Lord of the Rings contains a diverse number of adversaries. Tolkien ranges from the ugly, warmongering Orcs to the malevolent Sauron, who is in leadership of the demonic Nazgûls. However, the enemy with the strongest and most skin crawling characterization is the two-faced member of the River Folk that joins Frodo and Samwise in The Two Towers. Gollum, or once known as Sméagol, is the grotesque creation of greed. Tolkien describes Gollum a number of times as looking like something of insect kind (598). Samwise calls Gollum out by saying, “Look at him! Like a nasty crawling spider on a wall” (Tolkien 598). Gollum’s emaciated body constructs his bug like appearance, but also one of a sickly frog (Tolkien 670). His physical presence is not deceiving to his personality. Gollum is not to be trusted. Yet, Frodo adopts Gollum to his group in hopes of him guiding them into Mordor. Faramir warns Frodo, “I do not think you should go with this creature, it is wicked” (Tolkien 676), and wicked is the best word to describe Gollum. Gollum’s character …show more content…
Good imagery helps build a whole new world from words. Tolkien does not shy away from using powerful imagery and describes every babbling creek and each hilltop the Hobbits cross. Near the end of the book, Samwise, Frodo, and Gollum navigated an area called the Dead Marshes, which was devoid of animal life. They assumed this is the worst of the worst until they completed their crossing to the land in front of the Ash Mountains, the border of Mordor. “Frodo looked round in horror. Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been… more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes” (Tolkien 617). Where in the Dead Marshes the group could see green of weeds and grasses but in the land before Mordor “neither spring nor summer would ever come again” (Tolkien 617). This would be a foreshadowing for what the party would come to