I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
When readers first meet the creature beneath the Misty Mountains, they are confronted with a strange duet issuing from a single body. Sometimes he pleads, sometimes he threatens; sometimes he refers to himself as "I," sometimes as "we." This oscillation of pronouns is not a mistake or a lapse in Tolkien's craft but a deliberate linguistic signal that exposes the fracture running through the character. Across the chapters of The Hobbit and the later volumes of The Lord of the Rings, Gollum's vocabulary becomes the audible scar of a self torn in two. To follow his words is to witness a psyche splitting in slow motion, narrated in two registers that never quite agree on who is speaking.
Tolkien, who spent a lifetime cataloguing the histories of words, approached Gollum as he would any philological specimen. He layered his dialogue with traces of an earlier self, and that earlier self speaks with a different cadence, a different set of favoured terms, and a different moral colouring. In a culture that has long been shaped by writers like Garth Nix in Melbourne and the reading circles hosted at Dymocks across Sydney, Australian readers are particularly attuned to the way an author's word choices construct a character. Gollum offers an extreme case study of that principle at work, and his two voices remain one of the most discussed features of the legendarium at gatherings such as the Australian Tolkien Convention, which convenes each year in Melbourne's inner north.
The clearest marker of Gollum's bifurcation lies in his pronouns. When the Sméagol-self is ascendant, the singular and the humble dominate, and we hear "I," "me," and "my." When the Gollum-self takes hold, the pronouns multiply: "we wants it," "us must get it," "they doesn't know." The plural is not, as some readers assume, a vestige of royal language. It is the language of conspiracy, of the Other who has invaded the self, and of a creature who treats himself as a small, loathsome committee. The shift between singular and plural is therefore a moral barometer, more than a grammatical curiosity: it tells us which personality currently holds the floor, and how fully the other has been silenced.
| Linguistic feature | Sméagol register | Gollum register |
|---|---|---|
| Self-reference | "I," "me," "my precious" (possessive, mournful) | "we," "us," "our precious" (possessive, conspiratorial) |
| Phonetic texture | Softer, plosives and liquids ("nice hobbit," "Smeagol") | Sibilants and gutturals ("hobbitses," "tricksy," "stinker") |
| Vocabulary pool | Pleading, lamenting, childlike ("we knows, we knows safe paths for us") | Threatening, greedy, legalistic ("thief, thief, thief! Baggins, we hates it forever!") |
| Sentence shape | Short, broken, asking permission ("Master would not hurt us?") | Longer, cajoling, accusatory ("Wicked, tricksy, false!") |
| Address of others | Respectful ("Master," "hobbits") | Derogative ("hobbitses," "you nassty thing") |
This pattern recurs throughout the trilogy. At the edge of the Cracks of Doom, even the tormented question "what have we done?" betrays the doomed Sméagol, because the "we" includes both murderer and victim. The pronoun is, in this sense, a confession disguised as a question. Readers borrowing a battered paperback from a Brisbane book exchange, or picking up a recent reissue at Readings in Carlton, will find the pattern still startling, still unsettling, and as precise as the day it was written.
The split extends beyond grammar; it is audible. Gollum's sibilants grow thicker when his darker nature surfaces, and the language bristles with sounds that seem to crawl across the page. Phrases such as "sneaking," "stinker," "nassty," "hobbitses," and the redundant "tricksy" accumulate a phonetic menace that English-speaking ears, whether in Perth or Hobart, parse as belonging to a creature more serpent than hobbit. When Sméagol briefly reappears at the Black Gate of Mordor, the sibilance ebbs and the voice softens, almost recalling the river-dwelling hobbit he once was.
Tolkien's training in Old English and Gothic allowed him to perceive that certain consonant clusters carry emotional weight across centuries, and he exploited this perception to give each persona a different sensory texture. A reader can, without parsing a single grammatical unit, hear when Gollum has yielded the floor to Sméagol, or vice versa. This is the deepest meaning of the word "precious" in the book: it is the only item in Gollum's lexicon that both selves claim, but each lays claim to it in a different tone. Sméagol mourns for it; Gollum hisses over it. The same word, two grammars, two moral worlds.
Across Australia, Tolkien's work has found unusually fertile soil. The annual Australian Tolkien Convention has drawn devoted readers to Melbourne's inner north for years, and similar gatherings have sprung up in Sydney, Brisbane, and the Adelaide Hills. Bookstores such as Dymocks, Readings, and several smaller independents regularly host Tolkien reading groups, and the conversations held there frequently turn to questions of voice and character. Australian scholars, including those affiliated with the University of Melbourne, have contributed essays exploring the deeper mechanics of Tolkien's invention, and the question of Gollum's split identity remains one of the most discussed topics at panels devoted to his work.
This local enthusiasm shapes how the linguistic evidence is read. Critics in Britain have sometimes treated Gollum's split as essentially theological, a battle for redemption in which the creature either falls or is saved. Australian readers, schooled in a literary tradition that prizes the laconic and the dry, often listen for a more psychological and forensic register. They parse the dialogue as one might parse a confessional poem, attentive to where the speaker breaks from himself and what each fragment of vocabulary reveals about motive and memory. In a country where poetry slams in Melbourne laneways and bush poetry gatherings in regional Queensland both thrive, the split voices of a single character offer irresistible material.
The riddle game in The Hobbit is more than a narrative device; it is the first extended demonstration of the duality. Sméagol, in the original telling of Bilbo's encounter, framed riddles of domestic and natural things: roots, mountains, wind, time. His world was a hobbit's world, even if filtered through centuries of isolation. The voice in these riddles is patient, sometimes tender, and recognisably the voice of a Stoor who once loved the sunlight on green leaves. Vocabulary that celebrates the world is, in linguistic terms, a vocabulary of relationship, of belonging, and of small, particular joys.
When the Gollum-self reasserts dominance, the discourse shifts to accusation and ownership. The riddles stop, replaced by demands and threats. Vocabulary that once celebrated the world is replaced by vocabulary that catalogues grievances and claims. Tolkien uses the silence at the heart of this scene to dramatise the disappearance of one self. Australian readers picking up the chapter in a Bondi Junction bookshop will notice how the empty space in the dialogue is itself a linguistic event. The missing words, the unspoken riddle, tell us everything about what has been lost.
By the time we meet Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, his vocabulary has thinned dramatically. The richer domestic language of the earlier book has all but vanished, and what remains is a lexicon of need: "precious," "hobbitses," "filthy," "tricksy," "nassty." The split has hardened into something closer to monomania. The Sméagol-self flickers occasionally, pleading with Frodo or with the absent Bilbo, but the words are fewer, more halting, more childlike than they once were.
This thinning is, in linguistic terms, a phenomenon well-known to scholars of trauma and dissociation, and Australian audiences accustomed to reading literary accounts of returned soldiers and refugees will recognise the pattern. The vocabulary contracts around the central wound; grammar loosens; pronouns wobble. Tolkien, perhaps unwittingly, anticipated some of what later trauma theorists would describe. The Gollum who finally tumbles into the fire speaks with the vocabulary of a creature who has exhausted every register except hunger, and the contrast with the rich-voiced Sméagol of the riddle scene becomes the most poignant linguistic tragedy in the entire legendarium. To read him well is to hear, in his slow silence, the dying of a self that never entirely deserved to die.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading