"Sneaking,
sneaking! Hobbits always so polite, yes. O nice hobbits!"
"No,
sweet one. See, my precious: 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; fresh
from the sea. Most Precious Gollum! Must have it. We wants it, we wants it, we
wants it!"
"Precious,
precious, precious!" Gollum cried. "My Precious! O my Precious!"
And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he
stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a
shriek he fell. Out of the depths came his last wail Precious, and he
was gone.
"Don’t
kill us. Don’t hurt us with nassty cruel steel! Let us live, yes, live
just a little longer. Lost lost! We’re lost. And when Precious goes we’ll
die, yes, die into the dust. Dusst!"
"Sméagol
has to take what’s given him. He was given that name by kind Master
Samwise, the hobbit that knows so much."
"Sméagol
won’t go, O no precious, not this time. He’s frightened, and he’s
very tired, and this hobbit’s not nice, not nice at all. Sméagol won’t
grub for roots and carrotses and - taters. What’s taters, precious, eh,
what’s taters?"
Drastically
mutated from his original hobbit form by the power of The One Ring and the
dismal dark of the mountain roots where he abode, Gollum was the ultimate
epitome of the Ring's powerful corruption. He had decrepit skin, thin and wispy hair,
and pale green, lamp-like eyes which apparently aided him in keen night vision.
He was withered down to a lean frame of skin and bones, but very strong still.
Sméagol's original name was Trahald, the Anglicized equivalent of which is
Smeagol. Sméagol was born in the year 2430 to a fairly prominent family
of hobbits of the Stoor strain near the Gladden Fields. In the year 2463,
the day of Sméagol's coming of age, he went fishing with his cousin Déagol.
While fishing, Déagol was pulled into the water by a large fish, and underneath
the water he saw something glittering on the riverbank. It turned out to
be none other than The One Ring, lost millennia past by Isildur during his
ambush. Sméagol eventually killed Déagol over
it because of its beauty and because he felt it should have come to him for his
birthday, and not to Déagol.
He found that the Ring made him invisible and he was shunned by his relatives
(when visible). They kicked him, and he bit their feet. He began to
make strange noises in his throat, and they thus called him "Gollum,"
and his grandmother expelled him from their hole. Cursing his bad luck and
his family, he eventually made his way to a gloomy den underneath the Misty
Mountains. The One Ring went with him, and vanished out of all knowledge.
He was eventually visited by Bilbo Baggins who found the Ring, carelessly
abandoned by Gollum on the shore by his lake. Gollum could not get the
Ring back, cursed Bilbo, and eventually left the Mountains in search of the
"thief." He wandered far and wide until the year 3017, when he
was captured by Sauron. It was through Gollum that Sauron learned of the
whereabouts of the Ring and sent the RingWraiths to capture it.
Gollum eventually met up with Frodo and Sam on their journey to Mount Doom to
destroy the Ring. The Ringbearer showed him mercy and refused to kill him,
remembering a wise admonition of Gandalf's years earlier, though Sam was all for
dispatching the vile creature. It was this wisdom that Frodo embraced and
thus employed which ultimately saved Middle-earth, because Frodo was eventually overcome by the power of the Ring
at the edge of the Cracks of Doom, and once again he was accosted by Gollum,
wrestling for the Ring. In the struggle, he managed to bite off Frodo's
Ring finger and recovered The One Ring. But in his excitement, he toppled
over the brink into the fiery chasm below. With a last wail of "Precious...."
he, and the Ring, were destroyed. Frodo and Sam then fled the fiery cone
and were rescued by the Gwáihir and the Eagles.
