# Smeagol and Gollum



## Persephone (Jul 5, 2006)

Don't know if this was posted before and if I'm posting in the right place. This is a topic discussed elsewhere that I think would make a great discussion here as well.

True enough, this is a very intruiging character in the book. Has anyone ever wondered what the thought or the inspiration behind him was? What he represented if anything? Would Frodo have ended up the same as him if Sam hadn't have been there to push Frodo on?

Need your thoughts on this.


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## YayGollum (Jul 5, 2006)

If it's about poor Smeagol, the hero, and Gollum, why ask a question all about the evil sam and the superly boring Frodo? Ick! oh well. I'll answer that first, then get to the appetizing questions. No, the superly boring Frodo would have died, easily. Gollum would have seen the Baggins as an even easier kill. Or, if the guy was especially lucky, he would have died at some point after those Orcs caught him. 

Anyways, no, I haven't thought very much about what the inspirations were behind poor Smeagol, or if he represented something that would have had to be something achingly cool. Plenty of other people are more interested in real life type things than I am. I remember reading something about how there was some Dwarf in some Norse mythology, who lived in a cave and had some gold ring with some bits of magic in it that let him turn into a fish or something. Kind of similar to poor Smeagol, but I don't know if the Tolkien dude was attempting to use it as inspiration.


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## Persephone (Jul 28, 2006)

I can't believe it, you're the only one who replied to this thread!!! **GASP**

I think the inspiration Tolkien used to create him would be Dr. Jeckle and MR. Hyde. Don't you think?


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## Alcuin (Jul 28, 2006)

I don’t know the origins or inspirations for Gollum, either. I believe, however, that he was not initially envisioned as another halfling when The Hobbit was first written, but more nearly man-sized.



Narya said:


> I think the inspiration Tolkien used to create him would be Dr. Jeckle and MR. Hyde.


 He certainly shows those qualities. _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ was a tale about drug addiction, was it not? Perhaps Gollum was addicted to the Ring. He certainly seems to be mentally deranged: he is schizophrenic, in the sense that he has “impairments in the perception or expression of reality and by significant social or occupational dysfunction,” as the Wikipedia article puts forth. He clearly has delusions of grandeur:


> ...if we has it, then we can escape, even from Him, eh? Perhaps we grows very strong, stronger than Wraiths. Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum! Eat fish every day, three times a day; … We wants it, we wants it, we wants it!


But this may be merely a property of the Ring: it seemingly created such delusions in everyone, or at least in Sam. Gandalf said that, “‘The murder of Déagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defense, repeating it ... until he almost believed it.’” Like Dr. Jekyll, he certainly has an completely separate alter-ego (dissociative identity disorder, separate from schizophrenia).


> ‘No, no! Not that way!’ wailed Sméagol.
> 
> ‘Yes! We wants it! We wants it!’


That might also be due to long exposure to the Ring: Gollum could be a manifestation of the Ring’s conquest of Sméagol, while what is left of the old Sméagol cowers in a back corner of his mind. (Hats off to Andy Serkis for that performance! By the time the third film came out, I really hated them; I’ve only seen PJ’s _RotK _once: it was all I could stand; but it was worth suffering through it just to see Serkis and the CGI artists make Gollum come to life.) Other than Jekyll and Hyde, I do not immediately recall another literary character with this kind of presentation. (Stephen King wrote a story about a character like this, didn’t he? I cannot recall, and neither can my resident Stephen King aficionado.)

And I can’t recall having read about Tolkien’s inspirations for Gollum.


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## Shireman D (Sep 27, 2006)

Psychotic schizophrenics are - I understand - described as having bi-polar personalities and in that sense Smeagol seems to be suffering a major case but actually aren't all of us prone to bi-polarism? Are there not constant tensions within every psyche between what we want to do and what we do - between what we believe is right and what we feel is convenient ... and so on. 

In that sense Smeagol can be a metaphor for all the free peoples.

Must go, time to fork over the west field.


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