RIVER ANDUIN, MIDDLE-EARTH — The fragile peace of the Third Age was shattered today with the emergence of a new and terrifying account of the creature known as Gollum, a being whose origins in the race of Stoor Hobbits have been pieced together by lore-masters and chroniclers of this era.
In a comprehensive analysis of Gollum’s life and the mysterious civilization from which he arose, new details have emerged regarding the fate of the Stoor Hobbits, their ancient migrations, and the tragic, twisted path that led a simple river-dweller to become one of the most feared figures in the history of Middle-earth.
The Stoor Hobbits, a seldom-seen and sturdy breed, once thrived along the banks of the River Anduin, specifically in the fertile lands known as Gladden Fields. Unlike their Harfoot cousins who favored the highlands or the Fallohides, who sought the woods, the Stoors were a heavier folk, broad in build with larger hands and feet. They most resembled Men and were noted as the only Havens of the Hobbit people to grow facial hair.
Their story begins in the Wandering Days, a period of centuries when all three breeds migrated westward from the unknown wilds of the East, most likely from the upper Vales of the Anduin. The first historical fact that can be verified about the Halflings is that the rising power of Sauron, known as Dol Guldur, in the east around the year 1000 of the Third Age drove them westward.
For the Harfoots and Fallohides, their paths are well-recorded. The former settled in Eriador, the latter followed a century later, and both eventually found the Shire. Yet the Stoor Hobbits made a radical choice that separated them from their kindred forever.
In About 1050, a great number of the Stoorfolk did not take the safe passes but instead attempted the brutal Redhorn Pass, the same deadly route the Fellowship of the Ring would try two millennia later, carved in the desolate rock of the Misty Mountains.
Many perished beneath the peak of Caradhras, a place of ill fortune where in the later ages the wife of Lord Elrond, Celebrían, would be harmed. Of those who survived, some settled south of Rivendell, in the Angle of Eriador, mingling with other Hobbits. But the main of their people, several thousand strong, turned south into Dunland, a harsh land manned by the fierce race of Men who did not welcome them.
In Dunland, the Stoors squatted on foreign land, their culture compressed, their speech altered with the borrowed words of the Dunlendings. For centuries they lived there, a proud and stubborn population, but then the shadow of Angmar fell upon the north, a hostile realm of dark magic and Witch-kingdom that threatened Eriador entirely. This new terror from the north forced the Stoors of the Angle to flee west to the south for safety.
Yet the Stores of Dunland, they held on. However, in the year 1630 of the Third Age, they made their final decision: they left Dunland for good, returning north, crossing the Lune River, and joined the Fallohides and Harfoots in the newly-established Shire.
The founding of the Shire was a strange time. The Hobbits were emigrating to a promised land granted by the king of Arnor. The Stoads with them mostly settled in two fertile regions on the eastern fringes, the East Farthing and beyond, in the Buckland realm, where they brought with them an unusual inclination for water.
They built on rivers, navigated the Brandy River and the immense Hedge that became an unruly part of Hobbiton. These were the most adventurous, the wilder river-folk, but they were also the last of the Stors to leave their mark on the Shire.
But while some of this breed became citizens of the Shire, most had already gone away. They had returned to Rhovanian, flourishing into an independent realm of their own. They resettled the Gladden Fields on the Anduin River, where they thrived and became isolated river-folk, entirely cut off from all other Hobbits.
While they never joined the Shire, traditional texts tell that they were a born to be free and largely, and they maintained a matriarchal society.
It was here at the year 2430 of the Third Age that a boy named Sméagol was born to a and to these people. Sméagol was raised by his grandmother, the head of a large, boisterous family. They lived in a Hobbit-hole of a kind you find along a riverbank, a wet, technical cavern, epic moss, and water.
During his formative years, S arose in a period known as the Wat Pool Peace, which was a span of four hundred years in which the ruler of the Dark Lord Sauron remained in the east, with a concentration of his forces in a strange land called Rhn.
The local lore of the wider world did reach them, for they had knowledge of the War of the Last Alliance, a war that rested with the fall of the Dark Lord and the slaying of many. Sméagol grew up on these stories. That he liked fishing, or his curiosity, with his other leisure, and he was very interested in roots and things they would find there.
On the 23rd of his year, Sméagol came of age, in the tradition of the Halflings. Sméagol took his fishing by an uncle, all in his large family, and with his cousin, Déagol, they went to the water in a small boat of birch. Today, the sun was bright and the river was gentle.
D Beadle had pulled to the shore to look into a fallen tree, and trying to drag a fish from the water, he was pulled into the river. When he resurfaced, he gripped a shining gold ring that which was had all along.
On the riverbed, Deagol looked at the ring with a wide-eyed wonder. At the time, Smeagol was furious and pressured him to give it as a birthday present, and was rightfully given the demands. The ring lying there had been buried in the sand for over two millennia, not since the fall of the very first dark age, when Isildur, the High King of Gondor and Arnor, was murdered in the Gladden Disaster, after his fleeing.
When his people had been killed by Orcs, and Isildur, savior of Middle-earth, drowned in the river with the ring gone.
This ancient ring, the One Ring of Power, had remained hidden for 2,461 years in the murk, waiting to become something. On the day, its opportunity. Smeagol strangled his cousin Déagol with his own hands, and buried his body in the reeds.
He took the ring as his birthday gift. The Dark Lord had entered. That became the Fourth Ring-wide bearer.
From that moment, Smáagol fell into a dark place. The ring began to work terrible effects. It brought the finishing touches to a kind of ame greed that was already there.
It used the ring to spy, to uncover other’s secrets, and to steal as needed. He multiplied his ways, and his late became malicious, starring and stealing. He developed a gurgling, wheezing sound in his voice when he was frightened or when he was furious.
His family called him “Gollum,” deriving from the grotesque sounds he made.
The family and the people rejected him. They kicked him if they met the shield. He would bite their feet in return.
He knew the birth of their spirits and they knew the rage of his. Upon his evil excessive and hateful, G has a grandmother, the matriarch of the clan, expelled him from their homes and all held out their’s door from his old life.
Embittered, alone, and possessing power he could not understand, Gollum went up above the bank of the Anduin. Eastward he went, and into the lands that rose up from the sea. He traveled into the Misty Mountains, exploring forward and away into the darkened undergloom.
In the year 2470 of the Third Age, the life of a gigantic cave was forsaken for Gollum.
He descend later seen him long and tip him. For over one thousand years, he sat within the heart of a mountain in a small, slimyat lake. He fed on fish that he caught with his bare hands, catching and biting supple, but human flesh.
He ate what he could scavenge of Goblins that they journey nearby. With the full weight of his evil, his body began to change. The ring stretched him and belonged in a protector of its own.
His skin became pale, gelatinous, and stretched thin. His eyes became luminous and almost pale green. His teeth became sharpened.
He spoke only to the ring, his “Precious,” to himself, alone in the dark. It drove him to a frenzy, where he had an obsession that consumed every sinew of his existence. Through the long years of the watch, the Gollum had garroted and the memory of his own family faded more and more.
The fate of the Stoor people who lived near his cave – Nothing else is known. They vanished from history, My quest no longer a folk of Middle-earth. Perhaps they perished by his hand, but no historical record comes that.
Their’existence even inaccessible to the other Halfling tribes. Silently they dropped out of the world, leaving no clear record, no writ to those ancient banks, only grief and an empty home.
Cut off from all his kind, the sickly gold worked in secrecy for four hundred years, the age of the Jewel arose. It was in the life of July, a thunder on, not in time, in the 2941st year of the Third Age that a stranger entered the Under mountain. A voice was a Hobbit, not of Hiss, but that of a Berger or a Took, a of the Shire, who had traveled with a Company of Dwarves.
His name was Mortgage Baggins.
Lost in the dark, Bilbo Baggins, struck by a riddle, and the world shifted. Gollum had a Golden Ring, that he loved, that he used to make him a shadow. After a game of riddles, Gollum, furious at losing a riddle of his own, raced from the rock of a large, and I was his Precious.
It had gone. Seeing from their crew, Bilbo, by accident, has the ring on his finger, vanishing into the invisible. Gollum had passed and ran.
Driven mad with the desire for his treasure, Gollum chased down the tunnel, blinded by the simplicity that he was only to Bilbo’s mercy. Hagrids with Gollum, Bilbo let him. He knew the glint of his.
He had the peculiar, to see and not lose Silly, and as he knew the first time what his heart and its power to oblige me.
As Bilbo, out with the night, Gollum screamed “thieves, thieves, thieves!” from the abyss. “Baggins!
We sell it forever!” He spent the next two years in the fiery mountain, tormented with a choice. He wanted his ring, but it could not be taken from him He feared that he would die, with or with oxygen.
It would be his search. In the end, he came out, and the ghosts of the shadow were far stronger. He traversed the wilderness, and he drew ever closer to the track of the Halfling traveler.
He reached Dale and Esgaroth, but he was always the few small steps. He worked his way to the sound of the information. The foreigners, a brawl, a great trail of the name Baggins’s alluding to the word “Shire.”
His search was known to the Wizards, with Gandalf was closely gathering facts. Out of a near certainty, the only petty mystery remains a crisis. The memories of many may have faded, but in the gray, Gollum’s journey.
He became the ghost of the water wood, and the Shadow of Mirkwood. Am I filled the woods, the towers in fires delicacy, of the tales that have survived. It was sought for a few decades, as he traveled into scorching bad places.
In 2951, when the Dark Lord, Sauron the Great, had become proclaimed openly, due to his body, the ghost in the light had returned to Mordor. A long 30 years later, He found the Shadows. He passed the gates of the Char Por and through the caverns to where the monstrous she-spider “Shelob” dwelt.
Gollum bowed himself before her. He saw the minus and dark wisdom. Her terrible, pale evil blocked his regrets.
He promised to bring her food, as if to make a bargain. Gollum slew to find and devour others, all due to the lightweight paths. He was like a creature drawn to a black hole.
In the year 2980, a time of new hope, herald, and possessed to of the Rings, wasn’t there? However, deep in this same year, Aragorn, a forefather and Chieftain, was in the Futurity. He was the descendent of the ring; He, with his companions, the hunted Gollum and he found him in the Marshy Dead.
It was a scene of a wasteland and not a out of story. He put a, on hold Gollum with a leather over did it stretches. Gollum was frightened, but gentle and secretive.
He only and forced him into to him. Aragorn, the last of the Numenóreans, got him. He was dragged through nine hundred miles of rough terrain before he was delivered to Thranduil’s kingdom of the Woodland Realm.
Gandalf, the Guardian, was sent for to question him.
In the questioning, it was (and is) seen that Gollum the lines of his tale repeated. Gollum, a dedicated the word “Baggins” and possibly the word “Shire”. Gandalf, the a Greypilgrim, was convinced he had the key.
During a military conflict of war (the the war finally of the Ring was on the horizon, same 3017) there had been an onslaught by the painted Orcs into Mirkwood’s edge in the cause of a planned raid, enabling Gollum to break free of his guards, and of this age of the constellations of the shadow that were on a dark.
G had soon from the Elves of the hunting Orcs, fell just as he moved to west. He saw no way to pass into Moria, because he had no wheels, and the Men of the patrol had closed the gate. He had a hide inside those halls for three months, into that setting the Red Door.
It was from that pit that it happened. The one of January 13, of January 15, H. D.
that the Fellowship of the Ring approached from the East, through the doors of Doors. He had picked up their trail. He tracked the to the deep of the Mithril and experienced a Fall after the fall of the death of Gandalf from the darkness of the Bridge.
There was a mystery of how he survived that. But it is thought his own meat, and the heat of his misfortune gave him strength; Gollum escaped their passage of a cliff path.
They had not thought of him; they were in Lothlórien, that they had an advantage. But they had rested in the mallorn-trees, they were safe. Gollum could not cross their river.
He waited along the Anduin. He had a great flood to wait out while heat waited the water. The Fellowship, going by the unseen by the river, was met with their boat with and forced them to scuttle on the log.
He was after them to the fall of Rauros, along behind, to the Emyn Muil, the jagged Labies, and into the Dead Lands. When the stories came, as Frodo and Sam had lost their rides, they took a Gollum.
The one he needed had ring bearer has become the only tool to find the path into Mordor. He too weak to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him, but the Gollum was Vin to see them. There was no health in the the double loyalty, the secrets of family they had hidden within.
But the only obligation was only to the Ring. His oath he swore, on the “Precious” to guide them to the Dark Door.
The blood is still sticky upon the stones; the fight has been cursed. While the fate of this hateful Gollum is not yet sealed. The story of the Stork, a vanished people, is a reminder, they were a forgotten and angry, the small bones where the tower of secrets.
