Of all the characters in the Lord of the Rings who blur the lines between good and evil, Gollum is one of the most difficult for audiences to despise. He’s an often malicious, sneaky devil full of trickery and selfish greed, but his centuries' worth of torture and manipulation under the spell of the one ring makes a compelling case as to why he can’t necessarily be blamed for his own actions half the time.
Gollum is a wretched thing, whose desperate desire for the ring goes against the one thing he really needs in life: to be free of it. There are many points during the movies where audiences feel that Sam and Frodo could have redeemed Gollum if they had met him years earlier because his alter-ego Smeagol seems field by a genuine want to be good, to help them, and to fix the damage that he has done during his long life. But, in the end, his lust for the ring wins, and he betrays them.
This isn’t unusual, as many who come into contact with the ring are quickly driven mad by lust for it. Another perfect example of this is Boromir, the most compassionate member of the fellowship, who also starts out with good intentions in wanting to protect his people, and restore the beauty of his city, but whose human weakness is rapidly overcome by the rings allure. It is easy to see Boromir’s betrayal coming, and Frodo is warned of it many times before it happens, by Gandalf in the mines, and by Galadriel in her magic mirror. But it is equally easy to predict Gollum betraying Frodo, even when he has all of the appearances of wanting to help and aid the hobbit, because his own desire for the ring is far stronger than any allyship or loyalty he may wish t possess. In fact, Gollum’s own words belie the fact that he will try to take the ring back, very early on in the Two Towers.
The breaking of the fellowship results in Aragorn choosing to follow Merry and Pippin instead of Frodo and Sam, which leaves the two hobbits alone in the barren lands of Mordor at the end of the Fellowship of the Ring. The beginning of the Two Towers starts with them being followed by some sinister, unknown entity, who soon reveals himself to be Gollum. After a struggle in which he tries to choke Frodo, and nearly bites Sam’s ear off, they capture Gollum and bind him with an elven chain carrying magical properties.
The material burns Gollum, and he shrieks loudly enough that all of the orcs in Morodr would be able to hear them and loathe their whereabouts, so Sam and Frodo decide to let him go, but not before making him promise to guide them truthfully and faithfully. Frodo tells him “There is no promise you can make that I can trust” at which point Gollum says “We swears to serve the master of the precious. We swear on the precious” But this clever play on words was a trick all along.
It is clear that Gollum doesn’t see Frodo as the master of the ring. In fact, Frodo is merely a lowly ring-bearer in Gollum’s eyes, and so when he swears to serve the master of the ring, he isn’t actually vowing to protect Frodo in good faith as it appears to the hobbits, he is already scheming from this moment to betray him, as Sam guesses. The ring only has one true master, and that’s Sauron, but Gollum spends the entire films saying “don’t take it to him!” which suggests that he isn’t swearing to serve Sauron at this moment either.
Actually, Gollum considers himself to be the master of the precious because he sees the object as his own. He believes he has every right to the ring, it stayed with him for over 500 years after all, and so when he swears to serve the master of the ring, he is actually swearing to serve himself. Although Gollum didn’t become the new dark lord in all the years he had the terrible object in his possession, he did manage to keep it undetected for all that time, so he believes that the ring chose him.
Unfortunately, the ring will always abandon whoever wears it in order to try to get back to Sauron. It betrayed Gollum and fell into the hands of Bilbo. Then the one ring betrays Bilbo and almost gets him killed in the goblin tunnels during The Hobbit. It makes its way to Frodo, and eventually betrays him too as it pulls him in right at the last moment when he is on the brink of Mount Doom about to destroy it. Luckily for Sam and Frodo, Gollum isn’t able to let go of the power the ring has given him, and in one last-ditch attempt at getting it back, he falls over the edge and into the lava, destroying the ring in the process. In betraying the only person who shows compassion and kindness towards him, Gollum seals his own fate, and that of Middle Earth.
