here’s the thing about eldritch!gollum vs weirdlookindude!gollum
it’s not just that i read the descriptions in the book and pictured some visually freaky thing that may or may not have been meant to be evoked by the text
it’s because no one in-universe can identify wtf gollum is when they see him and they never guess at anything humanoid
bilbo baggins, who knows what a hobbit looks like
yes, it is dark in that cave. but bilbo is still able to navigate around, so he has some idea of what’s around him and also gollum gets right up in his grill:
He sat down in the dark by Bilbo. That made the hobbit most dreadfully uncomfortable and scattered his wits.
“It’s got to ask uss a quesstion, my preciouss, yes, yess, yesss. Jusst one more quesstion to guess, yes, yess,” said Gollum.
But Bilbo simply could not think of any question with that nasty wet cold thing sitting next to him, and pawing and poking him.
- The Hobbit, ‘Riddles in the Dark’
you know, if i was in a dark room with another human that was sitting right next to me pawing and poking me, even if it was a very ugly and weird human and there were options in my world for humanoid creatures that aren’t human, i would start to suspect that ‘humanoid’ was at least a possibility. bilbo can tell enough that gollum is sad because he’s been in a cave eating fish too long, but it never even enters his mind that gollum might be even possibly any of the humanoid creatures that exist in this world at all. never mind ‘that’s not a hobbit’, because, ok, bilbo knows it’s very unusual for one hobbit to be in this situation, and he wouldn’t expect there to be two hobbits who have ended up under goblin town. but he never thinks ‘is this a small man or something related to a man or an orc or w/e’? he doesn’t even think it might be a weird orc. why would you encounter something that speaks your language in a cave near some orcs and immediately understand that this is not an orc and not connect that it could possibly be humanoid even though it talks like one and knows riddles? because it’s WEIRD LOOKING, that’s why!
gandalf, who knows what a hobbit looks like
gandalf has seen a lot of hobbits. he knows what they are and could probably identify one that was just scrawny and hairless and had weird eyes. but from the sound of it, he had to deduce that gollum was once a hobbit from context, historical information and backstory details.
‘Long after, but still very long ago, there lived by the banks of the Great River on the edge of Wilderland a clever-handed and quiet-footed little people. I guess they were of hobbit-kind; akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors, for they loved the River, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reeds.
and he has to argue frodo into believing it through mathematical proofs. (and lest we forget: frodo is very offended.)
‘I can’t believe that Gollum was connected with hobbits, however distantly,’ said Frodo with some heat. ‘What an abominable notion!’
you come into my smial and tell me i’m the same species as gollum. you can finish your tea but then you need to leave
sharp and insightful men. not very familiar with hobbits, of course. but they see sam and frodo and then they see gollum. the response to hobbits by gondorians, etc. is typically ‘hmm, a weird child’. and the response to gollum is: wtf is that.
He had an ill-favoured look. Some spying breed of Orc, I guess, or a creature of theirs.
> sam and frodo are immediately identified as NOT orcs
`Well, no, lord,’ said the man. `No Orc at least. But I saw, or thought I saw, something a little strange. It was getting deep dusk, when the eyes make things greater than they should be. So perhaps it may have been no more than a squirrel.’ Sam pricked up his ears at this. 'Yet if so, it was a black squirrel, and I saw no tail.
Faramir turned to the man at his side. `Now what would you say that it is, Anborn? A squirrel, or a kingfisher? Are there black kingfishers in the night-pools of Mirkwood? ’
`'Tis not a bird, whatever else it be,’ answered Anborn. `It has four
limbs and dives manwise; a pretty mastery of the craft it shows, too.’
It has four limbs and dives manwise, but it sounds like Anborn doesn’t consider the possibility of ‘small man’ or ‘Halfling’ even though at this point he knows the whatsit was with Sam and Frodo and is the same general size.
orc, in mordor, where gollum is a known quantity
“the… sneak. the gobbler with the flapping hands. that thing. i don’t know. i tried to kill it on sight.’
like a spider himself, or perhaps more like a starved frog
And finally, stairs of citith ungol:
For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
…a fleeting moment. That implies that, normally, you don’t get that impression from Gollum.
your personal ‘wtf-is-that-o-meter’ can always vary but idk, i think something’s lost in versions where gollum looks so humanoid that i start to wonder why no one in-universe is saying ‘oh this looks like a hobbit with a medical problem and maybe i should try to offer him a shirt’
