Gollum of Fire
Gollum of Fire
J. R. R. Tolkien’s character, Gollum, a Stoor Hobbit, originally going by the name of Sméagol, spans the major opus of the English fantasy writer’s oeuvre, through The Hobbit (1937), which introduces ‘the One Ring’, cut by Isildur, king of Arnor and Gondor, from the finger of the Dark Lord, Sauron of Mordor, before his mortal form was destroyed, subsequent to the defeat of Sauron’s host by an alliance of men and elves at the battle of Dagorland.
Orcs from the Misty Mountains, elves deformed in the black pits of Mordor to do Sauron’s bidding, stationed there by the Dark Lord, slew Isildur with poisoned arrows, though he’d swum across the river Anduin to escape the ambush trapping him and his men. Although the ring, with the power to confer invisibility, had helped, it slipped off his finger, exposing his position, and it was later found by Gollum, who called it his ‘precious’. When found again by another ‘halfling’, the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, it was much to Gollum’s chagrin, ‘Thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!’ Gollum, who played a ‘riddle game’ with the victims he killed and ate, which he didn’t expect to lose, hadn’t understood Bilbo’s, ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ Putting it on, Bilbo escaped invisibly.
Sauron, looking to find the ring for its enslaving properties, waged war in Middle Earth, ‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.’ It’s determined in The Fellowship of The Ring, which is the first book in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings (1953), that the ring be thrown into the fire of Orodruin, a volcano, known colloquially as ‘Mt. Doom’, which is what Bilbo’s heir and nephew, Frodo embarks upon in the second book of the trilogy, The Two Towers, while Gollum, still frantically trying to wrest the ring from the hobbit’s grasp, falls into ‘the crack of Doom’, along with the ring. With its unmaking, the power of Sauron is broken, and his realm in Mordor, including the tower of Barad-dûr, Ephel Duath, ‘The Fence of Shadow’, Morannon, ‘The Black Gate’, Carchost and Narchost, ‘The Towers of the Teeth’, the city of Minas Morgul, once built by the men of Gondor as Minas Ithil, the pass of Cirith Ungol, and that of Terech Ungol, where the giant spider, Shelob, dwelt, collapse into ruin. The final book of the trilogy, The Return of the King, relates how the leader of the fellowship, ‘the man of the West’, Aragorn, recognized as the legitimate heir to Isildur, is made king of the men of Westernesse.
For many there were parallels in the 21st century with the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, at the Lower East Side of Manhattan island, New York city, on September 11, 2001. Islamic extremist terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, ‘the base’, led by Saudia Arabia’s heir to a civil engineering business, Osama Ben Laden, hijacked civil airliners at Logan Airport, Boston, Massachusetts, to crash into the WTC, thereby precipitating a US’ invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This resulted in the deposing of dictator, Saddam Hussein, who’d evinced support for Al Qaeda ‘live’ on TV, which had incurred the wrath of then US’ President George W. Bush Jnr.
Although Tolkien had written The Lord of the Rings in reaction to Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party’s leader, Adolf Hitler, during World War II’s (1939-45) pogroms against the Jews, where 6,000,000 died in ‘concentration camps’, before being burned in ovens, at places such as Belsen and elsewhere, in fulfilment of Hitler’s ambition to enslave the Earth, like his predecessor Kaiser Wilhelm II had sought to do in World War I (1914-18), as philosopher George Santayana observed, ‘Those who repeat the mistakes of history are doomed.’ Anyone reading the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, which is the history and law of the Jews, that is, their Torah and Talmud, would be apprised of the truth, which is that’s God.
The ‘red eye of Sauron’ atop the tower of Barad-dûr, in the manner of a searchlight, trying to descry the ring’s whereabouts, is a signal illustration of point of view (POV), whereas omniscient God has many points of view, which constitute perspective. When people aren’t perspectival, a single POV dominates, as was the case in 1930s Germany with the election of Hitler as Chancellor. In terms of clinical psychology a single dominating POV is what the psychotherapist almost instantly identifies as psychopathic schizophrenia, that is, beleaguered egos abandoning perspective in the acceptance of an overriding POV, which is how dictators like Sauron come to power and rule over their thralls.
Although almost all novels have points of view, it’s perspectival, whereas the evil, or negative characters, represent the single POV, depicted as undesirable by the writer. Illuminating in this regard is the description of ‘the feminine spirit of God’, the Shekinah, sitting in the ‘mercy seat’ atop the Ark of the Covenant containing God’s law, that is, the tablets of stone, given to Moses by God, according to Judaic tradition, and kept in ‘the box’, as the Jews traveled from their captivity as slaves of Pharaoh Thutmose III (1479-1425 BCE) out of Egypt, inside the tent of the tabernacle, where the Shekinah dwelt (Ex: 30. 34-6), as the Jews’ exodus led them to God’s ‘Promised Land’, Canaan, where they promptly set about sacking the city of Jericho, as a first step towards conquest, under the auspices of their military commander, Joshua.
Though that seems standard warfare, this is how the Shekinah subsequently responded to perceived immorality in Jerusalem, ‘Then the glory of the God of Israel rose from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple … “… start killing; do not show pity or spare anyone. Slaughter the old men, the young men and maidens, the women and children.”’ (Ez: 9. 3-6) When the God perspective is reduced to a single POV, the feminine spirit of God becomes ‘He’ and a vengeful psychopathic schizophrenic.
In the course of the Jews’ journey to Canaan, the Shekinah, described as ‘the Glory of God’, is depicted as guiding them, as ‘a column of cloud by day, and a column of fire by night’ (Ex: 13. 22), which suggests not only that the Jews A-bombed their way out of Egypt, and into Palestine, but that they possessed the technological know-how to minimize the radiation fallout. By separating the atomic energy released into a mushroom day-cloud and a nocturnal inferno, as a byproduct of that the Jews revealed that the nature of the Shekinah’s power was that of a separator.
Of interest in this regard is the sudden changeover from God’s feminine spirit to His male voice, which is reminiscent of the belief espoused in Jewish Midrash that the first man created by God, Adam, in the image of God, was hermaphroditic. That Eve, the first woman, was created from Adam’s side by God, is perhaps a euphemism for hermaphroditic self-fertilization and self-birth, that is, God’s nature is male and female, which is why God’s feminine while sitting in the mercy seat and masculine when arising therefrom to give orders.
Just why God is angry is evident from the promise to Eve about her ‘seed’, which God tells her will prevail, despite her being persuaded to ‘eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ that it is death to taste, rather than ‘eat only of the fruit of the tree of life’, which is immortality, as God had ordered, ‘You shall crush the head of the serpent with your foot, but he will bruise your heel.’ (Gen: 3. 15) Though Eve and Adam are expelled from the paradise of Eden, God’s promise is that the seed of Eve will produce brainpower enough to restore immortality to their descendants through medical science.
However, it’s clear that the treatment meted out to God’s futanarian species of women’s seed, that is, Eve’s hermaphroditic ‘foot’, is what angers God towards men, whose wars are essentially caused by their attitude, for example, if people were aware that the human race on the planet Earth are women’s seed, that is, women, any invasion of another nation would be seen as being that of an alien, which would make war abominated as an inhuman taboo perpetrated by misanthropist aliens. As a separator the Shekinah’s role is that of God separating women’s seed from men of the serpent’s seed of Satan.
That Sauron is a type of Satan in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is undeniable. That the fires of Orodruin are a type of the purifying feminine spirit of God’s Shekinah is also arguable. Though not explicitly a wedding ring, the One Ring stands for the slavery of marriage, as anciently a bride was expected to understand that she was a chattel to be disposed of as her owner saw fit. Consequently, when the ring is destroyed in the fires of Mt Doom’s volcanic eruptions the fortresses of Sauron’s slavery collapse and, as a logical concomitant, the feminine spirit of God, the Shekinah, is free to seek the perspective of a romance more to God’s liking.
1 Tolkien, J. R. R., The Hobbit, ‘Riddles In The Dark’, Ch. 5, Allen & Unwin, 1937.