Simon Cook has been working on teasing out the connections between the Golem of Hebrew mythology and Gollum of Middle-earth. His son has cast the story into video, featuring one of the more convincing Gollums I’ve seen on screen.

I know exactly one thing about semitic philology: the words are based on three-consonant roots; the vowels are malleable. So, let’s see if I can use it for something.  What other words go in the class with Golem and Gollum?  I grepped all the words that have the letters g,l,m (possibly doubled), with vowels in between them from the Linux word-list in /usr/share/dict/words (the one that runs the spell checker). Apart from “golem”, I found three classes of words.

Ten words are unquestionably Gollum-related:
glaum – to snatch at, make threatening movements. I had to go to the OED for this.
glim, glimmer, gleam – giving off light, like Gollum’s eyes.
gloam, gloaming – twilight, dimness
gloom – no question.
glime – to look obliquely at something (“…looking sidelong at the hobbits.” IV,ii)  Hello again, OED.
glom, glam – two related words in Scots dialect, related to clam, clamp. Gollum had strong hands, and JRRT almost used the word (“clammy fingers were feeling for [Sam’s] throat” IV,i) That subscription to the OED is paying off today.

One word doesn’t apply to Gollum any more than to anyone else: glum.

Five words have absolutely nothing to do with Gollum: agalma, a votive offering to a Greek god; glioma, the nerve-cell cancer; galium, the genus of catchweed bedstraw; gallium, which is in the device you’re using to read this; and glume, the hard covering around a grass seed.

Tolkien chose words whose sound matches their meaning. (And the moral of THAT is, “Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of themselves”, pace the Duchess.) I conclude that there were plenty of phonetic reasons for him to choose the name “Gollum” apart from the dyspeptic resonances he mentions in the text.

Regardless of how his current project turns out, Simon has already accomplished one thing. From that video, he’s put golem firmly in that first set of words. It now has a two-thirds majority to override any objections.

(edited to add: glume, from /usr/share/dict/words on Free BSD.)