LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 10 - The Choices of Master Samwise

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bb

All I am saying is that my seeing 'applicability' of the Lilith legend to Shelob enhances my reading of Tolkien's myth-making. Just as the applicability of the hero's mystic marriage with the queen goddess brings richness to my reading of Aragorn and Arwen.

I wouldn't deny your right to find any kind of applicability in the text. My point was that I can see more differences than similarities between Shelob & Lilith. They aren't at all the same kind of being, & their origins, motivations & 'fates' are different. What I'm saying is that first of all, as far as possible, we should read & experience the story as story & let it work on us. We should enter into the secondary world to teh fullest extent that we can, leaving as much baggage behind as we are able to. Second, we should attempt, just as objectively & without attempting to psychoanalyse him/her, to appreciate the story the author is telling us, what he wants us to know. Then, in the third stage, we can step back & psychoanalyse text & author (& ourselves if we wish), deconstruct, reconstruct, play around with, make guesses about it, draw on it, throw it around or set fire to it - because this is the least important, & least necessary, stage of the process. It breaks the spell, it is the 'breaking of the text to find out what it is made of.

Lilith carries too much baggage with her, & the danger of allowing that (inevitable?) mental connection to have its head is that we start seeing Shelob as 'nothing but' Lilith, or at least of having our appreciation of Shelob & what Tolkien was doing with her & saying about the nature (or one aspect of it) of evil.

Dion Fortune once said 'All the gods are one God & all the goddesses are one Goddess' which is absolutely true on one level, & completely wrong on another. The Romans had a tendency on encountering the deities of another culture, to declare them as being merely versions of their own gods. Any foreign god that might have had an association with battle was immediately declared to be a manifestation of Mars, of love a manifestation of venus, of Smithcraft, of Vulcan, etc. This lead to some complete misallocations & misunderstandings which went on to cause confusion among mythographers of later periods. What do you do with a goddess like Bridget, who is patron of poetry, healing & smithcraft, for instance?

I can't help feeling that if you could ask Tolkien about his thoughts on the Shelob/Lilith debate he would acknowledge some similarities, many differences, & then ask you how you felt reading the story he wrote - did it frighten you, inspire you, & most of all, did it 'enchant' you enough that you were 'in the moment' as you read it. If you weren't, if while reading of Shelob you were thinking of Lilith (or the shopping, or what you were going to watch on tv in half an hour) then he's probably feel he'd failed as a writer.

This certainly is what happens when I read this chapter, I constantly cross reference it back to things I recall from previous chapters. And at this point, forward too, which takes me far out of bounds of that illusory, imaginary first reading.

I don't think Tolkien would have had a problem with that - in fact I think that's what he would have wanted you to do. But in doing that you are mentally remaining within Middle earth, not tripping off to the ancient Middle east.