That gagging sound lurches from his throat, as if there’s another creature somewhere inside. His skin is pale from rarely seeing the sun, with bones threatening to pierce the sickly flesh.
Gollum’ eyes are as wide as saucers to capture the slim light. This movie’s hero, another hobbit named Bilbo (Martin Freeman), comes across him there while lost inside the mountain, but he hardly recognizes this monster as one of his own kind. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we find him so paranoid and fearful of losing the ring that he’s exiled himself to a dismal lake beneath a mountain, where he survives on cold fish and the occasional goblin. So enamored with it that he killed the relative in order to keep it, Gollum went on to use its power – invisibility – to thieve and spy until he is banished from his home. While fishing with a relative, Gollum came upon an unusual ring that cast an immediate spell over him. Gollum was once a hobbit, one of those small and quiet folk who form the unlikely heroes of Tolkien’s tales. In case you didn’t grow up poring over the maps that accompanied Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings novels, here’s a bit of background. A cinematic and theological wonder, Gollum forces us to confront the ugliness of sin, and claim that ugliness as our own. He’s also the most arresting element in director Peter Jackson’s ongoing movie adaptations of Tolkien’s work – including his latest, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. That’s also the name for the poor creature who makes the sound, which Tolkien described as “a horrible swallowing noise in his throat.” Gollum is a minor character in the author’s fantasy novels, but he’s the one that haunts me the most. It’s an awful noise, so awful that J.R.R.
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