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Article Excerpt
J. R. R. Tolkien was fascinated with monsters. His most enduring influence as a critic is his defense of the monster's central place in Beowulf, and he expressed similar enthusiasm for his own famous monster, Gollum, who owes much to the monsters of this Anglo-Saxon poem, particularly Grendel. Writing to his son Christopher on 21 May 1944, Tolkien observes that "Gollum continues to develop into a most intriguing character" (Letters 81). Tolkien returns frequently in his correspondence to the topic of his monster, implying Gollum's importance and that, like his counterpart in Beowulf, this monster has a central place in his story. Tolkien's conscious recognition of Beowulf as a source for his own fiction is incomplete: one of two direct acknowledgments of its influence comes in a letter to his son Christopher, dated 18 December 1944, and pertains not to Middle-Earth but to a "long shelved time-travel story" to which he was returning; the other, a comment in a letter to the editor of the Observer, concerns The Hobbit and identifies Beowulf 'as being "among my most valued sources" (105, 31). Readers of these works, however, have noted a number of significant parallels: some see influences in plot and structure, and many more find similarities between the various monsters of these two stories. But surprisingly little has been said about the influence of Beowulf's monsters, especially Grendel, on Tolkien's Gollum. (1) As Verlyn Flieger notes, Gollum's "parallel with Grendel, the man-eating monster of Beowulf, is unmistakable" (141), but it is a parallel that is largely overlooked in Tolkien criticism.
Early in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf relates to Frodo the story of Gollum's origins, which foregrounds two important typological connections between Gollum and Grendel, evoking both the Leviathan of romance as elaborated by Northrop Frye and a second and related typology, one not recognized by Frye: the fall of Cain. A prominent detail in Tolkien's rendering of the scene is the relationship of Smeagol (Gollum's original name) to water. Smeagol belonged to a race of hobbits that bore one striking difference from the water-fearing hobbits of the Shire: "they loved the River, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reeds." Smeagol in particular was "[t]he most inquisitive and curious-minded" of his family; he
was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward. (I.i.2.62)
Smeagol's opportunity arises while fishing on a pond with his kinsman, Deagol, who hooks a great fish which drags him to the bottom of the pond where he finds the ring. Moved apparently by envy and greed, Smeagol demands that Deagol give him the ring as a birthday present and then strangles him when his request is refused. Smeagol and Deagol are not biological brothers, but the rhyming of their names suggest kinship of some kind. They are at least brothers in a figurative sense, and the results are the same as in the Genesis story: the profound guilt of the murderer, his exile, and a subsequent growth of wickedness. (2)
The association with Leviathan connects these two stories with a particular mythos that Northrop Frye identifies with medieval and early modern romance. Applying Frye's "grammar of literary archetypes," one might view both Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings as romance owing to their "tendency to suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience" than is the case in "undisplaced myth" (myth that occurs in an overtly mythical context) (Anatomy 139-40). While both stories partake in a world divided between the apocalyptic (desirable) and the demonic (undesirable), leaning toward the former in what Frye calls the "analogy of innocence," the struggle of these characters is recognizably human. Each is an ideal world, a world of superlative heroes facing marvelous enemies in a series of adventures that prove their mettle, but one in which human real-world experience is reflected (186; 151-55; 192ff). Recast (by Frye) in the language of psychoanalytic dream analysis, this "quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality"; in the language of ritual, it is "the victory of fertility over the wasteland," where "[t]he enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth" (187-88, 193). Whatever other modes one might identify in the generic mix of these two stories, romance must be part of it.
A key figure in the mythical landscape of romance is Leviathan. Frye describes the sea of romance as "the sea of chaos itself, the abyss of nothingness symbolized in the Bible by the monster Leviathan, the dragon of the deep that only God, in God's own time, can hook and bring to land." Leviathan, and by metonymy the sea, is both the "power of tyranny" and "the abyss of lost identity" (Natural 148-49; cf. Anatomy 189-91). In Job, Jonah, Ezekiel, and Revelation, Leviathan is a figure both of social oppression and sterility and of a universal state of fallenness into sin and death, which are identified with Satan (archenemy of man and God), the Edenic serpent, Pharaoh, and Babylon. Frye's treatment of Leviathan as the "power of tyranny," however, gives romance a social-universal slant, which is certainly an important aspect of the romance plot, but equally significance in Frye's scheme is the individual struggle for identity against the backdrop of chaos, decay, and fallenness. It is surprising, then, that Frye denies Cain a place in the mythos of romance, a story both of universal import and personal significance, and an element of typology that combines with Leviathan in the figures of Grendel and Gollum to make monsters that are not just social threats but themselves sites of struggle against lost identity. As a type of both Cain and Leviathan, Gollum, much like Beowulf's Grendel before him, faces a crisis of identity arising from guilt and the stigma of alienation, forgetting but retaining a trace of his former self and association with his original kind. But whereas Grendel's struggle against lost identity is expressed in outward hostility toward the social order, Gollum's is more explicitly internalized in a struggle of a divided self. Important imagery common to these two works brings these typologies together in a way that effects this shift from the universal to the personal, a shift that exists in potentia within the character of Grendel and is fully realized in his modern counterpart, Gollum.
Both the general shape and several details of Gollum's story evoke traditional associations with Grendel as sons of Cain and types of Leviathan. As Ricardo J. Quinones describes him, the culmination of the medieval Cain is characterized as the "abhorred other," a threat to society that is both anti-social and socially ostracized (58). Marked by the guilt of his associated violence, he is a wandering outcast living in everlasting exile from human society. David Williams adds that "[t]he chief characteristics of Cain's place of exile were that it was a desert place, a waste, solitary, and dark," a dwellings of beasts appropriate to his bestial soul (26-27). To match their feral environment, the traditional descendants of Cain-giants, monsters, dragons-had ferocious appetites. The products of miscegenation between women and libidinous angels, "The giants function[ed] only to devour" and symbolized physical appetite...
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