In the new version, Gollum pretended that he would show Bilbo the way out if he lost the riddle-game, but he actually planned to use the Ring to kill and eat him. The version of the story given in the first edition became the lie that Bilbo made up to justify his possession of the Ring to the Dwarves and Gandalf. To fit the concept of the ruling Ring that emerged during the writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien revised later editions of The Hobbit. Originally, he was also characterised as being less bound to the Ring than in later versions he offered to give the Ring to Bilbo if he lost the riddle game, and he showed Bilbo the way out of the mountains after losing. In the first edition of The Hobbit, Gollum's size is not stated. At his wits' end in the dark, Bilbo agreed to a riddle game with Gollum on the chance of being shown the way out of the mountains. īilbo Baggins stumbled upon Gollum's lair, having found the Ring in the network of goblin tunnels leading down to the lake. Over the years, his eyes adapted to the dark and became "lamp-like", shining with a sickly pale light. He survived on cave fish, which he caught from a small boat, and small goblins who strayed too far from the stronghold of the Great Goblin. Gollum was introduced in The Hobbit as "a small, slimy creature" who lived on a small island in an underground lake at the roots of the Misty Mountains. In Tolkien's Red Book of Westmarch, the name "Déagol" is supposedly a translation of the "original" name in the author-invented language of Westron, Nahald, with the same meaning. The rhyming name of his relative "Déagol" is from Old English: dēagol, meaning "secretive, hidden". In Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings, the name "Sméagol" is said to be a "translation" of the Middle-earth name Trahald (having to do with the idea of "burrowing"), and rendered with a name based on Old English smygel of similar meaning. He was portrayed through motion capture by Andy Serkis in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. Gollum was voiced by Brother Theodore in Rankin-Bass' animated adaptations of The Hobbit and Return of the King, and by Peter Woodthorpe in Ralph Bakshi's animated film version and the BBC's 1981 radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
For Gollum's literary origins, scholars have compared Gollum to the shrivelled hag Gagool in Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines and to the subterranean Morlocks in H. They have noted, too, that Gollum is not wholly evil, and that he has a part to play in the will of Eru Iluvatar, the omnipotent god of Middle-earth, necessary to the destruction of the Ring. Gollum finally seized the Ring from Frodo Baggins at the Cracks of Doom in Mount Doom in Mordor, but he fell into the fires of the volcano, where both he and the Ring were destroyed.Ĭommentators have described Gollum as a psychological shadow figure for Frodo and as an evil guide in contrast to the wizard Gandalf, the good guide. Bilbo Baggins found the Ring and took it for his own, and Gollum afterwards pursued it for the rest of his life.
#PRECIOUS MOMENTS DRAWINGS FREE#
Centuries of the Ring's influence twisted Gollum's body and mind, and, by the time of the novels, he "loved and hated, as he loved and hated himself." Throughout the story, Gollum was torn between his lust for the Ring and his desire to be free of it. Gollum referred to the Ring as "my precious" or "precious", and it extended his life far beyond natural limits. Sméagol obtained the Ring by murdering his relative Déagol, who found it in the River Anduin. In The Lord of the Rings it is stated that he was originally known as Sméagol, corrupted by the One Ring, and later named Gollum after his habit of making "a horrible swallowing noise in his throat". Gollum was a Stoor Hobbit of the River-folk who lived near the Gladden Fields.
He was introduced in the 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit, and became important in its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. Sculpture of Gollum catching fish at Wellington Airport, 2013, to mark the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey