FarFromHome
Valinor
Mar 5 2013, 10:19am
Views: 2157
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Mirkwood was always the intended prison, it seems
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[The Elves of Lorien] probably don't have anything resembling a suitable facility, anyway, and it's known that Mirkwood does. And in fact Aragorn says in The Council of Elrond that there was an agreement that Gollum should be brought there once he was captured:
"I deemed it the worst part of all my journey, the road back, watching him day and night, making him walk before me with a halter on his neck, gagged, until he was tamed by lack of drink and food, driving him ever towards Mirkwood. I brought him there at last and gave him to the Elves, for we had agreed that this should be done..."
This agreement was probably based on the Mirkwood Elves' involvement years before, when Gollum was first lost from sight:
"The Wood-elves tracked him first, an easy task for them, for his trail was still fresh then. Through Mirkwood and back again it led them, though they never caught him. The wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among beasts and birds. The Woodmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles. But at the western edge of Mirkwood the trail turned away. It wandered off southwards and passed out of the Wood-elves’ ken, and was lost." (Gandalf in The Shadow of the Past)
Mirkwood had already been terrorised by Gollum, so the Wood-elves were already aware of him and so would be ready to take responsibility in a way that none of the other realms were. At this point, neither Aragorn nor Gandalf would have wanted to be talking openly about Gollum's connection to the Ring (or even talking about the Ring at all), so I imagine it would have been a difficult bit of diplomacy to convince any other realm to take Gollum in and keep him imprisoned without any evidence that he posed a threat to them.
They went in, and Sam shut the door. But even as he did so, he heard suddenly, deep and unstilled, the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth. From the unpublished Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings
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