Analysis
Darkness opposed to the light
The critic Joyce Tally Lionarons writes that Tolkien constructs the Elves and the spiders such as Shelob as polar opposites, the Elves good and bright, the spiders evil and dark. [5] Milbank writes more specifically that the ancient Shelob's adversary is another ancient female character, the elf-queen Galadriel. Galadriel both chooses not to be "She-who-must-be-obeyed" by rejecting Frodo's offer of the One Ring, and gives Frodo her light (the Phial of Galadriel) which enables the hobbits to defeat Shelob. [3]
Patrick Grant, a scholar of Renaissance literature, saw Shelob and Galadriel's character pairing as fitting the opposition of Jungian archetypes. Frodo's anima is the Elf-queen Galadriel, who is opposed by the evil giant female spider Shelob. Frodo's Shadow is the male Hobbit Gollum. All of these, along with oppositions between other characters in the story, create an image of the self. [4]
Insatiable evil
Jane Chance compares Shelob with the wizard Saruman, stating that both are "monsters" that live in "towers"; they have similarly structured books in Lord of the Rings, one ending in a military attack on Saruman's tower, Orthanc; the other, in the hobbits' venturing into Shelob's lair in Cirith Ungol. On the other hand, she writes, while Saruman's evil is in his mind, Shelob's is in her body. [7]
Chance stresses Shelob's "gluttony", one of the traditional seven deadly sins, consisting of an "insatiable appetite"; her laziness, since the Orcs bring her food; and her "lechery" with many bastard offspring. Chance compares Shelob with the guardian of the gateway to Hell, noting that in John Milton's Paradise Lost , Satan mated with his daughter, Sin, their offspring being Death, constantly lustful for his mother: [7] [8] but Tolkien in one place describes Shelob as Sauron's cat rather than his daughter. [7] The scholar of literature George H. Thomson similarly compares Shelob to Milton's Sin and Death, noting that they "serve neither God nor Satan but look solely to their own interests", as Shelob does; she is "the Death and Chaos that would overcome all". [1]
Sexual monster
The Tolkien scholar Carol Leibiger writes that Shelob is presented as a disgusting female monster in the story. [9] The Anglican priest and scholar of religion Alison Milbank adds that Shelob is undeniably sexual: "Tolkien offers a most convincing Freudian vagina dentata (toothed vagina) in the ancient and disgustingly gustatory spider Shelob." [3] Milbank states that Shelob symbolises "an ancient maternal power that swallows up masculine identity and autonomy", threatening a "castrating hold [which] is precisely what the sexual fetishist fears, and seeks to control". [3] The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance mentions "Sam's penetration of her belly with his sword", noting that this may be an appropriate and symbolic way of ending her production of "bastards". [7]
The scholar of children's literature Zoë Jaques writes that Shelob is the "embodiment of monstrous maternity"; Sam's battle with Shelob could be interpreted as a "masculine rite of passage" where a smaller, weaker male penetrates and escapes the vast female body and her malicious intent. [10] The Tolkien scholar Brenda Partridge described the hobbits' protracted struggle with Shelob as rife with sexual symbolism. [8] She writes that Tolkien derived Shelob from multiple myths: Sigurd killing Fafnir the dragon; Theseus killing the Minotaur; Arachne and the spider; and Milton's Sin in Paradise Lost . [8] The result is to depict the woman as a threat, with implicit overtones of sexuality. [8]
| Tolkien's image | Implications |
|---|---|
| Sauron's cat | woman as "graceful, sensual, and aloof" |
| Spawning broods of monsters | sexual overtones: fertility |
| Underground lair | womb |
| Tunnels to lair | "female sexual orifice" |
| Cobwebs at entrance brushing against Frodo, Sam | pubic hair |
| Frodo cuts cobwebs ... "a great rent was made ... swayed like a loose veil" | tearing of the hymen |
| "Soft squelching body" | sexually aroused female genitals |
| Folds of skin | labia |
| Swords | phalluses |
| Sam "held the elven blade point upwards, fending off that ghastly roof; and so Shelob ... thrust herself upon a bitter spike. Deep, deep it pricked" | erection, penetration |
Not all commentators have agreed with the sexual associations detected by scholars such as Partridge. The Tolkien scholar Daniel Timmons wrote in Mythlore in 2001: "The obsession of reading the Shelob episode as a sexually violent encounter, rather than as an archetypal struggle between human and monster, likely reveals more about the decadent social attitudes of the critics, rather than those of Tolkien". [11] Timmons accepted the possibility of a "subtext of the fear of female sexual appeal", and agreed that the text might "function in the literary tradition of clashes between man and female monsters, with the attendant sexual innuendos", but called it "disingenuous or perverse" to assert that this was the "main or dominant impression". [11]
