Gollum

Gollum falls into the fires of Mount Doom at the Crack of Doom in The Return of the King, destroying the One Ring and Sauron's power along with himself. After Frodo claims the Ring for himself, Gollum bites off Frodo's finger to seize it, then loses his footing in his ecstatic triumph and plunges into the fire, an act of pure obsession that accidentally saves Middle-earth.

"My precious" is Gollum's most iconic utterance, the phrase he uses to address the One Ring throughout the novel. It encapsulates his entire psychological condition: the Ring is no longer a mere object to him but his sole remaining attachment to existence, a surrogate companion that has replaced every other bond — kinship, friendship, even his own name and identity.

Gollum leads Frodo to the giant spider Shelob because he wants the Ring back and cannot take it by direct force. By steering Frodo through Cirith Ungol and engineering Sam's separation via the lembas-bread deception, he plans to let Shelob do his killing for him, then recover the Ring from the bodies. His overriding motivation is always recovering "my precious," not loyalty to any person or cause.

Sam and Gollum share unrelenting mutual antagonism throughout The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Sam openly calls Gollum "Stinker" and never trusts him, while Gollum resents Sam's protectiveness and deliberately exploits Sam's blunt manner to drive a wedge between the two hobbits. Sam's eventual return after the lembas incident ultimately foils Gollum's plan to have Shelob kill Frodo, making their enmity a crucial counterweight to Frodo's pity.

Gollum — then still called Sméagol — murdered his cousin Déagol on his own birthday to claim the Ring after Déagol pulled it from a riverbed. That single act of murderous covetousness defines everything that follows, setting Sméagol on a path of five-hundred-year isolation beneath the Misty Mountains, where the Ring gradually hollowed him out into the wretched creature Frodo and Sam encounter in the Emyn Muil.

Gandalf warns Frodo that "even the very wise cannot see all ends," counseling pity because he senses Gollum still has "some part to play yet, for good or ill." His foresight is vindicated literally at the Crack of Doom: Frodo's mercy in keeping Gollum alive — and binding him as a guide — places Gollum in exactly the right location to seize the Ring and, in falling, destroy it, making compassion both a moral duty and the pivotal strategic act of the entire quest.

Gollum's divided self — the scheming, Ring-obsessed "Gollum" and the residual innocent "Sméagol" — functions as Tolkien's portrait of addiction and the progressive destruction of identity through desire. Tolkien renders the split through anguished internal dialogues, giving readers dramatic irony and genuine pathos simultaneously. The brief, tender moment when Sméagol gently strokes the sleeping Frodo in The Two Towers shows that the original self has not been entirely extinguished, even after centuries of corruption.

Bilbo first encountered Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains and won the Ring from him through the Riddle-game — an act Gollum experienced as theft of his "birthday present." His obsessive pursuit of that Ring eventually led him to Sauron's dungeons, where he revealed the words "Baggins" and "Shire" under torture, directing the Enemy's agents toward the Shire and triggering the entire quest of The Lord of the Rings.