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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9252301" data-attributes="member: 82106">To put it even more forcefully: Tolkien himself was NOT obsessed with consistency! In fact it is a matter of record that he wrote and rewrote, sometimes multiple times over, much of his personal foundational lore. During that process he would write a story, and then another one that wasn't consistent with the first, and the rewrite one or both of them, possibly in a more consistent form, and then repeat the whole process again and again. AT NO POINT did he end up with a consistent corpus! If you read the material published in The Silmarillion and in Unfinished Tales, and compare it with LotR and its Appendices, and other collected material there's all sorts of discrepancies. Tolkien himself attributed them, post hoc, to unreliable narrators, mistranslation, revisionism, etc. Christopher Tolkien spent YEARS, no DECADES, laboriously cataloging and studying his father's notes and trying to piece together the most consistent versions of various material, and even resorted to editorial fixes aimed at making sense of some of it. One of the major points of Unfinished Tales and then The History of Middle Earth was actually to publish many of these alternate texts and fragmentary incoherent pieces. They establish thoroughly that there IS NO COHERENT MIDDLE EARTH! Not in Tolkien's mind, it is merely an exercise in creative writing, language construction, and a kind of analysis of the process of myth making. None of this detracts from his classically popular fantasy works in any way, it simply shows them for what they are, imaginings not bound to any of the rules of real world events or history. In that light, your (Pemertons) assertions about Gollum and the effects of the One Ring on him are obvious and simply illustrative of a truth which the man's works abundantly illustrate. Tolkien could have depicted any sort of effect of the Ring, the one he chose was PURELY chosen for its utility in telling a specific story. Even The Hobbit amply illustrates all this, as in 1937 when the book was published the version of the incident with Gollum and the Ring was substantively different from the one presented in later editions! At the time, if you read the original text, it's pretty clear that Gollum is a fairly insignificant figure, serving to illustrate Bilbo's cleverness and little more. The history of the One Ring had not, at that time, even been conceived by Tolkien! Later he used this incident as a jumping off point for LotR, and in his usual habitual way rewrote the incident with Gollum slightly to make it more consistent with the rest of the story! ONLY NOW did Gollum become this ancient creature, bearer of the terrible power of the One Ring. In 1937 he was just a boogyman with an invisibility ring and some nasty habits. We don't really know what in fact Tolkien thought he was, twisted hobbit, strange cave dweller, etc.</blockquote>

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