Gollum: Evolution of a Character Too Important to Remain in the Dark
Tags: There And Back Again, Fantasy, Tolkien, Books, The Hobbit

Is Riddle in the Dark the best chapter in The Hobbit? To me, it might be.

Today, it is probably the most momentous chapter in the book, but it took a lot of labour to get it there.

It’s a mysterious, visceral, enigmatic episode and so, fittingly, it all happens in the dark.

Separated from his companions, for the first time since he started the adventure, Bilbo finds himself alone with no idea where his friends are and if they will ever find him again.

It’s a dark, unknown place. Terrifying. Still, as Bilbo says, “Go back? No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!” And in so doing, Bilbo shows his true braveness. Going, alone and with no hope for help, toward the unknown.

As he goes forward in the darkness under the mountain, Bilbo finds a ring.

For today’s readers, that’s a moment that gives us the chills, but when Tolkien first wrote the story, this wasn’t the One Ring. There was no One Ring at that time. When it was first written, that was just a magic ring, one of the many around.

Yet, it is a magic ring Bilbo finds, he who is only a hobbit who doesn’t have any magic in him.

He will use the magic of the ring many times in the following chapters, but still, more than once, Bilbo thinks how the magic ring can’t protect you from danger. Can’t give you heart and bravery. It’s a tool, he can and will use it, but it’s his heart and his own courage that will make the difference in the end.

And to underline this, the first thing that Bilbo does with the ring — winning the riddle game — isn’t a magic fit, but it’s a result of Bilbo’s own wits and boldness.

In this unknown place, Bilbo finds someone totally unknown, Gollum.

Unknown because nobody knows he is there. Unknown because nobody (not even the omni narrator) knows who or what he is.

It is very hard for us today to see Gollum as just an extra in the story, but when The Hobbit was first written, Gollum was really just another character Bilbo meets on the journey, one that appears and soon disappears, like the trolls or the spiders. He was just a step in Bilbo’s evolution. But contrary to so many other characters in the book, he had a lot of potentials, as Tolkien soon discovered.

As it stands today, the chapter is divided into two, quite distinct parts. The first part is the riddle game, a smart challenge of wits, but also one of the ways Tolkien’s beloved Anglo-Saxon legends started to infiltrate the story (there will be a lot more such instances in the following chapters, more or less disguised). Gollum proposes it and doesn’t dare to desecrate it with killing. It’s an ancient game and a sacred one. Everybody knows the rules and knows something bad will happen if those rules should be broken. Without a context, this piece of information manages to create a world beyond the story, a world we sense, even if we can only glimpse it.

The second part is about Gollum going mad at the loss of the Rings. It is a chilling part if we care to look at it more in-depth. Here is where the chapter becomes the best in the book, for me. But it wasn’t always so.

Gollum, the dark corners of the soul

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the first part of the 1930s and published it in 1937, with no intention to ever write a sequel. But the book was such a success, that his publisher did ask for a sequel. After much hesitation — because he really didn’t have anything else to say about hobbits, as he said in a letter to his publisher — Tolkien started a new book about hobbits.

That story became The Lord of the Rings, with his vastly different tone and scope.

Right from the beginning, The Lord of the Rings concerned the magic ring Bilbo found and so of course also its previous owner, Gollum.

But very soon, that ring started to evolve. Not just one of many magic rings, but the One Ring, a tool of immense power. And Gollum, who possessed it for centuries, accordingly becomes much more threatening than the pitiful if malevolent creatures who Bilbo accidentally stumbled upon in the dark.

Tolkien tried anything to stay true to the first book, but as far as Gollum was concerned, he eventually had to accept that he couldn’t just use the event that happened in The Hobbit.

Writing The Lord of the Rings, he just assumed things had gone differently in Gollum’s cave. But being the meticulous author he was, he then asked the publisher the opportunity to revise the published Hobbit, which the publisher agreed to.

Tolkien revised the entre story to atune it to The Lord of the Rings. All those hints to his larger legendarium that he sprinkled over the book for his own comfort became part of the story. Not just names, not just vague ideas, but detailed references (as it happened with Elrond or the Necromancer). He invented new backgrounds (for Thorin and the Dwarves, for example). But to Chapter 5, Riddles in the Dark, he decided for a more drastic course of revision. He totally rewrote the second part of the chapter so that both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings would tell the same story.

In the old version, Gollum isn’t at all as menacing as he becomes in the revision. He accepts Bilbo’s victory in the riddle games and agrees to bring him to the Back Door. He does all of this willingly and leaves the hobbit at the mouth of the tunnel he doesn’t dare to enter for fear of the goblins.

It’s a simple enough chapter, which climax is the riddle game.

In his revision, Tolkien upped the stakes enormously. The climax becomes the ‘fight’ of Gollum and Bilbo over the Ring, and the bad feeling it let surface. Gollum’s madness and his obsession over the Ring emerges. The phenomenal episode where Gollum speaks with himself about the Ring enters the story, like his decision to sit in front of the mouth of the outbound tunnel because he knows that Bilbo has to come that way and he means to ambush him.

And Bilbo’s hardest moment of fear. That moment of despair where he would be willing to kill to survive and instead finds the strength to overcome it in pity and compassion.

Riddles in the Dark might well be the best chapter in The Hobbit. The chapter set in the dark that explore the darkest corners of the human soul.