He gets to eat as many goblins as he likes, and the threat of disappearance keeps the goblins from coming down to figure out who ate their comrades last watch. Based on the evidence, Gollum appears to live quite a satisfying life by the time of The Hobbit. Living in his lake, he “paddle” around searching for “blind fish” to eat, sometimes capturing the odd helpless goblin who ventures into his domain, “throttl them from behind,” with “his long fingers” whenever they come down. The Hobbit, Chapter V, “Riddles in the Dark”Ī creature of ravenous hunger (and atypically for a menacing fantasy creature, very small), Gollum’s rule under the Misty Mountain is pervaded by his appetites. He was Gollum-as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. An unknowable yet strangely charismatic horror, he is described with something nearing reverence:ĭeep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. Living under the Misty Mountains, Gollum, “a small slimy creature,” rules the literal underworld from his perch by an underground lake, aided by his magic ring. When he first appears in The Hobbit, Gollum is the fairy tale monster that other fairy tale monsters fear. In short, he’s Tolkien’s entire creation in one character, embodying The Lord of the Rings’s ethos each time he materializes. Gollum’s relationship with free will is inconsistent, evincing the paradox of Tolkien’s fervent Catholicism and racial-cultural essentialism. His demise is inadvertently caused by the decisions of both factions, and he experiences degrading and at times sadistic treatment from all of his captors. Throughout The Lord of the Rings Gollum is a pawn for both the Free Peoples of Middle-earth and Mordor’s forces. Gollum is a pauper of paradox he’s one of the trilogy’s few truly autonomous characters, having few loyalties (and no consistent ones) and little deference to the passing of time, and yet he is powerless. In many ways, Gollum embodies the zeitgeist of Middle-earth more completely than any other character in The Lord of the Rings. The Dead Marshes serve as much as an introduction to the nature of Gollum as they do to the geographic and ontological contours of Mordor and its surrounding lands. Andy Serkis as a wearied Gollum, in the final throes of a battle for his soul, departs Osgiliath in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
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