Thread: My Precious?
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Old 11-25-2004, 10:43 AM   #7
Firefoot
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Quote:
Gollum spoke like that because he was a severely muddled individual.
That's why he's so interesting. However, I don't think that this is the only reason Gollum spoke like that. Gollum certainly isn't stupid - in fact he is quite clever - and he has a fairly strong understanding of what the Ring is (at the time of LotR, anyhow) and its larger implications on himself, Frodo, and Sauron. At the time of the Hobbit, you might make the argument that he was simply severely muddled. The Ring was simply his precious and his birthday present, and a useful tool for going about invisibly, and he had been driven nearly insane by his solitude. Even then, though, he had intelligence and wiliness, so I do not think the term 'precious' was simply one he had picked up in his mad ravings. It meant something to him. There were very few things that mattered to Gollum: his precious self, his precious Ring, and fisssh. As he grew more attached to the Ring, he became more like it, associating himself with it, and thereby giving himself and it the same name.

So I do not think you can say Gollum's speech patterns came only from his muddled-ness (though, I grant that it was a large factor), which was a direct result of his possession of the Ring. It is more complex than that.

Gollum/Smeagol Re: It occurred to me that the contexts in which the two personalities use the term "precious" are very different. Gollum uses it referring to himself and having lost it - very selfish terms, focused only on himself. Smeagol solely uses the precious to refer to the Ring, and in these cases it is capitolized. It is then simply another name for the Ring, which though it grew from Gollum's usage of the word, it has very separate connotations indeed.
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