He hunted it down with the Ring to eat it, and in fact, that’s where he was and what he was doing when the Ring slipped away and fell onto the ground for Bilbo to find. We hear at length in the Hobbit about his years-long, intentional predation of the orcs in the Misty Mountains he would sneak up behind them with the Ring and throttle them and when we see him in the Hobbit we’re told that he ate a ‘goblin-imp’ (a baby orc?) that morning, which he refers to disdainfully as a ‘nasty young squeaker’. I think that’s the only reference to Gollum eating humans. I included that bit at the end to show you that Gandalf changed the subject and there’s nothing I omitted in between (look it up yourself if you don’t believe me). It wandered off southwards and passed out of the Wood-elves’ ken, and was lost. ‘But at the western edge of Mirkwood the trail turned away. It climbed trees to find nests it crept into holes to find the young it slipped through windows to find cradles.

The Woodmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood.

The wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among beasts and birds. Here’s the textual reference from Fellowship of the Ring (most relevant piece in bold): (And you can see a similarity there, enough that I could easily picture Tolkien going ‘my hero is a bit silly so what if Grendel was here but he was a bit silly *invents gollum*’)Īnd now to the baby-eating. It seems like there’s a pretty clear allusion to ‘thing in fairy tale that eats you’, and in particular I’ve seen it said that Gollum is partially inspired by Grendel from Beowulf, who is a man-eating monster that gets killed. I’m not super well-versed in the mythological background of Tolkien and the work stands on its own tbf, but. It must have a competition with us, my preciouss! If precious asks, and it doesn’t answer, we eats it, my preciousss. Now, this may sound a bit odd, but baby-eating boogeyman was clearly the character archetype. Gollum is introduced in his initial hobbit appearance solely as an obstacle to the hero. Next you’ll be telling me he killed his best friend/cousin at the drop of a hat No but let’s talk about this because it’s the premise of the character and not remotely a secret

Lord of the rings gollum swearing memes