We’ve all read the books before and we’ve all seen the movies, so at this point Gollum’s role in the final destruction of the Ring (about to be told yet again via an Amazon mini-series) is so much a part of the cultural air we breath that it may be easy to forget just what a fantastic twist it really is. For the question that permeated near the entirety of Book IV–the part where Frodo and Sam first encounter Gollum as let him join as guide (Frodo hopefully, Sam suspiciously)–is whether Gollum is good or bad, friend or foe, redeemable or irredeemable, an asset or a liability. The answer is, simultaneously, yes and no. Gollum never finds redemption, never gets better, never wins release, his story ends as bitter and tragic as it began–but his selfishness and monomania is also what saves the world in the end!
Even more of a Christ-analogue than Strider/Aragorn (The “King” ostensibly returning in the final volume), Gollum suffers immeasurably so that the rest of us might be redeemed–he hath no form nor comeliness, and there is no beauty in him that we should desire him–he is the Judas who ensures the Atonement who is also still Jesus. It is an enormously complex ending to that particular character arc, one that complicates any easy good-vs-evil narrative in wonderful ways.
Yet those same fraught questions of good and evil apply to Frodo and Sam as well! Frodo finally succumbs to the seductive power of the Ring in the fatal moment–he fails, he fails!–but that same seductive power is also what finally gets Gollum to inadvertantly destroy it, too; what was wicked in both Frodo and Gollum is also what saves Middle Earth–it is the Ring that finally trips over its own feet in the end.
Perhaps, if we’re going to locate any sort of moralizing lesson in Lord of the Rings at all, it is this: not only is no one person completely good or completely bad, but often our goodness and our badness are made up of the same thing. What obsessed and poisoned Gollum is also what allowed him to save the world; the naivety of Frodo that allowed Gollum to betray him is also what allowed Gollum to destroy the Ring when Frodo betrayed himself. Our weaknesses are our strengths; our virtues are our vices.
Unlike his colleague CS Lewis, whose Christian symbolism in The Chronicles of Narnia is always overt and obvious, Tolkien’s Catholicism tends to be relegated to footnotes status in Middle-Earth studies (this despite Tolkien’s well-documented role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity). Of course, The Lord of the Rings is never functioning as an obvious Christian allegory–and draws upon much more flagrantly from pre-Christian mythology–so that elision is understandable. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering Tolkien’s own devout Christianity in characters such as Gollum, who makes of him a Christ figure who truly is “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not”–and still makes of him a legitimate Savior of the World.
It is also worth wondering, then, who do we despise–and consider that we have very good and obvious reason to despise–who are nonetheless the last who shall be made first.