When Tolkien revised this chapter he let stand:
I don’t know where he came from nor who or what he was.
Tolkien need only have changed it to:
Who knew where he came from or who or what he was?
Oddly, Tolkien in later talking of Gollum’s life above ground and his teaching his grandmother to suck eggs indicates even in the first version of this chapter far more knowledge of Gollum than his original claim to know nothing permits. Perhaps he ought to have instead changed that sentence to:
Who then could claim to know where he came from or who or what he was?
The word
then would have provided a hint of later knowledge about Gollum which would make have made credible Tolkien the narrator’s surmises about what Gollum is thinking.
This will be a difficult chapter to film because it occurs in pitch darkness until Bilbo comes to the goblin gate with light coming through a crack. I expect Jackson will change it as he did in the
Lord of the Rings showing dim light streaming into Gollum’s cavern from above.
A more accurate technique would be to display the screen area black with only Bilbo permanently visible in back-and-white and the floor close to him with Gollum being dimmer and flickering in and out to the tempo of his voice, his glaring green eyes alone being always visible except when Gollum blinked. The audience would understand that we were being shown Bilbo according to Bilbo’s self-image and the lake and Gollum according to Bilbo’s imaginings.
Tolkien claims that Gollum's eyes really glowed, for example:
Bilbo could see the light of his eyes palely shining from behind.
In fact animal eyes only reflect light, say from a camp fire. One may suspect that Gollum’s unusual glowing eyes are an otherwise unmentioned effect of being a possessor of the Ring for such a long time.
This chapter is the only place in
The Hobbit where the word
orcs appears by itself where Tolkien writes (bolding mine):
… not knowing that even the big ones, the orcs of the mountains, go along at a great speeds stooping low with their hands almost on the ground.
Of course the name of the sword
Orcrist contains the word
orc.
Tolkien is careful to put Bilbo barely in the right in keeping the Ring. Bilbo finds the Ring on his own, unrelated to Gollum. Bilbo is under no compulsion to tell Gollum anything including what he has in his pocket. Gollum attempts to physically attack Bilbo at that point. Tolkien the narrator assumes, although he really cannot know, that Gollum was already planning to attack Bilbo as soon as Gollum had lost the contest, a full breaking of the rules.
Angry at Bilbo’s delay in presenting his last riddle, Gollum demands it vigorously, but uses the word
question instead:
It’s got to ask uss a quesstion, my preciouss, yes, yess, yesss. Jusst on more question to guess, yes, yess.
So he perhaps has no reason to complain when he gets a question instead of a proper riddle.
That Gollum at the time had accepted Bilbo’s pocket question as a proper riddle binds Gollum to continue to accept it as a proper riddle. In folklore riddle contests often the so-called riddles are really questions. In giving two answers for his third guess, Gollum is definitely cheating. Here Bilbo had the option to call the answer a cheat, but since both answers were wrong he did not.