Spiders

There was a sinister side to the spiders of Middle-earth that entered it with the monstrous Ungoliant in the years before the First Age. A gigantic creature of spider-shape, it was she who destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor by sucking the light out of them, and escaped with Melkor into the lands of Middle-earth. There other great spiders already dwelt. Though Ungoliant disappeared into the far south, she left the northern lands infested with her offspring. During the First Age, the mountains of the Ered Gorgoroth were infested with these monsters, and became a place of dread.

Beren fought some of the spiders of Nan Dungortheb, possibly Shelob herself, when he passed through to enter Doriath.

The most infamous of Ungoliant's children lived far to the south and east of the Ered Gorgoroth, on the borders of the land of Mordor. This was Shelob, who haunted a network of tunnels watching the pass of Cirith Ungol, making a living on hapless Orcs and anyone else who happened to come down the passage. She had offspring of her own, smaller than she but with a cruel intelligence, that spread throughout the Ephel Dúath and the Eastern hills, spreading as far north as Dol Guldur and Mirkwood. The return of the Necromancer seemed to have emboldened the spiders' hungry tendencies. It was creatures like these that Bilbo Baggins encountered, and after fighting them he gave his sword its name Sting.

Tolkien says of Shelob, "Most like a spider she was," [emphasis added], and the offspring of Ungoliant differed from normal spiders in respects beyond their enormous size. Bilbo sees the Mirkwood spiders' eyes as "Insect eyes," and Shelob's eyes are "clustered" and "many-windowed", with "a thousand facets", like insects' compound eyes. However, normal spiders do not have compound eyes. Tolkien may not have been over-concerned with the difference between spiders and insects, as in the same chapter of The Hobbit he refers to spiders as "hunting and spinning insects". Another difference is that when spiders grow, they moult their skins, but Shelob's hide was "ever thickened from within with layer on layer of evil growth." Yet another difference is that Shelob has a "beak drabbling a spittle of venom," but normal spiders don't have beaks.

Tolkien never depicts the venomous attack of his giant spiders. He repeatedly describes Shelob as "stinging" and having a "sting". That has been taken to mean a sting like that of a wasp or a scorpion, which normal spiders do not have. However, once the narration mentions her "bite", and in the quotation from "Letter 163" in the "Inspiration" section below, Tolkien used the verb "sting" in the rare sense of a spider's envenomation. Possibly he thought of Shelob as biting, or he did not want to be specific about what his spiders did.

In Sindarin, the word for "spider" is ungol. It is found in such names as Torech Ungol, Ungoliant, and Cirith Ungol.

In Gnomish, one of Tolkien's early conceptions of an Elven language, the word for "spider" is cing or cingwin (a struck-out word was gung). A deleted Qenya word for "spider" was ung-we.

In a song, Bilbo Baggins taunted the spiders of Mirkwood with the name "Attercop" which the spiders found insulting. "Attercop" is an obsolete English word for spider, and can figuratively mean a malignant, ill-natured person.

Tolkien made inconsistent comments on his feelings about spiders. In a letter to W. H. Auden (quoted more completely below), he wrote, "I do not dislike spiders particularly, and have no urge to kill them. I usually rescue those whom I find in the bath!"

However, in an interview with Jan Broberg in 1961, Tolkien said, as translated by John-Henri Holmberg, "I don't like spiders. It's not a pathological fear, but I rather won't have anything to do with them."

Likewise the writer Richard Lupoff asked Tolkien whether the giant spiders in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books had inspired Shelob, and Tolkien replied in a letter:

Tolkien was bitten by a spider that he called a tarantula (often said to be a baboon spider, an African member of the tarantula family) when he was a small boy in South Africa. Many writers have suggested that the incident underlies the horrifying and deadly giant spiders in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien saw no reason to accept that explanation, and he specifically said that his purpose in putting spiders into The Hobbit was to scare his son Michael, who had a fear of them. But some commentators have avoided committing themselves to saying the analysis must be false, as seen also in the quotation from Humphrey Carpenter's biography below, and Tolkien did not commit himself either.

Regarding the spiders in The Hobbit:

1980: Der Hobbit (1980 German radio series):

The spiders of Mirkwood are played by Uta Hallant and Lieselotte Rau.

1982: The Hobbit (1982 text adventure game)

In the text adventure game, spiders don't make any explicit appearance, although you will see "Pale Bulbous Eyes" as you and your party travel along the Old Forest Road. If you stay on the road for too long, something will leap down from the trees and kill you.

2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:

See Shelob: Portrayal in adaptations

2007: The Lord of the Rings Online:

Non-player (NPC, computer controlled) spiders are found in a number of areas of Middle-earth. Players can play a spider in the Player-versus-Player (PvP) area of the Ettenmoors once the player reaches level ten. Spiders in The Lord of the Rings Online have the ability to root and spit poison from a distance.

The appearance of spiders vary from zone to zone for NPC spiders and from rank to rank for player controlled spiders. They all look like very large spiders from the size of a cat up to the size of a large elephant.

2012-4: The Hobbit film series:

The spiders of Mirkwood are portrayed in the first two films, An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. In the former, they attack Radagast's dwelling in Rhosgobel, but are driven away by him. Radagast discovers that they came from the ruins of Dol Guldur (implying that they are drawn to the power of the Necromancer lurking there), and deduces that they are descendants of Ungoliant. In the latter film, their role is faithful to their portrayal in the novel. As in the book, they are capable of speech (although Bilbo is only capable of understanding them while wearing the Ring). When one of the spiders screams about how Bilbo's Elvish blade "stings" it, it is then that Bilbo decides to give his weapon a name.

2017: Middle-earth: Shadow of War:

See Shelob: Portrayal in adaptations

1. Esta ficha se ha importado inicialmente de TolkienGateway.net el día 29/05/2026.