[hijack]Immediately I read that, I couldn’t help but think of: “Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”[/hijack]
With whom would Ungoliant (or Shelob, for that matter) mate? … the vision of Shelob putting on lipstick and eyeshadow and a slinky dress and hanging around in an orc-bar looking for a pickup is not one that the world is ready for.
I’d also like to interject that I was slightly disappointed in Jackson’s Shelob. She was just a giant spider. I was hoping for something like the balrog – a creature of shadow, whose webs were darknes, etc. But I guess that would have been hard to see, set in a dark cave. I got no problem with Shelob having a stinger in her tail, poison jaws, etc. She’s not a spider, she’s the great-grandmother of spider-like things. Let’s not forget that her children in Mirkwood can talk.
I don’t think it was that close. When JRRT referred to Shelob as “the last spawn of Ungoliant”, I think it was in the same sense that Aragorn is the last spawn of Elros. Not a literal child of the old matriarch, but a great-to-the-umpteenth grandchild.
As for Peter Jackson’s rendition of Shelob, the abdominal stinger bothered me, but not nearly as much as the anthropomorphic face. He should have made her look more like a spider, darn it!
{I have a fwiend in Mowdow named. . . . hmmm–how do you say “Bigus Dickus” in Quenya? Or in the Black Speech?}
Well, in the words of the old Haladim proverb, “Drûgs will get you through a time of no lembas better than lembas will get you through a time of no Drûgs.”
I’m not so certain. JRRT definitely indicated Shelob was a fell spirit in spider form, and his non-human spirit types were immortal. And he also posited Shelob fleeing the Wreck of Beleriand, so that takes Her Nibs back to the First Age. So while it’s not a certainty, Shelob certainly could the daughter of Ungoliant.
Quoting the old subcreator directly, we see that Shelob was
.
While it’s certainly open to interpretation, I’d not dismiss the most literal reading of this offhand.
In fact, “child” here pretty much has to be taken literally, since we know that Shelob had other descendants among the spiders of Mirkwood, some of which presumably survived her. And, of course, any descendant of Shelob would also be a descendant of Ungoliant. So “last child” can’t mean “last descendant”; it has to be literal.
However, it’s not certain that any of the spiders in Mirkwood at the time of The Hobbit, or any of those specifically encountered by Bilbo, were children of Shelob, or even descendants at all. I would imagine that the spawn of Shelob would form a sort of “spider royalty” (as would her consorts, except for the fact that she probably ate them), while Attercob, Lazy Lob, and Old Tomnoddy were probably just peon field soldiers. So we don’t need to imagine the bloodline (or ichorline, I suppose) degenerating quite that far in a single generation.
Did you know he was such a language geek that he created the word “Emnet” (as in Rohan’s East and West Emnet) and defined it as the Mercian word for steppe or prairie. He felt this is what the Mercians would have called a steppe if they had ever actually seen one.
But, England already had a mythology. Tolkien knew that since he drew from it as well. The Balrog is based on Balor of the Fomorians, enemies of the Tuatha Da Danan.
