The Lord of the Rings: The Taming of Smeagol (Part Five and Last)

 

The Tale

They all three sit against the stony wall, Gollum between Frodo and Sam, and wait for the moon to set. Gollum is very tense, eyes closed, as if waiting for something. The hobbits exchange an understanding look, and then pretend to fall asleep.

Gollum cautiously opens one eye, and then the other, then slowly looks from one to the other hobbit. Then with a sudden leap ‘like a grasshopper or a frog’ he goes bounding forward into the darkness.

But this is what the hobbits have been waiting for. Sam jumps up and grabs him, and Frodo grabs Gollum’s leg and brings him down. Frodo suggests some of Sam’s rope might be useful again, and Sam gets it out. Sam growls at Gollum, accusing the treacherous creature of going to find some of his orc-friends. ‘It’s round your neck this rope ought to go, and a tight noose, too.’ Gollum lays quiet but gives Sam ‘a swift venomous look.’

Frodo suggests tying one leg (they need him to walk) but when the noose goes on Gollum starts to scream, ‘a thin tearing sound’, and will not stop. Frodo determines that he is in pain, but it can’t be from the knot. It is hardly tight enough, in fact. ‘Sam was gentler than his words.’ He asks Gollum what is the matter.

‘It freezes, it bites!’ Gollum hisses. ‘Elves twisted it, curse them! Nasty cruel hobbits! That’s why we tries to escape, of course it is, precious … Take it off us! It hurts us!’ Frodo says they cannot take it off, not unless there is any promise that Gollum can give them that he won’t run away that Frodo can trust.

Gollum desperately agrees to swear to anything, then suddenly and clearly and in a strange voice declares ‘Smeagol will swear on the Precious.’

Frodo draws himself up sternly. ‘On the Precious? How dare you?’ It is an evil thing: it will hold Gollum to his promise, ‘[but] it is more treacherous than you are. It may twist your words.’ And what would he swear?

‘To be very very good.’ Gollum grovels and he shakes with fear. ‘Smeagol will swear never, never to let Him have it. Never! Smeagol will save it. But he must swear on the Precious.’

Frodo looks down on him with stern pity. No, not on it. Gollum just wants to see it and touch it again, even though it would drive him mad. He can swear by it. Because it is indeed before him. To Sam it seems that Frodo is suddenly some lordly figure standing before a whining dog at his feet, but Gollum and Frodo are still somehow akin: ‘they could still reach one another’s minds.’ Gollum raises himself and begins pawing and fawning at his knees.

‘Down! Down!’ said Frodo. ‘Now speak your promise!’

‘We promises, yes, I promise!’ said Gollum ‘I will serve the master of the Precious. Good master, good Smeagol, gollum, gollum!’ He begins to weep and bite at his ankle where the rope ties him. Satisfied, Frodo orders Sam to take off the rope.

Gollum gets up and starts ‘prancing around, like a whipped cur whose master has patted it.’ After this he changes for a good while, and becomes fawning and eager to please, talking to the Hobbits directly and not just to himself, hissing and whining less. He still cringes away from the touch of their Elven cloaks, or indeed anything Elvish. Sam still distrusts him, ‘and if possible liked the new Gollum, the Smeagol, less than the old.’ He remarks that the Moon has gone down and that they should be on their way.

Gollum agrees. There is only one way across the North-end and the South-end, and Orcs don’t know it. They don’t cross the Marshes. Only Smeagol found it long ago; they are very lucky they found him! He takes a few steps ahead and looks back, ‘like a dog inviting them for a walk.’ Sam tells him not to get too far ahead, but Gollum assures him, ‘Smeagol promised.’

‘In the deep night under hard clear stars they set off. Gollum led them back northward for a while along the way they had come; then he slanted to the right away from the steep edge of the Emyn Muil, down the broken stony slopes towards the vast fens below. They faded swiftly and softly into the darkness. Over all the leagues of waste before the gates of Mordor there was a black silence.’

Bits and Bobs

Before his ‘taming’ Gollum is again likened to an insect or a frog; afterwards, he becomes more like a dog, still ‘lower’ but approachable and less repellant, his personhood closer to our sympathies.  Indeed he becomes less ‘Gollum’ and more ‘Smeagol’, the hobbit he used to be before the Ring shattered his identity into fragments.

Through his long contact with the evil of the Ring, Gollum has contracted an aversion to all things Elvish, to items that have been imbued with their spiritual power, with the powers of light and good that oppose Sauron. The irony is that you could try to reward him with the most paradisal delights on Middle-earth and he would feel only the worst infernal pains. In Goethe’s Faust, the roses of mercy that fall from Heaven are like flames to the damned; in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters ‘what is blind, suffocating fire to [the demon] is now cool light to [the saved soul], is clarity itself.’

The ‘promise’ of Smeagol is interesting in its ambiguity. The only clear article is that he will never let ‘Him’ have the Ring. Sauron is still the clear main rival to the Precious in Gollum’s mind; he was never going to let the Dark Lord get it in any case, if he could help it.  He swears he will save the Ring and to serve the master of the Precious, rather ambiguous terms that allow his divided mind to accept the oath. I always felt the oddity of Frodo’s phrasing of the situation in the Jackson movies; it sounded as if he were saying that because the Ring is treacherous it would hold Gollum to his words.