[Kalimac]

Actually Bilbo did tell Gollum his full name; in "The Hobbit" his opening statement to Gollum (so to speak) is "I am Mr. Bilbo Baggins. I have lost the dwarves and lost the wizard, and I don't know where I am and I don't want to know, if only I can get away." Come to think of it, Bilbo managed to give away an awful lot in one sentence, if Gollum had cared to spend time extrapolating. Anyway, this is pretty much the only time at which Bilbo gives Gollum any personal information at all, and it's a lot to take in all at once when you're in Gollum's situation and haven't really spoken to anyone except yourself for the past half millennium.

While I do like the theory that Gollum deliberately withheld information from Sauron's minions so as to equivocate - lie without lying, so speak - it doesn't seem very likely - he doesn't seem like the type to think ahead quite that way. He has no hesitation about lying even to someone he's afraid of (he's afraid of Frodo and Sam, but doesn't mind saying that Cirith Ungol is unguarded) as long as there's a reasonable certainty that the lie won't be discovered by the time he escapes/is let go. And if he doesn't think he's going to get out (and Gollum didn't, remember that he was convinced that he had escaped by luck, and by himself) then why not spill everything he knows to avoid torture? If it's not going to help him out personally, then why care?

So why did Gollum only give those two bits of information? I'm afraid my guess is rather anticlimactic; he just couldn't remember anything else. When he was captured by Sauron it had been about fifty years since he saw Bilbo, and all the information he had about Bilbo came from that one sentence Bilbo had said at their first meeting. Gollum's first reaction to that was probably "Baggins? Dwarves, Wizards, what are those, precious? Lost? Hmm, is it tasssty?" It's more than likely, especially considering what happened subsequently, that Gollum very quickly forgot all of it except for two things; the name Baggins, which just stuck in his head, and of course the Ring. Bilbo didn't even mention the Shire at that point, that was something that Gollum found out later on after he had left the mountains and was skulking around.

So the Black Riders only had "Baggins, Shire" to work with, and thus there's no particular reason they should have gone after Bilbo especially, especially since Frodo was now "THE Mr. Baggins of Bag End." In Hobbition if someone asked for "Baggins" probably it wouldn't occur to anyone that they could be looking for anyone OTHER than Frodo, since Frodo was very much the local well-known gentleman. Bilbo's name would never even come up except possibly afterwards, as when the Gaffer told Sam "Likely enough it's Old Mr. Bilbo they were wanting news of." And the Ringwraiths would probably never hear of Bilbo's "disappearance" it was a nine-days'-wonder, of course, but very much a local one.

Sorry about the length. Just wanting to be thorough [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img].