2. The Passage of the Marshes
We shall begin this chapter with a reflection on Gollum’s fate. It is true that Gollum’s story begins with him, as Sméagol, being overcome by desire for the ring that Déagol had just found in the river, and strangling him. He justifies this by claiming it is his birthday and that he is consequently entitled to the find. This reveals him as self-centered and “unrelated,” in a way that perhaps resembles Saruman – they are trapped in a complex or equivalent unconscious content that makes them inflated, egocentric, and self-justifying. Their desire for power and obsession with the higher idea instilled by the archetype gives them the “right” to remove obstacles, which often consist of people who do not share their delusions. In Gollum, in other words, there was a dark streak from the outset, which, upon encountering the ring’s archetypal energy, opened the door to the darkness that led to the strangling and the subsequent, prolonged degradation.
If we set aside this backstory for the moment and only consider the pitiable Gollum, trapped in his dark fate, his meeting with Frodo – as we saw in the previous chapter – is in some ways redemptive for him. For the first time in the story (including The Hobbit), he expresses joy and veritably brims with energy. This unexpected transformation is a result of Frodo accepting him; he listens to Gollum and suggests that he become their guide, which implies that he attributes intrinsic value to Gollum.
In Ego and Archetype, Edward Edinger writes about the ego-Self axis (simply put, the ego’s relationship to its inner core, the Self) and how its disruption leads to fruitless oscillation between inflation and alienation,[1] in a way that, with a bit of imagination, can be illustrated by the exiled Gollum. But when Frodo does not harm or reject him, instead inviting him into the fellowship, a change occurs. Edinger writes:
“Patients with a damaged ego-Self axis are most impressed in psychotherapy by the discovery that the therapist accepts them. Initially they cannot believe it.”[2]
There is no creature in our story as rejected and alienated as Gollum. Frodo is the first being Gollum meets who does not despise, exploit, or harm him. Gollum is filled with previously inaccessible energy as his repressed “true self,” Sméagol, surfaces. He suddenly seems genuinely eager to help Frodo. But this experience does not so much redeem him as give rise to an inner conflict between the “evil” Gollum and the “good” Sméagol. As time passes, he becomes aware of this unbearable conflict, himself a “bearer.” But while Frodo has had the support of figures like Gandalf, Aragorn, and Galadriel, Gollum/Sméagol is only traumatized. It was not long ago that he was tortured in Barad-dûr, to mention just one destructive experience in the series of this fundamentally lonely creature’s life. How could he possibly bear or endure an inner conflict of such a critical nature?
Apart from the ring, Sméagol became a monster as a result of being rejected by the community he belonged to and becoming isolated in the wilderness. This is a vivid image of how what we repress within ourselves returns as something repulsive, for example, in our dreams. The symbol is perceived as decidedly negative, not because the content itself is bad, but because the image reflects our attitude toward it. Jung writes:
”The general rule is that the more negative the conscious attitude is, and the more it resists, devalues, and is afraid, the more repulsive, aggressive, and frightening is the face which the dissociated content assumes.”[3]
We have touched on this before, but it is worth revisiting the question now. One could, for instance, entertain the idea that the Entwives – the feminine – were rejected by the Ents and “returned” as the labyrinth of eerie, half-conscious trees in the Old Forest, with the devouring Willow-woman at its center. A well-known image of this psychological, unconscious dynamic is Frankenstein’s monster. In Mary Shelley’s novel, the creature Frankenstein creates is not inherently evil. On the contrary, it seems eager to be accepted as a human among others. But its appearance fundamentally contradicts Frankenstein’s self-image, so he rejects it. Time and again, the monster tries to establish contact with humans, but each time it is violently cast out. Alone and alienated in the wilderness, the monster becomes increasingly bitter and hateful toward Frankenstein, whom it ultimately seeks to take revenge on. In this way, it returns to Frankenstein’s life – as an evil monster that destroys his life. Frankenstein and the monster end up in a mutually destructive relationship of hatred and revenge, much like the ego and its complexes can spiral into a negative cycle – in our story illustrated by Gollum and the ring. But it is fundamentally the act of repression that creates the “monster.” This is what Jung refers to when he says it is a therapeutic necessity to confront one’s shadow,[4] one’s inner monster; to become aware of it and ultimately accept it. The relationship between Frodo and Gollum illustrates this process. Back in Bag End, when Gandalf mentions Gollum in his account of the ring, Frodo exclaims:
“Gollum! Do you mean that this is the very Gollum-creature that Bilbo met? How loathsome! I can’t believe that Gollum was connected with hobbits. What an abominable notion!”
We see that Frodo, while still unconscious in the bosom of the Good Mother, expresses disgust not only for Gollum, whom he has never met, but also for the very idea that the monster could in any way be connected to him, however remotely. Already here, it is clear that Gollum represents his shadow, the loathsome within us that we refuse to engage with.
But now, on the other side of the river, on the other side of initiation, adventure, and transitions, he has grown wiser; and when he truly encounters his shadow in this twilight land, he understands what Gandalf meant when, in response to Frodo’s outburst, he said: “I think it is a sad story, and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits I have known.” One can imagine Frodo nodding to himself as he now stands face to face with the monster, realizing that at its core, it is simply a sad story; but also that this is a part of his life that can become valuable.
And so, Gollum becomes their guide to Mordor. We recall that Frodo and Sam immediately got lost on their own after crossing into the land of the Terrible Mother. Gollum belongs to this place, he knows it, and can consequently lead them in this domain – and the first place he leads them to is the Dead Marshes, an evocative symbol of the Terrible Mother.[5] As a guide, he scampers forward on all fours, and like a dog, he waits for the hobbits when he has run too far ahead. He thus represents the instincts, deeply rooted functions that Frodo must rely on in this unfamiliar, previously untraveled world. But we also note that while Gollum, in the initial encounter, was compared to a spider and associated with snakes, he is now described more as a dog. This is thanks to Frodo’s acceptance. Unlike insects and reptiles, a dog is something one can establish a rapport with, a relationship. The content that Gollum represents has, through Frodo’s “confrontation,” come closer to consciousness; instead of an enemy, it has become something Frodo can cooperate with. A tame dog – and Frodo does tame Gollum – can, according to Jung, represent “a kind of instinctive psyche that follows you… that is not against you.”[6]
The relationship between Gollum and Frodo is fated; the former is part of the latter’s life story. Another way to express this is that Gollum is a part of Frodo’s myth, to use Jung’s terminology. We have written about the personal myth elsewhere and will not repeat ourselves here,[7] but in brief, Jung means that we all have a myth, and we can only understand ourselves through this myth.[8] The Jungian analyst and author Robert Johnson frequently returns to this aspect of our lives, emphasizing the necessity of understanding our own myth:
“It is extremely important for a person to know his own myth, because that dominates so much of the characteristics of that person. To know his myth, to be conscious of it, means that one can cooperate with that myth, and do the best possible job with it.”[9]
Often, we are not aware of our personal myth because it does not “fit” the expectations of our surroundings and, by extension, our own identity. So, we repress it as children while adapting to the people who influence our lives – parents, teachers, schoolmates, and so forth. While the ability to adapt is crucial, something remains unresolved within us, which risks steering our lives in a destructive way. To return to our story, Gollum could have terrorized, constantly threatened, and laid obstacles for Frodo, and ultimately strangled him. (In a similar way to how Frankenstein and the monster destroy each other’s lives.) The risk would have been great for this to be the outcome if Frodo had fled from Gollum, wished him away from his journey, or tried to kill him. But he did not; he accepted Gollum as part of his personal myth, thereby achieving what Johnson speaks of. One does not need to like one’s myth; on the contrary, like much other repressed content, it can be frightening and highly “inappropriate,” but one needs to become conscious of it to make the best of the situation. In this way, Frodo now walks, led by Gollum, toward the marshes, despite Sam’s protests against trusting the “monster.”
The Dead Marshes
Just as they followed a stream to reach Lothlórien, the domain of the Good Mother, they now follow a streambed to reach the Dead Marshes, the domain of the Terrible Mother (and we had a similar image in the Old Forest on the way to the Willow-woman). Back then, they were led by Aragorn and Legolas; now they are led by Gollum.
This section is characterized by familiar imagery. Gollum wants to stop and sleep when dawn arrives because “the yellow face” sees him; the sun “makes you visible.” In the story, the sun represents masculinity and consciousness (yang), the ability to discern, while the moon, as mentioned, is associated with femininity and unconsciousness (yin). When they follow Gollum to the domain of the Terrible Mother, the sun is naturally a threat. They must pass through the marshes to avoid being detected. Gollum says he can lead them “through fog and mist, thick lovely mist.” Darkness, moonlight, and mist are preferable because they provide obscurity and unconsciousness. When everything blends together, “the eye” cannot discern or see the ring-bearer.
They walk through bogs, water flows over a “fragile” stone slab (the father-rock is thus brittle here); there is brown moss, no wind (spirit), slimy vegetation, rotting reeds, swamps; no birds (spirit), only snakes, worms, and insects, Gollum recounts. When they begin to emerge from the marshes, they are “slimy and sticky almost up to their necks and stinking as much as each other.” (We jump back and forth a bit in this commentary to keep themes together.)
But before they have come that far and are still in the middle of the marshes, Frodo asks his guide if he is hungry. The question of hunger causes the creature to temporarily regress and behave like the usual Gollum, in contrast to the dog-like Sméagol; he talks to himself, hisses sarcasms, and expresses self-pity. The reason is that Frodo asks this prisoner in the clutches of the Terrible Mother if he feels hunger – and of course he does; he carries an insatiable hunger. We have previously seen how creatures in her clutches are insatiable, often gaunt, even skeletal, while they crave something. Gollum is repeatedly described in this chapter as “gaunt.”
When the three emerge from the Dead Marshes and rest in a hollow in the wasteland, Sam wakes to Gollum talking to himself – a verbalization of the conflict between the Gollum personality and what had been buried for so long but has surfaced through Frodo’s acceptance, the Sméagol personality. The Gollum side tries to persuade Sméagol that they should take the ring from Frodo. He argues that they would then become strong, perhaps stronger than the Ringwraiths. “Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum!” he says excitedly. At the same time, we know this is an illusion. With the ring, Gollum would become inflated beyond all reason and sense, but he would not become “great” in the eyes of others. In any case, he expresses exactly what we discussed: he says, “We wants it, we wants it, we wants it!” Once again, we see how the ring fills certain individuals with infantile desire. Then Gollum considers that they might lead the hobbits to “her,” that she might help. “No, no!” whimpers Sméagol, “not that way!” “Yes!” says Gollum, repeating, “We wants it! We wants it!”
But this scene takes place later. While they are still in the marshes, it becomes increasingly swampy, and at times it is “utterly dark.” Once again, Frodo finds himself in something of a labyrinth, but this time they have a guide. It is now that they begin to see pale wisps of light that appear and vanish. Gollum warns the hobbits not to look at them. Sam snaps Frodo out of his enchantment. He was standing alone in the darkness behind them, staring. When Sam goes back, he stumbles and reaches out to catch himself, but his hands sink deep into a sticky mire. He perceives the water’s surface he is staring at as a pane of glass, and on the other side lie “dead faces.” Terrified, he rises. Frodo says absently that there are “pale faces, deep down in the dark water… decayed, rotting, dead.” This is an explicit description of the attributes of the Terrible Mother: drowning, dissolution, decay, and death.
Gollum has spoken of “the wraiths,” which he sometimes calls Nazgûl, and he returns to them later as well. Now he speaks of ghosts in connection with the dead in the marshes. We saw early on how the Black Riders, these undead, formless ghost-hunters, were associated with the Terrible Mother, and we mentioned Hecate as an archetypal image for this content. In her guise relevant here, she was a devilish goddess, often serpentine, queen of ghosts and mistress of black magic, and, of course, associated with the underworld and ruler of the shades of the dead.[10] As an archetypal image, Hecate aligns to a great extent with our story’s depiction of the Terrible Mother.
Eventually, the three emerge from the marshes and find solid ground beneath their feet. Before them lies a dry and dead landscape, stretching out between them and Mordor’s mountains and gate. When Frodo wakes after their first rest in this environment, Gollum greets him “with dog-like delight.” Frodo says, “You have led us faithfully and well.” While the author initially described Gollum’s behavior in a way that merely suggested a dog, he has now become more explicit in this transformation from a reptilian, utterly cold-blooded creature to – thanks to Frodo’s attitude – a helpful, dog-like animal. The author now compares Gollum to a dog on several occasions, as in the example given. We recognize the motif of the guiding dog from, for instance, folktales and alchemical writings.
But something serious happens in the borderland between the marshes and the empty, dry region: a Nazgûl flies over them, back and forth. They see it pass across the moon’s disc. Its presence instills terror in Gollum and the hobbits, so much so that all three begin crawling on the ground, beside themselves with fear. But then it disappears.
“Wraiths!” whimpers Gollum. “Winged wraiths! The Precious is their master. They see everything, everything.”
After this experience, Gollum regresses. He begins talking to himself again, hissing and whimpering, and so on. While Frodo’s humanity awakened Sméagol, the Terrible Mother’s emissary now strengthens Gollum. By the end of the chapter, Frodo must, for the first time, threaten Gollum with violence and sternly order him to resume his compliant role. “Then he got to his feet with a snort and walked ahead of them like a beaten dog.”
This regression and renewed repression of Sméagol is a result of Gollum’s continued vulnerability. Even though he still has Frodo with him, the hobbit cannot create a safe environment where Sméagol can eventually emerge without fear. If we entertain the idea that Frodo, immediately after their meeting, took Gollum/Sméagol to his home in the Shire and let him live there, Gollum’s influence would likely fade while Sméagol was reintegrated into life. This can be compared to Jung’s temenos, in this context a protected space where the “patient” can feel safe and accepted; a “sacred place that protects the center of the personality from undue exposure and influence from outside.”[11] What dooms Sméagol to isolation in the darkness is that Gollum is heading straight for Mordor, constantly threatened and reminded of the horrific pain the wraiths and the Dark Lord inflicted on him. This causes Gollum, as a form of self-defense, to inevitably suppress Sméagol and ultimately perish along with him.
It is during the next rest that Sam wakes to Gollum/Sméagol talking to himself, where the creature’s evil intentions seem to prevail. With Donald Kalsched, one might speculate that Gollum is a result of Sméagol’s trauma.[12] When the world becomes too hostile and unbearable for Sméagol, this personality – the true self – withdraws and is buried, while Gollum forms as a shield for the fragile, innocent core within. One could say that Gollum’s project is to protect Sméagol from the pain he has endured – it must never happen again. Gollum as a self-defense mechanism (or “self-care system,” according to Kelsched) is not inherently evil from the outset, but a necessary protection. But now, as Sméagol, through Frodo’s acceptance, approaches the surface, Gollum becomes a counteracting, destructive force. For Gollum, Sméagol must remain hidden to avoid exposure to pain, while Sméagol – given the safety Frodo offers – strives to become part of life again. When Sméagol surfaces, the “self-defense system” kicks in: Gollum becomes tyrannical toward Sméagol and hateful toward Frodo because he draws out the fragile, risking a repetition of the trauma.
(Complexes are historical emotional knots that, so to speak, remain in the historical situation where they were formed; they cannot reason or look forward, only react to the situation they were in, and thus always find themselves in. “Gollum” does not understand the possibility Frodo represents, but only reacts to the danger of Sméagol being harmed – as a reflex, not as a result of any reasoning.)
They begin to wander across the dry wasteland. Gollum degenerates after the encounter with the Ringwraith, and Frodo, for his part, finds it increasingly difficult. Not only does the ring grow heavier, pulling him toward the ground (just as the Ringwraith caused him to start “crawling”), but the Eye torments him more and more; a force that strives to “pierce through everything, to catch sight of you, to pin you down with its gaze, stripped bare and motionless.” Once again, the effect of Sauron is described in the same way as that of the Terrible Mother.
Where they now walk, there is no life. The pools are clogged with ash and mud, “sickly white and gray,” the earth is poisoned; heaps of stones resemble endless burial mounds; “unwholesome vapors” sting their throats and nearly choke them. Gollum crawls on all fours, the hobbits crawl behind him, and the three finally huddle together in a hollow with “sludge” at the bottom. A dry, dead, poison-tainted landscape, associated with death and disease; as a terrain, the opposite of the marshes, yet unmistakably still the domain of the Terrible Mother.
When Frodo keeps watch for the first time in this dreadful land, he thinks he sees “strange wraiths, dark rider silhouettes, and faces from the past.” With the experiences in the marshes behind him and the impressions of this landscape, it is hard to avoid an association not only with Hecate but also with Hades; or perhaps rather Hel, the realm of the death goddess in Norse mythology.
Hel means “that which conceals,” as we mentioned earlier; it is “a dark and frightening world, a grave-land with its own somber topography.”[13] The ruler herself has a corpse-blue complexion. In Hel, the food bowl is called Hunger, the knife Starvation, and so on, which aligns with our earlier discussion of hunger, desire, and emaciation. We are reminded of “Chief Bromden” in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who speaks of his once great and admired father: “The last time I seen my father, he was blind and diseased from drinking. And every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him until he shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs didn’t know him.” With the Terrible Mother, there is an unconscious and thus irresistible desire to fill a void that slowly devours the victim. All who suckle at her breast starve, while the craving for her milk is insatiable.
We spoke earlier of The Divine Comedy, because at the outset of his individual adventure, Frodo, like the protagonist of that story, is lost in the wilderness. Like Dante, Frodo then descends into the underworld. Not literally in our story, but it is clear that he figuratively passes through the realm of the dead.
But we also discussed nigredo, the depressing, confusing, and dark initial stage of the alchemical process, where one typically, and hardly encouragingly, encounters one’s shadow – “the therapeutic necessity” Jung spoke of. The nigredo includes the stages of mortificatio and/or putrefactio,[14] and we hardly need to remind the reader of all the images of death, decay, and hopelessness that have characterized Frodo’s adventure since he crossed the river. This death and decay are not something Frodo himself undergoes, but he passes through these stages in the form of the landscape and surroundings, while alternately feeling exhaustion, fear, and vulnerability. The environment the protagonist finds himself in represents the psychological situation he is experiencing. For Frodo, the Dead Marshes and the dead landscape that follows are a putrefactio and a mortificatio. It is horrific, but according to alchemical experience, this can be followed by some form of renewal. We will also see later that Frodo temporarily emerges from this grim situation and arrives at a place where grace prevails, meeting a supporting character in the story, Faramir, who is symbolically very significant.
Footnotes
[1] Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p. 42.
[2] Ibid., p. 40.
[3] Jung, ”The Philosophical Tree”, CW 13, par. 464.
[4] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 514.
[5] We can note that Joseph Campbell describes the witch-like goddess Circe's island as "swampy." (The Goddess, p. 166.) Circe was also, speaking of our earlier discussion, a weaver.
[6] Jung, Dream Symbols, p. 227.
[7] "The Personal Myth I-IV", on this blog.
[8] Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 17.
[9] Quoted from an interview published on YouTube; notes taken, source lost.
[10] Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend.
[11] Jung, ”The Tavistock Lecture”, CW 18, par. 410.
[12] Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 12f.
[13] Folke Ström, Nordisk hedendom: Tro och sed i förkristen tid (Gothenburg: Akademiförlaget-Gumperts, 1967), p. 216.
[14] Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, pp. 148ff.