story of gollum lord of the rings chapter

Sméagol takes it by force, where Frodo was given the Ring as a gift. Sméagol is, in a kind of way, an inverse of Frodo in the way that he came about possessing the Ring and what followed after. So we were talking about this on twitter and referred to him in this sense as “Frodo’s Shadow”. Second, Frodo was also 33 when he was given the Ring, on his birthday.

So Sméagol chose to take the Ring as an adult, not as a child. First, 33 is the year when a hobbit is considered officially an adult, they’ve come of age. He also referred to the Ring as ‘his birthday present’, although it’s unsure if it it was actually his birthday because Sméagol is such an unreliable narrator. His birth year is listed as Third Age 2430 and then the year he got the Ring is approx. So you can take it or leave it, but I thought I’d mention it. It isn’t in the books and I haven’t been able to find an actual source for this but I’ve read it in several places and I wouldn’t put it past Tolkien to choose this age intentionally.

I want to pause just for a second here to mention the importance of that age, 33. When he was 33 years old, he was fishing with his cousin Déagol who found a gold ring in the water. Sméagol spent his early childhood living with his Grandmother. I wanted to start out with a little bit of background information on Sméagol before the Ring. Maybe you even find yourself, like Frodo, wishing Bilbo had simply killed him when he had the chance and that was the end of it.Īnd yet when we spend just a little bit of time looking for the humanity within Gollum, we find Sméagol, and we are reminded that he himself is a creature worthy of love and yet desperately broken and lost. Today I wanted to spend some time with a character I have a very dear place in my heart for and that character is Sméagol, also known as Gollum.Īt first glance he’s just this gangly, wicked, nasty little monster that you may find easy to hate.

Story of gollum lord of the rings chapter