Q: Did Sméagol have any Brothers or Sisters?
ANSWER: The actual question reads: “With so much uncertainty surrounding Sméagol’s family history, is it possible that he might have had a twin brother or sister?”
So, what we know with certainty about Sméagol’s family is that he had:
- A mother
- A father
- A maternal grandmother
- A maternal grandfather
- A paternal grandmother
- A paternal grandfather
- An aunt (by blood or marriage)
- An uncle (by blood or marriage)
- A cousin named Déagol
Obviously Sméagol’s genealogy of unnamed ancestors can be presumed to extend back all the way to the earliest ancestors of the Hobbits but in this context I think it safe to say that these members of his family had to exist more-or-less within his lifetime, or just prior to it. We don’t even know if the grandmother who Gandalf mentions to Frodo was the maternal grandmother or the paternal grandmother. Much speculation has been published concerning the nature of Sméagol’s culture; in fact, most people in my experience seem to feel that Sméagol’s people were ruled by matriarchs, since his unnamed grandmother is “a matriarch” of the clan:
‘Then what happened after Bilbo escaped from him? Do you know that?’
‘Not so clearly. What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell — though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his “birthday present”, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way, but to talk of her possessing many Elven-rings was absurd, and as for giving them away, it was a lie. But a lie with a grain of truth.
Of this passage J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in Letter No. 214:
A trace of this can be seen in the account of Sméagol and Déagol – modified by the individual characters of these rather miserable specimens. Déagol, evidently a relative (as no doubt all the members of the small community were), had already given his customary present to Sméagol, although they probably set out on their expedition v. early in the morning. Being a mean little soul he grudged it. Sméagol, being meaner and greedier, tried to use the ‘birthday’ as an excuse for an act of tyranny. ‘Because I wants it’ was his frank statement of his chief claim. But he also implied that D’s gift was a poor and insufficient token: hence D’s retort that on the contrary it was more than he could afford.
The giving of presents by the ‘byrding’ – leaving out of account the gifts to parents,§…
§ In more primitive communities, as those still living in clan-smials, the byrding also made a gift to the ‘head of the family’. There is no mention of Sméagol’s presents. I imagine that he was an orphan; and do not suppose that he gave any present on his birthday, save (grudgingly) the tribute to his ‘grandmother’. Fish probably. One of the reasons, maybe, for the expedition. It would have been just like Sméagol to give fish, actually caught by Déagol!
…
However, the giving of information always opens still further vistas; and you will no doubt see that the brief account of ‘presents’ opens yet more anthropological matters implicit to such terms as kinship, family, clan, and so on. I venture to add a further note on this point, lest, in considering the text in the light of my reply, you should feel inclined to enquire further about Sméagol’s ‘grandmother’, whom Gandalf represents as a ruler (of a family of high repute, large and wealthier than most, p. 62) and even calls a ‘matriarch’ (p. 66).As far as I know Hobbits were universally monogamous (indeed they very seldom married a second time, even if wife or husband died very young); and I should say that their family arrangements were ‘patrilinear’ rather than patriarchal. That is, their family names descended in the male-line (and women were adopted into their husband’s name); also the titular head of the family was usually the eldest male. In the case of large powerful families (such as the Tooks), still cohesive even when they had become very numerous, and more what we might call clans, the head was properly the eldest male of what was considered the most direct line of descent. But the government of a ‘family’, as of the real unit: the ‘household’, was not a monarchy (except by accident). It was a ‘dyarchy’, in which master and mistress had equal status, if different functions. Either was held to be the proper representative of the other in the case of absence (including death). There were no ‘dowagers’. If the master died first, his place was taken by his wife, and this included (if he had held that position) the titular headship of a large family or clan. This title thus did not descend to the son, or other heir, while she lived, unless she voluntarily resigned.* It could, therefore, happen in various circumstances that a long-lived woman of forceful character remained ‘head of the family’, until she had full-grown grandchildren.
* We are here dealing only with titular ‘headship’ not with ownership of property, and its management. These were distinct matters; though in the case of the surviving ‘great households’, such as Great Smials or Brandy Hall, they might overlap. In other cases, headship, being a mere title, and a matter of courtesy, was naturally seldom relinquished by the living.
There is a lot of information to digest here. First, let me point out that Tolkien sees Sméagol as an orphan. He says nothing about what happened to Sméagol’s parents but they are apparently no longer around by the time he leaves his community. And yet Sméagol is the grandson of a wealthy, influential matriarch. She may simply have outlived her husband but they nonetheless appear to be members of a very prominent Stoor family. I think it’s important to establish that, culturally, the Stoors of the Gladden Fields were probably very similar to the (early) Hobbits of the Shire, traces of whose culture can still be noted among the larger families like the Tooks (and the Brandybucks of the Buckland). So Sméagol’s family may have been structured very similarly to those of the wealthier families of the Shire and the Buckland. We don’t know anything about how the families of the Bree-land were organized.
If Sméagol had had a twin brother or sister, though, I think his story somewhat strange for featuring his close friendship with a cousin. I have two cousins who are twins. They were always almost inseparable. I have known a few twins in my time as well and they, too, were always together whenever I saw them. There are relatively few examples of twins in Tolkien’s fiction but of those examples I can think of off the top of my head, they were almost always inseparable (unless circumstance intervened). Whether twins spend all their time together or not is irrelevant; we are dealing with a a stereotype here which is a convenient tool for extended story-telling.
I believe that if Tolkien had imagined a twin for Sméagol that he (Tolkien) would have left a note somewhere that should have surfaced by now. Such a significant detail would, I think, have caught someone’s attention — and more than a few people have scoured the Tolkien documents looking for hidden gems. So while I cannot say that we have clear and definitive evidence that Sméagol had no twin, I think the probability of such information ever coming to light is extremely small.
And I would say that Sméagol fits a trope that features prominently in Tolkien’s fiction: the lone child who is singled out for a significant role in history. Sméagol is somewhat like an anti-Bilbo or an anti-Frodo. He comes from a prominent family like they do, and he suffers a childhood loss like Frodo, but whereas Bilbo and Frodo both benefit from their isolation (both become “the Baggins” and inherit Bag End), Sméagol seems only to make bad choices and to follow a darker path.
Perhaps Sméagol had no real opportunities in life compared to those of Bilbo and Frodo; for even though Frodo was left an orphan he was still close enough to Bilbo by blood that Bilbo chose to adopt him and make him an heir. But Sméagol’s early life was already influenced by living with or near his grandmother. He had no close friends other than Déagol, and that seems to imply he had no brothers or sisters. In the end Sméagol has nothing to draw him back from the Ring. Frodo held on for so long because of his strong bond with Sam, because of his love for the Shire, and because he had close friends and relatives who filled his life with love.
I just don’t see any way that Sméagol could have had siblings and still fulfill Tolkien’s requirement for being a fallen character. I think Tolkien wants his tragic characters to have choices where they simply make bad decisions, as much as possible, because that way when the good guys make the right choices despite all the obstacles a hostile world throws at them those choices seem more real, more dearly-bought, and more sincere (literarily). For Sméagol to walk away from a loving family makes no sense. For Sméagol to seek solace (for a lack of familial closeness) with a Ring that seems as interested in him as he is in it does make sense, even though the Ring eventually rejects him and condemns Sméagol to the fire. Could any character be more tragic than that?
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