The lava was dazzlingly bright and malodorous, viscous and horribly searing.  He could feel the ring formerly called by some Isildur’s Bane, the One Ring, the one still on Frodo’s finger but both now both ensconced in his belly, both stirring and rumbling, as if fighting or perhaps mating.  Somehow the One Ring and Frodo’s finger formed a strange amalgam protecting him from the elements in which he found himself immersed, albeit changing him.  He was actually breathing the molten blend of minerals in the core of Mt. Doom, becoming one with them and gaining insights.  Everything that had once been vague, confusing and occluded was becoming crystal clear.  Well, actually, had become crystal clear.  His metamorphosis, if not complete, was well on the road to completion.  For some reason he thought of two thespians, one a crooner and the other a comic, and strangely, at the same time, visa versa.  They’d someday be famous for something called “road movies”, at least for a while, but their time would be followed by one where the past was something to be quickly discarded and replaced with nary a trace.  Strange sort of prescient instant but not one involving the Middle Earth he’d always thought of as home.

His Gollum aspects had been purified and distilled somehow, and become integrated with the Sméagol from whom they’d once escaped, the Sméagol who had once been and would be again, albeit in a drastically changed form, all occurring concurrently.  Everything, he realized, was both concurrent and complimentary, especially those things that most seemed at odds.  Oxymoronism was the rule rather than an exception as the power of the One Ring and the one finger were integrated into his being.  As had been the case with that damned Gandalf the Grey, when he’d been had been transformed into Gandalf the White, his essence seared and melded in the comparatively minor fires in the depths of Khazad-Dûm, so Sméagol was being transformed, was transformed in the infinitely more powerful and hellishly hot timeless fires of Mount Doom.  Yes, Sméagol too had emerged transformed, transformed into the all-powerful being he’d aspired to, but not quite.  The metamorphosis apparently involved a complex blend of good and evil, and the Gollum he’d been ironically found himself transformed into Sméagol the White, Sméagol of the many colors, Sméagol the-all-colored-and-none.  But what had he been before?  Gollum the Black perhaps, or Sméagol the sort of dingy grey.

Anyway, “it”, whatever “it was”, was not what he’d imagined.  His final triumph over the burglar had not turned out as he’d hoped.  He was encumbered rather than liberated, chained to responsibilities in every direction.  He was chained in chains more biting and bitter than those in Barad-dûr, although as ethereal as they were ephemeral.  He was as imprisoned as he’d ever been, although now in a prison of his own devise where “duty”, rather than feckless free will and whimsical follies and grandeur, seemed to be what divinity entailed. 

He was not quite omniscient, although he now knew almost everything that had ever happened and had a fair inkling of what was to come, and if he was omnipotent, his use of power was severely constrained through limits that may or may not have been self-imposed.  And omnipresence was very overblown as it stretched him so thinly over time and space as to make him virtually non-existent.  As to omnibenevolence, well that was only possible if he froze everything and failed to permit any action at all, and apparently, his possibly self-imposed limits rendered that as improbable as it was impractical.  The closest that could be attained in that regard was a sort of perpetual balance between the light and the dark, between absolute silence and the eternally unwinding song of the orbs.  Damned stifling he thought.

Sméagol was disappointed.  And he had a bit of indigestion as his body tried to assimilate both Frodo’s finger and the One Ring, and despite the hellish heat in the nethermost pits of Mount Doom, he felt bitterly cold.  And the massive constant input of information made him dizzy.  And he was lonely and alone, now the only being of his kind.  Worse, the former occupant of his current post had evaporated as Sméagol’s metamorphosis took hold, changing into a joyful mist from whence was shouted: “free at last, free at last, thank Me all-mighty I’m free at last”, … or some such thing.

Sméagol remembered Bilbo and Frodo and Hobbits and fishies and his cavern and his lake and his little boat, and he remembered the stages through which he’d passed to become what he now was, some phases when he’d been relatively happy, albeit mainly as a baby, then increasingly less so as he’d grown into a young lad of a species now extinct (having been assimilated into various other species, Hobbits among them).  He remembered how tasty orcs and goblins could be, especially when seasoned with a bit of garlic, which was hellishly hard to come by given the absence of Italians in the Middle Earth of his time.  But now all times were his to play with, albeit passively, but what fun was there in passivity he thought to himself, there being no one around with whom to chat, or with whom to share riddles.

He speculated on how Italians might fit into “his” Middle Earth.  Perhaps medieval Italians.  But had they already invented the cuisine for which future Italians would become famous and with which he, free of temporal constraints, was already somehow familiar?  And what about the famous “Mafia”, which was apparently not an acronym for the Mothers and Fathers Italian Association?  He wondered why Italy had come to mind, rather than say, South Africa, or England, now that he had the omniverse in which to play, although, he recalled, only in a passive sense.  Then he wondered why South Africa and England felt more relevant.  And Iceland, something about its sagas seemed important.

Perhaps, thought Sméagol the White (or whatever, the colors issue had become confusing), this was all a dream, perhaps everything was a dream and only dreams existed, and perhaps he was the only dreamer.  Perhaps he’d always been the only dreamer in a dream from which there could be no escape, notwithstanding omniscience and omnipotence and all the other omnis, all of them being somehow passive in the end, each one cancelling out the others.

Then gratefully, if not blissfully, everything became dark, if not quite silent.  That damned infernal music of the orbs was incessant as was the somewhat painful rumbling in his stomach, but Sméagol the White, Sméagol of the many colors, Sméagol the-all-colored-and-none slept; hopefully dreamlessly and forever if not quite peacefully.

Sigh!!!!!

In a corner somewhere else in time and space, a place but not a place, someone chuckled, and a string of multicolored rings made from some sort of smoke played at tag.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.  Adapted from concepts developed by JRR Tolkien in his diverse copyrighted Middle Earth projects furthered by his son Christopher in other Middle earth related projects. Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.