It’s an image few can forget: the emaciated, twisted face of the creature Gollum, huddling in his underground cave and clutching his precious Ring. One of the most pivotal characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe, Gollum stars in some of the most memorable scenes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But his actions have an impact on the story that reaches much farther than he could ever realize or understand.
But how did such a strange, pitiful being come to possess one of the most powerful magical items in existence? And what, in fact, is Gollum? To find the answer, one must journey hundreds of years before Frodo’s time to an obscure offshoot community of early Hobbits located in the Gladden Fields. It was there, on a seemingly normal afternoon in a sleepy village by the River Anduin, that one of the saddest and most important tales in Middle-earth’s history began.
Gollum was born late in the Third Age of Middle-earth, though still hundreds of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. He was originally a Stoor, one of the three breeds of early Hobbits (the other two being the Fallohides and the Harfoots), who favored flat riverside lands and made their living by fishing. In this early part of his life, he was known as Sméagol and was, by all accounts, an ordinary, unremarkable member of his community. But all of that changed when tragedy struck one fateful day on the River Anduin.
It was Sméagol’s birthday, and he was celebrating with an afternoon of boating and fishing on the river with his cousin Déagol. Their idyllic outing was rudely interrupted when a large fish suddenly pulled the Hobbits overboard. Déagol then stumbled across the One Ring at the bottom of the river, where it had been lying for over 2000 years after abandoning its previous bearer, Isildur. The innocent and simple-minded cousins were no match for the object’s malevolent power, and the overpowering desire to possess it took hold of them. Sméagol demanded that Déagol give it to him as a gift for his birthday but was met with refusal — and instantly flew into a murderous rage. And in mere moments, he had strangled his cousin and taken the Ring for his own.
When the other Stoors saw what he had done, Sméagol was branded a murderer and driven out of the community to scrape out a living in the wilds. It was a tragic but inevitable reaction — and even if he had been allowed to stay, there was no way the villagers could have understood what had happened to him and helped him in any meaningful way. Sméagol and the simple, happy life that accompanied that identity were utterly lost when he laid eyes on the Ring. It fundamentally changed him, body and soul, unnaturally prolonging his life and morphing him into a gray-skinned, gremlin-like form.
Over the next 500 years, Gollum eked out a twisted, unhappy existence in the caverns under the Misty Mountains, subsisting on raw fish (and sometimes goblin, when he could get it) and obsessing over the Ring. As fans of Peter Jackson’s films know, he loved to call it his “precious,” but in the books, he occasionally referred to it as his “birthday present,” a telling tic that reveals how he justified the memory of Déagol’s death. It wasn’t until Bilbo stumbled into the caves during his adventures with Thorin’s Company that the Ring saw an opportunity to break this centuries-long détente and escape Gollum’s clutches. The loss of the Ring, Gollum’s sole reason for living, was a blow he could not ignore, ultimately causing him to leave the caves after 500 years and begin the fraught, chaotic final chapter of his life.
Gollum’s story is a sad one, rife with cruel irony. By rights, he should have lived a simple life, wholly small and unimportant in the grand scheme of the world. Instead, a twist of fate ultimately made him one of the most important actors in the meta-drama of its unfolding history. His time as a Ring-bearer caused much harm and suffering, arguably most of all to himself — yet in the end, he was the one to assure the evil object’s destruction. Whether Gollum is ultimately a hero, a villain or something in between, one thing is for sure: his backstory is one of the most tragic threads in the tapestry of Middle-earth’s history.
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