If I Can't Have It, No One Can!

The first time that I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy in its entirety, it was the night before I had a midterm, it was a few weeks before finals, and I definitely had some work piling up that I should have been doing; yet, despite all of that, I sat down for about 10 hours with some friends to watch all 3 movies in a row. Alas I did not have access to the extended editions, but even so, the movies definitely made their mark, which is especially impressive considering that by hour 6 I was slightly delirious and more than likely realizing how late it was. When I think back to those movies though, there are definitely a lot of memorable moments or features that always make me want to go back and watch through them again; Legolas and Gimli’s “bromance,” getting to reconnect with the one and only Bilbo Baggins, Merry and Pippin’s evolution as comic relief to actual adventurers, and Samwise’s heroism and bravery are all definitely standouts. However, there is one thing I always come back to, and it makes me smile and shiver all at once: “My preciousssss.” Given, I just watched Andy Serkis read the Riddles in the Dark chapter of The Hobbit, voicing Gollum/Sméagol in his full creepy glory, but even without the recent reminder, I think that Gollum’s obsession over the Ring, and the Ring’s inevitable pull over almost anyone that tries to wield it, definitely speak to a broader theme that runs throughout Tolkien’s writings on Middle Earth.

            Gollum’s relationship with the Ring, especially when we first meet him in The Hobbit, is definitely a bit odd; he doesn’t constantly feel the pull of needing to wear the ring, just to possess it, as he “used to wear it at first, till it tired him; and then he kept it in a pouch next his skin, till it galled him; and now usually he hid it in a hole in the rock on his island, and was always going back to look at it. And still sometimes he put it on, when he could not bear to be parted from it any longer, or when he was very, very, hungry, and tired of fish.” These feel less like the actions of someone who wants desperately to keep the ring on his person; only when he feels like he really needs to wear it or wants some variety in his diet does he wear it. Instead, at least to me, this appears more like the behavior of a hoarder, or that by keeping it himself, he is actively making sure that no one else can possess it. He’s not keeping the ring for the pleasure of it, or even because he likes to be invisible (though clearly solitude is very important to him), but instead the idea that anyone else has the ring is so unthinkable that Sméagol inevitably becomes Gollum; his initial state of being enamored with the beauty of the ring turns into an uglier and darker selfishness, a need to be the sole caretaker of this object.

Even the way he dies shows how his one goal is to be the sole bearer of the ring, “But Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust within its circle. It shone now as if verily it was wrought of living fire. ‘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.” Even standing above a pit of fire, Gollum is too caught up with the victory of winning back the precious to care about the precarious situation he is in; by falling in to Mount Doom, in a strange sense Gollum has won, as he has died the last Ring Bearer, and as he died, only then did the Ring get destroyed.

This type of obsession over an object of this power is echoed in the story of the Silmarils, as not long after their creation, “though at great feasts Fëanor would wear them, blazing on his brow, at other times they were guarded close, locked in the deep chambers of his hoard in Tirion. For Fëanor began to love the Silmarils with a greedy love, and grudged the sight of them to all save to his father and his seven sons; he seldom remembered now that the light within them was not his own.” The compulsion to own the Silmarils, and more specifically to keep them from others, is akin to the pull of the Ring. This isn’t to say that the Silmarils themselves are evil, or that the Ring is good; in fact, I am not trying to make any sort of moral comparison between these artifacts. What I am trying to point out is that, throughout Tolkien’s works, the idea that attempting to hoard something just for the sake of making sure no one can have it leads to that person’s destruction and has the potential to harm many others.

Fëanor’s greed for the Silmarils essentially doomed many of the Noldor to many ages of strife, and his sons had to die for their father’s folly, among other catastrophic consequences. Gollum’s greed, on the other hand, was on a smaller scale, but in a sense equally tragic; killing one of his closest friends, betraying his true nature, and essentially torturing Frodo and Sam on their journey to Mount Doom are only some of the things Gollum did to either protect or try to ensure his hold over the Ring. However, when objects of power are kept for the sake of protecting others, not to hide them from view, oftentimes they can do great things; Earendil and Elwing were able to use a Silmaril to enlist the aid of the Valar on behalf of Elves and Men; Galadriel used Nenya to ensure the survival of Lórien, and the Palantíri used to ensure cooperation and friendship between far-flung groups of people. Power isn’t evil in its own right, or at least not always; the will to hoard though, that’s a different story, and one that always ends in tragedy.

-       SGK

P.S. If you’d also like to watch a hobbit solve some Riddles in the Dark, this should do the trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSeVHqp2eQA