LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 01 - The Taming of Sméagol

[Formendacil]

There's a certain amount of analysis that could be done, dredging up these ancient threads and seeing how the Chapter-by-Chapter project went in its original attempt. The threads gradually get shorter, for one thing--there's less and less reading for me to do to catch up with them--and fewer attempts to reinvigorate them the further into the books one goes.

This is a major breaking point, in that we deviate from the characters we've been following and go back to Frodo and Sam. Not QUITE back to where they left the Fellowship--Tolkien is content to advance the action three days from there to the end of their struggle getting past the Emyn Muil--but close enough. Earlier commentators pointed out that the landscape here is far more different and barren than in the other storyline, which I would attribute to the growing closeness of Mordor: both in literary terms and in literal terms. The decision that weighed upon Frodo and the Company all down the Great River can be seen as choosing between the green, living lands west of the River and the barren, diseased lands to the East.

Comparisons between the two books keep wanting to crop up, at least here at the beginning, and others on the thread have alluded to them. One that does not get much attention from our venerable forebears is something that caught my eye only a chapter ago: a direct encounter with Sauron. Like Pippin's encounter in the palantír, we do not see Sauron directly but only mediated through another character, but Gollum's one-sided dialogue with Sauron is, nonetheless, an encounter with the story's villain:

Originally Posted by "The Taming of Sméagol

Then suddenly his voice and language changed, and he sobbed in his throat, and spoke but not to them. 'Leave me alone, gollum! You hurt me. O my poor hands, gollum! I, we, I don't want to come back. I can't find it. I am tired. I, we can't find it, gollum, gollum, no, nowhere. They're always awake. Dwarves, Men, and Elves, terrible Elves with bright eyes. I can't find it. Ach!' He got up and clenched his long hand into a bony fleshless knot, shaking it towards the East. 'We won't!' he cried. 'Not for you.' Then he collapsed again. 'Gollum, gollum," he whimpered with his face to the ground. 'Don't look at us! Go away! Go to sleep!'

One thing I hadn't noticed before with this passage, though I feel as though I ought to have, is the extent to which Gollum/Sméagol wavers between "I" and "we" here. Gollum has always talked to himself, of course--that goes right back to the 1937 Hobbit, but it is possible that the full bifurcation into the Gollum/Sméagol personalities is a later development--even one driven by terror at the encounter with the Sauron?

Speaking of Sauron, the imagery of Sauron as a great eye ramps up in this chapter, and while I will never quite forgive the Peter Jackson movies for reducing him to that, it is certainly not out of line with the actual way that Frodo experiences him. The more "personal" encounters of Pippin and Gollum (and Aragorn and Denethor) are all the more terrifying to think about because of their connection to the demonic, impersonal presence that Frodo presents to us far more frequently.