This is another episode in my exploration of what we can see when we look at The Lord of the Rings through the lens of the frequency of French-derived words. Earlier posts are here and here, and the Silmarillion here. As always, kudos to the programmers of the OED Text Visualizer for providing the microscope.
We’ve seen that regular characters and situations use Germanic words. Like nuclear radiation, a low background level of French is unavoidable (viz., the louver on Meduseld), but as pomposity increases and sanity diminishes, the level of French in the text rises to double-digit percentages. This raises a question: does the craziest character use the most French words? The answer appears to be yes.
Gollum/Smeagol is almost certainly the least sane character in LotR. His dialogue needs quite a bit of editing before it can go to a computerized text analyser. The number of “s”s in a word needs to be standardized, sometimes “gollum” is an onomatopoeic punctuation mark not a proper noun, and so on. Also, his speech tends to be broken up in the text. The following computations are done on the closest dictionary-entry to Gollum’s words, aloud or internal.
There are seven blocks of dialogue long enough to support statistics between “The Taming of Smeagol” and “Shelob’s Lair”. One is a debate between Gollum’s two personalities; I’ve split that into its component parts. Depending on which of his personalities is dominant, the frequency of French words varies widely.
Frequency of French-derived words in Gollum’s speech
Tolkien gives us a brief flash of close reading from Sam that we can use as a guide: “[Sam] noted that Gollum used I, and that seemed usually to be a sign, on its rare appearances, that some remnants of old truth and sincerity were for the moment on top.” On each bar I’ve superposed the number of first-person singular pronouns in the passage. It correlates well, with the exception of one outlier.
The ring-maddened Gollum, as he talks to himself before he meets Frodo and Sam, reaches a level of French I’ve seen nowhere else in the text. If we recall our earlier estimate that something like 7% French is as far as a character can go without risking his health, Gollum’s 15.3% score is alarming. (Since much of that is his repetition of precious, maybe the computer isn’t telling us anything new.)
When Frodo uses his will, and the Ring, to dominate Gollum, Gollum’s word choices turn relatively normal for a chapter or two. Whether terrified or helpful, Smeagol’s French-level is healthy. But then, as the Gollum side recovers from the blow and he plots his revenge, he quickly blows past Feanorian levels into his record-level madness.
There’s one exception to this general rule. When Smeagol/Gollum gives us a short lecture on the history of Harad and Gondor, he briefly turns as normal as anyone in the book. He doesn’t use I, but he doesn’t sound much like himself either. And that’s a good thing. Later Frodo would say in another context, “his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.” There was no cure for Saruman, but Gollum could have been saved by an adjunct-lecturer position at the community college.
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