Things You Can Do
Take a thoughtful yet slightly goofy dive into ethics with your professor, Peter Owens, to discover some... things you can do.
Things You Can Do
The Hunt for Gollum's Conscience: An LOTRAMAPOD/Things You Can Do Crossover Event
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In today's episode, Matthias Austin from the Lord of the Rings AMA Podcast and I talk about Gollum. What motivates him? What's wrong with him? Should we pity him or fear him? Or something else? Come along for a journey into the ethics of Middle Earth where we'll discuss good and evil, pain and addiction, love and pity, and incontinence. Also, Frodo and Sam's Special Boat for Boys™ .
9:30 | Illustrated Hobbit Reddit Post
11:30 | Film Depiction Blog Post
23:45 | Anti-Climacus (Soren Kierkegaard), The Sickness Unto Death (Normally I try to put the edition and page, but I got this off the internet because I couldn't find my copy of this text - it's probably in a box somewhere in the basement, but I promise a cursory google search will confirm it's factuality!)
Of the many striking characters found in Tolkien's world, perhaps the one that stands out most is Gollum. There's literally no one else like him in Middle-earth. He's described as having glowing eyes with long fingers and webbed feet. He can climb cliff walls face down like an insect. He's described as leaping out of water like a frog. And despite his emaciated frame, he's strong and nimble, with sharp teeth that can bite the finger off of a hobbit. He speaks to himself in the dark, his two personalities fighting in a way that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would envy, and his very name comes from the uncontrolled sound that he makes. As though some inner demon is seeking a way out of his 500-year-old prison. He is a creature of nightmares, and most characters in the story treat him that way. He is described throughout the books as hateful, wretched, vile, wicked, a liar, a thief, and a murderer deserving of death. And yet, just as there is Gollum, there's also Smeagol, the steward who fished with his cousin along the banks of the Anduin River in the days of his youth, and who faithfully guided the hobbits to Mordor. To Gollum, Sam shows nothing but distrust and scorn. To Smeagol, Frodo shows mercy and pity. But what did Tolkien think of Gollum? And what can we discover from the differing treatments of him? In our episode today, Peter and I discuss the societal and individual lessons we can learn from one of Tolkien's most enigmatic creations in this special L O T R AMA Pod Things You Can Do Crossover: The Hunt for Gollum's Conscience.
SPEAKER_07Okay.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_07I'm I you know what? Let's do it. I'm just gonna trust it.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_07I'm gonna trust the t I'm gonna trust the computer machine.
SPEAKER_01I I have tested this myself and it did work. So hopefully it should be the same. Is that a yawn? I stubbed my toe.
SPEAKER_07You're sitting down.
SPEAKER_06How did you stub your toe sitting down?
SPEAKER_07Because I just move my feet constantly. That's just how I sit. That's fair. With only brief technical difficulties and minor injuries. Sorry, interrupting you. Can you hear my dog barking? No. No? Good. Keep it even a little. Matthias and I sat down to explore the question of Gollum together. He as an expert on Tolkien's world and me as an expert in ethics. For those of us who I've I've read the books. It has been a while. Uh I have seen the movies quite recently and the extended versions too. Um and I feel like I have a decent idea of what things are movie and what things come from book, and you know that sort of thing. Sure. Also, I listened to this really great podcast called The Lord of the Rings AMA podcast. So we we see what the ring does to Bilbo. It prolongs his life, but it definitely makes him desire it in an unhealthy way. We see him fidgeting with it at the party. He gets kind of cranky with Gandalf before he has to give it up. He had there's that moment where it's sort of been memed into extinction when he kind of gets goblin-y and reaches for it. Yeah. Yeah. Which when I saw that as a kid scared the everything out of me. Absolutely terrifying.
SPEAKER_01That's when you remember that Peter Jackson got started in horror.
SPEAKER_07We see what the ring kind of does to Bilbo over time. We see the result of what it has done to Gollum. Right. And from what I've seen, and based on some things that I I've heard from your podcast, like Gollum is like 600 years old. Does that sound about right? Five to six hundred, yes. Okay, somewhere in that like centuries range. Right. So first I I kind of wondered like, is there an in-universe reason for why Gollum doesn't begin to age the way Bilbo did when the ring is removed from him? And it do we have any evidence of what the ring might have done to Gollum if he had continued to possess it, right? Or is that kind of a non-starter? Because I know that like the ring sort of like wants to push in it in as much as it has a personality, it sort of wants to push the envelope, right? Right. So it's not gonna stay hidden indefinitely. Correct, yes. No one found it. The ring almost has this will of its own to go, like, I'm getting out there.
SPEAKER_01So yeah. So I think both of the answers kind of can be seen in the one very famous quote of Bilbo saying, like, I feel like butter scraped over too much bread. That's what the ring does. It prolongs your life. And when you have the ring, when you possess the ring, even if you're not physically holding on to it, there's a part of your soul basically that gets bound up in the ring. It's the reason why at the end of the whole story, Frodo is allowed to go over to Valinor, is because he cannot be wholly cured. Even though the ring's destroyed, there's a part of him that's always been caught up in it. So I think that probably um with in terms of like why doesn't Gollum age after he loses the ring? He probably does a little bit, but I think it's also just the fact that like he's already so old. After 600 years of living past your normal lifespan. Okay, yeah, it's been another about 50 years since he lost the ring to Bilbo. How much more physical aging is your body gonna actually get at that point? Like, there there are moments in the uh books where they talk about how emaciated Gollum is and how he's basically skin and bones, and he's and some of that can be because of the journey that he's on, but that could be what we see as uh because that emaciated element is not in the descriptions that we get of Gollum and the Hobbit. You get the description of him be well, you get get barely any real description. Um basically the these are the this is the description you get in the Hobbit. Uh Gollum was as dark as darkness except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. So you get the sense that he's thin, and then you get a few references to maybe he has webbed feet that flap when he walks.
SPEAKER_07I do remember that because there's the he paints the word picture of him in his tiny little boat, yeah, kind of flipping his feet to move the boat around. Right. Which is also very creepy if we're talking about horror elements.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. Um and so I I think that maybe maybe we see Gollum having aged by being sort of even more emaciated, being even more sort of gangly and skinny than he was in The Hobbit. Uh, but I also think it is just his body, there's only a limit to how much it's physically gonna change. It's it's already reached this point of it's stretched to its physical limit. Wow. For someone who can sometimes be criticized for being overly descriptive, I mean the common joke is that he'll spend four pages describing a tree, Tolkien was often extremely vague in his descriptions of actual characters. For example, there are somewhere around 135 named characters that we meet in The Lord of the Rings, and of that astonishingly large number, by my estimate, Tolkien only ever describes the eye color of maybe a dozen. And it's not even most of the main characters. We know that Sam has brown eyes, Thaedin, Tom Bombadil, and Goldberry have blue eyes, and Aragorn, Ferimir, Elrond, Arwin, Eowin, and Prince Imrahil of Dal Amroth are described as having grey eyes, which, by the way, in the real world only 1-3% of the population has, making it the rarest eye colour. Gollum, we are told, had eyes that switched between pale, which is not a color, and green, and somehow the switch happens depending on whether it's Smeagol or Gollum talking. Others have eyes just described as keen, bright, sharp, or dark. And this lack of descriptiveness led to some problems for Tolkien. For instance, in 1958, Tolkien received a movie treatment for his story, and in his notes he wrote, Why does Zimmerman, the person who put it together, put beaks and feathers on orcs? And at numerous points in Tolkien's life, he had to refute the idea that just because he said hobbits had hairy feet and lived in holes in the ground, they were not, in fact, anthropomorphic rabbits. But by far, the most difficult character for people to wrap their heads around was Gollum. Aside from his shifting eye color, in the hobbit he was described as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face, and that he had long, flat, webby feet and long thin fingers. And in The Lord of the Rings we get a few additional details, mainly that he had a long, thin neck, was emaciated, and at one point was described as having a frog-like ability to leap out of the water. Now, we're familiar with the depiction of Gollum as shown in the Peter Jackson films, but that is only one of a long line of versions of Gollum from over the years. At risk of engaging in an impossible task, I'm going to describe the various ways Gollum has been depicted over the years, knowing full well that this is an audio medium. Let's start with the illustrated editions of The Hobbit, because that's where the weirdest stuff comes from. The 1962 Portuguese Illustrated Edition shows Gollum as a bipedal, almost simian creature with webbed feet and a large bushy beard towering over Bilbo. In the 1957 German edition, it shows Gollum in his boat with legs longer than his body dangling over the side, and cylindrical eyes that come about half a foot out of his head. And again, he's easily twice Bilbo's size. In the 1965 Japanese edition, Gollum is Okay, if you've seen one of the worst episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Go Fish from season two, where the swim team turns into fish people, Gollum looks a lot like that. Just a huge frogfish hybrid with sharp teeth.
SPEAKER_07Hey, Pete from the Future here, I have to agree with Matthias on this one. Uh, as a fellow fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they kind of look like a cross between the Gorn from Star Trek the original series and the old creature from the Black Lagoon.
SPEAKER_01And my favorite of these illustrated versions is the 1947 Swedish edition, which shows a massive troll with long hair standing in the water wearing a flower crown. Now, if you haven't seen the pattern, let me point it out to you that something that Tolkien failed to describe in the book was Gollum's size. Illustrators just read creepy dude lurking in a cave that wants to eat our hero, he must be massive. But hey, that can be forgiven if they hadn't read The Lord of the Rings, where we learn Gollum was once a stewer, one of the races or ethnicities, I'm not really sure what you would call it, a subset of hobbits, the stewers. So the scale eventually gets better in the depictions. But the overall depiction definitely doesn't improve after the Lord of the Rings. I'm gonna again give Pete some homework here and link to another article, this time from someone named Daniel Stride, which, hey, shout out Daniel Stride, and his blog, A Foolish Fellow, but foolish is spelled P-H-U-U-L-I-S-H, and I haven't looked at any of his other posts, so I take no responsibility for what else he might have said, but this post shows all of the on-screen depictions of Gollum, beginning with the 1966 Hobbit film, where the character is called Golum, G-O-L-O-O-M, where to me he looks like a giant hairy bug. The next appearance of Gollum was the Rankin Bass Gollum from 1977 and 1980, and many people might remember this very clearly frog with human ears and claws. Like there's no other way to describe it. That is just a frog with a human head. The 1978 Ralph Bakshee film shows Gollum as some sort of subterranean gremlin, very goblin-like with creepy fingers, but only in silhouette in the prologue of his Lord of the Rings, which was like a live-action person rotoscope, so you've got this live-action gremlin-y looking thing in shadow. And in the actual animated version of him later on in the film, we get a clearer picture that is definitely closer to Gollum's depiction by Peter Jackson, but it looks to me a lot more like the green goblin from the first Spider-Man movie wearing a loincloth. Now Daniel Stride also includes the awesomely terrible Soviet-era knockoff version of The Lord of the Rings, which is just a guy in green face paint and what looks like fake vampire teeth. He could almost be like a creepier version of the Grinch. And there was apparently a 1993 Finnish live-action adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and in it, Gollum was played by the same guy who played Aragorn, and let me tell you, it's just a regular person in a loincloth with stringy hair. There is no attempt made to make him look like anything other than an actual crazy human man in a cave. And then, of course, we have the now famous Peter Jackson slash Andy Circus Gollum. You might be asking, how did Tolkien actually imagine Gollum? And there is an unpublished essay written around 1970 that's currently housed at the Bodlin Library in Oxford, and that essay Tolkien wrote this. Gollum was, according to Gandalf, one of a riverside hobbit people, and therefore in origin a member of a small variety of the human race, although he had become more deformed during his long inhabiting of the Dark Lake. His long hands are therefore more or less right, not his feet, they are exaggerated. They are described as webby, like a swan's, but had prehensile toes, but he was very thin, in the Lord of the Rings emaciated, not plump and rubbery. He had for his size a large head and a long thin neck, very large eyes, and then he puts in parentheses protuberant, and thin lank hair. He is often said to be dark or black. At first mention, he was dark as darkness. That of course means no more than he could not be seen with ordinary eyes in the Black Cavern, except for his own large luminous eyes. Similarly, the dark shape at night that we hear in the Fellowship of the Ring, but that does not apply to the black crawling shape from the Two Towers where he was in moonlight. And then Tolkien goes on to write this: Gollum was never naked. He had a pocket in which he kept the ring. He evidently had black garments, and in the Eagle passage in the Two Towers, where it is said that from afar above, as he lay on the ground, he would look like the famished skeleton of some child of men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long legs and arms almost bone white and bone thin. His skin was white, no doubt with a pallor increased by dwelling long in the dark, and later by hunger. He remained a human being, not an animal or a mere bogey, even if deformed in mind and body, an object of disgust, but also pity to the deep-sided such as Frodo had become. There's no need to wonder how he came by clothes or replaced them. Any consideration of the tale will show that he had plenty of opportunities by theft or charity, as of the Wood Elves, throughout his life. And so with the popularity of the Jackson films, it seems unlikely that we will see a fully clothed, mostly human-looking Gollum at any point in the near future, as Circus's Gollum becomes more and more fixed in the cultural understanding of the character. But all of these discrepancies could have been avoided had Tolkien given the same attention to the people in his stories as he gave to trees. Gollum is the only person other than Sauron who has held the ring for any significant amount of time. Sauron had it for, depending on I think the timeline, I think he had it for a couple thousand years. I think it was originally made around the year 1000 of the Second Age. Um and then he lost it at the end of the Second Age, which was like 2900. I'm making up those numbers, but something like that. But Isildur had it for like a few months.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like not very long before.
SPEAKER_01And then it was lost, and then Gollum had it for 500 years, Bilbo had it for like 70-ish years, Frodo had it for like 20 years. Um Gollum's other than Sauron, the one who's had it the longest. We don't know what would have happened if he just had it indefinitely. The thing that we can see closest is probably the ring Wraiths, because they have their rings of power, and they were once men. And it wasn't just like they put on the ring, they immediately became the ring Wraiths. It was very similar. Their sort of essence got caught up in the ring that was under the control of Sauron, and over time they became the Wraiths. So it it could be that if Gollum had it indefinitely, he would get more and more worn down and stretched out, stretched like butter over too much bread until the physical element of him was gone. And he could have ended up like a Wraith, you know, in that sort of spirit world, in that Wraith world.
SPEAKER_07I I'm thinking of this image of like the ghost or the shell of a person who has used so completely that what remains of them is ethereal. Like um, I I wish I could rem it's been a while since I read this, but Burroughs uses this language of like their wisps of of their former selves, like those who get addicted to opiates, uh heroin specifically in this context, use until they become literally like we use that phrase, a shadow of their former selves, right? And and that is kind of creepy when you think about it, because those who have used to the point of becoming emaciated, of losing tons of weight, they don't eat anymore, th their face is sunken, they cast shadows on their own body from their kind of skeletal frames. And that's a really kind of horrifying word picture that really evokes the ring rates and that I I d like the way that Jackson and Al make them appear in the movies. I don't know that it could have been creepier. They're they're one of the most effective horrifying specters of of any film.
SPEAKER_01Well, part this is just a fun fact that I love uh the the sound that they make, that scream. Yeah, ooh. That's that's one of the writers. It's either Philippa Boyans or Fran Walsh. One of them can just do that scream, and so they're trying to figure out what should the sound be, and one of them just did that screen, they added a little bit of effects to it to make it, you know, but like that is just a human being doing that noise. But that's like that piercing kind of oh, yeah. Um, yeah, I agree. I think their portrayal in the film is utterly terrifying. And it, you know, it Tolkien was really leaning on very famous sort of image, right? It's it's the Grim Reaper, it you know, these these hooded cloaked figures that are bringing death, right? We we see that all throughout mythology, throughout history, and that's what Tolkien was probably drawing from. Uh, but yeah, it's very, very effective. But yeah, I think that the the butter stretched over too much bread, that's what happens the longer you have it. So eventually there's no more, but you're still there. You're still trying to stretch the wisp of because the ring will never let you go. Yeah. It might leave you, but you still belong to the ring.
SPEAKER_07One of the powerful things about the character of Gollum is that he is no mere novelty.
SPEAKER_06Broken, angry, desperate people aren't unique to Middle-earth or even to fantasy stories in general. Gollum intrigues us because, in some way, we all likely know our own Gollum. We never see Theodon, son of Thingol, King of Rohan, dealing with his own Gollums in his kingdom, but we know that a good ruler and a good kingdom must deal with the conflicts that arise as a result of broken, addicted people.
SPEAKER_01So this is scene from The Fellowship of the Ring. It's when Gandalf and Frodo are talking to one another about the ring, and Gandalf is explaining to Frodo everything with with Gollum, and he says, He was altogether wretched. He hated the dark, and he hated light more. He hated everything, and the ring most of all. What do you mean? said Frodo. Surely the ring was his precious and the only thing he cared for, but if he hated it, why didn't he get rid of it or go away and leave it? You ought to begin to understand, Frodo, after all you have heard, said Gandalf. He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter. And so I don't think that he's saying like he literally has no will, but it's that idea it feels to me very much like a powerful addiction, right? Where he's he's no longer able to resist the lure of it. And so my ethics question for you is how ought a society deal with those who do things like Gollum did, who who commit crimes, behave unethically, they lie, they cheat, you know, they they kill. All of those things. When they're caught up in addiction, things that it feels like they have no will to uh get rid of. How ought a society deal with those people who are doing unethical things, but they're bound up in this sort of addictive thing that they can't themselves release themselves from?
SPEAKER_07Yeah. I so I I want to acknowledge that I I want to start a little bit granular and then zoom out. So it's gonna sound like I'm not answering the society part yet, but I I want to start a little focused, which is thinking about what an odd thing a self is. I I mean in the sense of we are burdened with a psychology that we are in and have this illusion of control over, and we find out its limits by being frustrated by it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Um so Kierkegaard talks about how the uh the self or or our mind or you know, the thing that does choosing is kind of this operation of noticing that turns back on itself. And there's a very famous quote that I'm sure I'll I'll look up, but I I can't remember exactly how it goes, but it's like this activity that does its activity not just outward, but back onto itself, and in reflecting on itself, doing reflecting about the world, yeah, becomes a self.
SPEAKER_06Soren Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym Anticlimachus, writes in his book The Sickness Unto Death, that the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self.
SPEAKER_05Or it is that interrelation that the relation relates itself to its own self. The self is not the relation, but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
SPEAKER_06What he means is that the self is this recursive form of relating. It isn't the mere doing of being a self, but the act of reflecting on the doing of being a self.
SPEAKER_07The self is the relating, doing the relating of self to self.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's a little dense, but basically what he means is that merely acting like a person isn't really being a self. Thinking about what it means to be a person while you're being a person is what a self really is. Interestingly, what Kierkegaard calls the sickness unto death is the state of despair. And one way that someone can be in despair, Kierkegaard says, is that they don't want to be their self. They want to be something other than this reflecting on what it means to be a self.
SPEAKER_07So like there's a reflecting action about, hey, what's going on out here? Oh, there's a person, there's a an action, there's a world that I can do things or not do things. But then I am also a thing in that world. So while I'm reflecting about here's Matthias, and he likes Lord of the Rings and he's done these things and we're good friends. I also see, oh, and there's a me. Matthias is friends with a me that is out there in the world, right? We for as a as a really uh to use a theater language, I'm a very leads with my head kind of person. Sure. So I live in the ether a lot, and I will literally forget that I have a body sometimes. I'll be so locked in and then just go, oh my gosh, I'm gonna pee my pants. Right. I'll forget, or like I'm hungry or thirsty.
SPEAKER_01I haven't eaten in 72 hours.
SPEAKER_07Right, yeah. And and that is a really bizarre human problem. Uh that I don't know we have a ton of evidence of other beings in the world experiencing because we we live in our bodies and also not. Right. Um, it's it's such a weird thing, and that makes it really weird to interact. That's why we talk about this thing called the mind-body problem. The problem isn't just, well, there's a mind and there's a body, and how do they work together? Sure. But the problem beneath that problem is what practical effects does that have on the world when there's a me doing things, and part of me is like nailed it, and the other part of me is like tripping and falling behind.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_07I want to get up out of bed and do the things that I want to do, and my body goes right. So that I think is the core of this mind-body problem, and it becomes exacerbated when we talk about things like addiction, things that appear to uh encroach on our will. Uh, it also I want to be really careful not to pathologize mental illness or um uh ways that people's brains work, like neuro uh orientations or anything like that. But something that alcoholism and ADHD has in common is you don't do the thing you are screaming at yourself to do. Right. Right. Yeah. Um and I'm sure that anyone who has struggled with whatever that thing is, whether it is or isn't a clinical addiction, and whether it is or isn't a clinically diagnosed learning disability or personality disorder or whatever, we've all been in that situation where it's like, why can't I do it? And then you don't. Aristotle calls that incontinence, which is basically just, I know the right thing to do. I want to do it, and I didn't do it.
SPEAKER_01And so just why is that definit how is that definition of incontinence the same why is it the same word as unable to control our bowels? Is there a reason for that?
SPEAKER_07My best guess without doing a sort of impromptu moment of Latin.
SPEAKER_06Incontinence comes from the Latin cognate incontinencia. The core part of this word is continent, which means to hold together or to contain. So we can see why this word is used to refer to a landmass, a continent, and a state of being able to control one's bodily functions, continents. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance period, it was used in French and Middle English to refer to controlling one's impulses, especially those of a sexual nature. But from the 17th century on, it began to be used in its present-day medical sense. Incontinence, or sometimes weakness of will, is the translation of the Greek word akrasia from kratos meaning power or strength, and the a being an alpha privative. So we get without the power or strength to do something.
SPEAKER_07There is a uh a firmness or a a oneness or a unity that is kind of not all there all the time. Yeah. Right. And we can think about that like when you talk about control of your bowels, and we can think about that when you think about control of your actions. I won't put this in the podcast, but you know about me specifically. I do that I have been in a situation where I have experienced incontinence literally. Hey, uh Pete from the Future here. Um I just wanted to say that uh uh one time about 15 years ago, I was visiting Matthias, and I was on my way to his house, and I uh could not find a place to stop to go to the bathroom, and I soiled my britches. So, you know, now you all know that about me.
SPEAKER_01You can include that in the podcast. It might be fine. We're all adults. I am literally about to poop my pants right now.
SPEAKER_07But it does, it kind of is a funny, but it makes sense, right? Like, boy, I know that this is not the place to use a toilet, and yet so, how to connect this to addiction at the level of society? Yeah. One, I want to acknowledge that I believe addiction is a disease, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a disease that involves human volition. And it's weird in that way. And this is why it's hard sometimes to talk about. I think that mental health is health, but some health doesn't work the way other health does. Right. If I have a tumor, I didn't like get it by forgetting to think non-tumor y thoughts. Right. Right. Right. Uh, but also if I am addicted to smoking, it is almost certainly the case that at one point I said, I'll smoke this, even if it was unreflective, right? Yeah. So some health problems involve volition in a really complicated way. I want to acknowledge that my thoughts on this were uh many years ago, right before I started my master's in philosophy, influenced by uh uh Dr. Kent Dunnington, who wrote a uh an excellent book um about the complex interaction between addiction and virtue. Ethical models that look at like, well, did you make the right or wrong choice in that moment are inadequate for dealing with things like addiction? And that's why I think it's important that your question says at the level of society, right? We're not dealing every time we talk about society, we're almost kind of forced to start dealing in probabilities in in ways that go, somebody's gonna get this wrong. Even in the best possible society, I don't really believe in a utopia. And I think in the best possible society, there are going to be criminals, there are going to be people who are addicted to substances, there are going to be people who have uh this is another conversation that could be had here, personality disorders. Sure. Like uh really difficult conversations about say narcissistic personality disorder. Wow, those people suck. And also, to what degree is there volition involved, right? There's going there has to be those kinds of conversations. So I think one, we acknowledge our society does quite poorly at this, right? And to be honest, I don't know that there is a society that's good at this on the whole. One thing that I believe really strongly is a legal system that is based on um let's look at your track record will not work. Yeah. Because you in that kind of system, and in a way, I'm a little bit foreshadowing your second question, so I won't go too much into this, but by saying, Well, you did this, you cannot rehabilitate someone merely by treating them based on their track record. And this is why you can't stop people from committing crimes who never committed a crime before. Well, they never committed a crime. How would we know? They never did it before. Well, but that's not why people commit crimes. Right. People commit crimes because they're in desperate circumstances.
SPEAKER_01Every single person who has committed a crime at one point had never committed a crime.
SPEAKER_07Exactly, right? And and this is my I I sort of become Humean in a lot of ways. And this is where Hume doesn't believe in things like cause and effect and the ability to predict actions and right. He thinks anything that we say is a cause and effect relationship is just our custom to understand how the world works, and that at any time that could stop being the case. I find that compelling because it kind of gives us this loose grasp on, well, I know what's going to happen, or we know how society is built, or right? We have to be really cautious about that because when we look at the history of technology, say, well, nobody can steer by the stars, or nobody can blow up a mountain, or nobody can go to space. Well, and then they did. I think society has to begin at a point of this is an individual who deserves grace and mercy and kindness, despite what it is that they have gone through, despite what it is that they are experiencing. And that rubs us the wrong way in the West because we have our whole legal system is built on cause and effect. Yeah. And if you knock down a house, then you like blame Hammurabi, right? That's got a legacy that limits our imagination sometimes. So true. I think the first thing we have to do is to say, we are going to put an energy into this person that they do not quote unquote deserve. The hardest people are going to take up the most energy. And if you've ever worked in a hospital or been in residence life or been a counselor, you know that this is true, and you have to be okay with that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Matthias and I realize that Gollum isn't just bad because he's got a disease or because he's unfortunate.
SPEAKER_06He's actively chosen to worship and pursue something that Tolkien is pretty clear is just evil. So, what effect do these big ideas of good and evil have on our understanding of what it means to be Gollum?
SPEAKER_07Maybe this is telegraphing a little bit, but I'll go into it. Like we have Eru Illuvatar, and Eru Alvitar does the song and makes all these things, and then it's uh Melkor who becomes discordant. Yes. But also in Melkor slash Morgoth uh does it mat like different so many layers, right? Sauron is not the devil, if we were gonna do a sort of like No, Sauron's the devil's assistant.
SPEAKER_01I will say it's not quite like there's a quote that is somewhere maybe in the Silmarillion where um Tolkien describes Sauron as being the only reason in some ways that he was lesser than Morgoth is because for a long time he served somebody else. Whereas Morgoth never served anyone else, but because Sauron served Morgoth in that way he was lesser. But in terms of like evil and power, it's a little more complicated. I actually have a couple episodes that are just coming out as we're recording this that are the biography basically of Melkor.
SPEAKER_07Yes, which I have been more interested in than I realized I would have been.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and so Melkor and Sauron end up being a similar to power levels, but just because of the way Melkor and Evil have power. Um the everything in Middle Earth has inherent power. Melkor is the most powerful thing in all of creation. Um that that's just he's the most powerful of all of the Valar. The only one more powerful than him is Aluvatar, who is so far above him in terms of magnitude, it's not even a conversation.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Um interestingly, Monway, who is also one of the uh Valar is not like an equal with No, so they he's close though.
SPEAKER_01Uh the Silmarillion describes it as that Monway and Melkor are brothers in the mind of Voluvatar.
SPEAKER_07Interesting.
SPEAKER_01And so, but Melkor is the most powerful. Monway is less powerful, but still very, very powerful. But because evil can't create, anytime Melkor wanted to do anything, he had to give up part of his own power to do that. Yeah. So when he's creating the orcs, he can't just go, bam, life, orcs, I made him. He takes elves in some versions of Tolkien's backstory, he messed around with orcs a lot, and then he has to disperse some of his power into them, and he gets a little less powerful.
SPEAKER_07It does uh one, I want to acknowledge that there is a sort of manichaeism here, which is just that like there is good, there is evil, and they sort of vie for power. But if you dig a little bit deeper, it's it's only uh appears that way because one Eru Iluvatar is the source of the Valar, if I'm uh understand that correctly.
SPEAKER_01He is the source of the flame imperishable, which is what he uses to create life.
SPEAKER_07Okay, and then not only is that the case, so like Melkor is dependent upon Eru for his being, but also the evil that he does is something like that, is such that it doesn't there's no fecundity to that. He can't grow and become more. And I'm thinking of a uh when you when you have a candle, it doesn't take anything away from the flame of the candle to light another candle, right? Yeah, that is a description of like how good be gets good, yeah. It doesn't take anything away from you for for good to come out of you, but there is something very metaphorically resonant about if evil wants to create the illusion of production, making something happen, then it is lessened.
SPEAKER_02Correct.
SPEAKER_07Um, and and that almost introduces a kind of I don't want to say fatalism, but like you kind of almost have to go, well, Malkor is going to lose, quote unquote, right? He it's not everything he does lessens him until he is too little to resist the goodness of the other Valar of Eru himself.
SPEAKER_01There's a moment in Return of the King. Sam and Frodo are in Mordor, they are at like just huddled, running out of food. They have they're nearly to Mount Doom. The the folk the smoke and fog of Mordor is all around them, and Sam looks up and he sees through the smoke a star shining. And he says he was struck to the core that in the end the shadow was only a passing thing. There was light and beauty beyond that the darkness could never touch. And that is sort of like the the real uh it's it's kind of fatalism. It's kind because it's not really fatalism, because there is a world where Sauron completely takes over Arta.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But Sauron cannot extinguish the stars.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right? So it's that idea of uh it's sort of the idea of like, you know, people say, well, there is no such thing as dark, there's only the absence of light. Yeah. Or there's no such thing as evil, there's only the absence of good.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, this is a Augustine would say that evil is not a thing itself, it's merely the privation of good, which is compelling. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And Tolkien talks about similar things where even Morgoth, even Melkor was at his conception, good. He didn't come evil and spread evil. He was good and lost it. Sauron was good and then turned away from it. So it's not I don't know if it's I guess you could say that's sort of fatalistic, um, but in a positive connotation.
SPEAKER_07It's it's interesting.
SPEAKER_01And we usually use fatalistic in like a negative connotation, but that's kind of like optimistic fatalism.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. You and I have had conversations about this uh specific concept, so I don't want to get too uh into the weeds, but it's really interesting to me how we know that C.S. Lewis's faith in many ways rests on his relationship with Tolkien. Yes. And I don't want to overstate that, but there is a significant element there. Um it would seem that the story that Tolkien has spent his life building and telling in a way that it's not just like, oh, it's just one of his books, right? I wouldn't say about George R. R. Martin that the metaphysics of the Game of Thrones universe reflects him. But like for Tolkien, like we know that there is something of him in this and in a in a really interesting, metaphorically resonant way about how he writes Eru that makes me think, huh. I I still read Lewis on hell and and uh the problem of of pain and grief, right? So I still read A Grief Observed, The Problem of Pain, and the Great Divorce of Lewis. And I'm still fascinated by these writings. And the implication of the metaphysics of Tolkien's world is eventually the evil will gas itself out and we'll all be back with Eru. Right. And that is not necessarily a return, but like, oh, we were all of Eru after all. To turn this back to lead into our final question, but also to turn this back to Gollum, I I will admit that because of the way that I was raised, I still feel really connected to questions of will this person who failed so spectacularly at loving in their physical life ever get back? Yeah. I'm really digging the the way that um he talks, uh Tolkien talks about how Eru plays or sings or makes this music. And that even when Melkor creates this discordance, Eru goes, I can handle that, and takes it and makes it a part of his great song. Yeah. And I I just I hope that for Gollum, who is far more pitiable than Melkor, at some point is able to go, I'm gonna stop playing against the band. I'm gonna start playing with the band. And we don't get that. We don't know if there's an afterlife or whatever. But Frodo, something that I think is so crucial about Frodo in terms of showing us what our possibilities are, is Frodo gives Gollum chances to play with the band, as it were. Yeah. And that is huge. That's so that's like that's it, right?
SPEAKER_01So this this leads into I I found a letter that Tolkien wrote in 1956 to Michael Strait, and I wanted to find someplace to bring this up when talking about Gollum and Frodo. And so the the question that Michael Strait was asking was like basically, you know, why did Frodo keep allowing this? And and it got into something that probably was Tolkien's his view of theology and Christianity or Catholicism or whatever. Um I'm gonna read this whole thing out. Yes. Because it's it's I love it, and it just talks about Gollum in a way that yeah, I'll just read it and we could talk about that. But at this point, the salvation of the world and Frodo's own salvation is achieved by his previous pity and forgiveness of injury. At any point, any prudent person would have told Frodo that Gollum would certainly betray him and could rob him in the end. To pity him, to forbear to kill him, was a piece of folly or a mystical belief in the ultimate value in itself of pity and generosity, even if disastrous in the world of time. He did rob him and injure him in the end, but by a grace, that last betrayal was at a precise juncture when the final evil deed was the most beneficial thing anyone could have done for Frodo. By a situation created by his forgiveness, he was saved himself and relieved of his burden. He was very justly accorded the highest honors as Frodo, since it is clear that he and Sam never concealed the precise course of events. Into the ultimate judgment upon Gollum, I would not care to inquire. This would be to investigate godess privite, as the medieval say. Gollum was pitiable, but he ended in persistent wickedness, and the fact that this worked good was no credit to him. His marvelous courage and endurance, as great as Frodo and Sam's or greater, being devoted to evil was portentous but not honorable. I am afraid, whatever our beliefs, we have to face the fact that there are persons who yield to temptation, reject their chances of nobility or salvation, and appear to be damnable. Their damnability is not measurable in the terms of the macrocosm where it may work good. But, we who are all in the same boat must not usurp the judge. The domination of the ring was much too strong for the mean soul of Smeagol, but he would have never had to endure it had he not become a mean son of thief before it crossed his path. Need it to have ever crossed his path? Need anything dangerous ever cross any of our paths? A kind of answer could be found in trying to imagine Gollum overcoming temptation, the story would have been quite different. So, in that, I mean Tolkien says, I don't know if we can judge him or not. I he was still a bad dude. He he made the decisions that he did, and there were things about him that made him, you know, if if he wasn't a sneaky, evil kind of person to begin with, he wouldn't have gotten in that situation. But he also says, that doesn't matter. The salvation of the whole world and Frodo's own personal salvation came because despite the fact that it may have seemed that Gollum was somebody you shouldn't trust, somebody who was damnable, he gave him pity and grace and mercy anyway. Yeah. And it's that idea of like, it's almost um there's a a C. S. Lewis quote of like, I don't pray to change God's to change God, I pray to change myself.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it's it's that similar idea of you know, Frodo showing pity and mercy to Gollum is what means that Frodo is going to himself receive pity and mercy, you could argue from Iluvatar or the world or the circumstances. Um it's just yeah, that that was something that as we were talking just now, it really jumped out at me. He's like, I gotta read this quote.
SPEAKER_07And and it's it's really interesting that that happened because I was thinking of this completely in isolation. Like I did not share this with you beforehand, but I had written down on a piece of paper weeks ago a poem that I believe I had heard in a clip of uh uh Stephen Colbert talking, who you know, sort of very famous Lord of the Ringslover. Yes, um, and I didn't know it it it's a it's a poem by Robert Hayden, who was the uh first black man to hold the office of what would come to be known as the US poet laureate. Okay. Um the first part of the poem reads We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us. And I I feel like that is really resonant here because the idea is is almost if you believe in God or gods or a divine plan or the the the way that the song of Aru accounts in the moment for any discord that attempts to disrupt it, the question of like, well, is there free will or is there fate or what like that almost doesn't even matter because the response then is still you you do this because of who you are, and Frodo does this because he is the one who was already judged worthy to be the ring bearer, yeah. And it is interesting how uh I know you get this more in the book because in the movies they appear to be of similar age, and there's a little bit less of the sort of mentality. They're just they're just money, yeah. Yeah, but in in the book, you definitely get like Frodo teaching Sam like this is why I did this, right? And and that makes me think that like I think that connects really importantly to the idea of how do we deal with people that just refuse to act harmoniously with community, and it is you just keep playing the song at them in a way that invites them, right? Yeah, there is a Canadian politician named Yagmeet Singh. One of my first times I saw something of him was about 10 years ago, there was quite a bit of um, as there have been in the last 25 years or so, a quite a bit of anti-Islamic sentiment. And um uh Yagmeet Singh is not Muslim, he is uh Sikh, but he wears a turban and he has a long beard, and people don't know what Sikhism is, right? So he's giving basically a town hall, and a woman comes in and interrupts and begins screaming at him about like what you're here for, you're bringing Sharia law, you're bringing like I want to know what your Sharia law is gonna do and like how you're gonna take over our country and da-da-da-da-da. And his response leads all these other people, and he just says, Thank you, we love you, you're welcome here, thank you for coming. Like he just repeats, he kind of shouts over her because he has a microphone, but he never says anything like, get this crazy woman out of here, right? Which it isn't unreasonable, but he says, We love you, we thank you. It's good that you're here. You are welcome.
SPEAKER_00What do we believe in? We believe in love and courage, right? Love and courage. Love and courage. We believe in love, we believe in love and courage. What this is, we don't want to be intimidated by hate. We don't want hatred to ruin a positive event, right? We don't want hatred to ruin a positive event. So let's show people how we would treat someone with love. We welcome you. We welcome you, we welcome you, we love you, we support you and we love you. We support you, we love you.
SPEAKER_07And that is what I thought of when you were talking about this idea of and using this image of the song of Eru. We're just gonna keep inviting you. Yeah, right? You're gonna we are never gonna stop inviting you because the only way to ensure that you might one day become harmonious with us is to continue inviting you to do so, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so the Tolkien wrote in his letters repeatedly the most tragic part of his entire story was one moment where Gollum almost became good. Um, and it's in Return of the King, they're climbing the stairs to um to Shelob's lair, and Sam and Frodo have fallen asleep. Frodo's asleep in Sam's lap, um, and Sam is sort of asleep over, and Gollum comes up upon them and it says this. A strange expression passed over his lean, hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly, putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee. But almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin and the fields and streams of youth, an old, starved, pitiable thing. But at that touch Frodo stirred and cried out softly in his steep in his sleep, and immediately Sam was wide awake. The first thing he saw was Gollum pawing at Master, as he thought, Hey you, he said roughly, what are you up to? Nothing, nothing, said Gollum softly. Nice Master. The fleeting moment was passed beyond recall. And Tolkien wrote, I I looked at it, he started writing in 1945, ten years before this book came out, um, about it was one of the saddest things he had in his whole story, that there was a moment where redemption could have been achieved, but Sam jumped to a conclusion and said, You're doing a bad thing again, I don't trust you, and it was gone. But if the Hobbits had not done that, there was a moment where Gollum could have completely changed. And he he wrote about it in 1945, he wrote it to somebody else in 1955, he wrote it about it in 1956, he wrote about it in 1963. He he couldn't stop thinking about this moment where basically Sam screwed the whole thing up.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And so I guess my qu my question was going to be, well, was Sam wrong for having responded how he did? But I think we kind of already talked about that. So I think I want to change it to how ought we view Sam in light of Tolkien's words that this is the most tragic moment in his whole tale.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01Does this take anything away from Sam that because Sam is often lauded as the great hero of the story, an even greater hero than Frodo? Does this take something away from the heroicness of Sam, or is it understandable and everything he achieved outweighs that?
SPEAKER_07Yeah. As you were saying that, my my my first impulse was to say something like, We are not Frodo, right? And and it's it's not always right to put yourself in a story that you're reading, but I do think Tolkien writes in a way that invites that idea. We are Sam. Yeah. Frodo is Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Socrates, right? The person who, through circumstance, through divine intervention, through machinations, through whatever, carries a monumental burden and does so with grace and humility and honor and and and duty and all those sorts of things, right? I think this moment for us is a little bit of pumping the brakes because Sam is a hero. He is dutiful, he is long-suffering, he is prepared, right? It just the the way that he is in this story is unequivocally heroic in a way that I think a lot of people connect to. They did, oh man, I didn't get to hit the game-winning shot. I didn't get to do the big moment. But those people that undergird the visible hero are as important. And and it's shown by the fact that he does end up bearing the ring for a while and ends up going to the halls of Valinor. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01No, he goes, well, it's close. He heads towards Valinor. He gets basically on like the outskirts of the yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, but he gets to go on the special boat for boys, right? Correct. Yes. Um, I think this moment is a moment for us to reflect and say, when have I acted in a way that appeared prudent to everyone and was still something that may have caused harm. And that's I don't think the purpose of that is to go like, you better be nice forever or else. But like, I think it's a reminder of living in a world with consequences, or at least in which it appears that our actions have consequences, because sometimes uh it's not certain, right? Sometimes it feels like, boy, some people, their actions don't have any consequences, good or bad, right? I think it's a reminder to us that you can act prudently and still have messed up, and you have to be willing to acknowledge that, and you have to be willing to forgive yourself of that. Um, I I don't think we're meant to see it as browbeating, like because Sam is not like the blemished hero because of this moment. Sam is a person who lives in the world, yeah. Who made the best choice that he could with the information that he had and still got it wrong because that's what it takes to live in the world. And yeah, I don't know, the uh lecturerslash sermonizer in me wants to kind of like bring this to a moment where the organ starts up and the if y'all want to calm down and have a moment with it, right? But I I think that that is one of the most crucial takeaways from this story, which is there are the main characters, but think about how many dozens, if not hundreds, of named characters there are in this book, all of whom make consequential choices for the story, right? In in positive and negative ways. How do we think about our role in whatever stories we are in in a way that illuminates the fact that we are a kind of person who has to be ready to make choices, right? And Sam was ready to be the person who defended Frodo, and I think he needed to be that, right? And in that moment, Gollum didn't need that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_07And I understand why that is very tragic for Tolkien, because maybe he had been that, right? Or maybe he knew that moment intimately of I needed someone to be something for me, and what I got was someone who was something for someone else. And that sucks. That's just the world is a hard place, and that's why you have to be like Frodo. That's why you have to have grace and perspective to be able to say, yeah, Gollum was wretched, and Gollum was conflicted and angry and nasty, and also we wouldn't be here if we were not a part of that story.
SPEAKER_06When we mess up, or when there's a missed opportunity, we're so often left asking ourselves, what if? What if I hadn't failed? What if one little detail had been different?
SPEAKER_01Eileen Elgar in 1963 asked basically, well, what if Gollum had reformed? And he speculated on it. And that's what he wrote. If he had, what could then have happened? The course of the entry into Mordor and the struggle to reach Mount Doom would have been different, and so would the ending. The interest would have shifted to Gollum, I think, and the battle that would have gone on between his repentance and his new love on one side and the ring. Though the love would have been strengthened daily, it could not have been wrested from the mastery of the ring. I think that in some queer, twisted and pitiable way, Gollum would have tried, maybe not with conscious design, to satisfy both. Certainly at some point not long before the end, he would have stolen the ring or taken it by violence, as he does in the actual tale. But, possession satisfied, I think he would then have sacrificed himself for Frodo's sake and have voluntarily cast himself into the fiery abyss. And so it's like it's still a sad ending for Gollum, but at least it's sort of like if that had happened, if he had been redeemed, because again, the ring will never let you go, right? You cannot get freedom from the ring within the world of within the bounds of Arta. He would have at the very least been able to go out in a noble way. Rather than merely a pitiable way. Instead of like a oh he fell, yeah, sort of way. Like he would have had agency with it. He would have been what's his Randy Quaid at the end of Independence Day. Yes. Sorry, I'm late, Mr. President, as Gollum grabs the ring and leaps into. But I just thought it was I didn't realize that Tolkien had ever even like speculated on that because so much of his writing, he just says, like, well, this is what it is. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. And this is one where he actually went, I think it would have gone this way.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's if that one moment had gone differently.
SPEAKER_07That's incredible. And and also it does I I, as a virtue ethicist, I believe very strongly in the idea that you have to be prepared to make choices that come to you. And part of the reason is because I'm a teacher and I'm a coach, and I would not put my 11-year-old up against like major league pitching and be like, get a base hit, right? Like that's ridiculous. That's setting them up for failure. They are not prepared for that. And also, every once in a while, they do. It's like, gosh, I'm I'm pulling out all the stops here. The end of the movie Hardball, G Baby goes up and he's he's never gotten a base hit in his life. He barely can swing the bat. He's so tiny, and he goes up and he he wins the game because the moment was made for him to be there and to be what that moment needed. And and I think that's a really, really interesting way of looking at the world, and one that personally keeps me hanging on this edge of like maybe there is a plan. It's that tiny bit where every once in a while people who are not prepared for the moment still are ready for the moment.
SPEAKER_01That's very talking. It's yeah, I did a whole episode about free will and people's actions and their umbar, the choices that they make. And sometimes it's just the way the world works, you end up in a situation, and when you're in that situation, you're the one to make the choice. And it doesn't mean that you you were the only one who could have ended up in that situation because of a variety of factors. But you're the person who makes the choice in that situation, and because of who you are, there's only one choice you can make. Because of who Sam is being fiercely loyal to protect Frodo, he cannot in any way go, Well, let's give Gollum a pass this time and see what he does.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And Frodo, because of who he is, cannot. And honestly, at the beginning of the story, he says, I wish Bilbo killed him. But that was before Frodo had even had the ring. But once Frodo had the ring and realized what it does to a person, all of a sudden he goes, I do pity him, and I'm going to keep pitying him, and I'm going to keep giving him mercy.
unknownBut for
SPEAKER_01Frodo's the only person because because Frodo's the only other one who had the ring, could be in that situation to give that to Gollum. Because I mean it's sort of the idea of like um the what's the story? There's a a man who falls into a hole and uh, you know, uh somebody comes by and says, Good luck, you know, you should really try this to get out, try doing this. And then a friend jumps into the hole, he goes, What are you doing? Now we're both stuck down here. And the friend says, Yeah, but I've been down here before. I know how to get out. Because Frodo has had the ring and he knows what it's like, he's the only one who can give pity. The only way that you're gonna know it is if you've gone through that yourself. And that's something that Frodo is able to do for Gollum because he knows what the power of the ring is. Wow. Yeah. And now it's time for this week in Middle Earth. If you haven't listened to the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast before, you might not know that Middle-earth is, canonically, the distant past of our world, and so the calendar of events can lay over our own calendar. And each week we look at what transpired in the world of Middle-earth throughout the ages. And so, on May 8th, Eowin and Aomir depart Minas Tirith for Rohan one week after Aragorn is crowned king, in order to make sure that the kingdom is in order, and with them go Elidan and Elrohir, the twin sons of Elrond. And apparently we are in a lull between major events because that's all for This Week in Middle Earth.
SPEAKER_06There's a lot more we could have said about Gollum. Heck, there's a lot more we did say about Gollum, as well as all kinds of other things. Matthias and I talked for over an hour and a half about this, and I think we could have kept going. There is so much for us to reflect on.
SPEAKER_07Ultimately, I think Matthias and I are on the same page about the fact that these stories, these characters and the lessons we can glean from their triumphs and failures, they're meant to display the greatest possible virtues of our character, and to encourage us to play the role that waits for us. Maybe you feel like Gollum sometimes, torn by allegiances to too many masters, weary and angry and bitter at what has happened to you. It's okay. I've felt this before too. I think just about everybody has. Maybe you feel like Sam, ever dutiful but still haunted by failure. Maybe you're Frodo, carrying a burden you don't deserve, but trying to remain steadfast and kind nonetheless.
SPEAKER_06We can learn so much about ourselves and the seasons of life we're in from reflecting on Tolkien's incredibly insightful and inspiring work.
SPEAKER_07But I think one of the things Matthias and I both want to drive home is that there is always a chance to be kind. There's always a chance to come back to the warmth of the ones who care for you. In a previous episode of his podcast, Matthias talked about how Tolkien would never abide cruelty, racism, bigotry, or prejudice. Those who embrace these qualities as virtues instead of the vices they so clearly are, they're not looking to be invited to play in the Song of Eru. But those who are confused, broken, angry, hurting, addicted, lonely, these are the ones that we always have to strive to treat not as burdens to bear, but fellow weary travelers to have lean on us. Frodo said to Gandalf, I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. And Gandalf says to him in response, So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. I feel really lucky that I was able to do this, and I know Matthias feels the same way. We're thankful that you all tuned in, and I hope that we can keep doing our best with a time that's been given to us, putting the best, most hopeful, most joyful things out into the world. Thanks for listening. The Hunt for Gollum's Conscience was a joint production between the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast and Things You Can Do. It was written by me, Peter Owens, and Matthias Austin. Be sure to check out the show notes for all the links to pictures and descriptions of Gollum and other tidbits from the episode. Special thanks to Matthias for allowing me to use his theme music and thumbnail art for this special episode. The music for this episode was written by me, except for Shrines by David Celeste, Slowly Like an Aching by Jay Taylor, and Gentle Night by Beza. Check out the link in the show notes to some of my music for season one of Things You Can Do. If you listened to this episode in my podcast feed, be sure to go over to Lotramapod.com and subscribe to Matthias's podcast. If you listen to this in Matthias's feed, search for Things You Can Do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to hear more from me. It's my sincerest hope that this is not the last collaboration you'll hear from us. So stay tuned.