I recently returned to an old favorite: the glorious hard back, single volume version of J.R.R.Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings.
One of the greatest characters in Tolkien’s cast of heroes is the frog-like hobbit Sméagol otherwise known as Gollum. With marvelous psychological insights Tolkien perfectly portrays a character distorted by depraved desire and dominated by a magnificently evil obsession.
As I was re-reading I began to wonder about the origins of Gollum. Did he simply spring from Tolkien’s imagination or was there some spark that gave the creature life in Tolkien’s mind? I remembered the Jewish legend of The Golem and wondered if there could be a link.
The Golem, according to Jewish folk tales, is a humanoid creature which a rabbi, versed in Cabalistic lore, creates from clay. The monster, serves as a slave to his master until he is “de-programmed” and falls back into dust. Was the legend of the Golem an inspiration for Tolkien’s creation? I wondered. I couldn’t find any evidence of a historical connection. If there was a Jewish link in Tolkien’s thought at all it was a scrap of evidence from one of his letters that he thought of the dwarves as Jew-like, and there did not seem to be any link other than Gollum’s name to a possible link to the Jewish monster Golem.