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.

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

 

The Tale

 

‘Gollum collapsed and went as loose as wet string. Sam got up, fingering his shoulder. His eyes smouldered with anger, but he could not avenge himself; his miserable enemy lay grovelling on the stones whimpering.’

Gollum begs and whines not to be hurt. He didn’t mean to hurt them, but they leapt on him ‘like cats on poor mices.’ He tries to appeal to their pity by proclaiming his loneliness and invokes reciprocity: ‘We’ll be nice to them if they’ll be nice to us.’

Sam wants to tie him up and leave him so the wretch won’t follow them anymore, but Gollum points out with sobs that that will kill him. Frodo says if they’re going to kill him, they should do so outright, but they can’t. He has done them no harm. Sam rubs his Gollum-bitten shoulder and begs to differ. Gollum means to harm them; probably ‘throttle us in our sleep.’ Frodo says what he has done and what he means to do are separate matters.

Frodo pauses a while in thought. Gollum lies still and stops whimpering, awaiting his judgement. Sam just glowers. But Frodo seems to hear, quite clearly, his distant conversation with Gandalf about Gollum, when Frodo declared that it was a pity Bilbo hadn’t stabbed the creature long ago, and that he deserved death.

‘Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not so eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.’

Frodo lowers his sword. He says out loud that he won’t kill Gollum; now that he sees him he does pity him. But he is still very afraid. Sam just stares at him; he seems to be talking to someone unseen. Gollum grovels a bit more and calls them nice hobbits for sparing his life.

They won’t kill him, but they can’t let him go, either. Gollum must go along with them and help them if he can. ‘One good turn deserves another.’ Gollum agrees with him eagerly. He will show them safe paths, yes. But a glint of cunning flickers in his eyes. ‘And where are they going in these cold hard lands, we wonders, yes we wonders?’ Sam sucks his teeth and glowers at Gollum but says nothing. But next he is amazed at Frodo’s straightforward answer.

Gollum knows that or guesses well enough. They are going to Mordor, and Frodo (calling him by his old name Smeagol) believes Gollum knows the way. Gollum covers his ears at the open speaking of the name of Mordor, as if it hurts him. He gabbles in horror. Yes, he guessed it, and he doesn’t want them to go that way. It is full of ashes, dust, thirst, pits, and Orcs everywhere. ‘Nice hobbits mustn’t go to – sss – those places.’

Frodo presses him. But Gollum has been there? And he is being drawn back?

Gollum at first agrees, then shrieks no! He went there once by accident, but ‘we’ won’t go back. Then suddenly his manner changes, and he speaks sobbing, but not to them. It seems he is having a mind/memory encounter, just as Frodo did, but with … someone else. He begs to be left alone, and whimpers at how his poor hands were hurt. He doesn’t want to go back. He’s tried to find It, and he can’t; there are Dwarves, Men, and Elves everywhere, always watching. He’s tired. He gets up and shakes a bony, fleshless fist at the East. ‘We won’t!’ he cried. ‘Not for you.’ Then he falls to his face. ‘Go away! Go to sleep!’

Frodo says that Sauron (though he does not speak the name) will not go away at Smeagol’s command, but if he wants to be really free of the Dark Lord, Frodo will help him. But ‘that I fear means finding us a path towards him. But you need not go all the way, not beyond the gates of his land.’

Gollum cackles. Well, he’s always at home. Plenty of Orcs East of the river who will take them to him. Don’t ask Smeagol; he went away long ago. They took his precious and he is lost in the dark.

Frodo suggests perhaps they will find him again if he goes with them, but Gollum does not believe it. Nevertheless, Frodo commands him to get up. He asks the poor creature if he can find a path better by night or day. The hobbits are tired, but if he says night they’ll leave right away.

‘The big lights [Sun and Moon] hurt our eyes, they do,’ Gollum whined. ‘Not under the White Face [moon], not yet. It will go behind the hills soon, yess. Rest a bit first, nice hobbits!’

‘Then sit down,’ said Frodo, ‘and don’t move!’  

Bits and Bobs

It has been noted that Gollum uses the word nice for anything that he likes (or in the case of nice hobbits, anyone that he wishes to ingratiate himself with) and nasty for anything he dislikes. There is mostly nothing as definite as good or evil in his terminology (except for good Smeagol); it is all about his feelings and whether it furthers his cause.

Also, it is to be noted that he whimpers or squeaks when he is frightened and hisses when he is angry, and seems to use ‘I’ when he is being more sincere and ‘we’ when he is being devious. He is obviously under some compulsion from Sauron to seek out the Ring and bring it back, but even the Dark Lord’s power cannot overcome Gollum’s desire to take it for himself.  

I did not notice until this reading the parallel between Frodo/Gandalf’s and Gollum/Sauron’s inner monologues and their influence on their decisions. Gandalf’s is totally advisory, of course, while Sauron’s is plainly coercive.

It is the pity of Frodo (despite his fear) that is the turning point of his quest, and that will ultimately lead to its success. Sam once again ‘sucks his teeth’ at Frodo’s seeming oddity, and despite his anger and suspicion refrains from striking Gollum when he’s down. It is a natural virtue that may bloom in time into real ‘charity’, a spiritual fellow-feeling and understanding of others and their position.

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.

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

 

The Tale

 

‘But that day wore on, and when afternoon faded towards evening they were still scrambling along the ridge and had found no way of escape.’

Frodo and Sam seem to hear faint sounds of pursuit behind them, the fall of a stone or the sounds of flapping feet. Even the wind through the rocks sounds like hissing through sharp teeth. But there is no other sign that Gollum may be following them.

As they pass along the ridge it bends gradually northward and gets lower, though their path is hindered by deep, worn gullies in the cliff face that drives the hobbits further from the edge. At last, they are stopped by a cleft deeper than most. Beyond it, the cliffs rise ever higher. West would lead them back into more labor and delay; to go east would take them to the outer parapet.

Frodo decides the only way to go is down into the gully before them to see where it goes, though Sam fears it will just lead to a nasty drop. The cleft turns out to be longer and deeper than it seems once they get down into it. A ways down they find ‘a few gnarled and stunted trees’, the first they had seen for days, mostly dead but straggling to the cliff’s edge. Frodo looks over and sees that the cliff is much lower here, not so sheer and full of broken stone. He estimates it is eighteen fathoms (108 feet) down.

‘And that’s enough!’ said Sam. ‘Ugh! How I do hate looking down from a height! But looking’s better than climbing.’

If they’re going to try, they need to try soon. The day is getting darker, and a storm is coming. Frodo is determined to give it a go. Sam says alright, but he’s going first. He doesn’t want to slip and take Frodo down with him. With no further preparation, he swings his legs over the brink and twists over the edge. ‘It is doubtful if he ever did anything braver in cold blood, or more unwise.’

‘No, no! Sam, you old ass!’ Frodo hauls Sam up again and tells him to be patient. Frodo will scout a way down, then call him to follow or come back up himself. Sam says it would be better to wait until morning and more light, but Frodo grudges every minute.  He lowers himself down almost a full stretch and finds a ledge with his toes. He is just reporting to Sam when he is cut short.

The speeding storm has overtaken the day and swallowed that light with a leap. At the same moment there is a crack of thunder and a blast of wind, and on that wind rides the rising shriek of a Nazgul, its terror magnified by the isolation and darkness into knives of horror and despair. Frodo involuntarily claps his hands to his ears, loses his grip, and goes slithering down the cliff with a wailing cry.

Sam flops to his belly, crawling to the edge and calling after his master. After a heart-stopping minute Frodo calls faintly back. He is all right: he has come to rest on a somewhat wider ledge, not too far down. But for some reason, he can’t see. He wonders if he’s been struck blind.

Sam wonders what can have happened to him. It is dim but not dark. He can see his master’s grey figure now, far out the reach of any outstretched hand. Suddenly the rain and hail of the storm strikes. That settles it. He is coming down anyhow, to help Frodo.

Frodo calls up that Sam should wait; he is feeling better now. ‘Wait! You can’t do anything without a rope.’

‘Rope!’ The word has triggered his memory. ‘Well, if I don’t deserve to be hung on the end of one as a warning to numbskulls! You’re nowt but a ninnyhammer, Sam Gamgee: that’s what the Gaffer said to me often enough’. He’s been carrying a forgotten coil of Elven rope from Lorien in the bottom of his pack for hundreds of miles.

He throws an end of it down to Frodo, who seems to see it as a shimmering light coming down to him in his darkness. Frodo ties it around his waist, and with Sam’s help, scrambles back up the cliff. They withdraw from the edge a ways and rest. The storm is sending down a spate of rain; if Frodo had stayed below he would have been washed away.

They discuss the luck of having the rope. Sam had taken a fancy to it and personally packed a coil, being told ‘It may be a help in many needs.’ It is soft to the hand, but thin and tough, and packs away close and light. He measures it and it comes out to thirty ells (37.5 yards, or almost 113 feet).

Frodo decides that if the rain passes before nightfall they should try again. It is already passing. He doesn’t want to spend more time up here ‘with the eyes of the Dark Country looking over the marshes.’ The clouds roll away towards Gondor and Rohan. But here the evening comes out again, with a few pale stars and a crescent moon.

They tie the rope to a nearby stump. This time Sam will go down first; they tie the other end of the rope around his waist. The climb doesn’t feel as bad as he imagined: the rope seems to give him courage. Frodo follows, although he doesn’t quite have Sam’s confidence in the slender rope. But at last they are at the bottom, and have escaped the Emyn Muil. But Sam looks up forlornly at the cliff.

‘Ninnyhammer! … Noodles! My beautiful rope!’ There it is at the top and tied to a stump, and as nice a little stair for Gollum to climb down after them. But Frodo can think of no way to get it. Sam tugs the rope regretfully. Maybe even made by Galadriel made it herself. Galadriel, he murmurs. He gives it one last pull.

To their surprise the rope comes slithering down the cliff, landing all around the startled Sam. Frodo laughs, suggesting that Sam must not have tied it very well, or that the rope frayed. Sam is offended by both suggestions. He is quite competent at knots (his Uncle Andy and his rope-walk again) and he’ll hear nothing against the work of the Elves. He believes the rope came when it was called!

Well, it came, and that’s the important thing, says Frodo. But now they have to think of their next move. They look up at the stars, and the crescent moon, now waxing brighter. ‘They do cheer the heart, don’t they? Said Sam looking up. ‘Elvish they are, somehow.’

‘Yes,” said Frodo. ‘But he [the moon] won’t be full for some days. I don’t think we’ll try the marshes by the light of half a moon.’

 

Bits and Bobs

“You’re nowt but a ninnyhammer” translates into “You’re nothing (nowt) but a simpleton (ninnyhammer)”. The term “noodles” used later also means ‘simpletons’ (see Noodles, Nitwits, and Numskulls, by Maria Leach).

Frodo’s momentary blindness seems to be related to the horror of the passing Nazgul as much as the flash of lightning; it is relieved by the light of the Elven rope.

The stars and moon (which is male in Middle-earth mythology; it is steered by the Maiar, Tilion) seem Elvish to Sam, and the Elves, ‘the People of the Stars’, have been connected with the stars since they awoke in the perpetual twilight before the rising of the Sun or Moon. Perhaps because the moon is associated with the night and stars it takes on that Elvish connotation. 

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

The Tale

‘Well, master, we’re in a fix and no mistake,’ said Sam Gamgee. He stood despondently with hunched shoulders beside Frodo, and peered out with puckered eyes into the gloom.’

It is the third evening since Frodo and Sam have left the Company. They have picked their way through the twisted knot of hills that is the Emyn Muil, often lost and sometimes going in circles, but on the whole moving steadily east. But they are finding the eastward faces of the hills too sheer to climb down into the marshes below. They are paused on the brink of a tall cliff, looking towards the dark mountains of Mordor.

Sam remarks on the irony that of all the places in the world they’ve never wanted to go to Mordor and now they have to try to get there but can’t ‘nohow’. Frodo shudders. If they can’t get down, they can’t stay there, but must find a sheltered place to stay the night and try again tomorrow.

Frodo ponders his doom. He thinks he’s fated to go into ‘that Shadow yonder’, but will good or evil show him the way? Delay helps the Enemy. ‘Is it the will of the Dark Tower that steers us?’ He should have left the Fellowship long before and come over the Battle Plain to the passes of Mordor. But now they can’t find the way back and Orcs prowl the east bank of the River. Frodo’s too tired to think. They’ll just have to camp and try again tomorrow. What food have they got?

Sam answers that they’re down to the lembas, the Elvish waybread from Lorien, but there’s quite a bit of it. It’s good but getting monotonous; he wishes for a bit of plain bread and a mug of beer. He’s lugged his cooking gear for miles, but there’s no fuel for a fire and no food, ‘not even grass’, to cook.

They go down and find a stony hollow to make a camp in. It is at least a shelter from the cold easterly wind. They sleep, one watching as the other rests, until morning. In the cold grey dawn, as they munch their lembas for breakfast, Sam asks Frodo if he’s seen anything through his watch.

For it seems Gollum is still following them; they’ve seen his eyes shining in the dark. It’s given Sam a turn, and he threatens (not for the last time) ‘the miserable slinker’ if he should ever catch him. But they haven’t had any sign of him for two nights, and Frodo hopes they’ve lost him. At any rate, he’s not Frodo’s main concern at the moment. It’s getting down out of these hated hills.

‘I feel all naked on the east side, stuck up here with nothing but the dead flats between me and that Shadow yonder. There’s an Eye in it.’ They’ve got to find a way down today.

Bits and Bobs

And so, in Book Four we take up again the thread of Frodo and Sam’s story, which, despite all the wonders and battles of Book Three, is where the crux of the quest and the main narrative lies. We go back in time a bit; while Frodo and Sam wander the cliffs (Emyn Muil = Sindarin ‘drear hills’) seeking a way out, the Orcs are carrying off Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are pursuing them.

I noticed the odd phrase ‘puckered eyes’ to describe Sam looking into the gloom. I can’t be altogether sure, but I have the impression that Tolkien might be using this to avoid the terms ‘squint’ or ‘squinting’, almost always a word in his vocabulary that implies disapproval, of a failure of true sight. ‘To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face.’

Frodo’s words about his bad decisions echo Aragorn’s earlier ‘All that I do goes amiss.’ He even goes so far as to wonder if Sauron is somehow guiding his actions. The irony in this case (as it is in Aragorn’s) is that his decisions prove to be good in the end, even providential. If he had taken a more direct approach earlier, he (and possibly Sam, if he had followed him) would probably been captured; as it is, the less obvious move nets him a sneaky guide and later Gollum’s being present to save him from ultimate failure. ‘Something happened that the Dark Lord did not purpose.’

I love Sam. Sam is just … Sam. Whether wishing for some plain food and a mug of beer over lembas, or threatening to thrash and maybe even kill Gollum if he ever gets his hands on him, Sam has the normal reactions; he is the simple hobbit, the ‘ordinary man’, driven by the ‘stock responses’ as C. S. Lewis calls them. ‘Stock responses are those responses which certain things merit. They are the natural and proper response to seeing a waterfall or a sunrise or a dying child.’ Although Sam can rise to some higher vision or insight, it is his ‘plain hobbit sense’ of who he is and of his place in the world that helps him to resist the call of the Ring.