In the Same Boat: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera as Inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gollum

[page 5] Abstract: Longstanding misconceptions about J.R.R. Tolkien’s reading interests, as well as a blockbuster Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, have for decades obscured a compelling and heretofore unexplored source for the character of Gollum in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: Erik, the titular “Opera ghost” from mystery writer Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, known in English as The Phantom of the Opera. Opening with an argument for the plausibility of Tolkien having read Phantom and an overview of how Erik’s rich cultural afterlives “mask” Leroux’s original character, this article identifies and analyzes the many strikingly specific similarities between Leroux’s Erik and Tolkien’s Gollum—including the uncanny descents to their lairs, their little boats on their deadly underground lakes, their glowing eyes and corpse-like physiques, their penchants for stalking and strangling, their groveling and third-person bemoaning of their “poor” selves, and the importance to both of a gold ring—before concluding with a reading of Gollum as Phantom adaptation, uncovering Tolkien’s transformations of pity and desire: two concepts central to both The Phantom of the Opera and The Lord of the Rings which find their shared locus in Erik/Gollum.

Keywords: Gaston Leroux, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Phantom of the Opera, Gollum, influence, monstrosity

Two eerie, glowing points of light approach from across the cold water of an underground lake, accompanied by a faint sound of splashing in the darkness. These must be eyes. There must be a boat. As the small vessel touches the shore, the uncanny figure that leaps out is corpse-like in appearance yet dangerously strong.

This is Gollum, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy novel The Hobbit, as he draws toward Bilbo Baggins across a strange subterranean lake deep beneath the dark tunnels under the Misty Mountains. [page 6]

Or, this is Erik, the titular character from Gaston Leroux’s 1910 Gothic detective novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra—known in English as The Phantom of the Opera—as he draws toward the man called the Persian across a strange subterranean lake deep beneath the dark tunnels under the Opera.

Various influences for Tolkien’s Gollum have been suggested, including Grendel from Beowulf and the biblical Cain (B. Nelson 466-467), the Morlocks from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (D. Nelson 371), Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Dracula (Hopkins 284-286); Gagool from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (Rogers and Underwood) is one of the better candidates, though the comparison becomes increasingly tenuous once it goes beyond appearances and the concept of degeneration; the deformed dwarf Sigurd from Marie Corelli’s Thelma (Loofbourow) is a compelling possibility. Tolkien himself described The Lord of the Rings (hereafter LotR) as “grow[ing] like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten” (Carpenter 171), and it is certainly possible that aspects of some or all of these characters contributed to the “leaf-mould” for Gollum.

Yet a consideration of the totality of Gollum—including but not limited to his physical appearance, behaviors, manner of speaking, environment, and his centrality to the concepts of pity and desire—strongly suggests the presence of another sinister figure, heretofore unnoticed, lurking in the dark corners of that “leaf-mould.” A comparison of The Hobbit and LotR with Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera reveals Erik, the Opera ghost, to be a major and highly specific influence on Tolkien’s Gollum. It is not every day that one sees another obsessive, corpse-like, glowing-eyed stalker and strangler—given to bouts of crawling on the floor, weeping, groveling, and speaking in third person—out in his little boat on his underground lake. [page 7]

Would Tolkien Have Read Phantom?

Despite Tolkien’s longstanding popular reputation for eschewing everything modern and everything French (Ordway 6-7; Flieger 70), the notion of Tolkien reading a sensationally bizarre French detective thriller, retaining the memory of its most vivid character, and (whether consciously or not) using that character as a significant inspiration for one of his own most iconic creations is not nearly as unlikely as it may sound. Recent scholarship on Tolkien’s reading preferences and modern influences has done much to chip away at the erroneous construction, popularized especially by Humphrey Carpenter in his 1977 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, of Tolkien as a stubbornly fusty anti-modernist (Carpenter 99; Ordway 6-7). To the contrary, not only did Tolkien read modern literature, but he read it “in a variety of different genres, including children’s stories, historical fiction, fantastic romances, adventure, science fiction, detective stories, literary fiction, and poetry” (Ordway 8-9). A far cry from the popular legend of a man who turned up his nose at anything written recently, the real Tolkien read and enjoyed all kinds of contemporary fiction—including, especially, mystery and detective stories.

Tolkien’s enjoyment of detective fiction has been reported by multiple sources. According to Holly Ordway in Tolkien’s Modern Reading, “mystery stories were a particular favorite” of Tolkien, who had a “long-standing interest in detective fiction” (260, 265). Ordway recounts statements from Walter Hooper and from Tolkien’s children which illustrate Tolkien’s affinity for Agatha Christie novels and identifies letters in which Tolkien himself mentioned reading Michael Innes, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton (260, 265). Clyde S. Kilby writes of thinking that Tolkien “did a good deal of reading of detective stories and science-fiction” (26), while Tolkien’s grandson Michael G.R. Tolkien said of his grandfather that “[i]t’s not surprising that he read detective fiction for relaxation and went out of his way to praise Agatha Christie” (qtd. in Cilli 268). During Christmas 1912, shortly before turning 21, Tolkien participated in a family perfor-[page 8]mance of a detective-themed play of his own writing, in which he played the lead role of “Professor Joseph Quilter, M.A., B.A., A.B.C., alias world-wide detective Sexton Q. Blake-Holmes, the Bloodhound” (Carpenter 86-87). While the character’s name is clearly satirical, it evidences an awareness of the fictional detectives Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake, and the year is notable: 1912 is not long after Phantom’s initial release as a newspaper serial in Le Gaulois beginning in 1909, its first publication in book form in 1910, or the publication of its first English translation in London in 1911 (Coward xxv), suggesting that Tolkien’s interest in detective stories was contemporaneous with the publication of Phantom.

Leroux did not write strictly within the boundaries of the present-day notion of mystery: his novels also “embrac[e] romance, fantasy, and horror” (Perry 27), and Phantom itself is at least as much a Gothic thriller and luridly strange romantic tragedy as it is a mystery or crime novel. However, Leroux is known primarily as a writer of detective fiction; his 1907 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Le Mystère de la chambre jaune), one of the first locked-room mysteries, was the success which allowed Leroux to switch careers from journalist to novelist, and the novel itself went on to become a classic of its genre (Perry 26-27). Based on Tolkien’s comments about which detective novels he personally liked and disliked, Ordway proposes that Tolkien preferred stories which emphasize the “classic crime puzzle” and “focus on the mystery and its solution” (260-261). Yellow Room would in that case have been very much to Tolkien’s taste and may have been his entry point to Leroux and Phantom: perhaps Tolkien read Yellow Room and enjoyed it enough to seek out more from the same author, especially given that Phantom has been (and sometimes still is) marketed with reference to Yellow Room or advertised as a detective story.

Would Leroux’s Frenchness have been an impediment to Tolkien’s potential interest in his novels? This seems ultimately unlikely. Tolkien’s supposed aversion to everything French, while not without evidence—for one example, Tolkien [page 9] claimed in a letter to “dislike” the French language (Letters 288)—is, according to Verlyn Flieger, an overgeneralization, attributable largely to Carpenter and to Tolkien’s own comments being taken at face value, obfuscating Tolkien’s more complex relationship with French influence (70). A small but applicable example of the disparity between Tolkien’s statements about French and the content of his writing can be found in LotR itself: despite Tolkien’s claimed advocacy for an English language “purged of Latin and French derivatives” (Garth 52), Tolkien had no aversion to the distinctly French-flavored word “phantom,” using it and its plural a combined ten times in LotR. The Germanic “ghost” (including “ghosts” and “ghostly”), for comparison, appears 17 times. If the French-derived word is not preferred, neither is it entirely eclipsed—and it is certainly not purged altogether.

The question remains, however, as to whether Tolkien would have read Leroux’s Phantom in its original French or in English translation. Despite his “dislike” of the language, Tolkien knew French well enough to go to Paris and Brittany in 1913 “with two Mexican boys to whom he was to act as tutor and escort” (Carpenter 96). According to Carpenter, Tolkien “loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own” (96), and it is entirely conceivable that he would have liked to read a mystery set (predominantly) in this city he enjoyed, perhaps picking up a copy of Le Fantôme during his Parisian explorations. Yet given that he was a native speaker of English and expressed a decisive preference for English over French, the English translation seems the more likely of the two. This would necessarily mean the abridged 1911 English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, the only English translation of Phantom published during Tolkien’s lifetime; with this in mind, all Phantom quotes in this article are taken from the Teixeira de Mattos translation.

Leroux’s Erik, Unmasked

The story of Erik—the mysterious, disfigured, multitalented musical genius known as “the Opera ghost” or “the Phantom [page 10] of the Opera”—has been adapted and re-adapted into nearly every conceivable form of media for over a century: the first adaptation of Leroux’s novel may have been a 1916 German film, while in the present day it is entirely possible, for example, to read a Phantom novel inspired in part by a film, which was itself adapted from a musical theater production, which was inspired by previous film adaptations as well as Leroux’s original novel itself (Hall 12, 35). When the author of the website The Phantom Library (admirably ambitious subtitle: One Woman’s Mission to Catalog All the Phantom Media Ever Produced), Anne Myers, mentions that “[t]here are hundreds upon hundreds of different versions of the story,” she is not being hyperbolic. Erik’s rich and varied cultural afterlife, however, tends to obscure his roots.

Much of recent popular culture’s impression of the character comes not from Leroux’s novel but from the immensely popular 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, which—despite ending its 35-year run on Broadway—is still playing in a variety of locations around the world (Kennedy). While Lloyd Webber’s musical is an ingenious adaptation which retains and reworks a surprising amount of Leroux’s novel, its Phantom—due in part, surely, to the strengths and limitations of stage performance—is in some ways markedly dissimilar to Leroux’s Erik. Most of these changes draw the character away from his more Gollum-like traits, which then recede from public consciousness.

Many aspects of what we may now take for granted about the Phantom as a cultural figure were thus unknown to Tolkien. The popular, modern vision of the Phantom as a conventional-looking (often, even handsome) man with one deformed side of his face, the deformity concealed by a white half-mask, did not have all of its pieces in place until thirteen years after Tolkien’s death, when the debut of the Lloyd Webber musical introduced the invention of the now-iconic white half-mask.1  In Leroux’s novel, Erik’s entire body is skeletally thin and corpse-like, with cold, bony hands (2-3, 94). His whole face resembles a skull, with a hole for a nose and [page 11] deep-set yellow eyes that can only be seen when they glow in the darkness; he does not always wear a mask, sometimes appearing in public with only a prosthetic nose and mustache, and he twice seems to appear with his own skull-like face entirely visible (101, 167). When he does wear a mask, it is black and covers his entire face (94).

Aided by the Lloyd Webber musical, which deemphasizes the mystery, horror, and adventure aspects of Leroux’s novel to place greater focus on the Phantom’s ill-starred love story (Perry 67-68), the tension of Christine being “torn between her love for the mysterious, passionate Erik and the conventional Raoul” (Hall 128), and (naturally, for musical theater) the story’s musical elements, mainstream popular culture remembers especially Erik’s romantic and Romantic aspects—the tortured artist, the forbidden lover and his dark passions, the Byronic hero with his “one virtue, and a thousand crimes” (Byron l. 696)—and forgets, mostly, the talking in third person and the glowing eyes. If Erik has, over time, grown into a more traditional model of Byronism, he has done so by largely shedding the most wretched, monstrous, and horrific aspects of his original Leroux self. 2 

Tolkien’s modifications to Leroux’s Erik, on the other hand, are almost precisely opposite to Lloyd Webber’s: in Gollum, Tolkien retains and amplifies Erik’s pitiful and grotesque aspects, doing away with love and art by silencing his potent, mesmerizing singing voice 3 and denaturing his obsessive desire for Christine into an obsessive desire for the Ring. Gollum’s and Erik’s most recent film incarnations are a particularly clear illustration of the characters’ divergence in popular culture: it is unlikely that a moviegoer in the 2000s and 2010s would have seen any connection whatsoever between Andy Serkis’s gurgling, groveling Gollum and the brooding, commanding sexuality of Gerard Butler’s 2004 Phantom. Nearly all they have left in common is an obsession, a murderous streak—and, suspiciously, that little boat on its underground lake. Return to Leroux’s original novel, however, and the similarities between Erik and Gollum become remark-[page 12]able, opening the door for a new interpretive context for one of Tolkien’s most memorable and important characters. Reading Gollum as a part of the Phantom’s cultural afterlife—as a character adapted in large part from Leroux’s Erik—leads readily to a consideration of the ways in which Tolkien transforms the concepts of desire and pity: two concepts central to both Phantom and LotR, and which are in both works located especially in Erik/Gollum.

“Deep down here by the dark water”: The Descent to the Lake

To begin, both Erik and Gollum are social outcasts and criminals who live alone underground to take refuge from society. Erik, “tired of his adventurous, formidable and monstrous life,” builds a home amid the watery foundations of the Opera, “dream[ing] of creating for his own use a dwelling unknown to the rest of the earth, where he could hide from men’s eyes for all time” (Leroux 214). Similar in all but Erik’s architectural prowess, Gollum, expelled from his family after taking up a life of Ring-assisted crime, “wander[s] in loneliness, weeping a little for the hardness of the world” until he eventually follows a stream into an underground cave and “vanishe[s] out of all knowledge” (LotR 53-54). Despite Erik and Gollum both being physically monstrous underworld dwellers, they are also both presented as essentially human characters with entirely human concerns, navigating ostracization and disappointment as they at once seek and reject connection with others while dwelling in their respective dark underground domains. 

In both Phantom and The Hobbit, this lonely lair is dominated by an ominous, deathly lake, and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins’s underworld descent from a mountain cave to Gollum’s eerie subterranean lake deep under the Misty Mountains, reached by going down through the network of tunnels beneath Goblin-town (Hobbit 106-119), contains numerous echoes of Christine’s descent to Erik’s eerie subterranean lake through the network of tunnels and cellars deep under the Opera (Leroux 94-95). In both novels, the initial threshold [page 13] crossing into the hidden world below occurs when what seemed to be an ordinary wall opens unexpectedly to reveal a secret passageway, and the protagonist is manually grabbed, captured, and dragged underground by the monstrous person(s) who engineered the trap. Christine is lured by Erik’s singing into a disorienting deception: “‘this was the extraordinary thing,’ she tells Raoul, ‘my dressing-room, as I moved, seemed to lengthen out ... to lengthen out. . . . I had the mirror in front of me ... And, suddenly, I was outside the room without knowing how!’” (93-94). She then denies Raoul’s suggestion that she was dreaming: “‘I was not dreaming, dear, I was outside my room without knowing how. . . . [S]uddenly, there was no mirror before me and no dressing-room’” (94).

Tolkien’s description of Bilbo’s entrance into the underground similarly emphasizes the question of dream versus reality, uses repetitive language to describe an extraordinary spatial expansion, and finds the protagonist suddenly and alarmingly on the other side of what once seemed a solid wall. Bilbo has “very nasty dreams,” including one in which, to his fright and alarm, “a crack in the wall at the back of the cave got bigger and bigger, and opened wider and wider”; he awakens to find that this is not a dream and is captured along with the dwarves by the goblins who emerge from the crack, soon finding himself as inexplicably outside of his previous location as is Christine: “The crack closed with a snap, and Bilbo and the dwarves were on the wrong side of it!” (106-107). The situation is unusual enough, and the specifics reminiscent enough of the scene in Phantom, that the similarity is notable.

Once the false wall opens, the capture itself is also very similar. Outside of her dressing room, Christine describes what happens next:

“I was in a dark passage, I was frightened and I cried out. It was quite dark, but for a faint red glimmer at a distant corner of the wall. . . . And, suddenly, a hand was laid on mine . . . that seized my wrist and did not let go. I cried out again. An arm took me round the waist and supported me. . . . I was dragged toward the little red light.” (94) [page 14]

In The Hobbit, Bilbo gives “a very loud yell” as he is “grabbed and carried through the crack” by goblins, who “seiz[e] Bilbo and the dwarves and hurr[y] them along” through “deep, deep, dark” tunnels toward “a glimmer of a red light before them” (106-107), echoing each major element of this passage from Christine’s capture.

Erik soon guides Christine through the five-story underground below the Opera, which is “large enough to hold a town,” taking her down winding passages and stairs “into the very heart of the earth” (95). Later, these tunnels are described as “passages of mystery and darkness,” an “extraordinary labyrinth,” and an “infernal underground maze” (119, 153, 204); along the way, Christine thinks that she sees “‘black demons . . . in front of the red fires of their furnaces’” (95). Again, these features of Christine’s descent are echoed in The Hobbit: the Misty Mountains hold a settlement described as a “town”—Goblin-town—located “in the heart of the mountains,” accessed by descending through “passages . . . crossed and tangled in all directions”; Bilbo and the dwarves eventually reach a cavern full of goblins, “lit by a great red fire in the middle” (107-108). Both descents thus feature a vast and maze-like network of underground passageways—in “the heart of” the earth or the mountains and compared in some way to a “town”—with similar infernal imagery of “red fire” and (real or imagined) demons/goblins: here, Tolkien’s concepts and even word choice recall the Teixeira de Mattos translation of Leroux.

After being separated from his companions, Bilbo begins a solitary descent through the passageways below Goblin-town. There is something ominous about these tunnels: Bilbo thinks of all kinds of “half-imagined dark things coming out of them” (117), reminiscent of the Persian and Raoul’s frightening encounters in the Opera underground with a mysterious “shade,” the illusion of a fiery floating head, and a teeming sea of rats (Leroux 154-158); that the goblins excavated these tunnels but now “very seldom” use them (Hobbit 119) is reminiscent of Erik’s own “secret passage, long known to himself alone and contrived at the time of the Paris Commune” (Leroux 149). [page 15]

Christine is then brought down to Erik’s dark lake at the deepest point below the Opera, which, like Gollum’s dark lake “down at the very roots of the mountain” (Hobbit 119), is presented as the source from which this danger and uncanny dread seems to emanate—and those who get too close tend not to return. The goblins have “a feeling that something unpleasant [i]s lurking down there,” and, when an occasional goblin goes to fish in Gollum’s lake, “sometimes neither goblin nor fish c[o]me[s] back” because Gollum “throttle[s] them from behind, if they ever c[o]me down alone anywhere near the edge of the water” (119). In Leroux, the Persian’s emphatic advice to Raoul illustrates a similar mortal peril:

“I fear that more than one of those men . . . who have never been seen again were simply tempted to cross the lake ... It is terrible ... I myself would have been nearly killed there ... if the monster had not recognized me in time! ... One piece of advice, sir; never go near the lake ... And, above all, shut your ears if you hear the voice singing under the water, the siren’s voice!” (158)

“What poor wretch had strayed to that shore this time?” the Persian later wonders when he suspects someone else to have met his untimely demise in Erik’s lake (180). The “siren” is Erik himself, lying in ambush underwater and luring in his prey by singing in his entrancing voice through a reed, waiting for his moment to strike: “Suddenly,” the Persian recounts, describing a time when he attempted to row Erik’s own boat across the lake, “two monstrous arms issued from the bosom of the waters and seized me by the neck, dragging me down to the depths with irresistible force” (163-164), an image which distinctly anticipates Gollum’s “throttl[ing]” of goblins who get too close to his lake.

The intense resonance with Gollum the aquatic, boat-paddling, lake-dwelling strangler is apparent—and even the siren trap has a Gollum-related echo in Tolkien. Gollum is preceded in Tolkien’s writings by the titular character of the poem “Glip,” written circa 1928 (Anderson 118n6). Much like Gollum, much like Erik, Glip lives “down a long hole” near [page 16] underground water (in this case, the sea), has eyes that glow in the darkness, and has something to do with “golden rings” (“Glip” ll. 8-10, 12-14, 20). And, reminiscent of Erik, Glip is associated with a siren, who becomes for him a trap he can use to his advantage: Glip “slinks” to where the “wicked mermaid sing[s] in the dark,” waits for ships to wreck on her rock, and scavenges the bones (“Glip” ll. 17-25). Glip’s siren can thus be read as an artifact of Erik, discarded somewhere along the way as Tolkien transformed Glip into Gollum.

As Christine is under Erik’s protection, the lake is not deadly to her: Erik lifts her into “a little boat,” then jumps in with her and takes the oars, “row[ing]” across the “noiseless water” toward his house on the other side (Leroux 95-96). In Tolkien’s initial description of Gollum, the reader is very similarly told that he “had a little boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake,” and that he lives on an island in its center (Hobbit 119). The choice of the word “row” is notable. Tolkien never uses “row” again in reference to Gollum, and until reading the next sentence, in which Gollum “paddle[s] it with large feet dangling over the side” (119), the reader is likely to assume that Gollum uses oars. Another possible artifact of Erik, Tolkien’s word choice suggests an earlier, rejected notion of Gollum, like Erik, using oars to row.

With those “little boats” on their respective dark, deadly subterranean lakes comes one of the most remarkably similar images shared by Tolkien and Leroux. Bilbo twice watches Gollum come toward him across the lake, the glow of Gollum’s eyes in the darkness an ominous sight as he menacingly draws nearer. The first time is when Bilbo struggles to come up with an answer to a riddle: “Gollum began to get out of his boat. He flapped into the water and paddled to the bank; Bilbo could see his eyes coming towards him” (125). The second is when Gollum realizes that he has lost the Ring and suspects Bilbo of stealing it:

[T]o his alarm Bilbo now saw two small points of light peering at him. As suspicion grew in Gollum’s mind, the light of his eyes burned with a pale flame. . . . But now the [page 17] light in Gollum’s eyes had become a green fire, and it was coming swiftly nearer. Gollum was in his boat again, paddling wildly back to the dark shore . . . [Bilbo heard] the splash as Gollum leapt from his boat. (129-130)

Leroux’s scene, in which an enraged Erik crosses the lake to confront the Persian, is unmistakably similar: “I therefore watched on the bank of the lake and . . . I heard a slight splashing in the dark, I saw the two yellow eyes shining like candles and soon the boat touched shore. Erik jumped out and walked up to me” (167). Tolkien’s combination of the boat on the underground lake, the darkness, the glowing eyes, the splashing, and even the leap to shore all echo Leroux so distinctly that the prospect of mere coincidence is dim. But those signature glowing eyes are only the beginning of Gollum’s monstrous resemblance to Erik.

“Eyes bright, fingers tight”: Monstrosity, Malevolence, and Murder

In Leroux’s novel, glowing eyes are one of Erik’s most frequently referenced and therefore defining physical features, as in Tolkien they are one of Gollum’s. Leroux mentions Erik’s glowing or fiery yellow eyes around twenty times in the course of a fairly short novel; Tolkien mentions Gollum’s glowing or fiery green eyes around twelve times in The Hobbit and approximately thirty times in the far longer LotR. The luminescence is not merely metaphorical: Gollum is at one point visible “only as a shadow in the gleam of his own eyes” (Hobbit 133); Erik has “blazing eyes that sho[w] only in the dark” (104). Their eyes have physical differences when viewed by day—Erik’s eyes are skull-like black sockets (101), while Gollum has “protruding eyes” (LotR 715)—and it is interesting that the eyes of Gollum’s Tolkien predecessor, Glip, are Erik-like in the emphasis on their shining only in the dark but Gollum-like in shape and color (“Glip” ll. 11-15), once again positioning Glip as a transitional character between Erik and Gollum.

In addition to reminding the reader of Erik’s/Gollum’s otherness or monstrosity, Leroux and Tolkien use those [page 18] glowing, unusually-colored eyes to highlight changing moods—Erik’s eyes are “scorching,” or “sparks fly from those yellow eyes,” or his “yellow eyes sho[o]t flames” when he is angry (46, 167, 197); when Gollum is enraged, the “light of in [his] eyes burn[s] with a pale flame” or a “green fire” (Hobbit 129-130), or the “light in his eyes [is] like a green flame,” or “a wild light flame[s] in his eyes” (LotR 12, 943)—and, especially, the eyes’ visibility in darkness adds a foreboding tension and aspect of supernatural horror to Erik’s/Gollum’s lurking presence or approach. Relatedly, Erik and Gollum both “disappear” at will, Gollum due to the invisibility powers of the Ring and Erik via his “preternatural ability to move around in the darkness” (Matlock xv): true to the reputation of the “Opera ghost,” Erik is believed to “vanis[h] as soon as he [is] seen, no one knowing how or where,” and more than one character recounts witnessing such a disappearance (Leroux 2, 48).

Gollum has been aptly compared to the Gothic character type of “the hidden pursuer,” a “mysterious stalker” whose persistence and elusiveness, revealed in half-imagined hints of his presence, causes psychological terror (Terranova 40-41), and the same description applies as well to Erik. Doubtless Erik and Gollum have some Gothic ancestors in common, though the unusually high specificity of a glowing-eyed stalker who pursues his quarry though underground interiors, by water, as well as via climbing is notable. Twice in fairly quick succession Frodo thinks he sees “two pale points of light, almost like luminous eyes . . . two pale points of light approaching, slowly” in the Mines of Moria (LotR 318); in a tree in Lothlórien, he hears something climbing the trunk and looks down to see “two pale eyes” which “gaz[e] upward unwinking” (345); not long afterwards, he sees “two pale lamplike eyes sh[i]ne coldly” from the water near moored boats (382-384).

Much as Gollum is able not only to climb trees but to scale cliffs, in the pivotal “Apollo’s Lyre” chapter of Phantom, Erik, having stalked Christine and Raoul up to the roof of the Opera in the evening, spies and eavesdrops on the pair from atop the immense rooftop statue of Apollo while they sit together [page 19] fearfully at its base, “clasping each other closely” (87-88, 100). At first Erik remains “a creeping shadow,” unperceived and drawing ominously nearer (92), more than once they think they hear something, and after darkness falls Christine and Raoul look “high up above them” and see, to their horror, Erik’s “blazing eyes” as he “stare[s]” down at them from Apollo’s lyre (103).

One of André Castaigne’s illustrations for the first American edition of Phantom, also featured on the dust jacket of some copies (Capitol Hill Books), depicts this scene (see Fig. 1).

[page 20] In the painting, a lean, menacing Erik with thin hair, a ghoulish face, and yellow eyes creepingly crouches over and around the rooftop sculpture of Apollo, leaning forward to leer down at Christine and Raoul. Though it is difficult to know whether Tolkien was familiar with the image, Erik’s posture, face, and attitude resemble the way that various Tolkien illustrators would portray Gollum decades later. But for the three figures’ style of dress, the painting could pass for an illustration of Gollum stalking Frodo and Sam in Emyn Muil: the two take shelter at the foot of a rocky cliff, where they “s[i]t huddled mournfully together in the cold stony night” and then notice the “two small pale gleaming lights” of Gollum’s distant eyes as he crawls forebodingly down the cliff face toward them, eventually descending “right above their heads” (LotR 612-614). If any of this is coincidental, it is—at least—a coincidence which vouches for the similarity of the texts being illustrated.

Perhaps one of the most horrific examples of Gollum’s stalking behavior is the rumor of his alleged activities in Mirkwood: “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” (LotR 58). While Erik does not share Gollum’s connection to hunting and eating, nor to cannibalism or infanticide, the comparison of Gollum to a “ghost” certainly recalls the “Opera ghost” or “Phantom” Erik, and the idea of Gollum climbing and entering a window to attack someone in their sleep—an unusually modern and domestic style of horror for Tolkien—recalls a scene in Phantom in which Raoul, lying in bed, thinks Erik is either at his bedroom window or inside the room: “Two eyes, like blazing coals, had appeared at the foot of his bed. They stared at him fixedly, terribly, in the darkness of the night” (107). Raoul cannot tell whether the eyes are in the room with him or on the balcony, but he fires his pistol, aiming to kill, and finds outside on the balcony a trail of blood that goes up the gutter spout (107-109). His brother ridicules him for shooting a cat, but Raoul is convinced that “the monster [Erik] had fled up the gutter-spout like a cat or a convict” (119). [page 21] Later, Raoul thinks of Erik’s eyes and wonders “why had he not put them out for good” (119), much as in Erik’s past the Shah-in-Shah of Persia “order[s] Erik’s yellow eyes to be put out” (213)—and much as, in The Hobbit, Bilbo momentarily wants to stab Gollum and “put [his] eyes out” (133). Erik’s and Gollum’s glowing eyes are significant, characteristic, or disturbing enough to other characters to become a target of aggression; while the Shah-in-Shah at first means to literally blind Erik, Raoul and Bilbo also use the imagery of putting out eyes as a synecdoche for killing those eyes’ owner.

In addition to anticipating Gollum, Erik’s blazing, staring yellow eyes—also described as having “fixed pupils” (2)—watching Raoul, along with the repeated comparison to a cat, also anticipate Frodo’s vision of the Eye of Sauron: “The Eye was rimmed with fire, but it was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent,” with a “slit . . . pupil” (LotR 364). Erik’s remarkable eyes are prominently depicted with cat-like slit pupils on the cover of the first French edition of Le Fantôme (see Fig. 2).

Erik and Gollum also have very similar physiques. Erik is “lean and skinny,” “ghastly” and “cadaverous,” and is compared to a “corpse” on multiple occasions (Leroux 19, 102, 167, 195, 213). As one character describes Erik: “He is [page 22] extraordinarily thin and his dress-coat hangs on a skeleton frame. . . . His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but a nasty yellow. . . . All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks on his forehead and behind his ears” (2-3). This description alone is echoed in two of Tolkien’s descriptions of Gollum, in which he is a “famished skeleton . . . its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin” (LotR 644), and he is “a lean, starved, haggard thing, all bones and tight-drawn sallow skin” (943); Tolkien also mentions Gollum’s “thin lank hair” (614). After diving for fish, Gollum’s “sparse locks [a]re hanging like rank weed over his bony brows” (689); the “sparse locks” distinctly recall Erik’s “three or four dark locks,” the “bony brows” unusually (given that Gollum’s eyes protrude) resemble the skull-like sockets of Erik’s eyes.

Their hands, too, are both similar and similarly emphasized. Erik seizes a man’s wrist with his “skeleton hand,” the other man “feeling the clutch of the knucklebones” (Leroux 70); when Gollum makes a fist, he “clenche[s] his long hand into a bony fleshless knot” (LotR 616). Erik has “dead fingers” (Leroux 101), and Gollum has “long fleshless fingers” (LotR 944). Gollum’s two attempted strangulations of Sam, in which Gollum puts his “clammy fingers” or “long clammy hand . . . over his mouth” (614, 725) are reminiscent of Erik’s initial abduction of Christine: “‘And, suddenly, a hand was laid on mine ... or rather a stone-cold, bony thing that seized my wrist and did not let go. . . . [M]y mouth opened to scream, but a hand closed it, a hand which I felt on my lips, on my skin ... a hand that smelt of death’” (94). Both descriptions feature a similarly tactile, sensual style of horror which emphasizes the touch and feeling of Erik’s/Gollum’s corpse-like hands, though in Tolkien those hands touch Sam’s “mouth” and “neck” rather than Christine’s “lips” and “skin.” As is typical of Tolkien’s transformation of Erik into Gollum, the eroticism of Leroux’s scene is reduced in LotR though not entirely eliminated.

While Erik does not strangle Christine, strangulation itself is another important similarity between the two characters. [page 23] Erik and Gollum are both murderers and accomplish their crimes mostly if not entirely via this method. Though Gollum is a manual strangler and Erik is at least primarily a ligature strangler—his weapon of choice, memorably translated by Teixeira de Mattos as “the Punjab lasso,” is depicted as a catgut cord which can be thrown through the air to catch its victim around the neck (171-172)—their respective texts associate them so closely and so frequently with strangulation that in both cases it becomes a major part of the concept of the character. Erik is called “the king of stranglers” by the Persian, who then tells the story of how Erik “acquired an incredible skill in the art of strangulation” while living in India, and used his Punjab lasso to win one-on-one battles to the death for the entertainment of the royal court of Persia (171); the Persian also teaches Raoul how to prevent the Punjab lasso from wrapping around one’s neck from behind: “‘If [Erik] does not come behind us, we shall always see his yellow eyes! That is more or less our safeguard to-night. But he may come from behind, stealing up; and we are dead men if we do not keep our hands as though about to fire, at the level of our eyes, in front!’” (156). Like Erik, Gollum sneaks up on his victims unseen, whether by “throttl[ing] them from behind” (Hobbit 119) or by wearing the Ring so that “[n]o one would see him, no one would notice him, till he had his fingers on their throat” (128); Tolkien’s description of Gollum’s “clinging grip” on Sam “squeezing him like slowly tightening cords” (LotR 614) contains an echo of Erik’s ligature strangulation via Punjab lasso.

Gollum’s strangling is a notable enough part of his character that Tolkien includes it, along with the lake deep underground, the “small boat,” and the “pale luminous eyes,” in his description of Gollum in the prologue to LotR: “He ate any living thing, even orc, if he could catch it and strangle it without a struggle” (11). In LotR, Tolkien even creates a backstory for Gollum’s penchant for strangulation. Sméagol’s killing of Déagol for the Ring, “[catching] Déagol by the throat and strangl[ing] him” (53), becomes a defining moment in [page 24] Sméagol’s life, his alter-ego Gollum born in this first act of murder. Gollum comes to self-identify as a strangler, twice in LotR expressing a desire to “squeeze” or “throttle” someone, and eating fish for sustenance because it, in Gollum’s words, “Makes us strong. Makes eyes bright, fingers tight, yes” (57, 686). Those luminous eyes and strangling hands seem to be the parts of his body that Gollum himself values most.

“Wretched we are, precious”: Creeping, Weeping, and Other Unhappy Idiosyncrasies

Many more of Gollum’s signature characteristics precede him in Leroux’s Erik, including his multiple identities, his speaking in third person of “poor Sméagol,” his dog-like servility to Frodo, and even the importance of a golden ring.

Erik has three major identities—the Angel of Music, the Opera ghost, and Erik—at least the former two of which are roles he consciously plays and cultivates (Leroux 96), while Tolkien takes the concept further and casts it in a more psychological light by creating Gollum and Sméagol as separate and distinct personalities within the same character, capable of carrying on a debate with each other (LotR 632-633). Similarly, Gollum’s memorable and varied forms of self-reference, though much elaborated and used far more frequently in Tolkien, appear in a simpler and more occasional form in Leroux. Erik speaks in third person on occasion and, highly suggestive of inspiring Gollum’s oft-repeated “poor Sméagol,” he calls himself “poor Erik” and “poor, unhappy Erik” (99, 207). Other characters also use these phrases, for a total of six iterations of “poor Erik” and three of “poor, unhappy Erik,” and the phrases are emphasized by their use in scenes of high importance: Raoul overhears, and later comments on, Christine saying “‘poor Erik!’” in her dressing room just before her first abduction (73, 79), while the phrase “poor, unhappy Erik” occupies a key place in both the pivotal paragraph where Erik decides to release Christine and Raoul and let them marry, and in the book’s elegiac epilogue after Erik’s death (207, 214). [page 25]

Also striking is the sheer wretchedness of Leroux’s original Erik; his episodes of weeping, groveling, floor-crawling servility toward Christine are so similar to Gollum’s behavior toward Frodo that often all that is missing in Tolkien is (some of) the sexuality. As Christine recalls:

“He let go of me at last and was dragging himself about on the floor, uttering terrible sobs. And then he crawled away like a snake . . . He fell at my feet, with words of love ... with words of love in his dead mouth . . . He kissed the hem of my dress . . . [H]e tried to catch my eye, like a dog sitting by its master. He was my faithful slave and paid me endless little attentions.” (102)

Erik is compared to a dog twice more (207), while Gollum is compared to a dog several times: he is “at [Frodo’s] feet [like] a little whining dog,” watches “like an expectant dog by a diner’s chair,” greets Frodo “with dog-like delight,” comes “crawling on all fours, like an erring dog called to heel,” and so on (LotR 618, 622, 634, 687). Reminiscent of Erik kissing the hem of Christine’s dress, Gollum, who routinely crawls on all fours and is “pitifully anxious to please” Frodo, “weep[ing] if Frodo rebuke[s] him”—Gollum weeps twice in The Hobbit and six times in LotR, plus some sobs and whimpers—at times subserviently touches Frodo or his clothes, “pawing” or “fawning” at Frodo’s knees or “tugging” at Frodo’s cloak or sleeve (618-619, 634, 703, 705, 714). Both Gollum and Erik promise the object of their self-prostrating affections that they will not endanger them, Gollum when he swears on the Ring “[t]o be very very good,” while “crawling to Frodo’s feet [and] grovel[ling] before him” (LotR 618), and Erik when he suggestively promises Christine: “‘If you loved me I should be as gentle as a lamb; and you could do anything with me that you pleased’” (Leroux 175). Once again, Tolkien removes direct references to romantic love, along with the most overtly suggestive aspects of Erik’s dialogue and behavior—yet a remarkable amount of Erik’s obsequious courtship behavior remains intact in the shift to Gollum’s homosocial context. [page 26]

Again preceding Gollum’s behavior toward Frodo, Erik also regularly kneels before Christine or otherwise places himself at her feet (88, 96, 98, 175, 207), “he crawls, he moans, he weeps!” (98); a dying Erik describes to the Persian how he was overcome with emotion when Christine allowed him to kiss her forehead, so happy that he “‘fell at her feet, crying ... and I kissed her feet ... her little feet ... crying’” (206-207). Only several lines of text later, the themes of “poor Erik” and Erik’s dog-like devotion to Christine combine with the image of a gold ring:

“While I was at her feet ... I heard her say, ‘Poor, unhappy Erik!’ ... and she took my hand! ... I had become no more, you know, than a poor dog ready to die for her . . . I held in my hand a ring, a plain gold ring which I had given her ... which she had lost ... and which I had found again ... a wedding-ring, you know ... I slipped it into her little hand and said, “There! ... Take it! . . . It shall be my wedding-present a present from your poor, unhappy Erik. . . . I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her.” (207, emphasis in original)

A “plain gold ring” lost and then found, referred to as a “wedding-present” (anticipating Gollum’s description of the plain gold Ring, lost and then found, as his “birthday-resent” [LotR 56]), described by a weeping, corpse-like man who speaks of his “poor” self in third person, is—particularly in light of all of the other physical and conceptual similarities between Erik and Gollum—difficult to accept as mere coincidence.

While Erik’s ring as a physical object in itself is not as central to Phantom as is the Ring to LotR, what it symbolizes is as central a concept: given to Christine as essentially an engagement ring (Leroux 78-79), it represents Erik’s obsessive desire for connection with and marriage to her, for her to accept him and love him “for [him]self” (175): the heart and engine of the entire story. The novel’s final image is of a skeleton lying in the Opera underground, identified by the narrator as being Erik’s because of the “plain gold ring” it wears, [page 27] evidence that Christine fulfilled her promise to Erik to find his body after his death and put the ring on his finger (215). Like Gollum after him, the ring, the symbol of desire, returns to Erik in death.

Reading Gollum as Phantom Adaptation: Tolkien’s Transformations of Desire and Pity

Desire and pity are two of the most central concepts in both Phantom and LotR, and in both, the locus of these paired concepts is in Erik/Gollum. Yet the two works portray these themes differently, and in reading Gollum as an adaptation of Erik, Tolkien’s transformations of pity and desire become at once intriguing and unfortunate.

A consideration of desire would naturally include locating Christine in LotR, where her role is split among Shelob, the sole woman in Gollum’s life and a grotesque caricature of female sexuality; Frodo, the recipient of Gollum’s groveling affections; and the Ring, the recipient of Gollum’s obsessive desire. It is a rather grim commentary on Tolkien’s portrayal of women that Christine is disallowed a human woman’s body and becomes instead a spider monster, a man, and a literal object; the Ring, penetrable object of most men’s desire, is in any case a sort of disembodied, sterilized vagina, relieved of the inconvenience of having a woman attached to it. Frodo, Gollum, and Sam form a homoerotic triangle (Bernard 15), whose shape recalls the Christine, Erik, and Raoul triangle at the center of Phantom: the murderous and physically different social outcast Erik/Gollum plays the forbidden demon-lover, competing with his wholesome, brave, conventional-looking rival Raoul/Sam for the heart of Christine/Frodo. As Erik loses Christine to Raoul, Gollum twice loses out to Sam, who penetrates Shelob at the climax of a highly sexualized battle (Partridge 187-191) and successfully outcompetes Gollum for intimacy with Frodo.

Pity, too, is transformed in Tolkien. “‘My heart tells me that [Gollum] has some part to play yet,’” Gandalf advises Frodo in a speech about Bilbo’s decision not to kill Gollum, “‘for [page 28] good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least’” (LotR 59). This concept is highly valued by much of Tolkien scholarship—for example, Ralph C. Wood calls it “the moral and religious center of the entire epic” and “its animating theme” (150)—yet, for all the heightened emphasis on pity, Bilbo’s moment of sincere empathy for Gollum in The Hobbit becomes framed and valued transactionally in LotR. While Tolkien claimed that “[o]f course, [Gandalf] did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later” (Letters 253), in Tolkien’s drafts Gandalf says exactly that: in one passage, Frodo recalls Gandalf saying that “‘[e]ven Gollum I fancy may have his uses before all’s over’”; in another, Gandalf tells Frodo that “‘even Gollum might prove useful for good before the end’” (The War of the Ring 96), employing the very sentiment and word (“useful”) which Tolkien would later disclaim. 

If the published passage is somewhat subtler about the transactional usefulness of pitying Gollum, the same meaning is conferred by Gollum’s complete disappearance from the text after his death. Not only is Gollum never memorialized, but other than Frodo’s brief postmortem confirmation that Gandalf was right, and his statement that we should forgive Gollum “[f]or the Quest is achieved” (LotR 947)—Frodo’s phrasing implying, uncomfortably, that the reason Gollum is forgivable is not out of any sense of compassion but because he ended up being accidentally useful after all—no one, not even the narrator, so much as utters the name of Gollum or Sméagol again over the course of the final 83 pages (before the Appendices) of LotR. For all that much-vaunted “pity,” when Gollum falls into Mount Doom—his “use” to polite society exhausted—he falls out of mind, and out of the text. Gollum is ultimately valued not as an individual, but in terms of his death’s worth to the collective and as proof of the hand of divine providence at work, rewarding Frodo’s pity by sparing Frodo’s life, never mind that the object of that alleged care and sympathy has toppled into a volcano. [page 29]

Not so Erik. Despite the fact that he is decidedly not “useful” to society, most of Phantom’s epilogue is a moving tribute to Erik by the narrator, a nuanced consideration of his “adventurous, formidable and monstrous life” as a conflicted, gifted, extraordinary man—a genius, a killer, and a tragic lover—and when the narrator concludes in one of the novel’s final paragraphs that “[a]h, yes, we must needs pity the Opera ghost,” it is in regard not to benefits rendered or anticipated, but to how Erik’s own life might have been different had he been born with an “ordinary face” (Leroux 215). The narrator prays for Erik over his anonymous and yet singular skeleton: in the end, Erik is appreciated “for [him]self” in a way that Gollum is not. He is remembered as a man, while Gollum is dismissed as a monster.

And yet, despite these differences in treatment, it remains that Gollum so closely resembles Leroux’s Erik, in such breadth and depth of similarity, that it becomes difficult to imagine Tolkien never having been haunted by the original Opera ghost. Much like the lyrics of the title song from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical—sung as a duet between Erik and Christine as he guides her down into the depths of the Opera and takes her in his little boat across his underground lake—the Phantom of the Opera was there inside Tolkien’s mind.

Notes

1. A testament both to Erik’s enduring popularity and to the dominance of Lloyd Webber’s Phantom in the popular imagination, Spirit Halloween sells a white half-mask called “Deluxe Phantom Mask.” The advertising copy in its online listing clearly markets it to fans of the musical (“Relive your favorite on stage moments”) and describes the mask as “elegant,” a suggestion as to popular perception of the story and character.

2. These aspects do, however, make appearances at times in fanfiction and other fan-created media, where depictions of [page 30] Erik’s body and behavior sometimes intentionally recall Leroux’s original.

3. While Gollum does sing “a sort of song,” it is rudimentary and unsophisticated to the point of being infantile (LotR 620-621)—entirely the opposite of Erik’s angelic, erotic, virtuosic singing, which holds the power to influence and entrance both Christine and Raoul and to “fl[i]ng Christine into marvelous ecstasy” (Leroux 78, 166). This is an interesting difference, given the importance in Tolkien of song in general, and magical song especially—yet Erik’s talent, denied to Gollum, may be part of the “leaf-mould” for other characters. See Clare Moore for an analysis of the power of song in Tolkien and Lúthien’s “[s]ong as a mode of influence over others” (7-10).

Works Cited

Anderson, Douglas A., editor. The Annotated Hobbit. Revised and expanded ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Bernard, Carol A. “Gollum: The Fulcrum of Desire in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” U of Houston, PhD dissertation, 2005. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/openview/08029f7c39a36eea88da5416332c52e4/.

Byron, George Gordon, Lord. “The Corsair.” Lord Byron: Selected Poems, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, Penguin, 1996, pp. 248-307.

Capitol Hill Books. “The Phantom of the Opera.” Capitol Hill Books, www.capitolhillbooks-dc.com/pages/books/10760/gaston-leroux-andre-castaigne-alexander-teixeira-de-mattos-trans/the-phantom-of-the-opera. Accessed 16 Sept. 2023.

Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Harper Collins, 2002.

Cilli, Oronzo. Tolkien’s Library. Second ed., eBook, Luna Press, 2023.

Coward, David. “A Chronology of Gaston Leroux.” The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, translated by David Coward, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. xxiii-xxvi.

Flieger, Verlyn. “Tolkien’s French Connection.” The Hobbit and Tolkien’s Mythology: Essays on Revisions and Influences, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, McFarland, 2014, pp. 70-77.

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Hall, Ann C. Phantom Variations. McFarland, 2009. [page 31]

Hopkins, Lisa. “Gollum and Caliban: Evolution and Design.” Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, McFarland, 2007, pp. 281-293.

Kennedy, Mark. “‘The Phantom of the Opera’ closes on Broadway after 35 years.” Associated Press, 17 Apr. 2023, apnews.com/article/phantom-opera-broadway-closing-533e3b348aab5924344f7b9f3b332531. Accessed 16 Sept. 2023.

Kilby, Clyde S. Tolkien & The Silmarillion. Harold Shaw, 1976.

Leroux, Gaston. The Phantom of the Opera, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, SeaWolf Press, 2021.

Loofbourow, Lili. “Gollum’s Mother: On Marie Corelli.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 Feb. 2013, admin.lareviewofbooks.org/article/gollums-mother-on-marie-corelli/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.

Matlock, Jann. Introduction. The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, translated by Mireille Ribière, Penguin Classics, 2012, pp. xiii-xliv.

Moore, Clare. “A Song of Greater Power: Tolkien’s Construction of Lúthien Tinúviel.” Mallorn, vol. 62, 2021, pp. 6-16. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/48650601. Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.

Myers, Anne. “About the Library.” The Phantom Library. www.phantomlibrary.com/about-the-project. Internet Archive, web.archive.org/web/20230711223747/www. phantom library.com/about-the-project. Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.

Nelson, Brent. “Cain-Leviathan Typology in Gollum and Grendel.” Extrapolation, vol. 49, no. 3, 2008, pp. 466-485, doi:10.3828/extr.2008.49.3.8.

Nelson, Dale. “Literary Influences, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, edited by Michael D.C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 366-378.

Ordway, Holly. Tolkien’s Modern Reading. Word on Fire, 2021.

Partridge, Brenda. “No Sex Please—We’re Hobbits: The Construction of Female Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings.” J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings, Vision, 1983, pp. 179-197.

Perry, George. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. Henry Holt, 1987.

Rogers, William N. II, and Michael R. Underwood. “Gagool and Gollum: Exemplars of Degeneration in King Solomon’s Mines and The Hobbit.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 121-131. [page 32]

Spirit Halloween. “Deluxe Phantom Mask.” Spirit Halloween, www.spirithalloween.com/product/deluxe-phantom-mask/215177.uts. Accessed 4 Sept. 2023.

Terranova, Joel. “Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction and the Terrors of Middle-earth.” Mallorn, vol. 58, 2017, pp. 38-41, www.jstor.org/stable/48614874.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit. Revised and expanded ed., edited by Douglas A. Anderson, Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

—. “Glip.” The Annotated Hobbit. Revised and expanded ed., edited by Douglas A. Anderson, Houghton Mifflin, 2002, p. 119.

—. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

—. The Lord of the Rings. 50th Anniversary ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

—. The War of the Ring, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Wood, Ralph C. The Gospel According to Tolkien. Westminster John Knox, 2003.

Kathryn Colvin (www.kathryncolvin.com; ORCID ID 0000-0002-0940-2546) is a novelist and independent researcher. The fruit of a lifelong passion for storytelling and the strange, Kathryn’s writing is inspired by her research interests in Gothic and supernatural literature, romance, Romanticism, folklore, and pop culture, particularly the love lives and influence of the Byronic hero and Elizabethan villain-hero. She is the winner of several academic writing awards, and her work appears in the peer-reviewed journals Brontë Studies and Mythlore. Her debut novel is Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London: A Victorian Gothic Romance.

MLA citation (print):

Colvin, Kathryn. "In the Same Boat: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera as Inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gollum." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2024, pp. 5-32.