[davem]

SHELOB

Shelob is a chip off the old block in many ways: ancient, insatiable, opportunistic, loyal only to herself (though she may inadvertently aid and abet the likes of Sauron and Gollum), unrepentant and fertile. JUSt as her mother made fleeting common cause with Melkor, Sauron's master, so does Shelob's hunger inadvertently serve Sauron's ends insofar as she provi des "a more sure watch upon that ancient path into his land than any other that his skill could have provided..." (17' 424). . Shelob is as fecund as Ungoliant, breeding and then cannibalizing her broods, her appetites unchecked, her matemal instincts non-existent. Her power is made explicit: "none could rival her, Shelob the Great" (TT 423), and Gollum is drawn into worshipping her and acting as procurer for her. His plan, of course, is to feed the hobbits to Shelob in the hopes that he can retrieve the ring and ..then we'll pay Her back" (IT 423). GolIum plans to wreak revenge on the bloated matriarch. Unlike her mother, however, Shelob is speechless: we never hear her speak, though Ungoliant converses briefly with Melkor at one point in the Silmarillion . Also unlike her mother (who ..sucked up all light that she could find...until no more light could come to her abode; and she was famished" [881]), Shelob is afraid of light: the light from the Phial of Galadriel makes her feel exposed rather than hungry: Finally, unlike her mother, Shelob is oblivious to the lure of jewels or rings. Ungoliant might have swallowed the ring, but Shelob is o~livious to history and culture and to the power of the Ring, oblivious to everything but her own primal hunger "Little she knew 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 mind or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the all hunger, with no ability to speak or reason and no transcendent values: a deliciously misogynistic conception. After Shelob emerges as a set of eyes, Frodo summons his courage and pursues Shelob, with the Phial in one hand and the spiderstabbing Sting in the other. Shelob backs doWn momentarily, allowing the hobbits to discover a "vast web." They try to hack at the web, realizing that it is their Phial that keeps Shelob at bay. They make a rent in the web and, prematurely, unag they are free.

Rowling's Aragog can be read as a revision of Tolkein's SheIob in a number of ways. One of the ways in which the gender of the authors manifests itself can be found in the differences between their most vividly portrayed arachno-monsters. Rowling transforms the dreaded monster from a female into a male; Rowling gives her spider the power of speech and logic (Aragog is not just a blind and malevolent appetite); Rowling de_eroticizes the scene of confrontation between Ihero(s) and spider; Rowling humanizes Aragog slightly by making him the patriarch of a family; most important, Rowling makes Aragog a grateful being-grateful for the empathy once shown to him by Hagrid. Whereas Shelob is able to enter into a legalistic, quid pro quo relationship with Gollum, Aragog, because of his gratitude for Hagrid's care and protectiveness toward him, has transcended his carnivorous spider's instinct and resolved never to eat Hagrid-nor to let his children eat Hagrid. Aragog is clearly Shelob's moral superior. Moreover, Aragog explains to Harry what happened fifty years ago when the Chamber of Secrets was last opened, offering a corrective to Voldemort's self-serving account of events and clearing Hagrid's name in the process. When Aragog finally gives his children permission to devour Harry and Ron, he is only acting as any conscientious parent would: prioritizing his children's best interests. But Harry and Ron never resolve to kill nrim; they seem to accept him as a denizen of the Forbidden Forest, while Tolkiel1 suggests that Shelob has been either killed by or seriously wounded in her confrontation with Frodo and Sam. ..
The spiders of Mirkwood help Bilbo conceive of himself as a worthy burglar, Shelob enables us as readers to see Frodo and Sam as independent fighters, and Harry's strength of will in the duel with Voldemort proves that Harry is an extraordinary boy. Tolkien's matrilineal family of spiders is clearly identitied as evil, although the intensity of the evil seems to attenuate with time, so that the spiders of Mirkwood are fairly tame IOmpared to their foremother Ungoliant. Juxtaposing Tolkien's she-spiders with Rowling's he-spider Aragog enables one to appreciate just bow deliciously mIsogynistic the conceptions ofUngoliant and Shelob are and just how ambivalent Tolkien is about the female body. Ungoliant and Shelob represent the dangers of unrestrained female appetites.Tolkien suggests that fecund females like Shelo't and Ungoliant are traitorous swallowers of everything from orcs to jewels to light to themselves. Rowling, by contrast, implies that actual spiders like Aragog fulfill certain positive long-term functions and simply need to be avoided if Harry Ron are to survive. The figurative spider Voldemort is Rowling's equivalent of Sauron: the ineluctable evil that both threatens the hero and enables the hero to define himself.

"Clicking its pincers menacingly": Arachnophobia, Gender, and the Transformation of the Hero in the Work of Rowling and Tolkien: ELLEN ARGYROS, (Concerning Hobbits & Other Matters)

She is, in fact, almost a parody of Sauron in certain of His aspects. Though Shelob, unlike Sauron, has no desire for slaves, willing or otherwise, and though there are hints of sexual appetite in Tolkien's presentation of Shelob, hints that appear in no other character, nonetheless the Dark lord and Shelob both serve to represent the far extreme of a single negative. The swollen, engulfing existence that Shelob desires is little different from the expanding reaches of Mordor' that the Dark Lord's destruction creates. Each brings darknch brings death. Each wishes for no other power than his or hers alone. Each is an example of appetite run amok:. "All living things" are Shelob's "food" (Tolkien, 1965aJ, and Sauron, we are told, "would devour all." What is emphasized by such statements is the sheer extent of Shelob's and Sauron's appetites, the insatiability each exemplifies. But in Tolkien's world it is not simply appetite that so moral gauge. Virtue or corruption can also be measured through the particulars of diet alone. To put it simply: baddies eat bad and the goodies eat good.
‘Eating, Devouring, Sacrifice & Ultimate Just Deserts’ Marjorie Burns. (Proceedings of the 1992 Centenery Conference)

Of course, these ideas have been discussed before - what did Shelob symbolise for Tolkien himself? Was she some kind of comment on his feelings about the ‘feminine’ - or simply about women? Or was she simply a horrific childhood memory ‘mythologised’ (‘seen through enchanted eyes’ as John Garth put it)?

Tolkien makes it clear that Shelob is not simply a big spider - she is ‘an evil thing in spider form’. In an early draft for the story we find an interesting statement:

The account of UngoIiant's retreat is largely illegible, but phra', can be read: 'She seemed... to crumple like a vast bag', 'her legs sagged, and slowly, painfully, she backed from the light away in the opening in the wall', 'gathering her strength she turned and with a last ..... Jump and a foul but already pitiable... she slipped into the hole’

CT comments:

The words 'foul but already pitiable' are read from a subsequent gloss of my father's. He gave up on the next word and wrote a q.uery about it; it may perhaps be 'scuttle'. The words 'but aIready pitiable' are notable. In TT there is no trace of the thought that Sheiob, entirely hateful and evil, denier of light and life, could ever be 'pitiable' even when defeated and hideously wounded.

I wonder whether this is more important to an understanding of what happens in this chapter as regards Shelob. Shelob is not a giant female, ‘she’ is evil made physically manifest - back to the idea of ‘incarnation’. The Light of Earendel, a ‘myth’ becomes physically real & present in this chapter, as does (& perhaps as a direct result of) the darkness of Evil being equally physically manifest. A cosmic battle between ‘Powers & Principalities’ has entered into the everyday world of Middle earth. Shelob must be an all consuming monster, unspeaking, irrational, because Evil in Middle earth is that way:

Melkor is a brutal coward, not a darkly glamorous Miltonic Satan. The more his wickedness waxes, the more his innate powers wane. By the end. he can only huddle stupidly in the dungeon throne room of his iron fortress. (The Universe According to Tolkien, Sandra Miesel)

Evil cannot be other than this monstrous negativity & so cannot be pitiable. And It is hardly fair to single out Shelob’s femaleness to make a point about Tolkien’s attitude to women, as his greatest ‘monsters’ are the two Dark Lords. Certainly Sauron & Shelob make a ‘pair’, but she is no worse than he.

More, hopefully, later.

Finally for now though, a few things that struck me in my reading of HoME. First of all, there’s the interesting idea, which Tolkien rejected, of having Gollum lead the orcs to Frodo’s body, which made me think of the obvious parallell with Judas leading the soldiers to arrest Christ. I can’t help wondering to what extent, as the story became more ‘mythological’, as Good & evil became more & more ‘solidified’ & grounded in the story, whether Tolkien had increasingly to fight against it becoming ‘allegorical’. Would such a blatantly Judas-like role for Gollum have increased the Christ-like nature of Frodo?

And a couple of questions: first, when Sam finds Frodo ‘dead’ he wishes to make a cairn over him, but can’t find enough stones.

'There were no stones for a cairn, but he rolled the only two he could find of a wieldy size one to Frodo's head and another to his feet.

Is this a primary world tradition placed in Middle earth? And does it tell us something about Hobbit funerary practices?

Second: Have we here an early reference to Sanwe in the conversation between ‘Gorbag’ & ‘Shagrat’:

, The Lords of Dushgoi have some secret f quick messages and they will get the news to Lugburz quicker than anyone you can send direct.'
...'I tell you, nearly two days ago the Night Watcher smelt something, but will you believe me it was nearly another day before they started to send a message to Lugburz.' How do they do that?' said Shagrat. 'I've often wondered.' 'I don't know and I don't want to ...'