Shelob

• 1. Introduction

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  Shelob was there, Tolkien writes, "before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr." She is the last child of Ungoliant to trouble the world. Her age makes the Dark Lord's ambitions look recent by comparison. Sauron knows she lurks in the mountain pass called Cirith Ungol. He leaves her alone, useful as a guard and occasionally fed prisoners. She answers to no one.

  The Orcs of the tower above her lair call her "Shelob the Great" and "Her Ladyship." Her servant Gollum they call "Her Sneak." Tolkien describes her as "drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness."

  She appears for only a portion of The Lord of the Rings, yet she has drawn decades of scholarly attention. Critics have placed her within debates about Jungian archetypes, medieval monster theory, and the literary history of the female villain. Even her name, assembled from two archaic English parts, hid a history that Tolkien himself felt needed explaining.

• 2. The Lair and the Ambush

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  Gollum had a plan. He led Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee into the tunnels of Torech Ungol, Shelob's actual lair beneath the pass, intending to let the spider do his killing. He had already encountered her on a previous trip through Mordor. He worshipped her, Tolkien tells us. He expected her to be a reliable instrument.

  Frodo drew the Phial of Galadriel when the spider cornered them, and its light forced her back. He then used his Elvish sword, Sting, to cut through the webs blocking the tunnel exit. Ordinary blades could not cut those webs; Sting could. Shelob's hide was similarly resistant to sword-strokes, with her eyes being the one vulnerable point.

  Gollum ambushed them from behind while they ran. He seized Sam and tried to strangle him while Shelob crept back and paralysed Frodo with her venom. Sam threw off Gollum and took up Sting. As Shelob moved to crush him underfoot, she drove herself onto the blade. The Phial's light, which Tolkien identifies as pure light from the Silmarils, nearly blinded her. She retreated into the dark.

  Tolkien records Shelob's fate with deliberate vagueness: "this tale does not tell" what became of her. Sam, believing Frodo dead from the venom, took the Ring and pressed on alone. He discovered the truth by eavesdropping on two Orcs: Frodo was alive but senseless, carried into the tower above.

  Her descendants survived her chapter in the story. The Great Spiders of Mirkwood had already been outwitted by another hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, years before Frodo's journey began.

• 3. Light Against Darkness

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  Joyce Tally Lionarons wrote that Tolkien constructed Elves and spiders as polar opposites: the Elves good and bright, the spiders evil and dark. Alison Milbank focused this reading onto a single pairing. The ancient Shelob's adversary, Milbank argued, is an equally ancient female character: the elf-queen Galadriel.

  Galadriel's contributions to what happens in the tunnel began long before the hobbits arrived. She rejected Frodo's offer of the One Ring, choosing not to become "She-who-must-be-obeyed." She then entrusted Frodo with the Phial that carries her light. Galadriel and Shelob never face each other in the text. Galadriel reaches Shelob through the hands of Frodo and Sam.

  Patrick Grant, a scholar of Renaissance literature, placed this opposition within a Jungian framework. In his reading, Frodo's anima is Galadriel and his Shadow is Gollum. Shelob, the evil female spider, stands as Galadriel's direct adversary in a web of character pairings. Grant argued that these oppositions, taken together, produce a composite image of the self.

  Milbank's analysis adds a moral dimension to the pairing. Galadriel chooses to give rather than to take, which is precisely what her rejected title described. Shelob takes everything and gives nothing. Both are depicted as ancient. Both are described in extreme terms. The opposition carries weight because neither figure is diminished by it.

  Jane Chance, approaching the same character from a different angle, was less interested in Shelob's divine adversary than in the particular vices written into Shelob's body.

• 4. Monster and Sin

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  Jane Chance drew a structural parallel between Shelob and the wizard Saruman. Both, she noted, are described as "monsters" living in "towers." Their narratives run in parallel across The Lord of the Rings: one book ends with a military assault on Saruman's fortress, Orthanc; the next ends with the hobbits entering Shelob's lair at Cirith Ungol. The symmetry is structural.

  Chance stressed that the two characters' evil operates differently. Saruman's corruption resides in his mind; Shelob's resides in her body. This distinction becomes the key to Chance's reading of Shelob against the seven deadly sins.

  Chance identifies gluttony as the clearest of Shelob's sins, describing an "insatiable appetite" that the Orcs feed by bringing her prey. Laziness follows naturally: she waits while others do the hunting. The third sin is lechery, evidenced by what the text calls many "bastard offspring." Chance also notes Tolkien's description of Shelob, in one passage, as Sauron's cat rather than his daughter, distinguishing her from the parallel figure in Milton.

  George H. Thomson compared Shelob directly to Milton's personifications Sin and Death from Paradise Lost. Those figures, Thomson wrote, "serve neither God nor Satan but look solely to their own interests," exactly as Shelob does. He called her "the Death and Chaos that would overcome all." Chance had noted the same Milton parallel but underlined a difference: Milton's Sin is literally Satan's daughter and lover; Shelob is not Sauron's offspring, only his occasional convenience.

  Brenda Partridge, another Tolkien scholar, took the analysis in a different direction, assembling a detailed table of the imagery across the Shelob episode and finding a sexual meaning in nearly every element.

• 5. The Monster and the Critics

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  Brenda Partridge traced Shelob's literary origins to four sources: the Norse story of Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir; the Greek legend of Theseus and the Minotaur; the figure of Arachne from classical myth; and Milton's Sin in Paradise Lost. The combined result, in Partridge's reading, is a composite female threat, assembled to depict the woman as danger with implicit sexual overtones.

  Carol Leibiger described Shelob as a "disgusting female monster." Alison Milbank went further, writing that Tolkien had created "a most convincing Freudian vagina dentata" in the character and that Shelob represents "an ancient maternal power that swallows up masculine identity and autonomy." Milbank named the threat Shelob poses a "castrating hold" of the kind that the sexual fetishist both fears and seeks to control.

  Zoë Jaques, a scholar of children's literature, read Sam's battle with Shelob as a "masculine rite of passage," in which a smaller, weaker male escapes the vast female body. Jane Chance added that Sam's method of wounding Shelob with a sword, and the outcome of that wounding, may be a symbolically appropriate way of ending her production of offspring.

  Daniel Timmons pushed back. Writing in Mythlore in 2001, he argued that the obsession with sexual violence in the Shelob episode "likely reveals more about the decadent social attitudes of the critics, rather than those of Tolkien." Timmons allowed a possible "subtext of the fear of female sexual appeal." He accepted that the text might function within "the literary tradition of clashes between man and female monsters, with the attendant sexual innuendos." But calling that the main point of the episode, he wrote, was "disingenuous or perverse."

  Tolkien himself addressed the origins of Shelob's name in his personal correspondence, and the explanation turns out to be simpler than the character.

• 6. She and Lob

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  Tolkien admitted, in a letter to his son, that Shelob is "of course only 'she + lob.'" Lob is an archaic English word for spider. The adjacent influence was Old English loppe, also meaning spider. Tolkien was careful to note that lob bears no relation to "cob" or "cobweb," as might be assumed.

  Tolkien had already deployed the full range of Old English spider-words in The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins sings two taunting songs to the giant spiders of Mirkwood. One runs: "Attercop, Attercop, Old Tomnoddy." Another: "Lazy Lob and Crazy Cob." The Old English word attercoppe derives from atter, meaning "poison," and coppe, meaning "head." Tolkien assembled his spiders' names from words the English language had carried for centuries before him.

  Shelob, unlike many of Tolkien's monsters, carries an English name rather than one in Elvish. She is "she" and "lob": a female spider, named plainly in the oldest available layer of the language. Her appearance on screen came much later, first in a BBC Radio production and eventually in cinemas, where she was given a body drawn from a spider that actually lives in New Zealand.

• 7. On Screen and in Games

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  Jenny Lee of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop voiced Shelob in the 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. The role posed a particular challenge: Shelob speaks no dialogue in the original novel. The production had to render her entirely in sound.

  Peter Jackson delayed her cinematic appearance until the third film in his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Her design was drawn from a real species: the New Zealand tunnel-web spider, a creature Jackson has admitted he hates. That antipathy apparently served the design well.

  Middle-earth: Shadow of War, a video game, gave Shelob the most dramatic departure from Tolkien's text. She appears as a major character who shape-shifts into the form of an attractive woman. Creative director Michael de Plater, responding to criticism of the choice, explained that Gollum and Shelob were "the unsung heroes of The Lord of the Rings." In his version, Shelob senses Frodo's weakness, makes a pact with Gollum, and acts to hasten the Ring's destruction rather than simply to feed.

  De Plater described Shelob as a dark counterpart to Galadriel. Both, he noted, manipulate lesser beings to achieve their ends, but Shelob is, in his framing, the more honest of the two. Jackson's design choice means the New Zealand tunnel-web spider has earned a permanent place in how the world imagines Tolkien's darkest mountain pass.