What was Shelob, and more importantly, what was Ungoliant?

[obloquy]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I'll say it how I like thanks, but do read what has been posted instead of rushing ahead to 'make your point'. Where did I say the Void or the darkness was 'evil'? Where do I say Ungoliant is 'evil'? In fact I'm saying quite the opposite, that Eru created all these things if we take him as Omnipotent, and if Eru is the creator god of this place then he can't be 'evil' as we mere mortals understand it.

By positioning Ungoliante in opposition to Iluvatar you appeared to be implying that she was the Bad to his Good. If you intend merely to define her without judgment as Unlight (stripping away also the judgment of Iluvatar as Good) then my disagreement is lessened, but I agree with Thinlo and Legate and believe that you accord her more importance than she is due.

It's not a bad point for discussion, however, since it creates an interesting trinity in Iluvatar, Melkor, and Ungoliante: Iluvatar and Ungoliante at opposite ends as Light and Unlight, and Melkor all over the middle, not as Darkness (sorry Legate), but rather as Nihil: creative power inverted. Still, I think that defining Melkor in this way creates an overlap with Ungoliante's status as Unlight and the exaggeration of her importance begins to show more clearly. Melkor is the Enemy, not Ungoliante, and I think that describing Ungoliante as "unlight" without judging her evil is glib: Light and Life go hand-in-hand, as you point out; so, then, do Unlight and Death. If Melkor was evil, it is because of his extinguishing of light and life, and therefore Ungoliante too must be evil as this is her sole purpose.

As for the point of Iluvatar, as creator, being the source of Melkor's theme and its "evil" manifestations, I have posted my thoughts elsewhere: 1, 2, 3

Ha! In being so reductive you miss the essential irony inherent in Tolkien's conceit of this all being translated from existing texts. Of course we know in our superior position as the reader that Tolkien made this all up - but at the same time, an essential element to what he made up is that it isn't made up. Therefore in one sense, as Legate suggests, Eru does have the power to create without Tolkien's influence. These are the fuzzy edges which make Tolkien's work so attractive.

No, I do not miss that at all. It has nothing to do with the question I was answering. You asked:

Can we as modern readers with critical minds ever truly think that this has a separate existence to Tolkien?

And I pointed out that you had just said:

We still cannot rule out the chance that there are other existences than Arda, which may have been created by Eru.

Either we view Tolkien's world as a living thing, the histories of which Tolkien merely transmitted to us, leaving open all kinds of possibilities that he neglected to mention, such as the possibility that "there are other existences than Arda...created by Eru." Or we view it as a finite story, complete despite gaps in our knowledge because what we have is all that Tolkien wrote, in which case there is no possibility of "other existences than Arda..." because Tolkien never directly created them or even implied them.