so said the messages. But maybe there has been some change of counsel that we have not heard. Elrond is far away, and darkness gathers between us, and all this year the shadows have grown longer.'

'Nay, there was no change of counsel,' said the Lady Galadriel speaking for the first time. Her voice was clear and musical, but deeper than woman's wont. 'Gandalf the Grey set out with the Company, but he did not pass the borders of this land. Now tell us where he is; for I much desired to speak with him again. But I cannot see him from afar, unless he comes within the fences of Lothlorien: a grey mist is about him, and the ways of his feet and of his mind are hidden from me.'

'Alas!' said Aragorn. 'Gandalf the Grey fell into shadow. He remained in Moria and did not escape.'

(FR 2.vii.355)

From the very first we can see that she perceives more than he does, not in the sense that she may be wiser or more intelligent than he is, but the juxtaposition of his words and hers suggests that her perceptions take in a wider world, at least as far as Gandalf is concerned. Celeborn and Galadriel do not share altogether the same frame of reference. She speaks of Gandalf as if she can still somehow sense him. She does not know where he is, or what he is thinking, but he is still out there somewhere. 

That Gandalf is 'hidden' in 'a grey mist' is an enticing detail, since when Frodo looks into Galadriel's mirror later in this same chapter, he twice sees a mist: first one that clears to reveal to him a vision of the Sea (FR 2.vii.364), which hobbits, mistakenly, regard as 'a token of death' (FR Pr. 7); and then he sees a 'small ship, twinkling with lights' 'pass away' into 'a grey mist' (FR 2.vii.364). That ship of course is the same one Frodo dreams (or has a vision) of in Fog on the Barrow-Downs (FR 1.viii.135), and upon which he sails into the West in The Grey Havens (RK 6.ix.1030). And in both of these passages the farthest shore is at first obscured by 'a grey rain-curtain'. 

What comes next in this scene is also intriguing. For Galadriel says not a word in response to Aragorn's euphemistic announcement of Gandalf's death. In fact she says nothing at all until he tells the tale up to their arrival at the bridge and the coming of the Balrog. When she does speak, it is to pull Celeborn back from his hasty remarks, to reaffirm that none of Gandalf's deeds were 'needless', and to greet with 'love and understanding' the member of the Company who has in fact suffered the most, Gimli, who has endured the loss of Balin and the dwarves of Moria, has seen his people's worst nightmare drag Gandalf into the abyss, and has so far met a rather hostile reception in Lothlórien (FR 2.vii.356). Is it an accident that she proceeds immediately from this to a statement that directly touches upon her wider perceptions and then to a demonstration of them?

'But even now there is hope left. I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be. But this I will say to you: your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true.' 

And with that word she held them with her eyes, and in silence looked searchingly at each of them in turn. None save Legolas and Aragorn could long endure her glance. Sam quickly blushed and hung his head. 

At length the Lady Galadriel released them from her eyes, and she smiled. 'Do not let your hearts be troubled,' she said. 'Tonight you shall sleep in peace.' Then they sighed and felt suddenly weary, as those who have been questioned long and deeply, though no words had been spoken openly.

(FR 2.vii.357, emphasis mine)

Her statement that she can 'avail' only through her knowledge of the past, the present, and 'in part' the future gives an authority none question to what she says about the hope and the precariousness of their quest. But note also that Galadriel does not say that she knows what may, or what might, or even what will be. She states that she knows some of what shall be. Shall is at least emphatic, and at most denotes necessity. Thus Galadriel here speaks not of possibilities, but of certainties. Yet we can also see her phrase 'in part' reflected in her later remarks about what one may see of the future in her Mirror:

'For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell.'

(2.vii.362)

'Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them.'

(2.vii.363)

this is beginning to look like an obsession

But for all the caution with which she warns against the indeterminacy of a future which is always in motion, there is something of which she is quite sure, as her use of shall attests. What can Galadriel mean? I believe we need to see her hint that she still perceives Gandalf in context with Gwaihir's statement to Gandalf that Galadriel had sent him looking for him (TT 3.v.502), which in turn leads to a question: why send an eagle to look for someone who had fallen to his death in a profound abyss beneath a mountain range? I would suggest that the future which Galadriel knew in part was Gandalf's death at the hands of the Balrog atop Zirakzigil and his return as Gandalf the White. (Recall that Frodo also sees Gandalf the White without realizing it in the Mirror -- 2.vii.363-64). It was only when Aragorn brought word of his fall at the bridge that she became certain, and stepped in to help keep the Company from straying too far before he returned. A look at the chronology presented in The Tale of Years is revealing here.

January

15. The Bridge of Khazad-dûm, and fall of Gandalf. The Company reaches Nimrodel             late at night.

17. The Company comes to Caras Galadhon at evening.

23. Gandalf pursues the Balrog to the peak of Zirak-zigil.

25. He casts down the Balrog, and passes away. His body lies on the peak.

February

15.* The Mirror of Galadriel. Gandalf returns to life, and lies in a trance.

16. Farewell to Lórien. Gollum in hiding on the west bank observes the departure.

17. Gwaihir bears Gandalf to Lórien.

(RK App. B 1092)

The first thing we may notice is that Galadriel's initial perception that Gandalf was 'hidden' was more accurate than what the Company had actually seen with their own eyes. She learned of his fall when she met the Company on 17 January, but Gandalf did not die until the 25^th. It also seems hardly coincidental that the day on which he returned to life is also the day on which Galadriel brought Frodo and Sam to the Mirror and told them it is time for the Company to move on (FR 2.vii.366).* The facts of the story almost invite us to conclude that Galadriel kept the Company in Lothlórien, 'in the ageless time of that land where days bring healing and not decay' (TT 3.v.503), until Gandalf revived; only then did she send them on their way, rested and recovered from the shock of the loss they thought they had suffered, and tested in ways that prepared them all, even perhaps Boromir**, to be the right people in the right place at the right time.

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*Hammond and Scull (2005) 718, point out that editions prior to 2005 wrongly dated the Mirror episode to 14 February, which does not match the events as described in the text. The episode takes place 'one evening' (2.vii.360), and Galadriel tells Frodo and Sam the Company must depart 'in the morning' (366). Directly after she says this, at the beginning of the next chapter, we read 'That night the Company was again summoned to the chamber of Celeborn' (2.viii.367). The demonstrative that and the adverb again can together refer only to the same evening as in The Mirror of Galadriel. Since the morning on which the Company departs is 16 February, and there is no evidence for an extra day, 15, not 14, February must be the correct date. This has no effect on my argument, but readers with an edition from before 2005 might note a discrepancy that needs to be explained.

**This may seem surprising, but it may be that by confronting Boromir with the temptation he felt to take and use the Ring Galadriel actually saved him. The self-knowledge she gave him created a conflict within him that came to a head on the slopes of Amon Hen. Without that knowledge or that conflict, he could never have pulled himself back and repented for his failed attempt to take the Ring from Frodo. His successful repentance forms an interesting counterpoint to Gollum's failed repentance. So I guess I've just thought up another article. You know, I'm convinced that at the end of one of these veins of mithril is a Balrog. 

Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (V)

In the first study of this series I proposed considering only the references to Gollum that we find in The Lord of the Rings proper, that is, excluding not only The Hobbit but also the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. My reasons for doing so are quite simple. First, there can be no certainty that a first time reader of The Lord of the Rings will have already read The Hobbit or even the Prologue. Second, Tolkien rewrote The Hobbit to suit the darker and more tormented creature into which Gollum had evolved in The Lord of the Rings. Thus, the portrayal of Gollum in this work has to stand or fall on its own, however much consideration of other material might enhance our understanding of it.  Having now completed our analysis of how Tolkien laid the groundwork for Gollum's arrival in the Tale itself, we can in all fairness explore the larger context and its relationship to The Lord of the Rings. 

Now Tolkien's original public, in 1954 and 1955, will have included many who knew only the first edition of The Hobbit (1937), as well as some who knew only the second (1951); and by discussing both versions of Bilbo's story the Prologue very clearly addresses both sets of these readers. As a result, what is a straightforward narrative of how Bilbo came by the Ring in each edition, becomes a more complex tale of lies and silent dishonesty, theft and hatred, near murder and sudden pity, which reveals more about the corruption worked by the Ring than either edition does if taken alone.

As Tolkien wrote with silken understatement on his proposed revisions in 1947, the year he submitted them to Allen and Unwin, '[...] if The Hobbit ran so the Sequel would be a little easier to <conduct> as a narrative (in Ch, II [i.e., The Shadow of the Past]), though not necessarily "truer".' (Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, 732). 'Not necessarily "truer" ' is a fascinating comment, which suggests that some doubt may attach even to the second version. It brings to mind how Bilbo is still attempting to justify how he got the Ring many years after the wizard had already 'badgered' him into telling 'the truth' (FR 1.i.33); and Gandalf called the lies Bilbo and Gollum told about how they came by the Ring 'too much alike for comfort' (1.ii.48). If, as Gandalf also says, 'Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words' (1.ii.56), what does that mean for Bilbo, whom we know to be a liar as well? It is quite possible that Bilbo never told the whole truth until the Council of Elrond, years after he had let the Ring pass to Frodo and had been bitterly confronted with the spiritual and moral effect it was having on him. For only then can he say that he 'understand[s] now' and ask forgiveness for his lies (2.i.232; ii.249).

However that may be, the simultaneous existence of two versions -- the one a lie, the other not necessarily truer -- argues that simple 'retcon' was not the point. Had it been so, we would expect the second version to suppress and supersede the first entirely. How do these two texts allow us to construe Gollum, and Bilbo, too, for, as we have seen here, it is from his behavior in A Long-expected Party that we glean our first impressions of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings? Since the 1937 Hobbit has long been out of print and the oft announced facsimile has not yet appeared, direct comparison of the two texts of Riddles in the Dark is not as easy as one could wish. We are not without resources, however. John Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit and Douglas Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit are works of the first importance. Also of great worth is Bonniejean Christensen's Gollum's Character Transformation in The Hobbit, the first work I know of to study the texts side by side. I would also gratefully draw the reader's eye to the parallel presentation of both versions in their entirety found here.  Being able to read each one from start to finish without the need for notes or substitutions, and then to compare them directly, is an invaluable tool.

With the exception of a dozen or so words, the 1937 and the 1951 texts of Riddles in the Dark are identical for almost the first 3,500 words. Before examining the differences, which quite naturally garner most of the attention, I'd like to look first at the words that are the same, because in both cases they establish a foundation for the rest of the action, and because Tolkien clearly decided there was no need to change them. The first 3,500 words take the story to the point where Gollum shrieks his last wrong answer -- 'String, or nothing!' -- and Bilbo, sword in hand, puts his back to the wall.  What can we see then in this section?

Bilbo spares hardly a thought for the ring he finds in the darkness -- 'a turning point in his career, but he didn't know it [....] it did not seem of any particular use at the moment' -- because he is too given over to the misery of being lost and cut off from his friends. His mind turns to the idea of frying bacon and eggs at home, a comforting thought if his hunger had not made him 'miserabler'. Next the hope of homely solace his pipe promises is 'shattered' by a lack of matches, leaving him 'crushed'. So though his thought seeks back beyond the moment for comfort, it fails to find any in the usual places. Yet his search is not wholly vain. For he finds his 'sword' from the storied elven city of Gondolin, so small that he had forgotten he had it, but its legendary connections and his sudden grasp of its usefulness against goblins comfort him. They enable him to go on. In the sword Bilbo 'comes upon' another ancient artifact, endowed with a certain power, which he has discovered only belatedly and which he had forgotten he possessed, and it helps him to continue on his journey. The same will be true of the ring. Most importantly at this moment, however, is that Bilbo has reached beyond the normal hobbitish comforts of food and pipe-weed to take hold of a wider and deeper world, one in which he 'explore[s ...] caves, and wear[s] a sword instead of a walking-stick' just as he had fancied he might do while still in Bag End (Hobbit 24).^[1] 'Go forward? Only thing to do. On we go.' And now that Bilbo has in this way recovered from his initial desperation, and by means of the sword and its associations found the courage to move forward, his native hobbit talents -- resilience, stealthiness, sense of direction underground -- and his native hobbit fund of 'wisdom and wise sayings' come to the fore.  A turning point indeed.

Advancing through the darkness steadily, though not without fear of 'goblins or half-imagined things', Bilbo is brought to a halt by a lake that blocks his path. We are told that the water may be home to 'nasty, slimy things with big bulging eyes [...] strange things' and 'other things more slimy than fish' and in the tunnels are still 'other things', which had been there before the goblins and still lived in 'odd corners, slinking and nosing about' (emphases mine). By this lake beneath the mountains, in this darkness full of things, lives Gollum, 'darker than the darkness', who catches and eats both fish and goblin, 'which he thought good, when he could get it'. His origins are a mystery, and even the goblins keep away from his lake, 'for they had a feeling that something unpleasant was lurking down there' (emphasis mine).

Thus, as we see later in The Lord of the Rings, the reader is prepared for Gollum's entrance. For he is both like and unlike those things in the lake and the tunnels; he preys on the blind fish whom he can see with his 'pale lamp-like eyes'; and though he does not seem to be one of the original residents of the tunnels, he, too, slinks and noses about the odd corners of the darkness. But he also practices something that is not quite cannibalism, but also not quite not, on the goblins whom he 'throttles from behind'.  Mysterious, monstrous, and murderous describe him, but don't disclose precisely what he is.

Yet we also may see similarities to Bilbo: in the darkness of the tunnels Gollum retains his sense of direction, and he can move stealthily.  As with Bilbo his eating habits and opinions on food also receive emphasis. These similarities furnish a common stage upon which the riddles and the well-known, supposedly inviolable, rules of the ancient Riddle Game play themselves out. Together with the memories of sunlight on daisies and of his grandmother when they lived 'in a hole in a bank by a river' (Hobbit 85-86) -- which suggest that Gollum was not always darker than darkness and a devourer of squeaking baby goblins (92, 95) -- these similarities establish a link not just between Gollum and Bilbo, but between Gollum and, as it were, humanity. Gollum may be depraved and monstrous, but he is not a monster per se, a creature of a different order like trolls or goblins, Mirkwood spiders or dragons. He was not born this way:

'Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciousss. It likes riddles, praps it does, does it?' He was anxious to appear friendly, at any rate for the moment, and until he found out more about the sword and the hobbit, whether he was quite alone really, whether he was good to eat, and whether Gollum was really hungry. Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains. 

'Very well, said Bilbo, who was anxious to agree, until he found out more about the creature, whether he was quite alone, whether he was fierce or hungry, and whether he was a friend of the goblins. 

"You ask first," he said, because he had not had time to think of a riddle. 

So Gollum hissed: 

    What has roots as nobody sees,
    Is taller than trees,
       Up, up it goes,
       And yet never grows? 

'Easy!' said Bilbo. 'Mountain, I suppose.' 

'Does it guess easy? It must have a competition with us, my preciouss! If precious asks, and it doesn't answer, we eats it, my preciousss. If it asks us, and we doesn't answer, [...]'

(Hobbit 84)

Sharing the riddles, they have some kind of cultural heritage in common. So again Gollum is not wholly alien. More than that -- whatever Tolkien may have envisioned Gollum to be when first writing the story -- he also comes of a people who dwelt in holes. Not only are Bilbo and Gollum both playing for time here, but the close parallelism of the sentences describing their thinking -- 'anxious...until...whether...whether...whether' -- reinforces how alike they are. Yet these similarities open a dangerous door, when the most chilling difference between them turns their 'chat' into a 'competition' in which Bilbo's life is the stake.

This brings us to the first divergence in the texts, which begins directly after 'If it asks us, and we doesn't answer':

'we gives it a present, gollum.' (1937) 

or

'then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!' (1951)

To begin with, in both of these statements there is a severe dissonance between the two parts of the wager: Bilbo is supper, or gets a present; Bilbo is supper, or gets shown out. Having introduced us to Gollum by first indicating his strangeness and monstrosity, and by then tempering that impression through the suggestion that he and Bilbo are not so different after all, Tolkien now brings that strangeness and monstrosity rushing back again with the shockingly unequal terms of the contest. For, while being eaten is clearly not a good result for Bilbo, not getting to eat him is scarcely an equivalent evil for Gollum. There are, as it were, other fish in the sea.

Then, too, there is the absurdity of his sincere offer of a present and, though Bilbo wins the contest in a questionable fashion, Gollum's distress at being unable to find it and his many apologies as he shows Bilbo the way out instead. As John Rateliff has pointed out, in the 1937 Hobbit Gollum is more honorable than Bilbo (Rateliff, 166-67). And it seems clear that Bilbo felt that even a ghastly cannibalistic creature like Gollum could be trusted to abide by the rules of the Riddle Game. Else Bilbo would not have begun 'to wonder what Gollum's present would be like' when it appeared he was about to lose. It isn't until Gollum begins to paw at him and Bilbo asks his unexpected and unfair final question -- 'What have I got in my pocket?' -- that Bilbo becomes unsure of 'how the game was going to end, whether Gollum guessed right or not' (89-90). And even then, with his back to the wall and his sword out, Bilbo asks 'What about the present?', which he felt that he had won 'pretty fairly' and had a right to by the time honored children's law of 'finding's keeping'. Yet the narrator is dismissive of Bilbo's fears, and asserts that even for creatures like Gollum the rules of the Riddle Game are inviolable.^[2] 

As frightening and dangerous as Gollum is in the 1937 Hobbit, his firmly abiding by the rules of the game which he himself initiated (no doubt thinking he would win) renders him harmless in this instance and almost admirable (but not quite entirely so since he considers cheating). Indeed Bilbo, having realized that he already possessed the present Gollum had meant to give him, prevaricates and manipulates his dismayed competitor: 

'The ring would have been mine now, if you had found it; so you would have lost it anyway. And I will let you off on one condition.' 

'Yes, what iss it? What does it wish us to do, my precious?'  

'Help me get out of these places.' 

Now Gollum had to agree to this, if he was not to cheat. He still very much wanted just to try what the stranger tasted like; but now he had to give up all idea of it. Still, there was the little sword; and the stranger was wide awake and on the look out, not unsuspecting as Gollum liked to have things which he attacked. So perhaps it was best after all. 

Now we should not be too hard on Bilbo here. That would be missing the point about Gollum as well as Bilbo. For using cunning and lies to escape from a dangerous creature is as old as heroic tales themselves. It is a mark of the hero's intellectual prowess. We need only cite the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, the cyclops, in Book Nine of The Odyssey. There Odysseus is trapped underground with a cannibalistic adversary, as remarkable for his one eye as Gollum is for his two. Odysseus uses his wits to save himself along with many of his men, though he also commits the nearly disastrous mistake of telling the creature his true name. (There's an interesting parallel to explore here, if someone else hasn't already done so.) Bilbo is clever enough to find a way to use the rules of the game against Gollum, so that Gollum feels he has no choice but to fulfill his part of the bargain: " 'Must we give it the thing, preciouss? Yess, we must! We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised.' "  To be sure, he remains aware of Bilbo's sword, but that seems more to confirm him in the decision he's has already made than to decide him.

Still the last we see of Gollum, and the last any public reader ever expected to see before 1954, is him fulfilling the obligation imposed on him by the terms of the contest he had proposed.  So he is a strange creature, frightening, dangerous, capable of monstrous acts to satisfy his hunger, but not so different from hobbits that he can't be dealt with. Unlike the Gollum we meet later in The Lord of the Rings, who haunts Frodo's tracks from Moria onward and who cannot be gotten rid of, this Gollum goes away once he has lived up to his promise. To have met him makes for a good story, which is precisely what Bilbo makes of it.

The 1951 version, with which we are all familiar, tells another story. How different from the positive, near sprightly 'We gives it a present!' is the concessive, almost disappointed 'then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!' Not very convincing. Every reference to the 'present' disappears. Bilbo's curiosity about what kind of present it would be becomes a 'hope that the wretch would not be able to answer'. When Gollum seems about to be stumped by the egg riddle, Bilbo now pushes him about his 'guess' instead of his 'present'. And when Gollum finally loses the match, Bilbo is much more interested in what he has won, and more pushy about getting it, whereas in 1937 it had been more a matter of principle:

(1937) 'What about the present?' asked Bilbo, not that he cared very much, still he felt that he had won it, pretty fairly, and in very difficult circumstances too. 

(1951) 'Well?' he said. 'What about your promise? I want to go. You must show me the way.'

By removing the ring as a present one of the most intriguing, and touching, links between Bilbo and Gollum in the 1937 Hobbit vanishes without a trace: that Gollum had received as a birthday present the very ring he meant to give Bilbo as a present for winning their contest; and Gollum, dismayed that he cannot find it, splutters profuse apologies. There's a charm in this, that he was going to pass on the present that he had received. Nor does the 1937 text cast the least doubt cast upon Gollum's claim that it was his birthday present. 

But from Gandalf we know that Gollum's story was a lie, even if he had all but convinced himself of its truth -- he was still telling the tale over 75 years later -- and only he could have told Bilbo (FR 1.ii.48, 56). So the 'birthday present' part of the story is no invention of Bilbo's. What is more, in the 1951 version the introduction of the ring as belonging to Gollum, and his assertion that it was his birthday present serves to darken the narrative. Whereas in the 1937 Gollum went to fetch his 'birthday present' to give it to Bilbo, in the 1951 he goes off to get it so he can kill and eat Bilbo. That is what his 'birthday present' is good for -- just ask the 'small goblin-imp' he had dined on earlier that day -- and that is his sole motive for fetching it. So what had supplied a charming touch in the first edition is turned on its head in the second to illustrate Gollum's treachery and ghoulish appetites. The transformation is so complete in fact that we might well wonder if Tolkien had this in mind when he said the second version was not necessarily truer.

Indeed the whole new section introduced in the 1951 text -- from Bilbo's demand that Gollum fulfill his promise to Gollum's discovery that his ring was lost -- does not just explain Gollum's motives and provide details about his use of the ring and its effects on him. It also contains information that Bilbo could not have known (what Gollum was thinking) at the time, or at any time before Gandalf learned them from Gollum decades later (how Gollum handled the ring), or finally before Gandalf had disclosed to him that this ring was connected to Sauron ('the Master who ruled them all'). Just as Gandalf had detected the falsity of Bilbo's initial story that he had won the ring because it was too much like Gollum's tale that it had been a present -- 'The lies were too much alike for comfort' (FR 1.ii.48) -- so we, too, may come to believe that Bilbo's new version is too much like the version Gandalf tells Frodo decades later. It is also true, however, that the claim that Gollum meant to cheat all along seems to have existed before Gandalf spoke to Frodo about it, since Frodo himself advances that claim (FR 1.ii.54).

This argues the existence of three and perhaps four versions of the story: the first coming down to us in the 1937, which represents what Bilbo 'told the dwarves and put in his book'; the second being that which he told Gandalf and then Frodo (FR 1.i.40); the third being the tale as he told it at the Council of Elrond when he had come to 'understand things a little better now' (FR 2.ii.249); and the fourth -- which may or may not be the same as the third -- coming down to us in the 1951 text, and which was preserved in 'many copies' of the Red Book as 'the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo and Samwise, both of whom learned the truth' (FR Pr. 13). In this context, which Tolkien's own assertion that the later version was 'not necessarily "truer" ' has provided us, it will be interesting to note that, while Bilbo says that the tale he tells at the Council of Elrond is 'the true story', Gandalf says only that Bilbo's and Gollum's versions 'agree' (FR 2.ii.254).

What we should take away here is not that none of these accounts are reliable, but that anyone who possesses the Ring, even briefly, is susceptible to its dire influence. Viewed together from the perspective of The Lord of the Rings, both the 1937 and the 1951 versions show this influence. In the first tale Bilbo substantially whitewashes Gollum's character in order to support the story of the 'present'; in the second he blackens Gollum's name by adding grisly emphasis to his cannibalism and by portraying him as intending to break his promise the moment he had the opportunity to do so.^[3]  The falsehoods Bilbo told to justify himself and his possession of the Ring in the 1937 have their analog in the falseness of Gollum in the 1951. Tolkien, moreover, meant for both of these versions of what happened that day to survive. Otherwise he would have just suppressed the 1937 version entirely, and not incorporated it into The Lord of the Rings as a lie Bilbo told, or inserted an account into the Prologue to explain variant manuscript traditions of the Red Book from which the 1937 and 1951 texts purportedly descend. For 'many copies' are not all copies. Together, their layered textuality tells a richer and more complete tale about Bilbo, Gollum, and the Ring than either could have done alone.

But this is not all. For with the 'revelation' that Gollum was not a funny little creature of gruesome appetites who nevertheless kept his promises, a new door opens. Not a drop of the 'bless us and splash us' Gollum survives. He is now shrewd, horrid, and terrifying, recalling with pleasure the squeak of the goblin child he had devoured earlier that day, and seething with a rage at the loss of his precious that boils over when he realizes the truth of what Bilbo has in his pocket. Bilbo, a bit highhanded until now in demanding the fulfillment of Gollum's promise, flees for his life at the last possible moment, and now it is a murderous creature with glowing eyes that pursues him through the darkness.

At this instant Gollum becomes for the reader what we have seen him portrayed to be in our studies of him in the first half of The Lord of the Rings.  At this instant Bilbo, with rage and murder at his heels, discovers the power of the Ring and the tables turn. He becomes the pursuer, and invisibility gives power to his fear and desperation, the power of murder with impunity, just as it had to Gollum. But, unseen, Bilbo can also glimpse what was invisible to him before.^[4] 

Not only does the unfairness of invisibly murdering an unarmed opponent from behind hit Bilbo hard,^[5] overwhelming his fear of Gollum and the goblins and his desperation to escape and rejoin his friends. He is also struck, and far more profoundly, by the 'sudden understanding' of how desperate, fearful, and alone Gollum is: the horror of that life -- to which possession of the Ring has now brought Bilbo perilously closer -- allows pity through the door the Ring has opened.

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped. 

(Hobbit 97)

As Gandalf says to Frodo years later, hinting at divine intervention, there was more than one power at work in Bilbo's finding the Ring (FR 1.ii.56). Even without this hint, however, it is hard to avoid seeing some measure of the same in Bilbo's back to back flashes, of insight and inspiration, and harder still not to think of the phrase 'a leap of faith' when reading the final sentence of this paragraph. Not that Bilbo has undergone some kind of religious conversion here, or that Tolkien means to suggest that he has, but he has changed; and by calling this notion to our minds Tolkien suggests a larger spiritual context of which Bilbo, like Frodo later, is himself unaware. 

And this is of course the third major change in the 1951 text. First we saw the increased savagery and treachery of Gollum in company with the elimination of his 'present' to Bilbo. Then the ring became the One Ring.  Now, on the very precipice of murder, Bilbo finds insight and pity, and 'a new strength and resolve'.  This leads directly, as it was meant to do, to Gandalf's attempts to elicit Frodo's pity for Gollum, and his flat assertion of the importance of Bilbo's pity:

'I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many -- yours not least.'

(FR 1.ii.59)

Here we always think first of Frodo, and then of the fact that the Ring is destroyed because Bilbo showed pity and mercy to Gollum. But we should also remember that Gollum is one of those many to whose fate Gandalf refers. For in the midst of all his concerns about Sauron and the Ring, Gandalf has not forgotten him. Bilbo's putting his hand on the Ring in the darkness was, ultimately, what brought Gollum out from under the mountains, and what gave Gandalf the hope -- not much hope, as he says, nor yet a hope forlorn -- that Gollum could be cured. The 'something else' that Gandalf said was at work in Bilbo's finding the Ring was at work here, too. Indeed the memories that the Riddle Game sparked in him, which are also evoked by their absence in Bilbo's flash of insight, and by Gandalf at Bag End with Frodo, all point to Gollum's corruption and the possibility -- and difficulty -- of his cure:

[...] Gollum brought up memories of ages and ages and ages before, when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river, "Sss, sss, my preciouss," he said. "Sun on the daisies it means, it does."

But these ordinary above ground everyday sort of riddles were tiring for him. Also they reminded him of days when he had been less lonely and sneaky and nasty, and that put him out of temper. What is more they made him hungry [...].

(Hobbit 97)

and

[...] a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering.

(Hobbit 97)

and

‘But there was something else in it, I think, which you don’t see yet. Even Gollum was not wholly ruined [...]. There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as through a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.

‘But that, of course, would only make the evil part of him angrier in the end – unless it could be conquered. Unless it could be cured.’ Gandalf sighed. ‘Alas! there is little hope of that for him. Yet not no hope.

(FR 1.ii.55)

The contrast between these two passages in The Hobbit and that from The Lord of the Rings shows the beginning and growth of the idea of the darkness of Gollum's days and its hopelessness before Bilbo discovered pity in his condition. The first passage, present in the 1937 and retained in the 1951, shows that darkness at its full. Even pleasant memories reinforce the horror. In the second passage, introduced in the 1951, Bilbo peers into that darkness and turns away from the path to murder. The third passage, part of a conversation in which Gandalf vainly encourages Frodo to pity Gollum as Bilbo had done, builds upon the two that went before to suggest that Gollum may yet return from the darkness of his soul just as he emerged from the shadows beneath the Misty Mountains.

Nevertheless, the narrative of The Hobbit moves onward so swiftly, without the least glance back at Gollum, and the characterization of him has been so powerfully negative, that it is not easy to see even the potential for something else. Nor, moreover, does the hint of something else become detectable until Gandalf's conversation with Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Even then, Frodo's reaction to the suggestion that Gollum was a hobbit, that he was to be pitied, and that he might be better cured than killed is as fierce as only denial can be. Here, too, the story moves swiftly on, and every mention of Gollum until he appears in The Taming of Sméagol emphasizes the danger he poses. Even in the Prologue, written with a certain air of historiographical detachment, he is 'loathsome', murderous, cannibalistic, and 'his heart was black and treachery was in it' (FR Pr. 11-12).

In the end Gandalf's hope that Gollum might be cured proves vain, but its failure should neither obscure nor invalidate the suggestion of the text that by guiding Bilbo's hand to the Ring that day beneath the Misty Mountains the other 'power' which was at work made redemption something possible to hope for. It was a near run thing, that moment on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Gollum nearly repented (TT 4.viii.714-15), and Tolkien called it 'perhaps the most tragic moment of the Tale' (Letters, # 246, p. 330). Indeed the echo of tragedy sounds first in the moment of Bilbo's horror and pity. Yet tragedies don't begin with one feckless friend murdering another over a 'birthday present' fished comically out of a river. Like the hint at a leap of faith at the paragraph's end, the echo of tragedy here in Bilbo's moment of horror and pity again suggests a larger spiritual context, one characterized by 'Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker' (FR 1.ii.56, emphases original), one which, as here, uses evil against itself to create a greater good and beauty (Silm. 17, 98).

Thus, we can see that the darkness within Gollum is present from the first, no matter how much of a shock the Gollum of The Lord of the Rings must have been to those who had read the 1937 Hobbit. It is, however, clearly with the 1951 text that the truly evil Gollum we hear so much of in the first half of The Lord of the Rings makes his debut. That's no surprise. What is unexpected is the way in which the two portrayals of Gollum in the first two editions of The Hobbit work together to create a fuller portrait of Gollum, Bilbo, and the Ring's power over them. Tolkien's decision not to do anything as ordinary as repudiate the earlier version, but to retain it as a lie, side by side with the newer version, which is itself 'not necessarily "truer" ' is nothing short of a brilliant example of Tolkien's eccentric genius in the telling of Tales. Then the characterization expands with the perspective of the story. For not only does he suggest in passing the slim chance that Gollum might repent of his evil and be cured -- an essential point for a Christian like Tolkien -- but he weaves that possibility into the long game of the plot and the role of providence within history, where it will lie forgotten until Frodo meets Gollum, and comes to understand the pity of Bilbo.  Yet, if in the end the burden of his deeds and the corruption of the Ring proved too much for him, if in the end he could not be saved, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred.

_________________________________

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (I)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (II)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (III)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (IV)

_________________________________

^[1] See Olsen (2012) 85-87, 109. Necessarily, all page numbers cited above for The Hobbit derive from the 1951 edition.

^[2] Since we are concerned with the perception of the reader, the identity of the narrator here, whether Bilbo or some later writer need not detain us here. It is also true that, regardless of the narrator, the accounts of Bilbo underlie the texts, with perhaps an admixture of what Gandalf learned from Gollum.

^[3] Note Bilbo's words to Gandalf on the night of his farewell party: 'Gollum would have killed me, if I hadn't kept it' (FR 1.i.34), which strongly suggest that Bilbo's admission of 'the true story' to Gandalf years before had included a claim of Gollum's motives. This 'agrees' with Frodo's assertion about his intentions (FR 1.ii.54).

^[4] For a discussion of the question of invisibility, see most recently Jane Beal, Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible? The Hidden War in The Hobbit, The Journal of Tolkien Research (2015) vol. 2, iss. 1, article 8.

^[5] 'No, not fair' brings Bilbo's rush of breathless fear, indeed near panic, to a dead halt.

"We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West." (RK 5.iv.825)

In my recent Abraham, Wilfred, and John at The Pyre of Denethor (RK 6.vii.850-57) we saw how Tolkien and Owen each used Genesis 22 to inform his own art.  One striking aspect of Tolkien's text that received only scant attention was the two uses of 'heathen.' This word occurs nowhere else in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, or in the fiction and poetry contained in The History of Middle-Earth, with one exception which we will consider presently. 

Now 'heathen', according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'is applied to persons or races whose religion is neither Christian, Jewish, nor Mohammedan; pagan; Gentile. In earlier times applied also to Mohammedans, but in modern usage, for the most part, restricted to those holding polytheistic beliefs, esp. when uncivilized or uncultured.'¹ So within The Lord of the Rings it clearly requires explanation.

Here are the two passages in which the word occurs:

Messengers came again to the chamber in the White Tower, and Pippin let them enter, for they were urgent. Denethor turned his head slowly from Faramir's face, and looked at them silently. 

'The first circle of the City is burning, lord,' they said. 'What are your commands? You are still the Lord and Steward. Not all will follow Mithrandir. Men are flying from the walls and leaving them unmanned.' 

'Why? Why do the fools fly?' said Denethor. 'Better to burn sooner than late, for burn we must. Go back to your bonfire! And I? I will go now to my pyre. To my pyre! No tomb for Denethor and Faramir. No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West. The West has failed. Go back and burn!'  

The messengers without bow or answer turned and fled. 

(RK 5.iv.825)

And:

'Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death,' answered Gandalf. 'And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.'

(RK 5.vii.853)

Tolkien here uses 'heathen' to distinguish between the men of Middle-earth before and after year 600 of the Second age when the Dúnedain first returned from Númenor. And in the only other passage where we find the word -- not surprisingly, in The Notion Club Papers -- the link between heathendom and Sauron (here called Zigur) is reinforced:

Then he, King (Tarcalion) landed on the shores of middle-earth, and at once he sent his messengers to (Zigur), commanding him to come in haste to do homage to the king; and he (Zigur) dissembling humbled himself and came, but was filled with secret malice, purposing treachery against the people of the Westfarers..... Thus he led astray wellnigh all the (Numenore)ans with signs and wonders.... and they built a great temple in the midst of the town (of Arminaleth) on the high hill which before was undefiled but now became a heathen fane, and they there sacrificed unspeakable offerings on an unholy altar.... Thus came death-shade into the land of the Westfarers and God's children fell under the shadow.

(HoME IX.258, emphasis added)

So, by falling under the domination of Sauron, the Númenoreans, till then 'God's children', became heathens. And, to see the meaning even more clearly, we need only recognize that the words 'a heathen fane' are the character Rashbold's translation from an Old English original of the words 'haethenum herge' (HoMe IX.257), literally a 'temple for the heathens.'² The point here is not to criticize Tolkien's translation, but to emphasize what the translation may not fully reveal to the modern ear, namely, that 'heathen' in 'a heathen fane' is a religious reference to a group of people who are not or are no longer God's children; it is not merely a disparaging synonym for 'barbaric' or 'uncivilized,' as it has become for most moderns. It is also perhaps noteworthy that the other four uses of heathen in The Notion Club Papers refer to pagan Vikings (IX 269, 270 twice, 272). That is, they refer to people, proper heathens, who are rightly so called.

Thus, for Denethor to liken himself and his son to 'heathen kings,' and for Gandalf to agree with this characterization, apparently without any knowledge of Denethor's statement, indicates that this word and the act which Denethor has in mind share a meaningful context, at least for those like Gandalf and Denethor whose knowledge of the history of Men in Middle-earth is deep. Equally obviously the word here has nothing to do with Christianity, but rather with the few slim references we find to 'worship' in Tolkien's legendarium.

The most immediate to spring to mind here would be the Men of the Mountains who betrayed Isildur during the War of the Last Alliance, 'for they had worshipped Sauron in the Dark Years' (RK 5.ii.782). Then, too, there is the Mouth of Sauron, of the race of the Black Númenoreans who, 'during the years of Sauron's domination' had 'worshipped' him (RK 5.x.888). With the next we leave The Lord of the Rings and turn to Akallabêth, which brings us once again into close contact with the passage from The Notion Club Papers which we saw above:

Then Ar-Pharazôn the King turned back to the worship of the Dark, and of Melkor the Lord thereof, at first in secret, but ere long openly and in the face of his people; and they for the most part followed him. 

(Silm. 272)

Turned back?

Now since the worship of any but Eru had been previously unknown in Númenor, and since the remarks of Denethor and Gandalf clearly are not referring to the Númenoreans as 'heathens', but rather as those who rescued the men of Middle-earth from both the domination of Sauron and heathen practices,³  these words -- 'turned back' -- can only refer to a much earlier period, one rarely mentioned and one few men apparently knew much about, though it loomed behind them like a cloud:

But when [Finrod] questioned him concerning the arising of Men and their journeys, Bëor would say little; and indeed he knew little, for the fathers of his people had told few tales of their past and a silence had fallen upon their memory. 'A darkness lies behind us,' Bëor said; 'and we have turned our backs upon it, and we do not desire to return thither even in thought. Westwards our hearts have been turned, and we believe that there we shall find Light.'  

But it was said afterwards among the Eldar that when Men awoke in Hildórien at the rising of the Sun the spies of Morgoth were watchful, and tidings were soon brought to him; and this seemed to him so great a matter that secretly under shadow he himself departed from Angband, and went forth into Middle-earth, leaving to Sauron the command of the War. Of his dealings with Men the Eldar indeed knew nothing, at that time, and learnt but little afterwards; but that a darkness lay upon the hearts of Men (as the shadow of the Kinslaying and the Doom of Mandos lay upon the Noldor) they perceived clearly even in the people of the Elf-friends whom they first knew. 

(Silm. 141)

That darkness upon the hearts of Men was the result of a Fall, in which hasty humans chose to follow Melkor, who promised them much and soon, rather than the Voice they heard, who counselled them that it was better for them to discover things slowly on their own. Too late they learned they had chosen wrong. For so says Adanel, wise woman of the Edain in the First Age, who told the tale to her kinswoman of Andreth:

The first Voice we never heard again, save once. In the stillness of the night It spoke, saying: 'Ye have abjured Me, but ye remain Mine. I gave you life. Now it shall be shortened, and each of you in a little while shall come to Me, to learn who is your Lord: the one ye worship, or I who made him.'      

(Morgoth 347)

This Tale of Adanel is 'given explicitly as a Númenórean tradition' (Morgoth 344), which brings it into close contact with Akallabêth, written by Elendil himself (UT 224), and allows us an understanding of 'turned back' not otherwise possible. Whether Ar-Pharazôn himself knew this tradition about the worship of Melkor himself and thus knowingly turned back is unclear, but Elendil did and saw the Fall happening all over again. Little wonder he called his account 'The Downfallen.'⁴ 

 ________________

¹ OED s.v. 'heathen'. 'Mohammedan,' while outdated and offensive today, was common usage at the time the OED was first published.

² Rashbold is pun, being a literal translation of the name 'Tolkien' from its German roots.

³ We need to distinguish between the worship of Sauron and the worship of Melkor. Clearly different groups practiced each of them. As has been pointed out many times, Sauron could hardly have credibly proposed to Ar-Pharazôn, his seeming conqueror, that the king should worship him as a god as he was worshipped in Middle-earth. Thus he turned him back to Melkor, cynically or sincerely, but expediently all the same. On this, see Morgoth 398:

Sauron was not a 'sincere' atheist, but he preached atheism, because it weakened resistance to himself (and he had ceased to fear God's action in Arda).  As was seen in the case of Ar-Pharazôn. But there was seen the effect of Melkor upon Sauron: he spoke of Melkor in Melkor's own terms: as a god, or even as God. This may have been the residue of  a state which was in a sense a shadow of good: the ability once in Sauron at least to admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself. Melkor, and still more Sauron himself afterwards, both profited by this darkened shadow of good and the services of 'worshippers'.  But it may be doubted whether even such a shadow of good was still sincerely operative in Sauron by that time. His cunning motive is probably best expressed thus. To wean one of the God-fearing from their allegiance it is best to propound another unseen object of allegiance and another hope of benefits; propound to him a Lord who will sanction what he desires and not forbid it. Sauron, apparently a defeated rival for world-power, now a mere hostage, can hardly propound himself; but as the former servant and disciple of Melkor, the worship of Melkor will raise him from hostage to high priest. But though Sauron's whole true motive was the destruction of the Númenóreans, this was a particular matter of revenge upon Ar-Pharazôn, for humiliation. Sauron (unlike Morgoth) would have been content for the Númenóreans to exist, as his own subjects, and indeed he used a great many  of  them  that he corrupted to his allegiance.    

⁴ I believe there is also a link here between King Sheave and the idea of the ships sailing in from the West and 'converting' the heathens to whom Gandalf and Denethor refer, but that is for another day. 

Gandalf, Odin, and the Wolf's Belly (FR 2.iv.298)

At Ragnarök the monstrous wolf, Fenrir, will swallow Oðinn, some of whose attributes Tolkien drew on in envisioning Gandalf, whom he saw as an 'Odinic wanderer' (Letters, no. 107).¹  Gandalf shows this in The Lord of the Rings, as Marjorie Burns points out, 

by wearing a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a walking staff, as the wandering Odin does, though Gandalf's association with eagles, his enmity with wolves, and his ownership of a nearly supernatural horse add to this as well.²

All of which leads me to think that Sam's remark when the Company is being menaced by wolves is a joke on Tolkien's part:

'My heart's right down in my toes, Mr. Pippin,' said Sam. 'But we aren't etten yet, and there are some stout folk here with us. Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, I'll wager it isn't a wolf's belly.' 

(FR 2.iv.298)

___________________________

¹ See John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, Oxford (2001) 111-14, 247-52, 254-58.

² Marjorie Burns, Norse and Christian Gods: The Integrative Theology of J. R. R. Tolkien, in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance, The University of Kentucky Press (2004) 168; Marjorie Burns, Gandalf and Odin in Tolkien's Legendarium, edd. Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, Greenwood Press (2000) 219-31. Gandalf, however, would have balked at the claim that he owned Shadowfax, a horse that carried riders only by his own consent. In Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, University of Toronto Press (2005) Burns rightly notes that Odin's fate is hinted at in Sam's words, but overlooks their humor.

'For this is what your people would call magic, I believe' (FR 2.vii.362)

In The Mirror of Galadriel we encounter a passage that suggests, but does not define, a difference between 'Elf magic' and the sorcery of the Enemy:

'And you?' she said, turning to Sam. 'For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf magic?'  

'I did,' said Sam, trembling a little between fear and curiosity. 'I'll have a peep, Lady, if you're willing.' 

(FR 2.vii.362)

Yet the visions Sam and Frodo see in the mirror do not help to clarify the distinction Galadriel feels exists between the two forms of 'magic.' A section of On Fairy-Stories offers us some help here:

We need a word for this elvish craft, but all the words that have been applied to it have been blurred and confused with other things. Magic is ready to hand, and I have used it above ... but I should not have done so: Magic should be reserved for the operations of the Magician. Art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief. Art of the same sort, if more skilled and effortless, the elves can also use, or so the reports seem to show; but the more potent and specially elvish craft I will, for lack of a less debatable word, call Enchantment. Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practised, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.

(OFS para. 75, emphasis mine)

Turning back to The Lord of the Rings, we may now more easily see the 'deceits of the Enemy' and view Frodo's conversation with Galadriel in a more disturbing light:

'I would ask one thing before we go,' said Frodo, 'a thing which I often meant to ask Gandalf in Rivendell. I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?'  

'You have not tried,' [Galadriel] said. 'Only thrice have you set the Ring upon your finger since you knew what you possessed. Do not try! It would destroy you. Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor? Before you could use that power you would need to become far stronger, and to train your will to the domination of others. 

(FR 2.vii.366)

I have discussed this conversation at length before, and mean to do so again once I have reflected further on what I have noticed here. Frodo is on a complex spiritual journey, as dappled with light and shadow as a wood in summer.  We too often ignore the shadow within him because the light that at times shines from him is more comforting (FR 2.i.223; TT 4.iv.652).  His interest in using the Ring to know the thoughts of others is a darkness that exists in tension with his offer a moment earlier to surrender the Ring to Galadriel.  At the same time this 'technique' he desires to employ is also in tension with the 'art' he tries to practice in the poem he composes commemorating Gandalf earlier in this same chapter (FR 2.vii.359-60), his first use of poetry since being 'enchanted' by the art of elvish minstrelsy in Rivendell (FR 2.i.233).

The biter bit -- Gandalf and Sauron Share a Perspective

© Jeff Murray

As Merry tells his comrades of the storming of Isengard by the Ents, he doubts the accuracy of Saruman's previous repute, 'wonder[ing] if his fame was not all along mainly due to his cleverness in settling at Isengard.' 

'No,' said Aragorn. 'Once he was as great as his fame made him. His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle, and his hands marvellously skilled; and he had a power over the minds of others. The wise he could persuade, and the smaller folk he could daunt. That power he certainly still keeps. There are not many in Middle-earth that I should say were safe, if they were left alone to talk with him, even now when he has suffered a defeat. Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, perhaps, now that his wickedness has been laid bare, but very few others.' 

(TT 3.ix.567, emphasis mine)

Later, after Pippin has looked into that same palantír and encountered Sauron, Gandalf says: 

'Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle's foot, the spider in a steel web! How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dur that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither.... 

'I wish I had known all this before,' said Pippin. 'I had no notion of what I was doing.'

'Oh yes, you had,' said Gandalf. 'You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. 

(TT 3.xi.598, emphasis mine)

Pippin's experience with the palantír re-enacts for us, on a smaller scale, that of Saruman himself, who thus became the fool (TT 3.viii.583) that Gandalf often considered Pippin to be (FR 2.iii.272, iv.306-07, 313; TT 3.ix.570, xi.593-94, 598; RK 5.i.754). To Sauron he is now one of 'the smaller folk' whom he 'could daunt.'

Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (IV)

What the reader learns about Gollum by the end of The Council of Elrond comes in two parallel phases at the beginning of Books One and Two. In each book a scene in which we may infer much about Gollum from the behavior of Bilbo and Frodo precedes the more open and direct telling of a tale about him within the larger Tale. In A Long-Expected Party possession of the Ring leads to a tense moment between Gandalf and Bilbo (FR 1.i.33-36), which is balanced by one between Bilbo and Frodo in Many Meetings (2.i.232). Likewise the story Gandalf tells in The Shadow of the Past (1.ii.52-60) finds its counterpoise in the stories of Aragorn and Legolas in The Council of Elrond (2.ii.253-256). In the first instance the two scenes suggest a dark and dangerous character for Gollum; in the second the two scenes establish that character by accounts of his actions. Both times the subject of Gollum vanishes from the narrative as soon as the tale within the Tale is done.

And yet The Council of Elrond contains one piece of information that makes a critical difference: Gollum has escaped the custody of the Elves, but, as Gandalf declares, it is too late for anything to be done about it (FR 2.ii.256). And there the matter of Gollum, which is given so much importance whenever it is raised, again slips away. The Company sets out, facing not only the hardships of a journey in winter, but threats of detection (FR 2.iii.284-85, 290, 294) and destruction (FR 2.iii.287-94; iii.297-99, 308-09), before they even enter 'the long dark of Moria.' Here, on the road that Gandalf led them to 'against their fears' (FR 2.iv.311), Gollum at last approaches the stage, fittingly and in hindsight almost predictably, in the darkness beneath the Misty Mountains:

Yet Frodo began to hear, or to imagine that he heard, something else: like the faint fall of soft bare feet. It was never loud enough, or near enough, for him to feel certain that he heard it; but once it had started it never stopped, while the Company was moving. But it was not an echo, for when they halted it pattered on for a little all by itself, and then grew still 

(FR 2.iv.312)

and then again

As the road climbed upwards' Frodo's spirits rose a little; but he still felt oppressed, and still at times he heard, or thought he heard, away behind the Company and beyond the fall and patter of their feet, a following footstep that was not an echo. 

(FR 2.iv.314)

'Approaches the stage' is precisely it. For all the hints and descriptions, for all the inferences about Gollum we may draw from the behavior of Bilbo and Frodo, even now Gollum himself still hangs just out of reach, like the 'ghost that drank blood [and] ... slipped through windows to find cradles' (FR 1.ii.58). Note how the two descriptions which assert that the sound Frodo heard was 'not an echo' echo each other, and how the certainty that 'not an echo' proclaims is balanced by the uncertainty in phrases like 'to hear, or to imagine that he heard' and 'heard, or thought that he heard.'

It is a wonderful evocation of the darkness and mystery of Moria, playing what the character and the reader do not yet know off against what the narrator will not yet reveal, as well as of the fear of an unknown and unseen pursuer. Gollum becomes one of those elusive secrets that he himself had once wished to discover beneath the mountains (FR i.ii.54). Nothing else may be told at this point. On a first reading we cannot know that the pursuer is Gollum, thought we can reasonably guess that he is no friend to the Company.

And, if anything, the first remote glimpse of him we get makes Gollum seem less real, but more frightening:

A deep silence fell. One by one the others fell asleep. Frodo was on guard. As if it were a breath that came in through unseen doors out of deep places, dread came over him. His hands were cold and his brow damp. He listened. All his mind was given to listening and nothing else for two slow hours; but he heard no sound, not even the imagined echo of a footfall.

His watch was nearly over, when, far off where he guessed that the western archway stood, he fancied that he could see two pale points of light, almost like luminous eyes. He started. His head had nodded. 'I must have nearly fallen asleep on guard,' he thought. 'I was on the edge of a dream.' He stood up and rubbed his eyes, and remained standing, peering into the dark, until he was relieved by Legolas. When he lay down he quickly went to sleep, but it seemed to him that the dream went on: he heard whispers, and saw the two pale points of light approaching, slowly. He woke and found that the others were speaking softly near him, and that a dim light was falling on his face.

(FR 2.iv.318)

'Not even the imagined echo of a footfall' supplies an obvious link to the other two passages, but leans more on the character's belief that he may have been imagining things than on the narrator's surety that he was not.[1] '[G]uessed' and 'fancied' pick up on this in turn, and lead straight to Frodo's conclusion that what he thought he saw was not real. Then, from thinking himself 'on the edge of a dream' while on watch, he seems to move into an actual dream once Legolas takes his place. Even without the feeling of dread that had already come over Frodo, it would be hard to describe this dream as anything but a nightmare. It is reminiscent of the dreams Merry and Pippin had in Bombadil's house (FR 1.vii.127-28), and of the parts of Frodo's dreams at Crickhollow and at Bombadil's that touch upon the Black Riders (FR 1.v.108; vii.127).[2]

But Frodo's dreams are often more than merely dreams, as his vision of Gandalf has already revealed (FR 1.vii.127; 2.ii.261). Something is in fact 'approaching, slowly' – note the emphatic comma, of horror – and only Frodo seems at all aware of it. Yet even now the smoothness with which Frodo slips from waking into dreaming and back again casts doubt on the sounds he has heard. Are the whispers in his dream actually the voices of his friends talking to each other while he sleeps? Are they Gollum? Or just a bad dream?

For now, however, these questions remain unanswered because the tale once again leaves Gollum behind, as more urgent and imminent dangers threaten the Fellowship. The day to which Frodo awakes swiftly leads the companions to the Chamber of Mazarbul, to the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm, and the woods of Lothlórien: Frodo and Sam are injured in an attack by Orcs; a Balrog comes; Gandalf falls; and strife briefly flares between Aragorn and Boromir over entering the enchanted wood (2.iv.318-vi.338). Yet just when they have found refuge with the elves and the danger seems to have passed them by – quite literally, the Orcs having pursued them from Moria – the echo that was not an echo, the dream that was not a dream, emerges from the renewed darkness and silence.

There were no more sounds. Even the leaves were silent, and the very falls seemed to be hushed. Frodo sat and shivered in his wraps. He was thankful that they had not been caught on the ground; but he felt that the trees offered little protection, except concealment. Orcs were as keen as hounds on a scent, it was said, but they could also climb. He drew out Sting: it flashed and glittered like a blue flame and then slowly faded again and grew dull. In spite of the fading of his sword the feeling of immediate danger did not leave Frodo, rather it grew stronger. He got up and crawled to the opening and peered down. He was almost certain that he could hear stealthy movements at the tree's foot far below.

Not Elves; for the woodland folk were altogether noiseless in their movements. Then he heard faintly a sound like sniffing: and something seemed to be scrabbling on the bark of the tree-trunk. He stared down into the dark, holding his breath.

Something was now climbing slowly, and its breath came like a soft hissing through closed teeth. Then coming up, close to the stem, Frodo saw two pale eyes. They stopped and gazed upward unwinking. Suddenly they turned away, and a shadowy figure slipped round the trunk of the tree and vanished.

Immediately afterwards Haldir came climbing swiftly up through the branches. 'There was something in this tree that I have never seen before,' he said. 'It was not an orc. It fled as soon as I touched the tree-stem. It seemed to be wary, and to have some skill in trees, or I might have thought that it was one of you hobbits.’

(FR 2.vi.345)

Here again, as in Moria, the silence is profound, and certainty elusive. But doubts about the existence of a pursuer, who here follows in the wake of the Orcs just as in Moria he had preceded them, soon vanish. Whoever the pursuer may be, he is no longer ‘far off,’ but right at hand ‘scrabbling,’ ‘sniffing,’ ‘climbing,’ and ‘hissing.’ As before, he is approaching ‘slowly.’ Only now the ‘two pale points of light’ seen in Moria are not ‘almost like luminous eyes’ (emphasis mine). They are eyes; Frodo has no doubt. With the report of Haldir, we receive not only a confirmation that Frodo was not dreaming in Moria (at least not at first), but also a suggestion that the figure tracking the company was something like a hobbit, which harmonizes with Gandalf’s assertion back in The Shadow of the Past that Gollum was of hobbit kind, a claim that Frodo had rejected as ‘an abominable notion’ (FR 1.ii.54).

One wonders how to read these last details. Frodo would have known better than anyone that Gollum had pale luminous eyes. Not only had he seen Bilbo’s account of his adventures in his book, but he had likely heard Bilbo tell it multiple times, always at length no doubt, most recently at the Council of Elrond (FR 1.v.105; 2.ii.249: ‘at full length’; Hobbit 82, 88, 93-97). Nor is there any sign that Haldir’s innocent comparison of Gollum to a hobbit provoked any reaction in Frodo. With this information Frodo the character should have been able to recognize Gollum.[3] Yet Frodo, both as character and narrator, remains silent, which places the emphasis of this moment on what we can see of the pursuer, who comes close on the heels of the Orcs, who can climb as they do, who has eyes that glow in the darkness, who sniffs after his prey like a Black Rider (FR 1.iii.75-76), and who now comes closer than ever before: to Frodo he seems even more dangerous than the Orcs themselves.[4] He’s seen by the Elves again the following day, apparently in company with the Orcs or close by them when they are destroyed.[5]

Then he is gone again, for the entire duration of their month’s stay in Lothlórien. Not until the companions have been on the Anduin for four days does he reappear, in two consecutive scenes, each of which we will consider in turn.

As dusk drew down on the fourth day, he was looking back over the bowed heads of Frodo and Aragorn and the following boats; he was drowsy and longed for camp and the feel of earth under his toes. Suddenly something caught his sight: at first he stared at it listlessly, then he sat up and rubbed his eyes; but when he looked again he could not see it any more. 

That night they camped on a small eyot close to the western bank. Sam lay rolled in blankets beside Frodo. 'I had a funny dream an hour or two before we stopped, Mr. Frodo,' he said. 'Or maybe it wasn't a dream. Funny it was anyway.' 

'Well, what was it?' said Frodo, knowing that Sam would not settle down until he had told his tale, whatever it was. 'I haven't seen or thought of anything to make me smile since we left Lothlórien.' 

'It wasn't funny that way, Mr. Frodo. It was queer. All wrong, if it wasn't a dream. And you had best hear it. It was like this: I saw a log with eyes!' 'The log's all right,' said Frodo. 'There are many in the River. But leave out the eyes!' 

'That I won't,' said Sam. ''Twas the eyes as made me sit up, so to speak. I saw what I took to be a log floating along in the half-light behind Gimli's boat; but I didn't give much heed to it. Then it seemed as if the log was slowly catching us up. And that was peculiar, as you might say, seeing as we were all floating on the stream together. Just then I saw the eyes: two pale sort of points, shiny-like, on a hump at the near end of the log. What's more, it wasn't a log, for it had paddle-feet, like a swan's almost, only they seemed bigger, and kept dipping in and out of the water. 

'That's when I sat right up and rubbed my eyes, meaning to give a shout, if it was still there when I had rubbed the drowse out of my head. For the whatever-it-was was coming along fast now and getting close behind Gimli. But whether those two lamps spotted me moving and staring, or whether I came to my senses, I don't know. When I looked again, it wasn't there. Yet I think I caught a glimpse with the tail of-my eye, as the saying is, of something dark shooting under the shadow of the bank. I couldn't see no more eyes though. 

'I said to myself: "dreaming again, Sam Gamgee," I said, and I said no more just then. But I've been thinking since, and now I'm not so sure. What do you make of it, Mr. Frodo?'

'I should make nothing of it but a log and the dusk and sleep in your eyes Sam,' said Frodo, 'if this was the first time that those eyes had been seen. But it isn't. I saw them away back north before we reached Lorien. And I saw a strange creature with eyes climbing to the flet that night. Haldir saw it too. And do you remember the report of the Elves that went after the orc-band?

'Ah,' said Sam. 'I do; and I remember more too. I don't like my thoughts; but thinking of one thing and another, and Mr. Bilbo's stories and all, I fancy I could put a name on the creature, at a guess. A nasty name. Gollum, maybe?'

'Yes, that is what I have feared for some time,' said Frodo. 'Ever since the night on the flet. I suppose he was lurking in Moria, and picked up our trail then; but I hoped that our stay in Lorien would throw him off the scent again. The miserable creature must have been hiding in the woods by the Silverlode, watching us start off!'

'That's about it,' said Sam. 'And we'd better be a bit more watchful ourselves, or we'll feel some nasty fingers round our necks one of these nights, if we ever wake up to feel anything. And that's what I was leading up to. No need to trouble Strider or the others tonight. I'll keep watch. I can sleep tomorrow, being no more than luggage in a boat, as you might say.'

'I might,' said Frodo, 'and I might say "luggage with eyes". You shall watch; but only if you promise to wake me halfway towards morning, if nothing happens before then.'

(FR 2.ix.382-83)

This scene brings back three elements we’ve seen before: uncertainty about whether the shadowy figure is a dream or real; luminous, lamplike eyes; and the narrowing of the gap between pursuer and pursued. Only now the approach of the pursuer is not ever slow and ever stealthy as it was in Moria or Lothlórien (FR 2.iv.318; vi.345), but is marked by increasing speed. Gollum is not just keeping pace with them, or coming closer while they are stopped. He is overtaking them, ‘coming along fast now,’ up behind an armed party with four warriors, including Aragorn, who had not been ‘gentle’ to him the last time they had met.[6] Here is the measure of Gollum’s desire for the Ring, and consequently of the threat he poses, that he would risk so much to come close to his Precious when he could have no present hope of regaining it.

Now Frodo and Sam’s conversation about Gollum is also quite intriguing. Sam, presented with much the same evidence that Frodo had possessed, quickly concludes that he has seen Gollum and hesitates only momentarily to name him. Frodo at once agrees, revealing that he had ‘feared’ Gollum was on their trail since their first night in Lórien. So Frodo did not fail to identify Gollum, but rather to name him. This initial refusal to name Gollum, especially after Haldir’s reminder that Gollum is a hobbit-like creature, is a quieter echo of the vehemence with which Frodo scorned Gandalf’s suggestion that Gollum was of hobbit kind, that what had befallen him could have befallen others hobbits he had known, and that he was a miserable creature who should be pitied (FR 1.ii.54-55, 59-60). Without a name, Gollum remains a thing, a creature, a shadow, eyes glowing in the darkness; as an uncertainty he may be frightening, but he is also not quite real.[7] Once Sam speaks up, Gollum can no longer be just a bad dream. He becomes a very real threat that Frodo must confront and cannot deny, as the next scene shows.

In the dead hours Frodo came out of a deep dark sleep to find Sam shaking him. 'It's a shame to wake you,' whispered Sam, 'but that's what you said. There's nothing to tell, or not much. I thought I heard some soft plashing and a sniffing noise, a while back; but you hear a lot of such queer sounds by a river at night.'

He lay down, and Frodo sat up, huddled in his blankets, and fought off his sleep. Minutes or hours passed slowly, and nothing happened. Frodo was just yielding to the temptation to lie down again when a dark shape, hardly visible, floated close to one of the moored boats. A long whitish hand could be dimly seen as it shot out and grabbed the gunwale; two pale lamplike eyes shone coldly as they peered inside, and then they lifted and gazed up at Frodo on the eyot. They were not more than a yard or two away, and Frodo heard the soft hiss of intaken breath. He stood up, drawing Sting from its sheath, and faced the eyes. Immediately their light was shut off. There was another hiss and a splash, and the dark log-shape shot away downstream into the night. Aragorn stirred in his sleep, turned over, and sat up. 

'What is it?' he whispered, springing up and coming to Frodo. 'I felt something in my sleep. Why have you drawn your sword?' 

'Gollum,' answered Frodo. 'Or at least, so I guess.' 

'Ah!' said Aragorn. 'So you know about our little footpad, do you? He padded after us all through Moria and right down to Nimrodel. Since we took to boats, he has been lying on a log and paddling with hands and feet. I have tried to catch him once or twice at night; but he is slier than a fox, and as slippery as a fish. I hoped the river-voyage would beat him, but he is too clever a waterman. 

'We shall have to try going faster tomorrow. You lie down now, and I will keep watch for what is left of the night. I wish I could lay my hands on the wretch. We might make him useful. But if I cannot, we shall have to try and lose him. He is very dangerous. Quite apart from murder by night on his own account, he may put any enemy that is about on our track.' 

The night passed without Gollum showing so much as a shadow again. After that the Company kept a sharp look-out, but they saw no more of Gollum while the voyage lasted. If he was still following, he was very wary and cunning.

(FR 2.ix.383-84)

Once again we begin with Frodo struggling on the margins of sleep, between the ‘deep, dark sleep’ from which Sam wakes him and the ‘dark shape, hardly visible’ of Gollum approaching. Suddenly, however, the verbs become more active and forceful. Gollum’s hand ‘shot out and grabbed’; his eyes ‘shone’ and ‘peered.’ He and Frodo are but a few feet apart, looking straight at each other. The threat has never been greater, and Frodo draws his sword.

As with Sam’s naming Gollum, a threshold is crossed when Gollum comes close enough for his eyes to meet Frodo’s. In the first place Frodo is compelled to admit what he must have known; in the second he is compelled to take action against the threat. It is no surprise after this that Frodo, when asked by Strider why he has drawn his sword, tells him straight out. The surprise – which is of course of the head-shaking, chagrined, no-surprise-at-all kind – is that Aragorn knew Gollum was there all along.

Now if we had only one scene in which either Sam or Aragorn had revealed that he knew about Gollum, I would not find that suggestive. But we have two such scenes in succession, involving the two members of the Company whom Frodo trusts and relies upon most now that Gandalf is gone. In a way that will become entirely clear by the end of the next chapter, The Breaking of the Fellowship, Frodo is isolated and alone because of the Ring, much like Gollum who pursues him like some shadow self from a fairy tale.[8] We have seen previously in A Long-Expected Party, The Shadow of the Past, and Many Meetings how the Ring undermines friendship, love, and honesty even in a good person;[9] and even before learning the truth about the Ring, Frodo had come to spend a worrisome amount of time alone.[10] As we have also seen, moreover, Gollum’s ‘longing for the Ring’ and his desire for revenge on the thief who stole his precious draws him to Frodo (FR 1.ii.57-59). So the Ring drives Frodo away from others, just as it brings him and Gollum together.

Aragorn’s last words on Gollum in this scene also merit our scrutiny: ‘Quite apart from murder by night on his own account, he may put any enemy that is about on our track.’ Not only do they exemplify the danger Gollum poses, but they suggest an erratic and irrational enemy who can veer between contradictory extremes.[11] For, knowing how much Sauron wants the Ring back, the last thing Gollum should do is tell the enemy where the Company is. Yet the link between him and the enemy has been established since The Shadow of the Past (FR 1.ii.59); Orcs rescued him from the Elves (FR 2.ii.255-56); and he and the Orcs have never been far from each other since Moria. 

Indeed from this point on cooperation between Gollum and the Orcs is openly assumed. When Aragorn notices several days later that the birds along the River seem strangely disturbed, he ‘wonder[s] if Gollum had been doing some mischief and the news of their voyage was now moving in the wilderness’ (FR 2.ix.385). Later that night Orcs do attack the Company, and Sam has no doubt it is ‘Gollum’s doing’ (FR 2.ix.386). 

On the night the before the Fellowship is broken, though Gollum has ‘remained unseen and unheard,’ Aragorn ‘nonetheless’ is ‘uneasy’ and cannot sleep: sure enough, Sting reveals that Orcs are nearby (FR 2.x.395). ‘Nonetheless’ dismisses Gollum’s seeming absence as irrelevant. The connection between him and the Orcs remains relevant. And the next day Aragorn states plainly and prudently that ‘we must fear that the secret of our journey is already betrayed’ (FR 2.x.402). Everything tends to confirm his earlier assertion that Gollum is ‘very dangerous’ (FR 2.ix.384).

The last passage about Gollum before his full entry into the story in The Taming of Sméagol confirms this connection to the Orcs. Merry and Pippin, captives of Saruman’s Uruk-Hai, finds themselves being searched by Grishnákh, the leader of a contingent of Mordor Orcs who have crossed the Anduin. Realizing that he knows about the Ring, the hobbits decide to play a perilous game with him (TT 3.iii.455):

For a moment Pippin was silent. Then suddenly in the darkness he made a noise in his throat: gollum, gollum. 'Nothing, my precious,' he added.

The hobbits felt Grishnákh's fingers twitch. 'O ho!' hissed the goblin softly. 'That's what he means, is it? O ho! Very ve-ry dangerous, my little ones.'

Nothing could demonstrate more clearly that Grishnákh knows precisely who Gollum is, and has therefore very likely been in contact with him.[12] The Orc had only recently crossed the river and was likely among the Orcs who were present when Legolas shot the Nazgûl from the sky (FR 2.ix.386-87; TT 3.iii.446-47, 451-52). All of what Aragorn said and feared about Gollum appears to be true.

The passages I’ve considered in this study differ from those in A Long-expected Party, The Shadow of the Past, and Many Meetings/The Council of Elrond in one very important way. There, Gollum is always part of someone else’s tale – that of Bilbo, Gandalf, Aragorn, and Legolas, but not of Frodo – and the possibility that he might enter his tale is never more than hinted at. In The Shadow of the Past, for example, Frodo is not yet prepared to accept that ‘we’re in the same tale still’ (TT 4.viii.712), and he resists Gandalf’s attempt to persuade him otherwise almost as vehemently as Bilbo had resisted Gandalf’s attempt to make him let go of the Ring. 

Here, Gollum, complete with all the unsavory and dangerous characteristics previously laid before us, is on the point of entering Frodo’s tale whether he wishes him to or not. He comes shrouded in darkness and shadow, echoes and dreams, passing from the underworld of a long dead and demon-haunted civilization to the borders of an enchanted realm, Lothlórien, the dream-flower, where ‘the ancient things lived on in the waking world’ (FR 2.vi.349).[13] So he approaches Frodo like some dream, or more properly, some nightmare out of the past, which Frodo seems reluctant to admit is real. It is only when Sam confirms his reality, only when Gollum’s hand seizes some tangible, undeniable part of Frodo’s world (FR 2.ix.384), that Frodo has no choice but to confront his existence and respond properly to the threat, by drawing his sword and telling Aragorn. That Strider has known all along, and is grimly amused – ‘Ah…. So you know about our little footpad, do you?’ (FR 2.ix.384) – reveals Frodo’s denial as much as Aragorn’s watchfulness.

So in the final scenes before Gollum at last enters the narrative in The Taming of Sméagol we see him repeatedly portrayed as a dream or a nightmare, a portrayal which seems to mirror the reluctance of Frodo to accept him as part of his tale. But Gollum’s own increasingly close and bold pursuit of the Ring, when added to Sam and Strider’s clearer assessments of the dangers Gollum poses, compel Frodo to face Gollum more like the threat that he is than a nightmare one is trying to shake off. The next time Gollum comes this close to Frodo, about ten days later,[14] all of that danger will be in play, and Frodo, drawing his sword once more, will at last have the chance to take the step he once wished Bilbo had taken on Gollum: ‘What a pity Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’ (FR 1.ii.59). Yet in those ten days Frodo will experience two events that will allow him to see Gollum differently.

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[1]  For Frodo the character the source of the footsteps is at this point an unknown, though he will soon enough guess who it is (FR 2.ix.383-84).  Frodo the narrator of course knows well that this is Gollum. The certainty that the footsteps are not imaginary is far more the narrator’s than the character’s.  This will soon change, however.

[2]  In her too brief study, Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien Studies, 3 [2006] 49), Amy M. Amendt-Raduege cites the use of the word ‘snuffling’ in the Crickhollow dream and later of Gollum (TT 4.i.604, 613; vi.688), to support the assertion that Frodo is here dreaming, prophetically, about Gollum.  She ignores, however, that Frodo is dreaming about "creatures" not a "creature," plus, as we all know, Frodo knows there are at least two Black Riders pursuing him by the time he reaches Crickhollow, one of whom seems to rely rather noticeably on his sense of smell (FR 1.iii.75, 76, 78; iv.87).  Frodo's next dream, moreover, clearly identifies the pursuit he fears as the Black Riders (FR 1.vii.127). So, while it is true that Gollum both sniffs (FR 2.ix.345) and snuffles, it seems far more likely that Frodo is dreaming of the immediate and frightening threat posed by the Black Riders.  On ‘creature’ in The Lord of the Rings, where it is used of both Gollum and the Black Riders, see my Again That Vile Creature, with a Special Guest Appearance by Grendel. 

[3] Note the process of elimination in this passage, going forward but leading nowhere. Frodo knows that the creature is not an Elf. Haldir declares that it is not an orc, but something like a hobbit.

[4]  At 2.ix.383 Frodo reveals that he had thought it was Gollum ‘ever since the night on the flet.’

[5] ‘A strange creature also had been seen, running with bent back and with hands near the ground, like a beast and yet not of beast-shape. It had eluded capture, and they had not shot it, not knowing whether it was good or ill, and it had vanished down the Silverlode southward’ (FR 2.vi.349-50).

[6] Not gentle: FR 2.ii.253. Cf. Gollum’s reaction to the mention of Aragorn’s name by Frodo later on: TT 4.iii.643.

[7] On the words ‘thing’ and ‘creature’ in reference to Gollum, see my Two Observations on Gollum's First Appearance at TT 4.i.612-13; That Vile Creature – An Observation Revisited; and Again That Vile Creature, with a Special Guest Appearance by Grendel.

[8] Consider not only Frodo’s solitary confrontation with Boromir and his consequent decision to go to Mordor alone, but the feeling within the Company that Frodo should say whether they should go to Mordor or Minas Tirith, stay together or split up.

As for the role of shadow, there is of course Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Shadow, but perhaps more relevant would be George MacDonald’s Phantastes in which Anodos, the hero, is stalked and ultimately imprisoned by his own shadow. Peter Pan’s shadow may also be relevant, since the play was quite popular in Tolkien’s youth and he said of a performance he saw of it in 1910:  ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E[dith] had been with me’, quoted in Carpenter, Tolkien, A Biography (Boston 1977) 47-48.

[9] Three examples will suffice: in A Long-Expected Party Bilbo accuses Gandalf of wanting his Ring and threatens him with his sword (1.i.34); in The Shadow of the Past Gandalf tells Frodo how Sméagol murdered his friend, Déagol, to obtain the Ring and was then driven out by his own family (1.ii.52-54); in Many Meetings Frodo momentarily sees Bilbo as a Gollum-like creature after his Ring and wishes to strike him (2.i.232). For further discussion, see the first, second, and third studies in the present series.

[10] FR 1.ii.42-42: [Frodo] lived alone, as Bilbo had done; but he had a good many friends…. Frodo went tramping all over the Shire with them; but more often he wandered by himself, and to the amazement of sensible folk he was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight. Merry and Pippin suspected that he visited the Elves at times, as Bilbo had done.

As time went on, people began to notice that Frodo also showed signs of good ‘preservation’: outwardly he retained the appearance of a robust and energetic hobbit just out of his tweens. ‘Some folk have all the luck,’ they said; but it was not until Frodo approached the usually more sober age of fifty that they began to think it queer.

[11] Contradictions within Gollum where the Ring is concerned are fundamental, and have been long in evidence: ‘He hated and loved it, as he hated and loved himself’ (FR 1.ii.55).

[12] Gollum will later admit to Frodo and Sam that he had in fact spoken to Orcs ‘before he met master,’ but he tries to place it in the context of his travelling far and speaking to ‘many peoples’ (TT ­­4.iii.642).

[13] The ancientry (to borrow a term from Faramir) of Khazad-dûm receives stress of course in Gimli’s song about Durin the Deathless (FR 2.iv.315-317).  Galadriel’s knowledge of how ‘fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dûm in Elder Days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone’ (FR 2.vii.356); and her echo of the song’s words about the fall of Nargothrond and Gondolin makes clear how ancient she and Celeborn, ‘the Lord of the Galadhrim,’ are also (FR 2.vii.357).

[14] Gollum and Frodo come face to face on the banks of Anduin on the fourth night out of Lothlórien, which the Company departed on 16 February.  Frodo and Sam capture Gollum on the eastern side of the Emyn Muil on 29 February. See Appendix B in RK 1092.