Gollum: Villain or Victim?

The murder that comes before the misery

Gollum’s appearance invites pity long before his history becomes easy to judge. He is isolated, hungry, suspicious and dependent on something that has prolonged his life without giving him a life worth wanting. It is tempting to begin his explanation there, with the damage done to him, and to treat everything else as the inevitable behaviour of a victim. Tolkien makes that explanation insufficient by placing a murder near the beginning of the story.

Déagol finds the Ring. Sméagol wants it and kills him to obtain it. The Ring’s influence matters, but the account does not present an innocent person accidentally blamed for a crime committed by someone else. Sméagol’s desire becomes an act of violence against a companion. His later suffering cannot make that companion disappear from the moral account. Any reading concerned with compassion for Gollum also needs to remember the person he kills.

This is why the question in the title cannot be settled by choosing only one of its terms. Gollum becomes a victim of possession, coercion and fear, while also remaining the agent of actions that harm others. Tolkien is interested in the difficult relation between those truths. A complete acquittal would falsify his past; a complete reduction to villainy would falsify the continuing evidence that a damaged person, rather than an empty mechanism of evil, is still present.

What the Ring does to a life

The Ring does not give Sméagol the lasting satisfaction that his first act of possession appears to promise. It intensifies secrecy, resentment and estrangement. His separation from his own community eventually becomes the long confinement beneath the mountains, where his relationship to the Ring takes the place of relationships with other people. Its loss exposes the depth of the dependence it has helped create.

That history is not merely a warning against liking valuable objects too much. Possession has changed the structure of Gollum’s attention. He interprets other beings in relation to the Ring, and interprets his own survival through the possibility of recovering it. Even his language carries the division between a person who can remember another life and a desire that repeatedly overwhelms the effort to recover it. The reader hears an argument in which the speaker is also his own adversary.

Yet the Ring’s power should not become a convenient explanation that makes every judgement unnecessary. Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum includes deception, a threat of murder and an unexpected act of mercy. Those actions have different moral characters even though all occur under the shadow of the same object. Tolkien’s narrative continues to distinguish them. Explanation makes the judgement more careful; it does not remove the distinction between sparing someone and intending to eat him.

Why Frodo’s pity is different from innocence

At first Frodo finds Gandalf’s defence of Bilbo’s pity difficult. From the safety of the Shire, killing Gollum can look like an obvious way to eliminate a future danger. Gandalf challenges both the certainty of that judgement and the assumption that the whole future can be known. Frodo later confronts the question under conditions that the sitting-room conversation cannot reproduce. He meets Gollum while carrying the Ring himself.

Their shared experience does not make their choices identical. Frodo has not begun his possession by murdering a companion, and Gollum has not volunteered to take the Ring to its destruction. But Frodo can perceive a form of suffering that is no longer wholly foreign to him. His mercy develops through recognition, not through a discovery that Gollum is harmless. He knows the guide is dangerous and still tries to address Sméagol as someone capable of responding to kindness and obligation.

The Forbidden Pool episode makes the difficulty particularly acute. Frodo has to help save Gollum from being killed, but the means by which he does so are experienced by Gollum as betrayal. An action intended to protect him becomes another reason for suspicion. The scene refuses to make mercy a simple technique that reliably produces gratitude. Frodo’s care matters even when the person receiving it cannot securely understand or trust it.

The hand on the sleeping hobbit

On the stairs above Minas Morgul, Gollum returns to find Frodo asleep. For a moment he appears older, wearier and less fixed in the role of a pursuing enemy. His touch draws attention to the vulnerability shared by the beings on the steps. Sam wakes, interprets what he sees through long-established suspicion, and answers harshly. The possibility glimpsed in the moment closes again.

Sam’s reaction is understandable. He is protecting the person he loves from someone who has given him substantial reasons for distrust. Recognising the tragic effect of his response does not require treating Sam as secretly malicious. The scene works because reasonable vigilance and an inadequate recognition of another person can coexist. He does not know everything the reader has just been permitted to see, and exhaustion has not made him an ideal judge.

Tolkien later discussed the scene in his correspondence and imagined a different course in which Gollum’s revived attachment to Frodo might have changed his final action. That discussion is important as a reflection on an unrealised possibility. It is not the ending that the published narrative actually gives us. We should not convert a moment of possible repentance into a completed redemption, or convert the failure of that moment into proof that no genuine possibility ever existed.

The ending is not a deliberate rescue

At Mount Doom, Gollum takes the Ring from Frodo and falls into the fire. The result saves Middle-earth from Sauron, but Gollum does not perform the act as a freely chosen sacrifice for the good of everyone else. He has recovered the object he wants, and his delight accompanies his fatal fall. The difference between intention and consequence is indispensable to an honest account of the ending.

It is therefore misleading simply to call him the true hero because his action destroys the Ring. That description can work as a deliberately comic provocation, but it cannot replace the ethical shape of the novel. The ending depends on a history of choices that includes Bilbo’s pity, Frodo’s endurance and mercy, Sam’s loyalty, Gollum’s continuing desire, and events none of them fully directs. No single participant possesses the whole accomplishment as a private triumph.

Nor does the outcome prove that Frodo was foolish to try to help Gollum. His mercy preserves the conditions under which the task can finally be accomplished after his own strength fails. This is not a calculation Frodo could have made in advance with certainty. If he had spared Gollum only because he knew exactly how to use him at the end, the relationship would have become another instrument of control. Mercy retains its distinctiveness because it acts without that guarantee.

Judgement without the comfort of a label

Calling Gollum only a villain can protect the reader from recognising his damaged humanity. Calling him only a victim can protect the reader from facing the reality of his violence. Tolkien makes both comforts difficult to sustain. The character remains capable of eliciting pity and fear, sometimes within the same scene, because his suffering and his agency have not become separable into convenient halves.

The distinction between Sméagol and Gollum is useful when describing the inner struggle, but it should not be turned into an effortless legal arrangement in which one independent person commits crimes while another remains entirely innocent. The narrative presents a divided and deteriorating life. It does not provide a clinical diagnosis, and literary interpretation should not pretend to do so. The important evidence lies in remembered affections, renewed decisions, deceptions, dependence and the responses of those around him.

Gollum finally asks readers to judge without pretending to know everything that would make judgement easy. His crimes remain crimes. His suffering remains suffering. His death does not supply the voluntary reconciliation that might have been possible, and the world’s rescue does not turn his motives into something they were not. The force of Tolkien’s pity lies in holding those truths together: a person can be terribly dangerous, terribly damaged, and still someone whose remaining capacity for good ought not to be dismissed as though it had never existed.

Sources and further reading

This essay offers literary interpretation. References identify Tolkien’s works and sections; pagination varies by edition. Plot details refer to the books rather than film adaptations.

• The Hobbit, “Riddles in the Dark”, in the revised text.
• The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Shadow of the Past”.
• The Two Towers, “The Taming of Sméagol”, “The Forbidden Pool” and “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”.
• The Return of the King, “Mount Doom”.
• The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, letter 246, for Tolkien’s later discussion of mercy and possible repentance.