Gollum tries to find his ring so he can become invisible and kill Bilbo. But the game makes Gollum both hungry and angry. Bilbo agrees, because he wants Gollum to show him the way out of the goblin kingdom under the Misty Mountains. So he tries to get on Bilbo's good side by challenging him to a friendly game of riddles (since "the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity"). When Gollum first encounters Bilbo, he isn't too hungry for hobbit-flesh, but he's rather afraid of Bilbo's knife. All we can say for now is that Gollum has dropped it in the goblin tunnels, and Bilbo just happens to pick it up again.
The narrator comments only, "who knows how Gollum came by that present, ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world?" (5.78). How it came to him in the first place, we have to wait until The Lord of the Rings to find out. Gollum uses it to sneak around the goblin tunnels and occasionally catch young goblins to eat (ick!). Gollum has one treasure, a golden ring he calls his "birthday-present" (5.100) because it came to him – you guessed it – on his birthday. He's not just a threat he is also incredibly pitiful. But he's obviously lonely and sad: he talks to himself using "we," so he must want company. Gollum is quite dangerous to Bilbo, since he's fond of eating other people and sometimes gets tired of fish.
He also punctuates his whispering with noisy gulping swallows, hence the name, "Gollum." Gollum spends a lot of time alone, something we can observe pretty easily by the frequency with which he talks to himself. He has spent so much time underground that his eyes have grown giant and protruding on account of all of his peering through murky tunnels. As Tolkien describes him, he is "dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face" (5.12). Gollum is a slimy, skinny creature living in the middle of an underground lake underneath the Misty Mountains.
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