[Formendacil]

A quick chapter--but not quick enough to warrant this being only the tenth post on this thread! This chapter pivots the whole relationship between Frodo and Gollum, thereby shifting the whole plot to come. After this, Sam is almost of a mediary between Frodo and Gollum where before it was Frodo between Sam and Gollum.

Something good is genuinely wounded in Gollum when Frodo betrays him, yet it is impossible to say how Frodo could have done much differently. And they say Tolkien writes only in black and white! Here we have Frodo and Faramir--two of Tolkien's most unequivocally "good" characters--acting within laws and from honest motives, and yet the result is to break Gollum's faith.

In some respects, Smeagol dies here, never again to have a hope of being ascendant. The thought occurred to me this reread that although it would have been a wicked deed to slay Gollum here with an unexpected arrow, *for Gollum* it might have been a better ending--or, to put it another way, he would have died a better person.