Read The Treason of Isengard for Free Online Page B

head that it had been a birthday present in order to get Bilbo to accept it more readily). While drafting a new version of this passage, my father was struck by a perturbing thought. He stopped, and across the manuscript he wrote:
    'It must be [i.e. It must have been] a birthday present, as the birthday present is not mentioned by Gollum until after he finds the ring is lost'.(13) In other words, if the story of its being a birthday present was a fabrication pure and simple, why should Gollum only trot it out when there was no longer any use for it? Apparently in order to counter this, Gandalf s words were changed:

    It was a lie, though with a grain of truth. But how hobbit-like, all that talk of birthday-presents! I fancy he had made up his mind what to say, if it came to the point of giving, so that Bilbo would accept the Ring without suspicion, and think it just a harmless toy. He repeated this nonsense to me, but I laughed at him.

    The implication of this seems to be that Gollum brought out this story of the Ring having been a birthday present to him long ago only when he found that he had it no longer, because it had 'a grain of truth'; and it was because it had 'a grain of truth' that he had decided on this story. But there is no suggestion in the draft of what this grain of truth might be. Only with the fair copy B does it appear - and there only by implication: 'There was no need to tell the lie, of course, when he found the Ring had gone; but he had told that lie to himself so many times in the darkness, trying to forget Deagol, that it slipped out, whenever he spoke of the Ring.' This shows of course that the Deagol story (pp.23-4) had already entered; but my father made the point clearer by pencilling on the fair copy after the words 'though with a grain of truth': He murdered Deagol on his birthday.
    He was being driven to more and more intricate shifts to get round what had been said in The Hobbit. But it seems to me very likely that it was precisely while he was pondering this problem that the story of the murder of Deagol (and incidentally the changing of Gollum's true name to Smeagol) arose. That Gollum had lied about its being a birthday present was an obvious necessity, from the story of the Ring that had come into being; but Gandalf's theory in the third version that Gollum told this lie to Bilbo in order to get him to accept the Ring had a serious weakness: why did Gollum only do so (as the story was told in The Hobbit) after he found that he had lost it? The answer to this was that it was an invention of Gollum's that he had come partly to believe, quite independently of Bilbo's arrival; but why was that?
    And this story of the murder of Deagol on Smeagol's birthday, the ground of Smeagol's 'lie with a grain of truth', became a permanent element in the tale of Gollum; surviving when, years later, the story of
    'Riddles in the Dark' was recast and the very difficulty that (if I am right) had brought it into being was eliminated.

    From 'He thought he was misunderstood and ill-treated' (p. 26) this fourth version of 'Ancient History' scarcely differs for a long stretch from the third, whose pages were largely retained;(14) and since the third version closely followed the second, this part of the conversation of Gandalf and Frodo preserves, apart from detail of expression, the text given in VI.263-5. But from 'The Wood-elves have him in prison, if he is still alive, as I expect; but they treat him with such kindness as they can find in their wise hearts' the new version reaches the form in FR (p. 69) with almost no difference to the end of the chapter.

    Gandalf's words about the fire that could melt and consume the Rings of Power (FR p. 70) remain however nearer to the earlier form: It has been said that only dragon-fire can melt any of the Twenty Rings of Power; but there is not now any Dragon left on earth in whom the old Fire is hot enough to harm the Ruling Ring. I can think of only one way: one would