Was Gollum completely naked in the books?

Question

This might sound like a weird question, but here goes anyway.

In the LotR and the Hobbit movies, Gollum is always shown with a piece of cloth hiding his private area. It seems dull to me that he would actually have the decency of putting up with that. A better explanation to me is that P.J. added this Tarzan-style clothing as to not scare off the audience.

In other words, is Gollum only 'dressed' in the movie (for clear purposes - who wants to see Gollum's privates?), or is he as well in the book(s)?

Answer 1

From Gollum - LOTR Wiki

In a manuscript written to guide illustrators to the appearance of his characters, Tolkien explained this by saying that Gollum had pale skin, but wore dark clothes and was often seen in poor light. The Hobbit states he has pockets, in which he keeps a tooth sharpening rock, goblin teeth, wet shells, and a scrap of bat wing. Despite these details, he is generally depicted wearing a loincloth or naked in illustrations and adaptations.

So from Tolkien's standpoint, he was clothed. No speculation as to why he's generally depicted wearing a loincloth or naked.

Answer 2

No

In addition to pockets, as mentioned by Kyralessa, in The Two Towers he's explicitly described as wearing clothing (emphasis mine):

Not even an eagle poised against the sun would have marked the hobbits sitting there, under the weight of doom, silent, not moving, shrouded in their thin grey cloaks. For a moment he might have paused to consider Gollum, a tiny figure sprawling on the ground: there perhaps lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin: no flesh worth a peck.

^{The Two Towers Book IV Chapter 3: "The Black Gate Opens"}

Answer 3

No

In one of the unpublished Tolkien essays sitting around in the Bodleian library, Tolkien went into some depth about Gollum.

Gollum was according to Gandalf one of a riverside hobbit people – and therefore in origin a member of a small variety of the human race, although he had become deformed during his long inhabiting of the dark lake. His long hands are therefore more or less right. Not his feet. They are exaggerated. They are described as webby (Hobbit 88), like a swan’s (I. 398), but had prehensile toes (II 219). But he was very thin – in The L.R. emaciated, not plump and rubbery; he had for his size a large head and a long thin neck, very large eyes (protuberant), and thin lank hair . . . He is often said to be dark or black. At his first mention (Hob. 83) he was “dark as darkness”: that of course means no more than that he could not be seen with ordinary eyes in the black cavern – except for his own large luminous eyes; similarly “the dark shape” at night (I 399, 400). But that does not apply to the “black (crawling) shape” (II 219, 220), where he was in moonlight.

Gollum was never naked. He had a pocket in which he kept the Ring (Hob. 92). ... He evidently had black garments (II 219), and in the “eagle” passage (II 253),10 where it is said that from far above, as he lay on the ground, he would look like “the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin”.

His skin was white, no doubt with a pallor increased by dwelling long in the dark, and later by hunger. He remained a human being, not an animal or a mere bogey, even if deformed in mind and body: an object of disgust, but also of pity – to the deep-sighted, such as Frodo had become. There is no need to wonder how he came by clothes or replaced them: any consideration of the tale will show that he had plenty of opportunities by theft, or charity (as of the Wood-elves), throughout his life.

_{(Bodleian, Department of Western Manuscripts, Tolkien Papers, A61 fols 1–31.)}

This 30-page essay is mostly unpublished (and is considered a "restricted" text, which one can not gain access to without permission from the Tolkien Estate.) The preceding excerpt was combines what is printed in The History of the Hobbit with what is printed in The Nature of Middle-earth.

Answer 4

I wonder whether the difficulty in answering this question comes from the fact that two very different Gollums have been depicted in The Hobbit.

The Gollum of the original version of the Hobbit was a bit more obsequious, at least at the end of the riddle game. But more importantly, a good deal of the original text was changed in preparation for The Lord of the Rings, such as this:

"Must we give it the thing, preciouss? Yess, we must! We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised." So Gollum paddled back to his boat, and Bilbo thought he had heard the last of him. But he had not. The hobbit was just thinking of going back up the passage—having had quite enough of Gollum and the dark water's edge—when he heard him wailing and squeaking away in the gloom. He was on his island (of which, of course, Bilbo knew nothing), scrabbling here and there, searching and seeking in vain, and turning out his pockets. [emphasis added]

Perhaps the Gollum of the original tale was more inclined to wear some sort of clothing; whereas the re-conceived Gollum of the revised version of The Hobbit was more animalistic and less sartorial, but the inconsistency in this relatively unimportant matter was simply not noticed.

But on the other hand, both versions have Gollum trying to think of what he keeps in his own pockets, so on balance it's harder to make a case against the clothing than for it.

Answer 5

Have we forgotten that in the interim between The Hobbit and LOTR, Gollum was taken to Mordor. Where he was most likely stripped of his belongings similar to when Frodo was captured. I have always imagined Gollum wearing at least pants (however tattered they may be) in the Hobbit, and not much more than what we see in the movies in LOTR.

Answer 6

You'd have to carefully go through the books to answer this question, but it seems that someone already did. Verlyn Flieger believes that Gollum ...

... is naked. Nowhere in the narrative is there any mention of clothing, as if, like a real animal, he does not need to be provided with covering.

Quote from: Verlyn Flieger, Tolien's Wild Men, in Jane Chance (ed.), Tolkien the Medievalist, London: Routledge, p. 103 (page available through Google Books)