The Lord of the Rings: The Taming of Smeagol (Part Three)

 

The Tale

 

‘Under the first shadows of night they started out on the next stage of their journey.’ Sam, looking up the way they’ve come, thinks at least it will be hard for Gollum to follow them now. They pick their way among boulders until they come to a fissure yawning before their feet. They decide to go back the way they came, and maybe find some nook to sleep the rest of the night. They find nothing and end up huddling down not far from where they came down.

The moon is now high and clear. Frodo finally says they should sleep. He’ll take the first watch. But looking around, he sees something on the cliff to which he draws Sam’s attention, and Sam knows what it is.

‘It’s that Gollum! Snakes and adders! And to think that I thought that we’d puzzle him with our bit of a climb! Look at him! Like a nasty crawling spider on a wall!’

Gollum, looking black in the moonlight, is climbing down what seems a sheer wall, head-down and sniffing his way along. Every now and then he lifts his head to look around, his eyes gleaming for a moment as they catch the light. Sam wonders if he can see them; Frodo thinks not, with their elven-cloaks on. But he can smell them, and perhaps hear them. They had not been very quiet until now.

Sam decides that he’s not going to take his tracking them anymore and wants to have word with Gollum. Frodo tells him to be careful, that the creature is much more dangerous than his scrawny body would suggest.

The crawling shape is now about three-quarters of the way down the cliff. As Frodo and Sam wait quietly in the shadow of a boulder, and they can hear Gollum hissing to himself as he pauses trying to find his way down.

‘Ach, sss! Cautious, my precious! More haste less speed.’ He curses the moon; it hurts his eyes. He wonders where the ‘thieves’ are; they have his ‘precious’, and he wants it. Sam whispers to Frodo. What is the Precious? Does he mean the --? Frodo hushes him. Gollum is close enough to hear them.

Gollum does indeed pause and listens carefully, but at last goes on. He gets to about a dozen feet from the bottom but cannot find a handhold down. He twists around to find a way but suddenly just falls with a thin whistling shriek, curling his arms and legs around himself, ‘like a spider whose descending thread has snapped.’

Sam leaps out and before Gollum is even up, the hobbit is on top of him. But even taken by surprise after a fall Gollum is more than he expected. Almost immediately the gangrel creature has pinned  Sam’s arms are pinned in a squeezing hold by Gollum’s arms and legs, and his fingers are seeking Sam’s throat. Then Gollum bites Sam’s shoulder. All the hobbit can do is butt Gollum’s face with the back of his head. But the creature does not let go.

Frodo springs forward, drawing Sting. He pulls back Gollum’s head by his lank hair, forcing him to look up at the sky.

‘Let go! Gollum,’ he said. ‘This is Sting. You have seen it before once upon a time. Let go, or you’ll feel it this time! I’ll cut your throat.’

Bits and Bobs

Gollum is introduced with a lot of inhuman imagery here.  He’s a ‘nasty crawling spider’, ‘like some large prowling thing of insect kind’, and he curls up like a spider when he falls. His voice hisses, whistles, and creaks.  It will take some time before the reader can see past all this to his ‘humanity’. All this likeness to a spider might also be a foreshowing of things to come.

Sam exclaims ‘Snakes and adders!’, a reference to the popular children’s game of ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ or as we would say in America, ‘Chutes and Ladders.’ Gollum uses the old adage ‘More haste, less speed’; perhaps it is part of that ‘fund of knowledge’ that he shares with Hobbit-kind from the days before he became what he is.

Gollum has, of course, seen Sting before, in his long-ago encounter with Bilbo under the mountain, when he lost his precious, the Ring Frodo now carries, into which Gollum has invested so much of his desires and identity that he can hardly differentiate between himself and it. They are both ‘my precious’. But when he refers to 'Precious' in the uppercase, he is referring to the Ring; 'my precious' is merely himself.