The Tale
They move on up the path under
a sky perhaps only just a little less than ‘utterly black,’ Frodo and Sam side
by side and Gollum going on before, through twisting pillars of stone towards a
great grey wall looming ahead. As they approach it, Sam comments on the stench,
growing stronger and stronger.
At last they come right up
to the looming stone wall, and there is a cave. ‘This is the way in,’ said
Gollum softly. ‘This is the entrance to the tunnel.’ Here is the origin of the
stench; it flows out, ‘a foul reek, as if filth unnameable were piled and
hoarded in the dark within.’ Frodo asks if this is the only way through and Gollum
insists that it is.
Sam suspiciously asks if
Gollum has really gone through this foul hole? But then maybe he doesn’t mind
bad smells. Gollum’s eyes glint. They don’t know what he minds, do they? But
Gollum can bear it, and he’s been all the way through. And now the hobbits must.
It’s the only way. Sam still wonders about the smell. It’s like a hundred years
of Orc ‘filth’, piled up and stored. But Frodo says if it’s the only way, they
must take it. They take a deep breath and enter.
In just a few steps they are
in utter darkness, darker even than when they passed through Moria. There,
there was a sense of space and of air moving. Here it is stagnant and close and
echoless, as if the darkness were a black vapor, pouring over them and being
breathed into their lungs, covering over even the memory of light and color in
their minds. But they can feel the tunnel. Surprisingly smooth and going upward.
But it is so wide that, each keeping a hand on the opposite wall, Frodo and Sam
are separated in the dark. For a while they can hear Gollum going ahead of them
into the dark.
But that fades away as their senses grow duller in the dark. Every now and then their outstretched hands feel other passages gaping, left and right, and sometimes something like ‘hanging growths’ brush them unseen in the darkness. And the smell gets worse and worse until it seems the only sense left them, ‘and that was for their torment.’
Suddenly Frodo feels a void
gaping in the rock wall, bigger than any they’ve felt yet, with a blast of
foulness and malice that almost knocks him over. Sam does fall forward, but
Frodo drags him up and urges him on. All their peril is flowing from this
gap. They must pass it. They stumble forward, six hard-fought steps, then they
seem to have passed the gaping void. But a new difficulty appears.
The tunnel has forked, left
and right, into two equal paths, with no indication of which to take. ‘[A]
false choice would almost certainly be fatal.’ They have been struggling so
hard just against the darkness they have not noticed their guide has
disappeared.
Frodo calls for Smeagol, but
the name falls dead, echoless and flat. There is no answer. Sam mutters that
this must have been Gollum’s plan all along. Sam threatens the absent creature
that if he ever lays hand on Gollum again, he’ll be sorry.
They try the left-hand way,
but find it blocked by stone: right or wrong, they must take the right-hand
path. ‘And quick,’ Sam panted. ‘There’s something worse than Gollum about. I
can feel something looking at us.’ They have not gone far up that way when
suddenly they do hear something behind them: a long, venomous, bubbling hiss.
They turn at bay and stare into the blank darkness behind them, waiting for
they know not what.
As Sam’s hand goes to the
hilt of his barrow-blade, he thinks of old Tom Bombadil, and wishes he were
near them now. Then in his anger and black despair a memory of light and color
comes to him, and he seems to see, distant and clear, ‘as in a little picture
drawn by elven-fingers’, the memory of Galadriel giving the Fellowship gifts,
and he hears her voice as she presents Frodo with his gift.
The bubbling hiss, a
creaking as of enormous joints, and the hideous stench grows ever nearer. In
desperation Sam finds his voice and cries out to Frodo to remember the Lady’s
gift. ‘The star-glass! A light to you in dark places, she said it was to be!
The star-glass!’
‘The star-glass?’ muttered
Frodo, as one answering out of sleep, hardly comprehending. ‘Why yes! Why had I
forgotten it? A light when all other lights go out! And now indeed light
alone can help us.’
Bits and Bobs
The narrator notes that Gollum
does not mention the tunnel’s name, Torech Ungol, which is Sindarin for ‘spider’s
lair,’ or more colloquially ‘Shelob’s Lair.’ Shelob was originally going to be
named Ungoliant, like the giant spider in The Silmarillion, but was
changed to be Ungoliant’s 'last unhappy child'. ‘Shelob’ is simply ‘she + lob’, lob
being an English dialect word for spider (see Bilbo’s taunting ‘Lazy lob!’ in The
Hobbit); cob is a related word, as in cobweb. How or even if Gollum really
knew the Elvish name is unknown.
The black vapors and
blinding darkness still recall the shadows that Ungolint spews forth to snare
and entrap her prey in the old tales, woven of 'Unlight'. ‘Gross, palpable darkness’ as Tolkien expresses
it in The Hobbit.
A hundred years of ‘orc-filth’
rather delicately hints at piled orc excrement as an indication of how bad the
stench is.
The tiny picture of a
memory, ‘as if drawn by elf-fingers’, does not indicate the tininess of the
fingers but of the skill and delicacy of the artist.
That the name ‘Smeagol’
falls dead in the darkness may be a subtle hint that in bringing them to Shelob’s
Lair, the better part of Gollum has died.
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