# Gollum as Cain, Grendel's great-great-grandad?



## Aldanil (Feb 16, 2002)

Listening to the BBC's Saturday Play just now (this week's episode: "The King of the Golden Hall"), a thought crossed my mind's eye which perhaps those like Goroshimura and others who have woven postings into that "Finding God in the LOTR" thread and look to find Christian root-beds for the rose-bushes of Tolkien's telling might enjoy giving heed to: was our dear John Ronald Reuel, I wonder, thinking of that most ancient ancestor of the monster Grendel, *Cain*, the bloody-handed grandsire of that man-eating "shepherd of evil" overcome and dismembered by the eponymous hero of the Old English epic he knew professionally better than any other scholar alive, mankind's first murderer in the slaying of his meeker brother Abel, at that authorial moment when the odd creature *Gollum* whose squeezings brave little Bilbo had squirmed his way free from and so brought home to Bag End a golden ring became, in our much-beloved Professor's expanding imagining, *Smeagol* the kin-strangling Stoor, whose sudden killing of his cousin to possess the Preciousss preserves his own wretched existence for nearly six centuries, carries Isildur's Bane from the reedy shallows of Anduin to the deeps of Hithaiglir and so binds the journey "there and back again" to the greater Tale of the Third Age's ending?



Another native son of Alabam might more feistily, having once drawn breath, suggest you could kiss his apposite grits, semanticists, but more mildly I bid you untangle my syntax!



(and just what kind of periphrastic pipe-weed is this weak-ender on, anyway?  )


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## Goro Shimura (Feb 18, 2002)

Gollum is quite Cain-ish when he murders Deagol... and quite Judas-ish when he betrays Frodo at Cirith Ungol.


But more than being an archetypical murderer and traitor, Gollum to me illustrates the inablity of man to overcome temptation without the help of a deliverer (as seen in Romans 7):



> 18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
> 19 For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
> 20 Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
> 21 I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.
> ...


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## Eonwe (Feb 18, 2002)

I agree. Gollum to me is the ultimate example of the statement of Illuvatar to Melkor at the end of the music:

*And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.*

How many times does Gandalf and Frodo both say that Gollum may play a part that even he can't imagine? This is neat stuff, and wove throughout the books.


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## Ged (Feb 18, 2002)

And Grendel in mythology used to creep through windows in the night to steal babies.

Didn't Gollum do something similar in Mirkwood?


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## Eonwe (Feb 18, 2002)

"It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles." re: Gollum, Gandalf in the Shadow of the Past

yep

cept Gollum didn't say to his Grandmother "am I my brother's keeper?", he just taught her to suck eggses.


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