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
Gollum is the most human of Tolkien’s monsters, yet his story is not simply a fall from grace. He begins as a thief, bully, liar and ring-bearer; he becomes a desperate survivor, an accidental guide, and finally a figure of sacrifice. The path between those identities makes him a mirror for readers who recognise how fear, shame and attachment can distort a person without erasing their capacity for choice. His fractured speech and divided self invite psychological interpretation, while his fixation on the Ring gives addiction a tangible form. His peculiar mixture of revulsion and tenderness also forces us to ask whether pity is mercy, weakness, justice or something more exact.
Reading Gollum through the vocabulary of modern psychology can illuminate him, but it can also flatten him. Schizophrenia is sometimes used as shorthand for his divided voice, suspiciousness and sense of persecution. Those terms belong to a clinical history that the novel does not simply reproduce. Gollum’s symptoms have an invented cause in the Ring, and the narrative gives him chances to resist it. His case is therefore less a case study than an argument about agency, degradation and moral recovery. To read him well is to hold together several questions: what has happened to his mind, what has happened to his desires, and what happens when another person sees him without treating him as a monster. The pity at the centre of his story is a test of what the reader believes a person can become.
Gollum’s body tells the story of his divided identity before he speaks. He crouches, stoops and wrings his hands, presenting himself as something half-animal and half-person. His thin hair, pale skin and luminous eyes make him appear wraithlike, yet his mind retains fragments of learning, memory and cunning. He has two names, Sméagol and Gollum, and either can gain control. The divided voice is more than a verbal trick: it dramatises a self unable to present a stable account of itself. When he speaks of “we,” the reader hears both the person he was and the creature he has become.
Modern readers may recognise symptoms associated with psychosis, including voices, persecutory beliefs and disorganised thinking. The term schizophrenia is often applied to these features, especially because Gollum hears and converses with parts of his own identity. That reading has value, but it needs qualification. Schizophrenia is not the same condition as “split personality,” and hearing a voice does not automatically establish a diagnosis. Gollum remains capable of sustained plans, elaborate deception and strategic thought. His mind is also being shaped by a magical object within the story. A clinical description can organise the symptoms, while the novel asks us to consider their meaning.
His fractured identity also reflects social cruelty. Sméagol wasonce mocked and driven away, while Gollum becomes the name associated with theft and murder. The story turns inward a conflict that might otherwise have remained between different people: the rejected boy imagines his persecutor within himself. Shame hardens into a second persona that can justify every appetite. This makes his divided self partly a history of cruelty rather than a mysterious disease concealed beneath an ugly exterior. The possibility of change depends upon recovering the person whom cruelty displaced.
The Ring converts desire into a system of control. It magnifies a person’s abilities while weakening the restraints that might limit their use. Gollum experiences this intensification as both grandeur and deprivation. The Ring feeds his self-importance, supplies an imagined realm of mastery and makes ordinary needs seem worthless. Its promise is always deferred because satisfaction lies in another conquest. Even when he has no immediate use for it, he protects it, hides it and returns to it. The Ring has become an object around which his remaining identity is organised.
Calling this addiction invites useful comparisons with substance dependence, though the analogy has limits. Gollum does not experience withdrawal in a conventional physiological sense, and the Ring does not erase his history of choice. He first takes the Ring freely and discovers its power gradually. That sequence matters. Addiction narrows a person’s field of attention, strengthens repetition and separates the wanted object from the damage done to obtain it. Yet moral corruption cannot be reduced to a chemical process. Gollum’s longing includes pride, resentment and a refusal to acknowledge the will of anyone else.
Daily life in Sydney and Melbourne offers quieter images of repetition and compulsion. Sydney commuters may take the same platform and follow the same route each morning; Melbourne workers may order the same coffee from the same laneway café. Such routines can provide welcome stability. Addiction corrupts a habit when it becomes disproportionate, when alternatives disappear and when defending the habit takes priority on relationships. This is why Gollum’s fixation cannot be understood merely through the lens of mental illness. The Ring supplies reward, but his inability to relinquish it also expresses a character who has made surrender feel equivalent to annihilation.
Pity occupies an unusual place in Tolkien’s moral universe. It is not merely a tender feeling prompted by suffering; it is a demand for attention. Thorin pities Gollum, Frodo cannot reduce him to an enemy, and Sam eventually refuses to abandon him even after deception and murder. Each response risks becoming sentimental, yet each also preserves a possibility that revenge would close. Frodo’s pity is complicated because it exposes Gollum to danger and, eventually, to the Fellowship’s distrust. Recognising another person’s pain does not guarantee that the recognition will be safe or rewarded.
Pity can also become paternalistic. It may treat someone as diminished, incapable of choice or suitable for rescue. Complete revulsion avoids that trap by refusing to see a person at all. Tolkien’s achievement is to make this middle ground uncomfortable. The reader must recognise Gollum’s suffering without claiming that suffering cancels his crimes. His longing for the Ring does not erase the fact that he strangles Frodo; his betrayal does not make him beyond the reach of mercy. Moral imagination begins in the tension between those truths.
That tension becomes clearest in the relationship between pity and action. Sam’s final response to Gollum cannot be reduced to forgiveness in advance. It requires effort, danger and the recognition that a hated enemy is still a vulnerable creature. The relevant compassion neither excuses the wrong nor demands its destruction. It keeps open a future that certainty would foreclose. Gollum’s final sacrifice then becomes striking because it emerges from a personality organised around self-preservation. At the edge of destruction, he performs an act that no longer serves his private desire.
Gollum belongs to a period when European literature often expressed social fears through theories of degeneration, criminality and abnormal bodies. Tolkien inherited some of these anxieties while reshaping them. The creature who covets power and resists fellowship can embody anxieties about industrial modernity, moral erosion and the loss of individual will. His wasted body resembles the popular image of the fallen or diseased criminal. Such literary history deserves attention, but it should not be mistaken for clinical evidence or complete authorial intention.
Australian health care provides a useful reminder that diagnosis is a social and legal process, not a casual label for unusual behaviour. A person concerned about psychosis may consult a general practitioner, obtain a Medicare-funded mental health treatment plan and receive support through public services, private treatment or telehealth. The National Disability Insurance Scheme can assist eligible people living with psychosocial disability. In Victoria, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022 governs compulsory assessment and community treatment, while other states and territories operate under different legislation. These systems demonstrate both the value and the burden of formal categories: they can open doors to care while affecting how a person is understood.
Applied carelessly to literature, diagnostic language can reproduce stigma. It may turn Gollum into a collection of symptoms or present addiction as evidence of weak character. It may also romanticise illness by making dramatic deterioration seem necessary for redemption. A responsible reading keeps the person visible without denying either pathology or responsibility. We can describe what the text represents, compare its language with modern ideas and acknowledge the limits of the comparison. We cannot diagnose a fictional being or use a clinical term as a shortcut for moral judgement.
Gollum has become a durable model for the fantasy creature whose outward form conceals an interior life. He joins monsters who are not merely threats but damaged seekers, often divided between appetite and attachment. His influence can be seen in later works that distrust neat categories of hero, victim and villain. He also demonstrates why bodily difference should not determine narrative importance. The crawling body, fractured speech and obsessive desires could have made him comic or repulsive; instead, they become the means by which the story tests whether recognition can survive revulsion.
Australian readers encounter this legacy through a book market shaped by large national retailers, online platforms, libraries and a small but active network of independent bookshops. Browsing a weekend market, borrowing a library copy or ordering online can each provide a different route into Tolkien’s work. The dominance of major retailers and the high cost of shipping to regional areas affect which editions, essays and inexpensive editions remain readily available. Independent reading communities help preserve the conversational side of literary culture. BookLikes reading conversations offer space for readers to compare interpretations, trace recurring themes and discover writers whose work asks similar questions about monsters, disability and moral repair.
What makes Gollum endure is the refusal to separate knowledge from compassion. Understanding how the Ring has shaped him explains his conduct, but explanation alone cannot absolve him. Pity alone is insufficient unless it becomes restraint, recognition or a willingness to leave another person’s humanity intact. His many faces cannot be reduced to one diagnosis, and his failures cannot be explained away by one diagnosis. He remains imprisoned by the Ring he loves, yet he also discovers, at the last moment, a freedom unrelated to possessing it. That final conflict—consumption against sacrifice, self-love against care for another—gives his story its lasting emotional force.
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