By Lindariel
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"Little she knew of or cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer holder her up and the darkness could not contain her." (The Two Towers, "Shelob's Lair")
Shelob the Great was a monster of spider-like appearance who was born in Nan Dungortheb, northern Beleriand, early in the First Age.
Her mother was Ungoliant, "the primeval devourer of light,"1 a primordial monster in spider form who allied with Melkor to destroy the Two Trees of Valinor. After the Darkening, Ungoliant and Melkor fled to Beleriand, where Melkor's Balrogs drove the still-hungry Ungoliant away from him. She fled to Nan Dungortheb where she encountered "other foul creatures of spider form [who] had dwelt there since the days of the delving of Angband."2 Ungoliant first mated with and then devoured these ancient creatures, among whom would have been Shelob's father. She then fled south out of knowledge and history,3 leaving her broods of offspring to haunt Nan Dungortheb.
Shelob was called "the last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world."4 She remained in Nan Dungortheb for an undetermined period of time before leaving Beleriand sometime in the First Age. Presumably her siblings all died in the Ruin of Beleriand; at least, there is no mention of another such as her after the War of Wrath.
By the time Sauron moved into Mordor and began to build Barad-dûr early in the Second Age, Shelob had already settled in Torech Ungol ("Spider Lair" in Sindarin),5 a complex of tunnels in the pass that cut through the Ephel Dúath on the western border of Mordor.6 The pass itself was also named after her, Cirith Ungol ("Spider Pass" in Sindarin). There she mated with and killed her own "lesser broods," populating the area "from the Ephel Dúath to the eastern hills, to Dol Guldur and the fastnesses of Mirkwood"7 with her descendants.
In the Second Age, the Men of Gondor built Minas Ithil near the western end of the pass. Early in the Third Age, they built the Tower of Cirith Ungol at the top of the pass. Both these fortresses were retaken and held by Sauron's forces in the Third Age. Sauron tolerated her presence on the borders of his realm, occasionally sending her prisoners to eat when he was in residence at Barad-dûr. Other than that she ate Elves, Men, and Orcs as she was able. By the end of the Third Age, Orcs of the Tower of Cirith Ungol had opened up at least one overpass tunnel that Shelob could not enter in order to permit travel to and from Minas Morgul without encountering her. As the years went on and the dread of Mordor grew, she was less able to find any prey save wary Orcs, which kept her hungry.
Sméagol/Gollum encountered Shelob when he first ventured to Mordor, in approximately Third Age 2980.8 Her ability to generate darkness affected his state of mind thereafter, "cutting him off from light and from regret," and he venerated her.9 Later during the Quest of the Ring, in a perversion of his vow to lead Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee to Mordor, Gollum secretly planned to lead Frodo into the clutches of Shelob.
The Orc garrison at the Tower of Cirith Ungol during the Quest of the Ring were aware of Shelob and her habits, calling her "her Ladyship."10 Sam overheard Shagrat, leader of the Tower patrol that discovered Frodo in Shelob's Lair, tell Gorbag, a Minas Morgul Orc, how Shelob hunted: by stinging her prey lightly in the neck to subdue it while she wrapped it in spider silk and dragged it back to her lair to consume at her leisure. The Orcs also knew of and tolerated Gollum on account of his relationship with her, referring to Gollum as "her Sneak."11
Gollum led Frodo and Sam into the lower portion of Cirith Ungol on 11 March 301812 and then left them so he could check on Shelob. He thought he would be able to reclaim the Ring once a hungry Shelob immobilized or fed on Frodo, but his plan failed because he was not able to kill Sam. Upon returning to Frodo and Sam the next day, he resumed leading them through the pass until Shelob ambushed Frodo. Gollum attacked Sam at the same time, but Gollum could not resist stopping to gloat before killing his victim, giving Sam the opportunity to fight back well enough to retrieve his sword and chase off Gollum. In the meantime, Shelob chased and stunned Frodo. Sam picked up Sting and then fought two-handed with Shelob, cutting off a claw with one sword and stabbing one of her eyes with the other. Even the Elven-blade Sting was not capable of dealing Shelob a death stroke by slashing, but when Shelob tried to sit on Sam he held the blade up so that she drove herself down onto it,13 dealing herself the grave injury no hero was strong enough to accomplish.14 She fled into the safety of her lair, and her fate after 12 March 3018 is unknown.15
Shelob looked somewhat like a giant spider, "huger than the great hunting beasts,"16 with eight hairy legs and two body segments divided by a waistlike area. She had two "horns"17 which were probably pedipalps. Her body was swollen and black, with livid markings and a light underbelly described as "luminous"18 even though in the part of her story that takes place in the dark no glow from her belly is mentioned. She was large enough that her webs were made of shadowy grey silk spun "as thick as rope."19
She differed from a spider in several important ways. Although she is not known to have spoken with words, as did her mother Ungoliant and her offspring the Mirkwood spiders, she did vocalize in the form of hisses, gurgling, and bubbling. She did not have a carapace to be shed, like a spider. Instead she had a skin that had continually thickened over the ages: "[k]nobbed and pitted with corruption was her age-old hide, but ever thickened from within with layer upon layer of evil growth."20 Her belly stank. Unlike the bulbous multiple eyes of a spider, she had an insectoid pair of compound eyes, "two great clusters of many-windowed eyes" that were capable of glowing with "pale deadly fire."21 Rather than having two or three claws on each leg, she had only one. Instead of a pair of poison fangs (chelicerae) she had a beak "drabbling a spittle of venom" during the fight with Samwise.22 Ungoliant23 and her get24 are also described as having this type of beaky protruberance, called a "neb." However, Shelob's principal weapon was a sting, frequently mentioned although neither its location nor appearance are ever described.
Although Tolkien sketched a plan of her lair on an early manuscript page of "Shelob's Lair,"25 there is no canonical artwork depicting Shelob herself. However, Tolkien did depict Shelob's offspring, the Mirkwood spiders. For an early edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien repurposed an older color illustration into a halftone depiction retitled "Mirkwood." He removed an Elf from it, adding mushrooms and a spider into it.26 The appearance of the spider in "Mirkwood" suggests two long pedipalps raised in front in addition to the eight legs (assuming the four on the spider's left side are mirrored on its not-visible right side).
Because the scale of the rest of the drawing did not change, it is possible to guess about the size of the spiders of Mirkwood:
While it's impossible to tell exactly how large the spider is in this picture, if the same scale holds here as in the original painting (as seems to be the case), then comparison between the two shows that it is about half as large as an elf. While this may not seem all that big, especially since Tolkien's elves were originally somewhat smaller than humans – after all, Bilbo is able to down one of those spiders with a single thrown stone – it still means they are a match for the halfling and dwarves, who are themselves considerably shorter than any full-grown man (Shelob and Ungoliant are, of course, much much larger.)27
Tolkien also drew a spider on the final version of Thror's Map, in both proof28 and as printed.29 It sits on a web in the lower left corner. This unexpectedly charming little cartoon drawing shows eight legs and two pedipalps, but there is nothing to give scale.
Shelob inherited a particular ability from her mother. Like Ungoliant and all her spiderish offspring, Shelob was able to create darkness.
From her earliest mention in The Book of Lost Tales Ungoliant was said to crave and ingest light: "for she sucked light greedily, and it fed her, but she brought forth only that darkness that is a denial of all light."30 A more specific description came in The Silmarillion where she is said to transform the light she consumed into darkness and send it forth in the form of black webs and vapors.31
While Shelob could "vomit"32 darkness, she is not described like her mother as an eater of light, nor a spinner of darkness; her webs are not black but "a greyness" and "a great grey net."33 The other spiders of Shelob's generation, her siblings in Nan Dungortheb, "filled it with clinging black despair" in the words of the Lay of Leithian.34 Later descriptions of Nan Dungortheb, although they refer to the dread darkness there, do not as explicitly attribute this darkness to the offspring of Ungoliant. It is possible to interpret these descriptions of darkness as the persistence of the original darkness created by Ungoliant's having dwelled there. However, the reference to spiders in the fifth century of the First Age "spinning their unseen webs in which all living things were snared,"35 suggests that the creation of darkness in Nan Dungortheb continued to occur long after Ungoliant had fled South.
Shelob's offspring, the spiders of Mirkwood, definitely inherited the ability to create darkness. The Hobbit describes the abode of the spiders there as "a place of dense black shadow ... like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away."36
Given the prevalence of evil spiders in his legendarium, many authors have speculated about Tolkien's attitudes toward spiders. He is on record as saying he neither liked37 nor disliked38 spiders in particular, despite having been injured by a "tarantula" in South Africa at the age of three.39 He himself referred to the distantly recalled incident as "being stung by a tarantula when a small child."40 As tarantulas are not native to South Africa, and spiders do not sting anyway, the true identity of the offending critter is unclear.
In a 1957 interview Tolkien said he put the giant spiders into The Hobbit in order to frighten his second son Michael, who was very afraid of spiders.41 But no known rationale exists for his insertion of a primordial giant spider into the earliest version of his legendarium, work that long predates The Hobbit.
The character of Shelob and her dwelling at Cirith Ungol as published in The Lord of the Rings represent the culmination of an enormous series of drafts and redrafts written and abandoned over the course of a few weeks. This work seems to have exhausted Tolkien creatively, as he did no further significant work on the story for more than two years.42
In 1942 during the initial drafting of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had first sketched out his idea about Kirith Ungol ("Spider Glen"). It was originally a pass at the northern entrance to Mordor. He populated this early version of the pass with many "great spiders, greater than those of Mirkwood," which he likened to the Nan Dungortheb spiders.43
He resumed drafting this part of the story in April 1944, sketching little maps and temporarily moving Minas Ithil/Minas Morghul to a spot near Kirith Ungol on the eastern side of the Gates of Mordor on the northern border before rethinking the Gates of Mordor.44 This portion of the work is particularly complex, represented by several drafts and notes along with changes to chapter names. Kirith Ungol became a stair in the pass at one point, in the same section that mentions how the "tunnel is black with webs [of] spiders."45 His initial plan for one chapter expanded ultimately into three.46
When he began the redraft of the Kirith Ungol chapter (the so-called "Version 1") in the middle of May 1944, the basic geography had settled down but not solidified. Kirith Ungol and Minas Morghul had moved into their proper location on the western border of Mordor, but their details were still in flux. Many elements of the story shifted, some temporarily, some permanently. He had, however, made no changes to the idea of multiple spiders:
There dwelt great creatures in spider form such as lived once of old in the Land of the Elves in the West that is now under the Sea, such as Beren fought in the dark ravines of the Mountains of Terror above Doriath. All light they snared and wove into impenetrable webs. Pale-fleshed, many-eyed, venomous they were, older and more horrible than the black creatures of Mirkwood.47
But then the draft suddenly shifts to talking about only one spider, whom he named Ungoliant/Ungoliante. She was "huge as a wild beast"48 and otherwise much as Shelob is described in the published version of the chapter rather than like his description of the Mountains of Terror spiders to whom he had previously compared her.
Tolkien abandoned that draft and created another draft, Version 2, which continued to use the name Ungoliant for the giant spider. But partway through Version 2 he started using the name Shelob.49 He wrote a letter asking Christopher Tolkien's opinion of that name on 21 May 1944.50 He also went back and annotated the two drawings he'd made of the spider's lair on pages of the manuscripts. He labeled them "Shelob's Lair" even though the texts referred to the spider as Ungoliant.51 After that he made no more major changes to his concept for the Shelob portion of the story. By the end of May 1944 the chapters of the Cirith Ungol story were in more or less their final form.52
Since Tolkien's earliest writings, Ungoliant's fate had remained obscure. Why he resurfaced the name Ungoliant for the spider in Versions 1 and 2 of the Cirith Ungol passage after thirty years of repose is unknown. He does seem to have struggled with how frightening to make the episode, based on his sense that the Hobbits would have simply refused to enter an area as "unendurably horrible" as he tried to make the spider's lair.53 Perhaps he was considering Mordor as the place to which Ungoliant had bolted in the First Age, since he had after all not yet written about her encounter with Eärendil.54 Her presence on the border of Sauron's domain would have unbalanced the narrative considerably, given how Melkor himself had required his Balrogs to get the better of her,55 and Sauron was a lesser power than Melkor. At any rate, Tolkien thought better of it and created a second named great spider, less fearsome than her mother but still a horrific monster. It is possible that the surviving poem fragment concerning the battle between Eärendil and Ungoliant,56 which also dates to this decade, may have been written after he rethought the idea of situating Ungoliant on the border of Mordor.
John Rateliff's discussion of "The Children of Ungoliant" in The History of the Hobbit57 is the most sustained single treatment of giant spiders in the legendarium. Beyond that, discussions of Shelob and her mother find their way into critical literature (particularly of the Jungian variety) as exemplars or archetypes of dark feminine creativity, most often in dualistic contrasts with the Elves in general or Galadriel in particular. But a more intriguing aspect of their nature is much less examined. They seem to have been able to create darkness so profound that, in the case of Ungoliant, even the mightiest among the Valar could not pierce it.58 Like the ultimate origin of Ungoliant, this unnatural ability is an impenetrable mystery in Tolkien's theology, and very little secondary literature even touches on it.
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Lindariel has been a Tolkien fan for nearly five decades and a fandom author for nearly six months. She is Team Vairë and enjoys wearing obscure JRRT fangirl tees. Her happy place is a mallorn tree. When she's not reading or writing, she might be tablet weaving Tengwar inscription bands or planning a Tolkien garden.
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