Sméagol Before Gollum — The Untold Stoor Backstory the New Movie Will Explore

Every villain has an origin story, but Gollum's is something rarer: a tragedy. Tolkien never wrote him as a monster. He wrote him as a hobbit — or something so close to a hobbit that Gandalf himself believed they were kin. A small, ordinary person from a small, ordinary family, undone by a golden ring lying in the mud of a river.

With Kate Winslet now confirmed as Marigol, a matriarch of the Stoors, the upcoming film is clearly going back to that riverbank. So this is the story the movie will be drawing from — who the Stoors were, what happened on Sméagol's birthday, and how a fishing trip changed the fate of Middle-earth.

Who Were the Stoors? The Forgotten Branch of Hobbit-kind

Tolkien tells us hobbits came in three breeds: the Harfoots, the Fallohides, and the Stoors. The Stoors were the broadest and heaviest of the three — the only hobbits who took readily to water, who used boats, who fished, and who could even grow a little down on their chins. While most hobbit-kind migrated west over the Misty Mountains towards what would become the Shire, one group of Stoors lingered in the east, in the green river-country of the Vales of Anduin near the Gladden Fields.

That is where Sméagol was born — into a large, respected family of riverside Stoors ruled by a stern grandmother, the matriarch of the clan. In Gandalf's account in The Fellowship of the Ring, she was a woman of standing, wealthy as their folk counted wealth, and it was she who finally expelled Sméagol from the family when his thieving and muttering became unbearable.

Is Marigol in the Books?

Not by that name. Marigol, Kate Winslet's character, appears to be the film's interpretation of the Stoor matriarch tradition — quite possibly inspired by Sméagol's grandmother herself, the unnamed clan-mother of Tolkien's account. The name fits beautifully: hobbit women in Tolkien carry flower names like Marigold, and Sam Gamgee's own sister was Marigold Gamgee. It is exactly the kind of detail the writers' room of Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou would reach for.

The Birthday at the River — Déagol and the Ring

It happened on Sméagol's birthday. He went fishing with his cousin and closest friend Déagol on the Anduin, near the Gladden Fields — the same reach of river where, two and a half thousand years earlier, Isildur had been ambushed and the One Ring had slipped from his finger into the water.

A great fish dragged Déagol out of the boat and down to the riverbed, and when he surfaced, gasping, his hand held something golden from the mud. Sméagol watched the Ring glitter in his cousin's palm and asked for it as a birthday present. Déagol refused — he had already given Sméagol a present that year, and the Ring was his find. So Sméagol caught him by the throat and strangled him, took the Ring, and hid the body.

No one ever found Déagol. And Sméagol discovered that when he wore his new treasure, no one could find him either.

The Slow Corruption

Invisibility made Sméagol a thief and an eavesdropper. He learned secrets and used them cruelly, took to muttering to himself, and gurgled in his throat — which is how he earned the name Gollum, an insult before it was an identity. His grandmother eventually expelled him from the family, and around the year 2470 of the Third Age he crept up the streams towards the Misty Mountains and vanished into the tunnels beneath them, taking the Ring out of the world's sight for nearly five centuries.

He was perhaps thirty-three when he found the Ring — barely of age, by hobbit reckoning. He was over five hundred and eighty when he finally fell into the fires of Mount Doom still clutching it. No other bearer carried the Ring so long, and no other bearer paid so terrible a price.

Why the Ring Didn't Destroy Him — and Why It Couldn't Save Him

Gandalf says something remarkable about Gollum: he was tougher than even the Wise would have guessed. The hobbit-part of his mind never fully died. There was a corner of it that remembered wind on the water, sunlight on grass, the taste of fish, the sound of family — and the Ring could starve that corner, but never quite extinguish it.

That is the war the films made famous: Sméagol against Gollum, the river-hobbit against the creature, fought in one ruined body across the centuries. It is also why Frodo could reach him where no one else could, and why Bilbo's pity — staying his hand in the dark under the mountains — turned out to rule the fate of the entire quest. As Gandalf foresaw, Gollum still had a part to play before the end.

What the New Film Will Show

Philippa Boyens has described The Hunt for Gollum as an intense, psychological story told through the perspective of this one creature, set in the years between Bilbo's birthday party and the Mines of Moria. The hunt itself — Gandalf and Strider tracking Gollum through the wild — is the present-day thread. But the casting of Winslet's Marigol among the Stoors tells us the film will also take us back: to the river, the family, the birthday, and the murder that started it all. For the first time on screen, we will meet Sméagol before the Ring.

The Ring That Started It All — Made in New Zealand

The Hunt for Gollum is being filmed in New Zealand, where every Middle-earth film has been made — and where the official jewellery has always been made too. Each piece at elvenjewellery.com is crafted in New Zealand by the New Line Productions licence holders, with a Licence of Authenticity card and a 5-year guarantee. The two treasures of Gollum's story are both here.

Sméagol and the Stoors — Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Further Reading