[59] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1938); J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (2d ed. 1965).
For those few readers who somehow escaped adolescence without having read, or seen one of the animated versions of, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , Gollum was once a hobbit (or similar creature) named Smeagol. He found the cursed mystical Ring and became so obsessed with it that he became a murderous recluse who shriveled to a miserable froglike form. When we first meet Gollum in The Hobbit , he dementedly mumbles his thoughts out loud, addressing himself as "My Precious" and referring to the Ring as the "Birthday Present." By the end of The Lord of the Rings , however, his identification with the Ring has become so complete that he now also addresses the Ring as the "Precious." In the final scene, Gollum achieves the ultimate jouissance of identity with object and submerges back into the real. He regains the Ring and plunges to his death in the fires of Mount Doom shrieking in ecstasy, "Precious, Precious, Precious! . . . My Precious, O my Precious." J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, vol. 3, The Return of the King 224 (2d ed. 1965).