Spiders are Scary and Yucky, and Maybe Tolkien Agrees

I have a huge fear of spiders. I have identified as an arachnophobe ever since this enormous spider bit my ankle when I went camping with my dad when I was six-years-old. This event established my fear and hatred for spiders, and so when Edmund Wilson wrote in his review of Lord of the Rings that the monsters in the novel weren’t “scary”, I understandably felt upset and angry about this comment. Obviously, I may be biased when I say that the Mirkwood spiders in The Hobbit and Shelob in Lord of the Rings are horrifying monsters that young children should be afraid of, but even people who do not have arachnophobia would still claim to dislike spiders for many reasons. Even Tolkien himself sees how scary spiders can be, which may explain why Shelob, or even the Mirkwood spiders, are presented as frightening, threatening creatures Sam and Bilbo must overcome.

Seeing as spiders are animals that people naturally fear, it only makes sense that Tolkien feature giant versions of them in his novels. Tolkien could easily have just described the spiders in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as “giant spiders” that the protagonist of each story must defeat. However, in both books, Tolkien goes a step further by using as much vivid detail as possible when describing the spiders because he not only wants to help his readers visualize just how frightening they look, but also give each novel’s protagonist a giant obstacle they must overcome to reach their goals. For example, in The Two Towers, Tolkien describes Shelob’s appearance by writing, “But still, she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness” (Tolkien 707).

Beyond the scary detail Tolkien used to described Shelob and the other spiders in Middle Earth, what always scared me about the spiders when I was younger was how conniving and sadistic the spiders were. For example, when Bilbo first encounters the Mirkwood spiders while trying to free the dwarves who were caught in the spiders’ webs in The Hobbit, Tolkien writes, “…these loathsome creatures were speaking one to another. Their voices were a sort of thin creaking and hissing, but he could make out many of the words that they said. They were talking about the dwarves!” (Tolkien 194). Tolkien’s description showcases that the spiders are not just mindless monsters who are solely focused on wreaking havoc on the main protagonists, but intelligent creatures who have their own personalities. It would have been easy for Tolkien to simply have the giant spiders be dumb, dangerous creatures, and this would have been enough of an obstacle for Bilbo and company to triumph over. By having his spiders be intelligent creatures who have human qualities such as language, Tolkien’s spiders not only become more fleshed-out beings, but also much more dangerous threats that the protagonists must prevail over.

Even Shelob, who does not seem to speak in The Two Towers, is still an intelligent being who is capable of independent thoughts. Described as someone Gollum “bowed and worshipped” (Tolkien 707), Tolkien states, “Little she knew of or cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness could not contain her” (Tolkien 707). From this passage, Tolkien showcases that Shelob has no allegiance to Sauron and his cause of getting the One Ring back because she could care less about Sauron’s goals. She seems entirely uninterested with the War of the Ring because, to Shelob, it does not matter whether the ring is destroyed or not. Shelob has her own independent goal: continuing to find prey to feed on. Shelob’s independence from the main conflict of The Lord of the Rings is, in my opinion, what makes her so much more frightening because she is different from the other antagonists in the novel. Shelob is not like the primary villains like Sauron and Saruman in which they are primarily motivated in getting back the One Ring. She, instead, is only driven by her carnal desire to feed on those who dare enter her lair, regardless if they have the One Ring, which is ultimately what makes her such a terrifying entity.

With such vivid descriptions of the spiders’ physicality and personality, I always believed that Tolkien must have feared spiders himself, especially since he was bitten by one when he was younger. However, when reading Letter 163 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Tolkien seems to be indifferent towards them since he writes, “And if that has anything to do with my being stung by a tarantula when a small child, people are welcome to the notion (supposing the improbable, that any one is interested). 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 particularly, and have no urge to kill them. I usually rescue those whom I find in the bath!” (Carpenter 217). Therefore, while Tolkien himself may not have had any hatred toward spiders, perhaps there was something in his subconscious that would make him think of spiders when attempting to create of a creature of horror for his stories. As an arachnophobe, he certainly created the ultimate creature of horror for me as a child.

Overall, whether Tolkien had some hidden dislike for spiders or if it were simply to scare his children, I think most people would agree that spiders are a good creature to add to stories like these. Some may love them, but most people like myself think they are horrible monsters that have too many legs and are out to get us in our sleep. Regardless, whatever the reason may be for the inclusion of spiders like Shelob or however readers like myself may react to them, we must become like the protagonists in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and triumph over them. As Tolkien wrote in The Hobbit after Bilbo killed his first spider, “He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath” (Tolkien 193). In the end, Spiders are like any other monster in Middle Earth: they are fantasy monsters that both protagonists and readers must be courageous enough to face head-on.   

-TL