![]() A long whitish hand could be dimly seen as it shot out and grabbed the gunwale two pale lamplike eyes shone coldly as they peered inside, and then they lifted and gazed up at Frodo on the eyot. >Frodo was just yielding to the temptation to lie down again when a dark shape, hardly visible, floated close to one of the moored boats. For a moment he might have paused to consider Gollum, a tiny figure sprawling on the ground: there perhaps lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin: no flesh worth a peck. >Not even an eagle poised against the sun would have marked the hobbits sitting there, under the weight of doom, silent, not moving, shrouded in their thin grey cloaks. ‘You must have seen him: little thin black fellow like a spider himself, or perhaps more like a starved frog. >’Yes, very funny: lights and shouting and all. A little black head appeared at the far end of the basin, just out of the deep shadow of the rocks. ‘Now what would you say that it is, Anborn? A squirrel, or a kingfisher? Are there black kingfishers in the night-pools of Mirkwood? They have black squirrels there, ’tis said.’ Perhaps under the shadow of the Unnamed some of the beasts of Mirkwood are wandering hither to our woods. I thought I heard the thing hiss at me from high above as I turned away. But I stayed for a while, for it seemed strange, and then I hastened back. It was too dark for sure shooting anyway, and the creature was gone into the gloom of the leaves in a twinkling. You will not have us slay wild beasts for no purpose, and it seemed no more, so I tried no arrow. ![]() ‘Twas like a shadow on the ground, and it whisked behind a tree-trunk when I drew nigh and went up aloft as swift as any squirrel could. ‘Yet if so, it was a black squirrel, and I saw no tail. So perhaps it may have been no more than a squirrel.’ Sam pricked up his ears at this. It was getting deep dusk, when the eyes make things greater than they should be. But I saw, or thought I saw, something a little strange. >The black crawling shape was now three-quarters of the way down, and perhaps fifty feet or less above the cliff’s foot. >Down the face of a precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out. He was Gollum as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. >Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I’ve described some passages from the hobbit/lotr. AS a matter of fact, it seems all characters perceive and describe gollum as black, while only the narrator ever describes gollum as being white. However, Angorborn, Faramir, and Shagrat’s descriptions all seem very literal, and not metaphorical at all. I have heard some claim that any description of Gollum being black is metiphorical. What color was Gollum? The books seem to go back and forth on this. Saruman was a white-skinned guy whose symbol was the white hand and he was known as Saruman the White so I suppose because of all that he really wasn’t evil, was he? ![]() Never mind the fact that Tolkien described many characters on the side of good as dark-skinned or dark-complexioned the anti-racists insist that in Tolkien’s fiction “good = white” and “bad = black”. The topic of skin color (or complexion) inevitably leads people to decry what they perceive to be racist stereotypes in The Lord of the Rings. This is like “are Orcs black-skinned or something else?” I think whatever you want to imagine his appearance should be is perfectly acceptable. So, before we get to the specifics of the question, let me restate three obvious, well-known facts: Gollum was a hobbit (his people were the “Stoors of the Gladden Fields”) who had possessed the One Ring for hundreds of years, and he had lived underground for most of that time. Tolkien seemed inconsistent and the movies used light to match the book’s conflicted tones. Was Gollum dark-skinned or light-skinned? J.R.R. The “let’s blog about it” point of view has prevailed in my mind. But this is one of those potentially incendiary questions and I have debated whether to address it on the blog. You said nothing wrong or which offends me. ![]() ANSWER: How does one respond to this question? Submitted in June 2018, I have cringed every time I’ve looked at the message.
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