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.

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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.

And Yet Remain Evil -- Some Parallels in Tolkien and Sassoon

Recently I've been reading Siegfried Sassoon's The Memoirs of George Sherston, a series of three novels which tell of the title character's experience before and during World War I and which also draw heavily on Sassoon's own life in England and the trenches of France. Now I have long found this era to be one of great interest since it has had such an impact on the history and literature that followed after.  And still does. 

But in addition to my interest in the WWI poets and writers, I've also been reading these novels in order to become more familiar with the context which men like Sassoon and Tolkien, so unlike each other in seemingly every way, shared and drew upon in their depictions of war. Tolkien was anything but affluent, could only attend the schools he did because of scholarships, and needed to complete his degree in order to have a hope of success after the war. Sassoon was by contrast something of a patrician, with sufficient means, even early in life, to make a degree and a job unnecessary. He left Cambridge without taking a degree, and filled the years before the war with cricket and fox-hunting. During the war his courage and poetry brought him fame, but his public denunciation of the war in 1917 provoked accusations of treason and nearly brought him before a court-martial. Young C. S. Lewis, himself back home from the front with a wound, wrote in a letter of October 1918 that Sassoon was 'a horrid man', likely (I believe) because of the scandal he had caused.^[1] What Tolkien may have thought has left no record that I have found.^[2] 

Given the differences between these two men, the parallels to The Lord of the Rings I came across the other day in the second of Sassoon's Sherston novels, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, seemed all the more striking. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Sassoon is in any way a source for Tolkien. Their common experience is the source for both of them.

We were at the end of a journey which had begun twelve days before, when we started from Camp 13. Stage by stage, we had marched to the life-denying region which from far away had threatened us with the blink and the growl of its bombardments. Now we were groping and stumbling along a deep ditch to the place appointed for us in the zone of human havoc. There must have been some hazy moonlight, for I remember the figures of men huddled against the sides of communication trenches; seeing them in some sort of ghastly glimmer (was it, perhaps, the diffused whiteness of a sinking flare beyond the ridge?) I was doubtful whether they were asleep or dead, for the attitudes of many were like death, grotesque and distorted. But this is nothing new to write about, you will say; just a weary company, squeezing past dead or drowsing men while it sloshes and stumbles to a front-line trench. Nevertheless that night relief had its significance for me, though in human experience it had been multiplied a millionfold.  I, a single human being with my little stock of earthly experience in my head, was entering once again the veritable gloom and disaster of the thing called Armageddon.  And I saw it then, as I see it now -- a dreadful place, a place of horror and desolation which no imagination could have invented.  Also it was a place where a man of strong spirit might know himself utterly powerless against death and destruction, and yet stand up and defy gross darkness and stupefying shell-fire, discovering in himself the invincible resistance of an animal or an insect, and an endurance which he might, in after days, forget or disbelieve.

(pp 161-62, emphasis added)

To be sure many details are salient here -- journeying towards battle through darkness, a distant threat on the horizon from a 'life-denying region', figures of men sleeping or dead in the darkness -- but as Sherston says, 'this is nothing new to write about'. What he calls attention to, however, stands out starkly. That moment of facing up against impossible odds and defying the darkness, which Tolkien would have called 'northern courage', a trait most famously displayed on the Field of Pelennor by Éomer when he thinks that all is lost. 

Stern now was Éomer's mood, and his mind clear again. He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither; for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark. So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind.

     Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
     I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
     To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
     Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall! 

These staves he spoke, yet he laughed as he said them. For once more lust of battle was on him; and he was still unscathed, and he was young, and he was king: the lord of a fell people. And lo! even as he laughed at despair he looked out again on the black ships, and he lifted up his sword to defy them.

(RK 5.vi.847)

Yet we may also see such courage in Sam Gamgee, not just in the literally 'animal horror'^[3] of his fight with Shelob (TT 4.x.728-30), but in 'his song in the Tower', which 'had been defiance rather than hope' (RK 6.ii.922); and in his stalwart refusal to do anything but endure until the end, even if there was to be no returning (RK 6.iii.933-34):

But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam's plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.

(RK 6.iii.934)

While such an uncompromising mood -- or perhaps Old English mód is more what Tolkien had in mind -- may be little or no surprise in the heroes, great and small, of The Lord of the Rings, a toff like George Sherston has come further from his shire days of cricket and fox-hunting than almost any of Tolkien's characters. Much like the once foolish Pippin at the battle outside The Black Gate, who wishes that Merry were there so they could die together rather than apart (RK 5.x.892), Sherston has suffered into this attitude.

Another parallel presents itself in the trenches and no-man's lands, which is again hardly surprising. It has long been clear that to some degree the battlefield of the Somme informs Tolkien's descriptions of the Dead Marshes in particular.^[4] Tolkien conceded as much himself (Letters, no. 226). It is the ghastly applicability of this particular parallel that makes it so noteworthy. As above, I quote at length because the text is building to a climax:

It was a yellow corpse-like day, more like November than April, and the landscape was desolate and treeless.  What we were doing was quite unexceptional; millions of soldiers endured the same sort of thing and got badly shelled into the bargain. Nevertheless I can believe that my party, staggering and floundering under its loads, would have made an impressive picture of 'Despair'.  The background, too, was appropriate.  We were among the débris of the intense bombardment of ten days before, for we were passing along and across the Hindenburg Outpost Trench, with its belt of wire (fifty yards deep in places); here and there these rusty jungles had been flattened by tanks.  The Outpost Trench was about 200 yards from the Main Trench, which was now our front line.  It had been solidly made, ten feet deep, with timbered fire-steps, splayed sides, and timbered steps at intervals to front and rear and to machine-gun emplacements.  Now it was wrecked as though by earthquake and eruption. Concrete strong-posts were smashed and tilted sideways; everywhere the chalky soil was pocked and pitted with huge shell-holes; and wherever we looked the mangled effigies of the dead were our memento mori. Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets or bombs, so they looked more resigned.  But I can still remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War.  Who made the War?  I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind.  But I only laughed mentally, for the box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw.  And the dead were the dead; there was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives.  Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew.  Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull. 

(pp. 165-66)

As if the shattered landscape of the trenches weren't nightmarish enough, we then encounter 'mangled effigies of the dead', effigies which at once become real bodies of German and British soldiers, and are then further reduced, to anonymous hands, first accusing then appealing to the heavens. They are all simultaneously real and symbolic. Yet the metaphor, the memento mori, the bodies, and the war itself are dismissed with a laugh and a shrug: the dead are the dead; questions are silly; such sights are banal. Then comes the horror in the water, the face that is no longer a face, as nameless and nationless as the hands.  The face, too, must be gazing up at the heavens.  

One can almost hear Sam's horrified cry: 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water.... Dead faces!' (TT 4.ii.627). One can almost hear Gollum laughing at him scornfully: 'The Dead Marshes, yes, yes; that is their name'; and his dismissive  'Who knows?' in answer to Frodo's question about whether the faces are real or not (TT 4.ii.628). In the Dead Marshes, too, such sights must be taken for granted, and the threat is real that the hobbits might join them if they're not careful. Asking questions about the faces accomplishes nothing.

L'Enfer © IWM (Art.IWM ART 441

The third parallel sounds a note as old as literature itself, of the man too long away at war, and longing only to return home.  Late in The Iliad Achilles weeps for the father he left behind and whom he will not live to see again (24.570-633, Fagles), and we first see Odysseus in The Odyssey sitting by the shore, weeping because he thinks he will never see his home and family again (5.1-175, Fagles). To say that this is a commonplace not only of literature, but of human experience would seem to require no demonstration.

As for our conversation between ten o'clock and midnight (when my operation orders arrived from the Adjutant) I supposed it was a form of drug, since it was confined to pleasant retrospections of peace.  Wilmot was well acquainted with my part of the world and he'd come across many of our local worthies.  So we were able to make a little tour of the Kentish Weald and the Sussex border, as though on a couple of mental bicycles. In imagination we cycled along on a fine summer afternoon, passing certain milestones which will always be inseparable from my life history.  Outside Squire Maundle's park gate we shared a distant picture of his angular attitudes while he addressed his golf-ball among the bell-tinklings and baaings of sheep on the sunny slopes above Amblehurst (always followed by a taciturn black retriever).  Much has been asserted about the brutalized condition of mind to which soldiers were reduced by life in the Front Line; I do not deny this, but I am inclined to suggest that there was a proportionate amount of simple-minded sentimentality.  As far as I was concerned, no topic could be too homely for the trenches. 

Thus, while working parties and machine-gunners filed past the door with hollow grumbling voices, our private recess in the Hindenberg Tunnel was precariously infused with evocations of rural England and we challenged our surroundings with remembrances of parish names and farm houses with friendly faces. A cottage garden was not an easy idea to recover convincingly.... Bees among yellow wall-flowers on a warm afternoon.  The smell of an apple orchard in autumn.... Such details were beyond our evocation. But they were implied when I mentioned Squire Maundle in his four-wheeled dogcart, rumbling along Dumbridge Road to attend a County Council Meeting.

(pp. 170-71)

The Weald

It's quite pleasant, a fine summer afternoon, just as he says, but it's also a 'retrospection', an imaginary 'tour' on 'mental bicycles', through his 'history'. The one 'local worthy'  named is seen as part of  'a distant picture' from 'outside' his park.  There's a silent dog and noisy sheep, but not a horse, the one beast we would expect to find in Sherston's imaginings. He and his comrade see everything in passing or from afar. They are not part of the scene, but observers. And the 'simple-minded sentimentality' he endorses as a counterbalance to the 'brutalitized condition of [a soldier's] mind' can only get him so far. The homeliest, most sensuous details will not be evoked at all. Those languid ellipses dividing one such detail from another suggest that being 'implied' by the mention of the Squire's name is scarcely good enough. Yet they had to suffice.

With Sam we get a very different picture:

... and now as once more the night of Mordor closed over them, through all [Sam's] thoughts there came the memory of water; and every brook or stream or fount that he had ever seen, under green willow-shades or twinkling in the sun, danced and rippled for his torment behind the blindness of his eyes. He felt the cool mud about his toes as he paddled in the Pool at Bywater with Jolly Cotton and Tom and Nibs, and their sister Rosie. 'But that was years ago,' he sighed, 'and far away. The way back, if there is one, goes past the Mountain.'

(RK 6.iii.938-39)

Sam's 'simple-minded sentimentality' about home is not without pain. As he lies thirsting in the wastes of Mordor, the memory of water becomes vivid and immediate, a torment, but it also evokes gentler feelings, of cool water, of friendship, and of Rosie Cotton -- set off from her brothers by commas, and mentioned here for only the second time, the first being in a similar moment a few pages earlier (RK 6.iii.934). Unlike Sherston, Sam's memories immerse him and transport him home, however briefly.  They point him back, to Rosie, and set his course 'past the Mountain'.

Yet while Sam's moment of recalling better days seems to accomplish for him what Sherston's could not, Frodo's is more reminiscent of the 'brutalized condition of mind' to which Sherston alludes. Not only can Frodo not evoke the pleasant details, he cannot recall them in any meaningful way. They are even more remote and unreachable than Sherston's. When Sam asks Frodo if he can recall the sunny morning they spent in Ithilien not yet two weeks ago, Frodo confesses that he can't:

'No, I am afraid not, Sam,' said Frodo. 'At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me.'

(RK 6.iii.937-38)

Little could show how common and profound an experience Sassoon and Tolkien share than the way in which these experiences of Sam and Frodo bookend Sherston's, as if all three exist along a continuum. Sherston of course is still in the middle of his journey; Sam and Frodo, though they doubt they'll survive, are nearly at the point where they turn back again. He will grow worse before he gets better. Nightmares and horrific visions of the dead will come to plague him, which also parallels what Sam and Frodo see in The Dead Marshes.^[5] Frodo, as we know, returns home in the flesh only, and at times is haunted by things that only he can see (RK 6.ix.1024-25). Sam, owing to his love for his master, for the Shire, and for Rosie, survives far better than either Frodo or Sherston. But from the beginning Sam has also seen their journey and the events in which he and Frodo take part as a story, and he increasingly comes to recognize that the Great Tales never end and that they are in one (TT 4.viii.711-13). Sherston sees the muck and the dead; Frodo sees the Wheel of Fire; Sam sees more. His larger view, I would suggest, combines with his love to give him a faith that carries him through, not unchanged but unscathed, to his chair and his pipe and Elanor in his lap.

His faith in the power of Tales is one he shared with Tolkien, who in 1944 wrote to Christopher who was serving in the RAF:

Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep up your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them. You are inside a very great story! I think also that you are suffering from suppressed 'writing'. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes. Lots of the early pans of which (and the languages) – discarded or absorbed – were done in grimy canteens,at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire. It did not make for efficiency and present-mindedness, of course, and I was not a good officer. ....

(Letters, no. 66)

As the hundredth anniversary of the Somme draws near, we may be grateful that the evil of those days proved the source of much that is good and true and beautiful in the writings of Tolkien, Sassoon, and so many others. But we should also remember that, for all that, it remains evil.

Paths Of Glory © IWM (Art.IWM ART 518)

____________________________

Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Penguin (2013).

____________________________

^[1] Lewis does not say why, but it seems to have nothing to do with his poetry -- just mentioned in the same breath without judgement -- and they don't seem to have been acquainted. If anything, since Lewis wrote disillusioned World War I poetry of his own, he could have had little objection to Sassoon on that score. Lewis, however, who could have avoided military service but chose not to do so, seems unlikely to have approved of so public a demonstration against the war as Sassoon made with his open letter of July 1917.

^[2] In the relationship of Faramir and Denethor there are echoes of the kinds of criticisms often made during WWI, and even orcs complain to each other about their superiors (TT 4.x.737-39; RK 6.ii.924-26).  One wonders if the stubborn folly of Turgon in The Fall of Gondolin might reflect Tolkien's perception of the same in the General Staff. 

^[3] In letter 61 (18 April 1944) Tolkien refers to the 'animal horror of the life of active service [...] such as trenchlife as I knew it'. Perhaps not coincidentally, in this same letter Tolkien remarks that he 'hope[s] to see C. S. L[ewis] and Charles W[illiams] tomorrow morning and read my next chapter — on the passage of the Dead Marshes and the approach to the Gates of Mordor, which I have now practically finished.'

^[4] See especially John Garth, 'As under a green sea': visions of war in The Dead Marshes (2008) 9-21, who rightly identifies other parallels in Sassoon; Hugh Brogan, Tolkien's Great War (1989) 351-67;  Jane Brennan Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2004); Livingston, The Shell-shocked Hobbit: The First World War and Tolkien's Trauma of the Ring (2015). 

^[5] Sassoon, pp. 186-87; Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1960) 267. Garth's discussion (above n.4) of Sassoon, Tolkien, and other WWI writers in this connection is a fascinating contribution.

Works Consulted

'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on Wings' -- (TT 4.ii.629-30)

Winged Messenger © Nick Marshall

[Gollum] went on again, but his uneasiness grew, and every now and again he stood up to his full height, craning his neck eastward and southward. For some time the hobbits could not hear or feel what was troubling him. Then suddenly all three halted, stiffening and listening. To Frodo and Sam it seemed that they heard, far away, a long wailing cry, high and thin and cruel. They shivered. At the same moment the stirring of the air became perceptible to them; and it grew very cold. As they stood straining their ears, they heard a noise like a wind coming in the distance. The misty lights wavered, dimmed, and went out.  

Gollum would not move. He stood shaking and gibbering to himself, until with a rush the wind came upon them, hissing and snarling over the marshes. The night became less dark, light enough for them to see, or half see, shapeless drifts of fog, curling and twisting as it rolled over them and passed them. Looking up they saw the clouds breaking and shredding; and then high in the south the moon glimmered out, riding in the flying wrack.

For a moment the sight of it gladdened the hearts of the hobbits; but Gollum cowered down, muttering curses on the White Face. Then Frodo and Sam staring at the sky, breathing deeply of the fresher air, saw it come: a small cloud flying from the accursed hills; a black shadow loosed from Mordor; a vast shape winged and ominous. It scudded across the moon, and with a deadly cry went away westward, outrunning the wind in its fell speed. 

They fell forward, grovelling heedlessly on the cold earth. But the shadow of horror wheeled and returned, passing lower now, right above them, sweeping the fen-reek with its ghastly wings. And then it was gone, flying back to Mordor with the speed of the wrath of Sauron; and behind it the wind roared away, leaving the Dead Marshes bare and bleak. The naked waste, as far as the eye could pierce, even to the distant menace of the mountains, was dappled with the fitful moonlight.  

Frodo and Sam got up, rubbing their eyes, like children wakened from an evil dream to find the familiar night still over the world. But Gollum lay on the ground as if he had been stunned. They roused him with difficulty, and for some time he would not lift his face, but knelt forward on his elbows, covering the back of his head with his large flat hands.  

'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings! The Precious is their master. They see everything, everything. Nothing can hide from them. Curse the White Face! And they tell Him everything. He sees, He knows. Ach, gollum, gollum, gollum!' It was not until the moon had sunk, westering far beyond Tol Brandir, that he would get up or make a move.  

(TT 4.ii.629-30, emphases original)

This scene, which replays itself twice more by the end of this chapter (TT 4.ii.634-35), is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. First, it allows us to make an observation that is important for understanding the power of the Ring, not because the Ring itself is directly in play here, but because of Gollum's similar behavior in another scene where its power is central. For outside the Black Gate, when Frodo declares that since there is no other way into Mordor, he must try this one, Gollum makes the mistake of suggesting that Frodo give the Ring back to him (TT 4.iii.637). At first Frodo appears not to have noticed what Gollum has said, or to attach no importance to it, so intent is he on his mission. When Gollum subsequently reveals the existence of another way into Mordor, Frodo's attention seems entirely devoted to considering that option.

But Frodo has not forgotten, not in the least.

'Sméagol,' he said, 'I will trust you once more. lndeed it seems that I must do so, and that it is my fate to receive help from you, where I least looked for it, and your fate to help me whom you long pursued with evil purpose. So far you have deserved well of me and have kept your promise truly. Truly, I say and mean,' he added with a glance at Sam, 'for twice now we have been in your power, and you have done no harm to us. Nor have you tried to take from me what you once sought. May the third time prove the best! But I warn you, Sméagol, you are in danger.' 

'Yes, yes, master!' said Gollum. 'Dreadful danger! Sméagol's bones shake to think of it, but he doesn't run away. He must help nice master.'  

'I did not mean the danger that we all share,' said Frodo. 'I mean a danger to yourself alone. You swore a promise by what you call the Precious. Remember that! It will hold you to it; but it will seek a way to twist it to your own undoing. Already you are being twisted. You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Sméagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Sméagol!' 

Sam looked at his master with approval, but also with surprise: there was a look in his face and a tone in his voice that he had not known before. It had always been a notion of his that the kindness of dear Mr. Frodo was of such a high degree that it must imply a fair measure of blindness. Of course, he also firmly held the incompatible belief that Mr. Frodo was the wisest person in the world (with the possible exception of Old Mr. Bilbo and of Gandalf). Gollum in his own way, and with much more excuse as his acquaintance was much briefer, may have made a similar mistake, confusing kindness and blindness. At any rate this speech abashed and terrified him. He grovelled on the ground and could speak no clear words but nice master. 

Frodo waited patiently for a while, then he spoke again less sternly. 'Come now, Gollum or Sméagol if you wish, tell me of this other way, and show me, if you can, what hope there is in it, enough to justify me in turning aside from my plain path. I am in haste.' 

But Gollum was in a pitiable state, and Frodo's threat had quite unnerved him. It was not easy to get any clear account out of him, amid his mumblings and squeakings, and the frequent interruptions in which he crawled on the floor and begged them both to be kind to 'poor little Sméagol'. After a while he grew a little calmer, and Frodo gathered bit by bit that, if a traveller followed the road that turned west of Ephel Duath, he would come in time .... 

(TT 4.iii.640-41, emphasis original)

In declaring that he trusts Gollum only because he must and only because of fate. Frodo is in essence declaring that he does not trust him at all. Indeed he has already twice indicated to Sam that this is so, first conceding that they were safe with Gollum 'at present' (TT 4.ii.622-23), and then that even the promise Gollum made on the Precious would hold only 'a while yet' (TT 4.ii.624). Frodo's 'so far' to Gollum here echoes his words to Sam there, and the private glance he steals at him as he says 'truly I say and mean' serves as a reminder to Sam that both patience and vigilance are still in order. And Frodo immediately gives evidence of both, and much more, as he glides smoothly from expressing, or seeming to express, concern for the danger which Gollum is in, to delivering a threat in which he invokes the power of the Ring to terrify him. He thus reduces him to a state of mumbling incoherence, something even the terror of the winged messengers had not done.

Without saying so explicitly, Frodo has here identified himself as the master of the Precious, which not only 'mastered' Gollum long ago, but the Ringwraiths as well. He has also -- if momentarily, yet not for the last time (TT 4.vi.687; cf. RK 6.iii.944) -- adopted the preferred weapon of the Ringwraiths themselves. For, as Strider said back in Bree when asked if the Nazgûl would attack The Prancing Pony, 'that is not their way.... their power is in terror' (FR 1.x.174, italics mine); to which we may add Gandalf's statement that they 'are only shadows of the power and the terror they would possess if the Ruling Ring were on their master's hand again' (FR 2.iv.295). He is also doing what Galadriel said he must do if he wished to use to Ring -- and warned him strongly against -- 'train[ing his] will to the domination of others' (FR 2.vii.366). It is perhaps especially worth noting in this context that, until now, it has been with Sting alone that Frodo has threatened Gollum (TT 4.i.614, ii.635; see also FR 2.ix.384).

That Frodo has come so far in so short a time is chilling. Not even ten days before this moment he had left his comrades because 'the evil of the Ring [was] already at work in the Company' (FR 2.x.401). And a few days after that he found within himself the pity for Gollum that Gandalf had failed to elicit from him back in The Shire (FR 1.ii.59; TT 4.i.615). That pity arose, as I have recently argued, largely because he saw how Boromir had 'fallen into evil' owing to the power of the Ring (FR 2.x.401).  Yet here we see Frodo himself trammeled in the web of the Ring's power, moved both to show pity and wield terror by swift turns. Galadriel's concern that 'all the Company' remain 'true' applies at least as much to Frodo as it does to Boromir (FR 2.vii.357), a point that we can too easily forget given the events on the slopes of Amon Hen. Indeed, Gandalf's 'neither strength nor good purpose will last' could almost be viewed as summing up the two of them (FR 1.ii.47). 

The second reason the scene with the wraiths is noteworthy is that it marks a turning point whose importance should be clearer in view of what we have just seen. Continuing directly from the point at which we stopped in the first quote, we find the following:

From that time on Sam thought that he sensed a change in Gollum again. He was more fawning and would-be friendly; but Sam surprised some strange looks in his eyes at times, especially towards Frodo; and he went back more and more into his old manner of speaking. And Sam had another growing anxiety. Frodo seemed to be weary, weary to the point of exhaustion. He said nothing, indeed he hardly spoke at all; and he did not complain, but he walked like one who carries a load, the weight of which is ever increasing; and he dragged along, slower and slower, so that Sam had often to beg Gollum to wait and not to leave their master behind. 

In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was that more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked. The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the veils were become that still warded it off. Frodo knew just where the present habitation and heart of that will now was: as certainly as a man can tell the direction of the sun with his eyes shut. He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his brow. 

Gollum probably felt something of the same sort. But what went on in his wretched heart between the pressure of the Eye, and the lust of the Ring that was so near, and his grovelling promise made half in the fear of cold iron, the hobbits did not guess: Frodo gave no thought to it. Sam's mind was occupied mostly with his master, hardly noticing the dark cloud that had fallen on his own heart. He put Frodo in front of him now, and kept a watchful eye on every movement of his, supporting him if he stumbled, and trying to encourage him with clumsy words.

(TT 4.ii.630-31)

The effect of the terror of the Nazgûl here once again brings to mind the verdict of Aragorn at Bree: 'In dark and loneliness they are strongest' (FR 1.x.174). The shriek Frodo and Sam heard on the cliffs of the Emyn Muil a few days earlier demonstrates the truth of this, as the narrator emphasizes how much more powerful that cry was now than in the comfortable woods of The Shire: 'Out here in the waste its terror was far greater: it pierced them with cold blades of horror and despair, stopping heart and breath' (TT 4.i.607).  Now, however, not only does it bring them temporarily to their knees. It changes them.

For as bad as the Emyn Muil were, the Dead Marshes are worse. So far from being merely a desolate, difficult, and lonely landscape, the Dead Marshes are a no man's land haunted by the phantasms of ancient wars whose appearance -- whether they are truly the ghosts of the dead in battle, evil spirits like the Barrow-wights, or altogether an illusion of Sauron -- mocks all victory and sacrifice as vain, and denies the glory of the Great Tales. The marshes and the phantasms seem to cast a spell over Frodo and Sam, much as Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight did, inducing a dreamlike state of consciousness that nearly tempts them to their ruin.^[1] As in the Old Forest, Sam seems more resistant than Frodo. Here, too, Frodo has a 'vision' in his dreams, explicitly called 'fair' here and quite reasonably seen as such there (FR 1.viii.135; TT 4.ii.635). Also as in the Old Forest, they have a guide or escort, who helps see them through the dangers to the other side.

But how different an escort is Gollum -- who flinches as if in pain at the sound of his own true name (TT 4.i.616) and is a slave to the Ring -- from Bombadil whose name has power, and over whom the Ring has none at all. And though the 'fair vision' of Frodo's dream refreshes him, he cannot remember it upon waking, in stark contrast with the six vividly remembered dreams in the chapters centered on Bombadil and his land. In the Dead Marshes, where even the land may be called 'weary', the wailing cry of the Nazgûl casts over them 'a shadow of growing fear in which memory could find nothing to rest upon' (TT 4.ii.631). Unlike in the Old Forest and Barrow Downs, or in Lothlórien, where Bombadil and Galadriel are present to ward off the darker powers, in the Dead Marshes that darkness holds sway; and aims at that domination which distinguishes 'the devices of the Enemy' from 'elf magic.'^[2]

As a result Gollum, who had changed for the better after promising 'to serve the master of the Precious' (TT 4.i.618), begins to revert to his former self: only a few days pass before the 'two thoughts' scene, in which Sam hears Gollum's worse self persuading his better self to betray the hobbits and recover the Ring (TT 4.ii.632-34). For Frodo, too, the Ring now begins to be a torment from moment to moment. The moral weight of its evil becomes a physical burden, wearying him and weighing him down; and though before he could perceive the spiritual pressure of Sauron's mind hunting for the Ring only when wearing the Ring or looking in Galadriel's mirror, now he feels it beating on his brow like the heat of the sun. Note the narrator's emphatic and uncharacteristic shift in pronouns from the normal and expected third to the more forceful second person: '...to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable' (italics mine).^[3]  Frodo's pity for Gollum, their kinship because of the Ring, and ability to reach each other (TT 4.i.618), now seem of little avail. A moment after the narrator tells us that Gollum's experience must have been similar to Frodo's, he also makes a point (hence the colon) of telling us that 'Frodo gave it no thought.' Feeling threatened as he does, Frodo attends only to the Ring even as he struggles onward with the intention of destroying it.

© Ted Nasmith 

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^[1] For an extended discussion of these states of consciousness, see here.

^[2] That The Dead Marshes exhibit these characteristics suggests that Faërie contains the enchantments that are an expression of the will to power as much as those that generate Art.

^[3] I find myself unable to think of a similar instance of this kind of shift by the narrator in The Lord of the Rings.

Boromir, Fear, and the Pity of Frodo (FR 2.x.396-402)

In studying the long lead-up to the introduction of Gollum as an active character in The Taming of Sméagol, I have come more and more to consider the following question: given that the portrayal of Gollum in the first three books of The Lord of the Rings is negative, dark, and monstrous, why does Frodo pity him? The narrator (Frodo) has taught the reader to regard Gollum with fear and loathing, and thus Frodo's pity, when it comes, may seem right in a high moral sense, but terribly wrong in visceral, practical terms.  Let us first examine the moment itself:

Things would have gone ill with Sam, if he had been alone. But Frodo sprang up, and drew Sting from its sheath. With his left hand he drew back Gollum's head by his thin lank hair, stretching his long neck, and forcing his pale venomous eyes to stare up at the sky. 

'Let go! Gollum,' he said. 'This is Sting. You have seen it before once upon a time. Let go, or you'll feel it this time! I'll cut your throat.'  

Gollum collapsed and went as loose as wet string. Sam got up, fingering his shoulder. His eyes smouldered with anger, but he could not avenge himself: his miserable enemy lay grovelling on the stones whimpering.  

'Don't hurt us! Don't let them hurt us, precious! They won't hurt us will they, nice little hobbitses? We didn't mean no harm, but they jumps on us like cats on poor mices, they did, precious. And we're so lonely, gollum. We'll be nice to them, very nice, if they'll be nice to us, won't we, yes, yess.'  

'Well, what's to be done with it?' said Sam. 'Tie it up, so as it can't come sneaking after us no more, I say.'  

'But that would kill us, kill us,' whimpered Gollum. 'Cruel little hobbitses. Tie us up in the cold hard lands and leave us, gollum, gollum.' Sobs welled up in his gobbling throat. 

'No,' said Frodo. 'If we kill him, we must kill him outright. But we can't do that, not as things are. Poor wretch! He has done us no harm.'  

'Oh hasn't he!' said Sam rubbing his shoulder. 'Anyway he meant to, and he means to, I'll warrant. Throttle us in our sleep, that's his plan.'  

'I daresay,' said Frodo. 'But what he means to do is another matter.' He paused for a while in thought. Gollum lay still, but stopped whimpering. Sam stood glowering over him.  

It seemed to Frodo then that he heard, quite plainly but far off, voices out of the past: 

What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!  

Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.  

I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.  

Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.  

'Very well,' he answered aloud, lowering his sword. 'But still I am afraid. And yet, as you see, I will not touch the creature. For now that I see him, I do pity him.'  

Sam stared at his master, who seemed to be speaking to some one who was not there. Gollum lifted his head.  

'Yess, wretched we are, precious,' he whined. 'Misery misery! Hobbits won't kill us, nice hobbits.' 

'No, we won't,' said Frodo. 'But we won't let you go, either. You're full of wickedness and mischief, Gollum. You will have to come with us, that's all, while we keep an eye on you. But you must help us, if you can. One good turn deserves another.' 

'Yess, yes indeed,' said Gollum sitting up. 'Nice hobbits! We will come with them. Find them safe paths in the dark, yes we will. And where are they going in these cold hard lands, we wonders, yes we wonders?' He looked up at them, and a faint light of cunning and eagerness flickered for a second in his pale blinking eyes.  

Sam scowled at him, and sucked his teeth; but he seemed to sense that there was something odd about his master's mood and that the matter was beyond argument. All the same he was amazed at Frodo's reply. 

(TT 4.i.614-15, emphases original)

It is essential to point out here, and to bear in mind as we go on, that Frodo in the book is not taken in by Gollum, as the version of Frodo in Peter Jackson's film is.  He may pity him. He may wish him well (4.ii.622-23). He may even trust him, conditionally and because he has no other choice (4.i.618; iii.640; cf. ii.624). Yet he is never fooled. Between their meeting at the foot of the Emyn Muil and their parting in Shelob's Lair, for as long as they journey together, Frodo repeatedly indicates that he knows well the danger Gollum poses, and that even the restraint placed upon him by his oath to the Precious will last only so long (4.ii.623-24; iii.640-41; viii.713-14), an oath Frodo will twice use to terrify Gollum into submission (4.iii.640-41; vi.687). 

Note how Frodo's first action compares to what he said to Gandalf.  He shows not the least hesitation. He springs up, draws Sting, seizes Gollum, and threatens to cut his throat. So far here, Frodo seems as swift and decisive as when he refused to pity Gollum and declared him worthy of death in The Shadow of the Past.  And yet if that were entirely correct, we might expect him simply to kill Gollum outright. Now in part it may well be that Frodo is finding that it is one thing to say 'he deserves death' in the safety of one's own home, and another to become the executioner of that sentence.  But there are other clues here we should not ignore.

At this crucial moment, with Sam's life at immediate risk, Frodo doesn't just kill Gollum or even simply threaten to kill him. Rather, he reminds him that he has seen Sting before and that Bilbo had shown him mercy. He then points out, to Sam's annoyance, that they cannot just kill Gollum, 'not as things are,' that 'he has done us no harm,' and that 'what he means to do' is not strictly relevant. These words, too, are striking reminders of Bilbo's encounter long before:

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. 

(The Hobbit, 97, emphasis mine)

So Frodo is clearly thinking of Bilbo here, and seeing the parallels in their situations, even before he recalls his own conversation with Gandalf. In fact that memory seems evoked by his own echo of Gandalf's words and attitude in response to him then. For Frodo's 'I daresay,' followed by a dismissal of what Sam has said about Gollum's intentions parallels Gandalf's 'I daresay' and dismissal of the question of Gollum's deserts.  It is at this moment that their conversation comes back to him, a conversation to which Bilbo had been as crucial as Gollum and the Ring.  But Frodo does not recall Gandalf's words with perfect accuracy:

‘What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’ 

‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so.With Pity.’  

‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’ 

‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in. 

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. ‘I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’  

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.   

(FR 1.ii.59)

Now, noticing that these two passages do not correspond word for word is nothing new. The remembered conversation condenses and omits much. One could easily argue that this is a realistic touch, since memory is selective both in what it recalls and what it forgets. One could also suggest, as Christopher Tolkien does, that the original conversation and the memory of it 'remain different in detail of wording, perhaps not intentionally at all points' (HoME VIII 97).  Thus the discrepancy might owe itself to chance rather than choice.  

I would argue otherwise. The words 'fearing for your own safety' represent a significant addition to Gandalf's actual statement, which stresses Pity and Justice and Life and Death merited and unmerited. To be sure, Frodo had mentioned that he was frightened, but Gandalf in his response had ignored the fear Frodo adduced as a motive. Gandalf, as we saw at that time, argues from higher ground. And yet here Frodo puts these words in his mouth.

In his recent near encounters with Gollum, Frodo had given no indications of pity, only revulsion and fear. In fact when they had come face to face in the darkness on the banks of the Anduin Frodo had also drawn his sword and then informed Aragorn -- who of course already knew -- that Gollum was stalking them (FR 2.ix.384). As Frodo knew well, Aragorn had once captured Gollum and treated him rather harshly (FR 2.ii.253). He cannot have expected less if Strider caught him again.

So what has changed? Is it merely the sight of Gollum, as Frodo openly says? Is it that Frodo has suffered more from evil and had more experience of the Ring since that morning in Bag End? We cannot ignore these factors of course. On no account may Gollum be called prepossessing, and Frodo has certainly learned much of the Ring. Yet between Frodo's encounter with Gollum on the banks of the Anduin and the moment when he holds Sting to his throat, but does not use it, something happens which can help explain Frodo's change of heart as well as the intrusion into his memory of the false detail 'fearing for your own safety.' We will be able to see it even more clearly if we step back to consider the setup. 

The heart of Legolas was running under the stars of a summer night in some northern glade amid the beech-woods; Gimli was fingering gold in his mind, and wondering if it were fit to be wrought into the housing of the Lady's gift. Merry and Pippin in the middle boat were ill at ease, for Boromir sat muttering to himself, sometimes biting his nails, as if some restlessness or doubt consumed him, sometimes seizing a paddle and driving the boat close behind Aragorn's. Then Pippin, who sat in the bow looking back, caught a queer gleam in his eye, as he peered forward gazing at Frodo. Sam had long ago made up his mind that, though boats were maybe not as dangerous as he had been brought up to believe, they were far more uncomfortable than even he had imagined. He was cramped and miserable, having nothing to do but stare at the winter-lands crawling by and the grey water on either side of him. Even when the paddles were in use they did not trust Sam with one. 

(FR 2.ix.382)

What a beautiful paragraph this is in detail and movement, from character to character and from boat to boat. Beginning with the loveliness of Legolas' vivid, dreamlike memory, and Gimli's chivalrous, romantic imaginings, we never expect the uneasy turn it takes, with Merry, Pippin, and the disturbing, almost threatening behavior of Boromir. We then follow Boromir's gaze through Pippin's eyes straight to Frodo in the boat ahead with Strider and Sam. But suddenly and unexpectedly, since our attention has just been directed to Frodo, we find ourselves with Sam instead. But the introduction of Sam here, uncomfortable, unhappy, and untrusted Sam, is a misdirection. It lightens the menace of the sentences on Boromir, but only in order to refocus it a moment later on another threat that is present on the Great River, another one who has his eyes fixed on Frodo and Frodo's burden. The next paragraph reads:

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. 

(FR 2.ix.382)

It is of course Gollum whom Sam has seen, but the way in which the narrator shifts our attention from Boromir to Gollum is masterful. Notice how Sam is looking back towards the boats behind his own. Given the previous paragraph, we might expect him to have caught the same 'queer gleam' in Boromir's eyes as Pippin did. But it is not so. For just as we followed Boromir's gaze forward to Frodo, but found Sam instead, so, too, we now follow Sam's back, not to Boromir, but to Gollum. Sam's remarking over and over again on Gollum's eyes further pairs these two threats. Nor is this the first time that Frodo has been the object of Boromir's intense gaze (FR 2.viii.369; ix.388). As the moment nears when Frodo must decide between Minas Tirith and Mordor, danger is converging on him from more than one direction. From Gollum of course, but also from Boromir, who, desperate to save his land, feels quite keenly the anguish of the choice which lies before Frodo. And if Gollum, as Boromir himself said, is 'small, but great in mischief' (FR 2.ii.255), what is Boromir?

So much of what Boromir says in the scene where he tries to take the Ring from Frodo plays off earlier scenes involving the Ring. When Boromir says it was only 'unhappy chance' that Frodo had the Ring, and that it should have been his, it recalls the justifications of Bilbo and Gollum (FR 1.i.33, ii.xx. 53, 56-57; 2.x.399) His statement that the Ring is 'a gift to the foes of Mordor', to use as a weapon against Sauron, turns on its head Gandalf's assertion that Bilbo and Frodo had been meant to find the Ring, with the result that they might destroy it (FR 1.ii.55-56; 2.x.398). When he imagines what he might accomplish with the Ring, and avers that ruthlessness -- that is, the want of pity -- is essential to victory, he follows in the footsteps of Gandalf and Galadriel, who also imagined what they might do if they had the Ring, but Boromir falls into the trap that they avoided (FR 1.ii.61; 2.vii.365-66, x.398). When he claims that the Ring belonged by right to the men of Númenor, he reasons as Frodo did when he said that the Ring should be Aragorn's, the heir of Isildur, but Aragorn rejected this reasoning (FR 2.ii.246-47, x.399).  When Boromir threatens to take the Ring from Frodo with his greater strength, it echoes Bilbo's paranoid fear that Gandalf wished to do the same, only now Frodo is not deceived by the Ring as Bilbo was (FR 1.i.34; 2.x.399).  And when Boromir's face changes 'hideously' and 'a raging fire' appears in his eyes, it echoes Frodo's vision of Bilbo as Gollum at Rivendell, but here the change is real, not imaginary (FR 2.i.232, x.399). It is also a reminder of the Eye of Sauron, 'rimmed with fire' that Frodo saw in Galadriel's mirror (FR 2.vii.364).  Again, however, this is not a vision, but a present, physical threat.

Finally, Boromir's attempt to take the Ring plays off the three scenes in which Frodo has freely attempted to give it away -- to Gandalf, Aragorn, and Galadriel (FR 1.ii.61; 2.ii.246-47, vii.365-66), all of whom refused to take it. But after Frodo's confrontation with Boromir, he never again makes this offer. He has seen for himself, unquestionably, how terrifying the evil that the Ring works can be. He has seen it happen to a comrade, whom he had so far known to be brave, self-sacrificing, and honorable. And after this present and personal experience of the evil of the Ring with Boromir, his vision of the Mordor and his near discovery by the Eye itself, his own eyes see some things more clearly.

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

(FR 2.x.401, emphases mine)

Where previously Frodo had been afraid to go to Mordor, as Sam correctly told the others (FR 2.x.403), he now fears to remain with his companions.  The gentle phrases 'the Ring must leave them' and 'now Boromir has fallen into evil' reveal the pity that Frodo feels for the man of Gondor, quite unlike the purely harsh words he had had for Gollum, when he rejected out of hand Gandalf's suggestion that pity was in order (FR 1.ii.59).  Then, too, he had scorned the idea that seeing Gollum would move him to pity, but here seeing does precisely that, not only for Boromir, but potentially for others, too. And so, fearing what the Ring could do to others, Frodo flees the company, only to run almost at once straight into the Tale's foremost example of the evil one could fall into because of the Ring. Although the structure of the book can lead the reader to forget this, only three days pass between The Breaking of the Fellowship and The Taming of Sméagol (RK App B 1092).

Notice, however, that Frodo does not seem to see the 'evil of the Ring' working on himself. He sees his friends and comrades as susceptible to something that makes at least some of  them  -- who, precisely? -- untrustworthy. He nowhere wonders what it is doing to him. Indeed his self-deception here is visible in his thinking that, with the Ring at work, he can trust any of them, regardless of how 'dear' they might be. After all, were not 'Give us that, Déagol, my love' very nearly the last words that luckless hobbit ever heard (FR 1.ii.53)?

What is the whole question of trust bound up with except the fear that someone else will try to take the Ring for himself just as Boromir did? From Gollum's cry of 'thief, thief, thief'' to Bilbo backed against the wall with his hand on his sword, from Frodo wanting to strike Bilbo for reaching for the Ring to Boromir's 'For I am too strong for you, halfling,' the fear of this threat persists, and underlying it is one simple sentence: 'The Ring is mine.'

Thus Frodo will not only pity Gollum when at last he meets him, but will use the Ring to dominate and terrify him, while allowing himself to be called the Master of the Precious. Frodo's journey from Bag End, where he can't throw the Ring into the fire, to the Sammath Naur, where he can't throw the Ring into the fire, is no simple quest by a hero without flaws.

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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)