Here be Spiders!

Melkor and Ungoliant destroying the Two Trees

I don’t think there’s a single more fascinating monster in the entire Legendarium than the Spider. The Spiders are all spawn of Ungoliant, the Mother of all Spiders. Ungoliant allied with Melkor to destroy the Two Trees, and is said to have drank the Light from these. Unsatiated by the Light of the Two Trees, she demanded that Morgoth turn over the Silmarils, the last source of the Two Trees’ Light in the World. On Morgoth’s refusal, however, she tortured Morgoth using her webs. Morgoth’s Balrogs came to his rescue and chased her off, and she then bred with other Giant Spiders, spawning the Spider race as one of the most fearful enemies of Middle-Earth. The most famous of the Spiders is Shelob, who made her nest near Mordor and tried to eat Frodo and Sam on their quest to destroy the One Ring.

There are two conflicting theories about who exactly Ungoliant is. The Book of Lost Tales suggests that she is a primeval creature, who is even older than the Valar themselves. She arose not from the Song of the Creation but rather from the Void itself. Here, she is seen as a creature of pure darkness and chaos. A conflicting theory from Morgoth’s Ring suggests that she was a fallen Maiar who served Morgoth, but soon abandoned him to live alone in Avathar. She is, in this theory, shown to be initially afraid of Morgoth, and only acquired the power to stand up to him after consuming the Light of the Two Trees. I think the former theory is more appropriate, for a few reasons. If Ungoliant was indeed weaker than Morgoth, there would be no reason for him to need her help, and not simply destroy the Two Trees himself and claim their Light. Also, the idea of abandoning Morgoth makes little to no sense. In a world where Melkor’s discord during the Song of Creation is the source of all evil, there should be no Evil that is not under the direct control of Melkor. Thirdly, Ungoliant’s power exceeded even that of Morgoth’s. She was able to torture him, and it took an entire host of Balrogs to counter her. Fourthly, her greatest spawn, Shelob, is shown to be independent from Sauron too. Fifthly, a quick reading of the chapters in The Two Towers where Shelob is seen show her as a fundamentally different Evil from Sauron and the like. None of Tolkien’s normal metaphors and imagery to describe Evil apply to Shelob. Thus, I believe Ungoliant (and the other Spiders) are beings of chaos, and darkness that originated from the Void before Arda.

The reason I find Spiders to be the most interesting monsters in the Legendarium stems straight from this fact: their difference in origin.

To understand the role of Spiders in the Legendarium, we must turn to Tolkien’s essay, The Monsters and Critics. In this essay, Tolkien draws an important distinction between the role of Northern Gods and Monsters(which are tied to Norse myth), and those in the Southern mythos. In the Southern mythos,

The gods are not the allies of men in their battle against these or other monsters.

Certain men and certain gods may be on the side of Good, and others will fight on the side of Evil. No one side is predetermined to win, or be particularly better than the other. These Gods are outside of Time itself, and they need not battle for their own survival: every battle they fight is for the benefit of the Good peoples. If all this sounds familiar, it is because this is the archetypal form of Gods in epics. The Greek and Roman pantheons are textbook examples of this. More to the point, the Valar follow this trope too. They are extremely uninvolved with the actions of Middle-Earth, and never fight for their own survival. The one battle where we do see the Valar is only after pleading from Earendil and the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth, to help them fight Morgoth. Atop this, Morgoth is clearly a Valar, who happens to be on the side of evil. Further, not all Children of Illuvatar are on the side of Good. A large host of men fight for Morgoth, and Orcs, Trolls, Dragons, and Wargs that fight for Morgoth aren’t inherently evil, but have rather been corrupted by Melkor to be so.

The Spiders depart from this. Ungoliant, instead, follows the Nordic/Northern archetype for a monster. In this style of writing, Monsters are entirely unrelated to the Gods. They are physical manifestations of Chaos and Unreason, of the Void that predated the Gods. The Gods, in this world, are powerless over the Monsters, and struggle against these Monsters is the only purpose of mankind and the Gods, to prolong their inevitable doom. Tolkien clearly uses Nordic myth at a variety of places in his books, the primary being the similarity of Dagor Dagorath to the ultimate prophecy of Ragnarok in Nordic myth. Ungoliant, and the Spiders, are the only ‘Monsters’ in the true, Nordic sense of the word. No other creature in the Legendarium is inherently evil. The Orcs, Trolls, and the other creatures of Morgoth are not monsters, for they aren’t otherworldly in their origin, but rather are a direct or indirect offspring of Morgoth himself, a Valar. In this sense, they are Evil, but they aren’t Monsters, for whom the motivation to do Evil is primeval in nature. For Ungoliant and her offspring, Evil is not a choice or a corruption of their true selves: it is necessary to their very being. Their insatiable hunger and thirst for Darkness and Destruction is not a choice, but rather an essentialist feature of their being. Thus, just by virtue of being Spiders(and not through any choice of their own), they are opposed to all that is Good in the World. Ungoliant, as a physical manifestation of the Void itself, is the closest thing to a Nordic monster in the Legendarium.

In this sense, Spiders are the only true monsters of the Legendarium.

-Rohan Kapoor