There's a Gollum in Every Man, But What About Frodo? (AKA: What's Love Got To Do With It?)

Further thoughts on duty, desire, and the healing of the fractured self

Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, played by Andy Serkis

My first conscious memory of love is an interior debate I carried on with myself at the age of four on the subject of which parent I loved most. On my mother’s side were the salient points that she was—like me—a girl, that she had soft hands, and that she was shortly to provide me with a baby brother. On the other hand, my father was undeniably superior in the essential matters of jokes, tickles, patience, and asking “who’s there” whenever I felt the urge to query “knock-knock.”  I puzzled over the question until I gave up, climbed into my father’s lap, and snuggled into his chest while he wrapped his arms around me. 

More often, however, love was as unconscious as air. Like most children I was, despite the yet unknown frailties of my parents, beloved. And it is this that undergirds everything. 

Every stream of knowledge throughout time and place acknowledges the fundamental necessity of love for human well-being. Of course stories are no exceptions. Love is the dividing line of every enduring story. The pre-eminence of love raises the question: what has love to do with the divided soul (which is ostensibly the topic of this column)?

To address this question, we turn to The Lord of the Rings, which contains an overt examination of the divided soul in Gollum, formerly Smeagol, whose internal division is so stark that the warring parts of his personality have different names. Through Gollum’s divided soul we identify the blessing of love and the curse of rejection in the space between duty and desire. 

Gollum is a despicable creature. He is an ordinary sinner, like you and me, characterized by small virtues and petty vices. Most of us have little inclination to dominate the cosmos like Sauron; rather, like Gollum, we merely corrupt our mundane realities. But petty corruption is not a lesser sin. His pathetic obsession with his “precious” nearly causes Middle Earth to fall into the hands of Sauron, revealing how even one divided soul manifests the sins of the whole world. The division between duty and desire is as destructive for ordinary folk as it is for mighty villains, and the consequences just as far-reaching.