Tolkien's Original Version Of The Hobbit Told A Very Different Gollum Story
J.R.R. Tolkien as writer deeply cared for his fictional world and its continuity.
However, perhaps inevitably, the world of Middle-earth kept changing and developing in his mind, as he wrote.
Most importantly in 17 years between publication of The Hobbit (1937) and the first book of The Lord of the Rings (1954), Tolkien's writing changed tonally and that resulted in certain facts in the first edition of The Hobbit no longer fitting the overall narrative.
The Hobbit was a somewhat whimsical fairy tale, while The Lord of the Rings was an epic saga.
And the Ring, which Bilbo obtained in his undermountain journey, turned from a useful fairy tale trinket, into an artifact of great and sinister power.
Originally in The Hobbit Gollum offered it himself as his bet in the riddle contest, which Bilbo eventually won with quick thinking and some luck, and while Gollum was still a weird and malevolent creature who wanted to eat Bilbo, he recognized that he lost fair and square, and gave his invisibility trinket to the winner.
Obviously, given what Bilbo's ring turned out to be in The Lord of the Rings, and the change to Gollum's own nature, who became a wretched slave to "his precious", that could not possibly happen in the re-imagined world.
Almost no creature could easily part with the One Ring, and Gollum would rather have died a thousand deaths.
So, Tolkien had to retcon that part of The Hobbit. But he went about it in a clever way. The Lord of the Rings still mentioned the original version of the event, as described originally in The Hobbit.
Except now it was a tall tale, invented by Bilbo to explain how something as useful and unusual – any items of genuine magic now were much rarer and more ominous – as the Ring ended up in his hands, when asked by Gandalf.
Furthermore, Bilbo now wanted to establish a righteous claim to the ownership of the Ring – the impulse which triggered Gandalf's initial suspicions about the true nature of Bilbo's trophy.
And, as The Hobbit was supposed to be Bilbo's memoir, when the new edition was published, it included a note from the author explaining that the rewritten chapter, which described Bilbo picking the Ring after it slipped off Gollum's finger, was the true version of the tale that Bilbo had previously been unwilling to share.