The second half of the chapter shifts the descriptions to highlight the eerie aspects of the endless woods, dim rather than pitch-dark but full of disturbing features: the alluring sounds and smells and sights that lure the travellers off the path into disaster, the uncanny appearance and disappearance of the feasters, the spell of sleep that falls first upon the hobbit and then the chief dwarf. For more on this enchanted forest theme, see ‘The Vanishing People’ following Chapter IX.
(i)
The Children of Ungoliant
Like the dwarves, elves, goblins, wolves, and eagles, spiders had a long history in Tolkien’s mythology going back more than a decade before he started The Hobbit. They are yet another link back to the legendarium, another example of the foes and friends Bilbo encounters on his unexpected journey turning out, on examination, to be descendents of the servants and servitors of the first great Dark Lord or his foes. Even the Necromancer Bilbo’s group take pains to avoid (and rightly so, since he destroyed the previous dwarven expedition led by Gandalf’s father a century before) fits into the same category, being Thû himself, Morgoth’s lieutenant, who would soon gain the additional name of Sauron.1 Unlike the goblins and wolves, however, the spiders cannot rightly be called Children of Morgoth, because they descend not from the first great Dark Lord himself but from his sometime ally Ungoliant, the Spider of Night. Significantly, when the goblins and wargs march to war at the book’s climax, the spiders stay put, playing no part in the Battle of Five Armies – like Ungoliant before them and Shelob after they are essentially an unaligned evil (as Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings is an unaligned good).2
At first glance a spider, however large, does not seem a very epic opponent for our hero, but this is deceptive. Tolkien’s use of spiders as major villains and dire threats goes back to an earlier layer of the mythology, when a hound (Huan) could defeat elf-lords, a cat (Tevildo) ably serve as one of Melko’s more capable lieutenants, and a Spider (Ungoliant) plunge the entire world into darkness. Certainly Lord Dunsany, a major influence on Tolkien at that early stage, pits his heroes against huge man-sized spiders in ‘The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth’ ([1907]; collected in The Sword of Welleran [1908]) and also in ‘The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller’ ([1910]; collected in The Book of Wonder [1912]). The monstrous spider-demon destroys the hero in the latter, while in the former the great spider is one of the few foes that evades the hero and escapes, defeated yet alive. These examples may underlie the prominence Tolkien gives in his own works to monstrous spiders and their slayers. By slaying one of the Great Spiders of Mirkwood, Bilbo joins a very select company of Tolkienian heroes: Eärendel the Mariner, the original character in Tolkien’s mythos (featured in the 1914 poem that was the very first piece of writing set in what later became ‘Middle-earth’; see below), was a spider-slayer. So too was Beren, the character Tolkien most identified with (even to the extent of having the name carved on his tombstone). And of course the inestimable Samwise Gamgee, whom Tolkien in some moods considered ‘the chief hero’ of The Lord of the Rings (Letter to Waldman; Letters p. 161), was if not a spider-slayer then certainly the victor in an epic battle with one, dealing her a near-mortal blow. As with Tolkien’s eagles (see p. 222), the Spiders represented a mythological element that originally occupied an important but specific part in the story which, over time, grew as they found their way into other parts of the tales. In this case, Ungoliant’s killing of the Two Trees of Valinor was the primal element going back to the original Lost Tales: the scene in which she and Melko make their alliance, sneak into Valinor, destroy the trees of light, and escape altered in details and tone over decades of revision but remained the same in essence all through the long evolution of the story.3
It is to this ur-story that our manuscript refers when, early in the next chapter (p. 380), Balin angers the Elvenking by asking
‘Are the spiders your tame beasts or your pets, if killing them makes you angry?’
Asking such a question made him angry at any rate, for the woodelves think the spiders vile and unclean.
This elven distaste for spiders goes all the way back to ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (BLT II.10–11), where we are told
Tinúviel danced until the evening faded late, and there were many white moths abroad. Tinúviel being a fairy4 minded them not as many of the children of Men do, although she loved not beetles, and spiders will none of the Eldar touch because of Ungweliantë [Ungoliant].5
Of the four earlier appearances of monstrous spiders in the legendarium before The Hobbit, three involve Ungoliant, who in initial conception is less a physical creature than an embodiment of what an earlier century would have called ‘Chaos and Old Night’ (Alexander Pope, The Dunciad): Primal Night itself made incarnate in monstrous form. The Gnomish Lexicon of 1917 glosses one of her many names, Muru, as ‘a name of the Primeval Night. personified as Gwerlum [Gloom-weaver], or Gungliont [‘the Spider of Night’] (Parma Eldalamberon, vol. XI, pp. 58 & 43; BLT I.index & 153). Gwerlum and (Un)Gungliont are themselves two earlier forms of her Gnomish (Sindarin) and Qenya (Quenya) names; Ungwë Lianti/Ungweliante (‘Spider-spinner’) and Wirilómë (‘weaver-of-shadows’) are other variants of the latter, while Ungoliant is the ultimate form of her name in Sindarin. Christopher Tolkien’s index to The Book of Lost Tales part I identifies Móru as ‘The “Primeval Night” personified in the great Spider’ (BLT I.288), and the earliest text describing her and her lair bears out this conception:
a region of the deepest gloom . . . a dark cavern in the hills, and webs of darkness lie about so that the black air might be felt heavy and choking about one’s face and hands . . . here on a time were the Moon and Sun imprisoned afterward; for here dwelt the primeval spirit Móru whom even the Valar know not whence or when she came . . . she has always been; and she it is who loveth still to dwell in that black place taking the guise of an unlovely spider, spinning a clinging gossamer of gloom that catches in its mesh stars and moons and all bright things that sail the airs . . . [S]he sucked light greedily, and it fed her, but she brought forth only that darkness that is a denial of all light. (BLT I.151–2)
Ungoliant’s greatest deed beyond doubt was her destruction of the Two Trees of Valinor, which plunged the world into darkness. But in the early stages of the mythology she remained a threat even after withdrawing back into her underground lair in Eruman far to the south (‘Melko held the North and Ungweliant the South’; BLT I.182); we are even told that the sun and moon travel an equatorial path to avoid the peril posed by these two archfoes (ibid.). The Valar’s successful attempt to bring light to the world once again through the creation of the Sun and Moon (‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’, BLT I.174–206; see also Silm.99–101) was almost undone by the Great Spider, according to Tolkien’s outlines and notes for the (unwritten) ‘Tale of Eärendel’.
In this original version of Tolkien’s cosmology, implicitly evoked by the line in The Hobbit manuscript
The woodelves lingered in the world in the twilight before the raising of the sun and moon, and in the great woods that grew after sun rise
— p. 315; italics mine
(that is, after the sun’s first rising in the West), the Sun and Moon were ships bearing the last lights of the Golden and the Silver Tree. Guided by a guardian Maia (Urwendi and Ilinsor, respectively), each sailed above the earth and out the Gates of Night in the west, then doubled back and sailed ‘behind’ or under the earth each night to re-emerge again in the east for the next dawn – a conception borrowed from Egyptian mythology, where Ra sails the sun-barge through the Duat or Underworld each night, battling his way past Apep the Devourer, a great serpent who was for the Egyptians the embodiment of Chaos, to emerge triumphant at dawn each day (a mythic journey celebrated in the so-called ‘Book of the Dead’, a set of ritual texts known to the Egyptians as The Book of Going Forth by Day). Similarly, Tolkien projected a tale wherein Ungoliant ensnared the Sun in her webs while it sailed under the earth: with the result
that the Sun was no longer enchanted, only the Moon:
Urwendi imprisoned by Móru (upset out of the boat by Melko and only the Moon has been magic since). The Faring Forth and the Battle of Erumáni would release her and rekindle the Magic Sun.
—‘The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales’
(BLT II.286).
Unfortunately, this elusive plot-thread, which underlay several major prophecies in The Book of Lost Tales, never found full expression in a written story.6
Ungoliant’s only other major appearance in the mythos was to have occurred in ‘The Tale of Eärendel’ – but, as Christopher Tolkien observed, ‘the great tale was never written’ (BLT II.252) and the story is known to us only through extensive outlines and synopses in several Silmarillion texts. Thus, an early outline simply lists an encounter with ‘Ungweliantë’ as one of the major incidents on Eärendel’s great voyage into the Firmament but gives no details. The 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ is succinct, but specific, following Eärendel’s decision to sail seeking Valinor:
Here follow the marvellous adventures of Wingelot [Eärendel’s ship] in the seas and isles, and of how Eärendel slew Ungoliant in the South.
—HME IV.38.
The 1930 Quenta adds a little to this in its equally brief account:
In the Lay of Eärendel is many a thing sung of his adventures in the deep and in lands untrodden, and in many seas and many isles. Ungoliant in the South he slew, and her darkness was destroyed, and light came to many regions which had yet long been hid.
—HME IV.152.
But the Lay itself remained unwritten; the closest Tolkien ever came to telling Eärendel’s story lay in two sets of poems, the first a group of four poems dating from the inception of the mythology [1914–15] telling of Eärendel’s voyages to furthest East and West and his glimpses of the Gates of Night and of Valinor: ‘Éalá Éarendel Engla Beorhtast’, ‘The Bidding of the Minstrel’, ‘The Shores of Faëry’, and ‘The Happy Mariners’ (all printed in BLT II.267–76). The second group began as a single poem, ‘Errantry’ ([circa 1931–2]; published in Oxford Magazine in 1933 and later collected as poem #3 in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962]). This was slowly transformed through a dozen intermediate stages into the poem Bilbo sings in the House of Elrond, ‘Eärendil was a mariner’ (LotR.250–53). In his analysis of the chapter for the History of Middle-earth series (HME VII.84–105), Christopher Tolkien shows how his father recast the poem stage by stage. Most significantly for our purpose, in one of the intermediate versions he prints is the following account of the battle with Ungoliant, one of Eärendel’s greatest but most poorly documented deeds:
. . . unto Evernight [Eruman] he came,
and like a flaming star he fell:
his javelins of diamond
as fire into the darkness fell.
Ungoliant abiding there
in Spider-lair her thread entwined;
for endless years a gloom she spun
the Sun and Moon in web to wind.
She caught him in her stranglehold
entangled all in ebon thread,
and seven times with sting she smote
his ringéd coat with venom dread.7
His sword was like a flashing light
as flashing bright he smote with it;
he shore away her poisoned neb,
her noisome webs he broke with it.
Then shining as a risen star
from prison bars he sped away,
and borne upon a blowing wind
on flowing wings he fled away.
—lines 73–88 (HME VII.93).
This entire scene was deleted from the final typescripts of the poem, including the one that appeared in The Lord of the Rings.
The final appearance of the Great Spiders in the legendarium8 before Bilbo’s encounter with them in the wilds of Mirkwood is also the one closest to The Hobbit in tone and detail: Beren’s battles with giant spiders, descendents of Ungoliant. This scene was absent from most early versions of the Beren and Lúthien story,9 but it did feature prominently in the narrative poem ‘The Lay of Leithian’. In Canto III, lines 569–574 and 583–592, Tolkien describes Beren’s desperate journey from Taur-na-Fuin (the Forest of Night) to Doriath in these terms:
there mighty spiders wove their webs,
old creatures foul with birdlike nebs
that span their traps in dizzy air,
and filled it with clinging black despair,
and there they lived, and the sucked bones
lay white beneath on the dank stones—
... ever new
horizons stretched before his view,
as each blue ridge with bleeding feet
was climbed, and down he went to meet
battle with creatures old and strong
and monsters in the dark, and long,
long watches in the haunted night
while evil shapes with baleful light
in clustered eyes did crawl and snuff
beneath his tree
—(HME III.175–6).10
In the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, which glosses Taur-na-Fuin as ‘Mirkwood’ (HME V.282), this is replaced by a similarly vivid passage written about the time The Hobbit was published:
Terrible was his southward journey . . . There spiders of the fell race of Ungoliant abode, spinning their unseen webs in which all living things were snared; and monsters wandered there that were born in the long dark before the Sun, hunting silently with many eyes. No food for Elves or Men was there in that haunted land, but death only. That journey is not accounted least among the great deeds of Beren, but he spoke of it to no one after, lest the horror return into his mind . . . (Silm.164).11
Spiders or Spider-like?
As the preceding excerpts and quotes make clear, some of the details Tolkien gives when describing his spider-creatures do not correspond to real-world spiders. Leaving aside their size for the moment,12 the Mirkwood spiders seem to have compound eyes like an insect (a feature they share with Shelob – cf. LotR.747 – and the things that beset Beren), whereas true arachnids have eight small separate eyes. Then too whereas spiders have tiny specialized legs that act as mandibles or mouth-parts Tolkien’s spiders are described as having a neb (a now-obsolete word meaning bill or beak; ‘Lay of Leithian’, Eärendil poem) or beak (LotR.756). We are not told specifically how the Mirkwood spiders poison their prey, but both Ungoliant (Eärendil poem) and Shelob (LotR.755) are described as having stings, another insect rather than spider feature (real spiders poison with their bite instead). Finally, spiders grow by shedding their carapaces, much as crustaceans do, yet we are told that Shelob has ‘age-old hide . . . ever thickened from within with layer on layer of evil growth’ (LotR.755). Not all of these features can be shown to be shared by all of Tolkien’s monstrous spiders, but he takes pains to connect them: Shelob is explicitly linked to the Mirkwood spiders as their progenitor, and to Ungoliant as her progeny (‘last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world’ – LotR.750). Ungoliant, Shelob, and the Mirkwood Spiders all share the ability to spin black webs (hence Ungoliant’s epithet ‘Gloom-weaver’; note her ‘ebon thread’ on p. 330 and see also LotR.750 and p. 303 above), which is not so far as I am aware true of any real-world spider.13
It can (and has) been argued that when Tolkien describes Shelob as a ‘monstrous spider creature’ (Letters p. 81) or states that Ungoliant ‘[took] the guise of . . . [a] spider’ (BLT I.152; emphasis mine) this implies his awareness of the deviation; they are meant to be spider-like rather than actual spiders. This is certainly possible, but the evidence (such as it is) is against it: in a letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien wrote:
. . . I knew that the way [into Mordor] was guarded by a Spider. And if that has anything to do with my being stung by a tarantula when a small child, people are welcome to the notion . . . I can only say that I remember nothing about it, should not know it if I had not been told; and I do not dislike spiders partic
ularly, and have no urge to kill them. I usually rescue those whom I find in the bath!
—JRRT to WHA, 7th June 1955; Letters p. 217.
This little bit of autobiography is important because tarantulas do not sting: they bite14 – a small point, but nevertheless suggestive. Tolkien cannot be faulted for forgetting such a detail, since he was only a toddler when the incident occurred, but its significance is that his account shows that even years after writing The Hobbit he was under the impression that spiders have stings. This strongly suggests that Tolkien’s other departures from spider physiology were simple mistakes, however uncharacteristic, rather than deliberate changes for effect – unlike, say, the Nazgûl’s mounts, where he expressly stated that he was not attempting historical accuracy in his depiction but merely drawing on the ‘semi-scientific mythology of the “Prehistoric”’ as inspiration (JRRT to Rhona Beare, 14th October 1958; Letters p. 282).15
The History of the Hobbit Page 43
