Gollum bad, Sméagol good: Peter Jackson defends Turkish doctor's tweet

The Turkish doctor who tweeted pictures of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alongside stills from The Lord of the Rings probably never expected Peter Jackson, the director of the films, would need to weigh in to save him from two years in prison, but he just has.

Bilgin Çiftçi was fired from his job in Turkey’s public health service for sharing the pictures, which compared Erdogan’s facial expressions to those of Gollum. His trial for allegedly insulting the Turkish president - illegal under the country’s laws - is currently adjourned so a group of “psychologists and film experts” can study the hobbit to determine whether Gollum is good at heart, or whether the comparison was indeed an insult.

However, Jackson believes this analysis of Gollum’s character is a waste of time – the character in the pictures, he says, is Gollum’s more lovable original form, Sméagol, before he was corrupted and became Gollum.

“If the images below are in fact the ones forming the basis of this Turkish lawsuit, we can state categorically: none of them feature the character known as Gollum. All of them are images of the character called Sméagol,” said Jackson, in a joint statement with screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

Walsh, who wrote many of the scenes of Gollum and Sméagol, insisted Sméagol is a sweet character. “Sméagol doesn’t lie, nor cheat, nor try to manipulate others. He is not evil, co-conspirator, nor vindictive. Those are Gollum’s qualities and should never be confused with Sméagol. Sméagol never imagines to manipulate ones weaker than himself by force. He is not a tyrant, but rather full of love. For this reason, people all over the world liked this character”.

Colbert weighs in
Nerdy courtroom arguments about the personalities of fictional characters aside, this isn't the first time in the past month confusion between the two characters has become an issue. Brazillian scientists recently named a new species of spider 'Iandumoema smeagol' after The Lord of the Rings character, something Stephen Colbert thought was just plain wrong.

"They named it Sméagol because it's scary looking and lives in caves. Okay, that's cute," he says on a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "Sméagol wasn't a creature that lived in a cave. Sméagol was a kind and friendly hobbit-like creature who lived on the banks of the Great River and enjoyed spending time with his friends and his family."

Gollum is the creature Sméagol turns into thanks to the power of the One Ring. “His shame and his fear turned him into an unrecognisable creature. That creature wasn’t Sméagol anymore, that creature was Gollum. You should have named the spider Gollum. You don’t discover a venomous snake and name it Anakin, you name it Darth Vader. Come on!”

Get it together, world.