Was there a deliberate parallel between the Thénardiers and Gollum?

Question

Long ago, I noticed that there was a parallel between *The Lord of the Rings* and *Les Misérables* in the characters of the Thénardiers and Gollum.1. Gollum has the One Ring at the start of the tale in *The Hobbit*, but it wasn't his. The Thénardiers had Cosette, but, of course, she wasn't theirs. The One Ring was taken from Gollum, and Cosette was taken from the Thénardiers.2. Gollum pretended to help Sam and Frodo, while really intending to betray them. Éponine pretends to help Marius, while intending to have him die. Monsier Thénardier also makes false pretences while intending to rob Valjean.3. Finally, Gollum had a major (if unintentional) role in the final destruction of the One Ring, just as Monsieur Thénardier was the unwitting reason behind repairing the relationship between Cosette and Marius and the ailing Valjean.Am I reading too much in this? If not, is the parallel deliberate - Tolkien paying tribute to Hugo, or both of them deriving from an older tradition?

Answer 1

I love these kinds of connections, and they can be incredibly useful for understanding older, denser, more complicated works. Plus, patterns are fun!

And I would say you should never worry about "reading too much" into something, especially not literature! What I would suggest instead is, on the contrary, keep going! So far you've said, essentially, "outcast scavengers scheming for personal profit." It's a good start, but if you're looking for meaningful connections, dig deeper. If you were going to write a compare / contrast essay, what would you want to talk about? How do Gollum and the Thernardiers see themselves? How do they see the world? What do we know of their pasts and how they got this way? How do other characters see them? What do they want out of life? How, if at all, do they change over the course of the narratives? It's in questions like that that you'll get to the good stuff.

As for the concrete question, Tolkien was notoriously cagey about the allegorical nature of LoTR, so you're unlikely to find anyone who can say definitively what homages he consciously made. Personally, I see some Caliban in Gollum (monsters with a soul, unwilling servants, fighting a metaphysical war with their identities), and since Tolkien was so into ancient mythology, I also see a fair bit of Loki (honey-tongued but vicious, life-saving companions / self-serving connivers, undisguised loathing for the hero's protector (Heimdall and Sam, respectively), ability to navigate both the heroes' and villains' worlds). But I don't know (or really care) how intentionally Tolkien mapped those guys onto Gollum; it helps *me* understand those characters and those books, and if I were to write an essay about it, it would be because I think it might help someone else understand them too.

Anyway, keep asking questions of what you read, and keep pushing yourself beyond circumstantial similarities and start investigating the characters' blood and guts (or hearts and souls if blood and guts are too icky).