It's quite obviously in my opinion that Tolkien meant to juxtapose Sméagol taking the Ring by murder and Bilbo beginning his ownership with mercy, and that he expected us to chalk the difference up to their respective characters, as you say,
Inzil; and I always assumed that Sméagol was a rather rotten tomato before he ever touched the Ring. I was therefore quite surprised to find that what little we're told about Sméagol the Stoor preceding first Ring contact in the passage I quoted in the post Leaf linked doesn't quite bear this out as far as I can see.
So either Tolkien always imagined Sméagol as a morally depraved individual who only needed a little external stimulus to commit murder but failed to describe him so, or he wrote the murder scene to illustrate the evil power of the Ring, as
Leaf suggests, but seeing that a Ring this powerful would collide with the rest of the story he came to see Sméagol as increasingly evil to begin with and coloured him so in later notes and letters.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Leaf
The problem is that this concept would directly contradict a story about a Fellowhip, at it's core. If Tolkien would have kept this level of intensity no story about friendship and holding together would have been possible. Frodo, essentially, would have to be on his own from the very beginning.
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You know, I could imagine a story about a Fellowship that would be like movie-Frodo's nightmare: a Fellowship where every member is tempted by the Ring and scheming against the others, some of them maybe pulling themselves back from the brink of betrayal and forming shaky alliances to protect the Ringbearer from the others... but in the end he would have to leave them for their own good. It would have been a much different story from the one Tolkien wrote, and I'm glad he gave us the story he did instead, but it could be a hell of a yarn if done by the right author.
(The somewhat reduced population of active Downers these days makes it a little difficult to spread out reputation enough to rep every post I'd like to, but I really like your thinking in this post and some other recent ones,
Leaf.)