Origins of Gollum

Originally posted by galpsi:
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/bluepal.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: Origins of Gollum

It has always seemed to me more or less essential that Gollum was a hobbit. He is the real dark threat hanging over Frodo throughout the latter books of the trilogy. Not merely the threat that he might attack or betray Frodo, but the threat that he is Frodo's future, the threat that Frodo would be mastered by the ring. And obviously it is a very real threat.
Tolkien plays a theologically interesting variant on the Christian conception of Christ as the second Adam, the man who must redeem man as Adam had previously damned man. For Frodo is the redemptor of the Ring as Gollum was debased by the Ring before him. Yet Frodo is unable to to redeem the ring, truly It claims him and only Gollum completes the quest, ironically repaying Frodo's earlier mercy.
There are less poetic bases for believing that Gollum was a (degraded) hobbit. Several have been recited above. I find them compelling. My favorite suggestion is near the end of Book 4, Chapter 8. It is the passage where Sam and Frodo fall asleep just before attempting Cirith Ungol. Gollum looks down on them emotionally, seeming to regret his planned treachery. He caresses Frodo's hand and Tolkien says that if the sleepers had seen him they'd have thought that they beheld just an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
Their kinship, their likeness as Ring-bearers, these traits make the relationship between Frodo and Gollum so effective.

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Very well put galpsi