Monday, June 24, 2024

The Lord of the Rings: The Choices of Master Samwise (Part One)

 


The Tale

Frodo is already lying on the ground, bound in Shelob’s webs from shoulder to foot, face up, his elven blade Sting dropped useless by his side. Shelob is already starting to drag him away. She is so busy with her prey she doesn’t even notice Sam until he’s almost on her.



‘Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage.’ He jumps forward with a yell and scoops up Sting in his left hand and charges. ‘No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate.’

Disturbed out her gloating over Frodo, Shelob turns her malicious stare to Samwise, but before she knows it the hobbit shears away a claw from one of her feet and getting under the arches of her legs, stabs upward, putting out one of her eyes.

Now right under her and out of the reach of her ‘sting’ and her claws, Sam stands under her putrid, stinking stomach. He slashes at her underbelly, but his strength cannot penetrate to anything vital underneath her ‘knobbed and pitted hide.’ No blade could, ‘not though Elf or Dwarf should forge the steel or the hand of Beren or of Turin wielded it.’ Poison froths from the wound and the stench makes Sam dizzy. Shelob splays her legs, raising up, ready to crush Sam under her huge bulk. But Sam is still standing.

He drops his barrow-blade and holding Sting in both hands pointing upward, he braces himself to ‘fend off that ghastly roof.’  Shelob ‘with the driving force of her own cruel will, with strength greater than any warrior’s hand,’ impales herself upon Sam’s upthrust blade, even as her bulk starts to crush him to the ground.




‘[I]n all her long world of wickedness’ Shelob has never known such pain and none of her victims, human warrior or Orc, has ever lasted so long against her attack. She heaves herself up and springs away from ‘the bitter spike.’ She stands a few paces away, green ooze dripping from her damaged eye, and contemplates her attacker.

Sam has fallen on his knees next to Frodo, head reeling with the foul stench, and tries to focus. Just a few paces from him his enemy crouches, ‘beak dribbling a spittle of venom,’ gathering for another leap, ‘this time to crush and sting to death.’ Sam sees his death in that gaze. He has little strength left for another defense.

But a thought comes to Sam, ‘as if some remote voice had spoken,’ and he reaches in and pulls out the Phial of Galadriel with his left hand. He murmurs ‘Galadriel!’, and then he remembers Elvish singing under the stars in his own beloved Shire and in the halls of Rivendell, calling to Elbereth. ‘And then his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language he did not know:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel

A menel palan-diriel,

Le nallon si di’nguruthos!

A tiro nin, Fanuilos!

And with that he staggered to his feet and was Samwise the hobbit, Hamfast’s son, again.’

With renewed spirit Sam yells at Shelob, calling her filth, and saying that they’re going on, but not before settling with her first. ‘Come on, and taste it again!’ ‘As if his indomitable spirit had set its potency in motion, the glass blazed suddenly like a white torch in his hand.’



It is too much for Shelob. The light enters her shattered eyes like lighting, filling the head of the beast of darkness with blasting fire. She has never known such pain, such an attack of light. She falls back, uselessly beating the air with her forelegs, turning her head and beginning to crawl away, back to her dark hole.

Sam follows, ‘reeling like a drunken man’ from dizziness, but Shelob is finally cowed. She flees jerking and quivering from Sam’s attack. As she finally slips her oozing, wounded belly back into her lair, Sam cuts a last stroke at her retreating legs.

‘Shelob was gone, and whether she lay long in her lair, nursing her malice and her misery, and in slow years of darkness healed herself from within, rebuilding her clustered eyes, until with hunger like death she spun once more her dreadful snares in the glens of the Mountains of Shadow, this tale does not tell.’

Bits and Bobs

I had hoped to cover this entire chapter this week, but that ain’t happening. Though I still hope to conclude it before June is over, perhaps posting on it more frequently in this last week. But again, we shall see.

Sam is likened, in a rather Homeric simile (“The typical Homeric simile makes a comparison to some kind of event, in the form "like a ____ when it ______."), in his ferocity to an animal defending its mate. This is a gift to the ‘shippers’ who want to make ‘Frodo+Sam’ a romantic item, but the phrase simply conveys to them (in their biased ignorance) the wrong cultural interpretation.

Beren and Turin are the two human heroes par excellence of The Silmarillion, tales of the First Age of Middle-earth. Beren faced many evil creatures of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, as well as spiders akin to Shelob. Turin killed a dragon, Glaurung. It is noted that Shelob has no ‘vulnerable spot’ like a dragon; even these two heroes could not have penetrated her hide with the best of weapons. Again, ‘oft does hatred hurt itself.’

Shelob’s ‘beak’ is likely a reference to her mandibles, ‘commonly referred to as "jaws", chelicerae may be shaped as either articulated fangs, or as a type of pincers.’ – Wikipedia. In common British parlance ‘beak’ can refer to any beaklike protuberance from the face. The fact that it’s frothing with poison suggests the ‘fangs’ interpretation. My brother John pointed out to me that many of these illustrations do show Shelob's horns, after I said that many don't.

As Tolkien notes in The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle, Sam’s inspired invocation in Sindarin Elvish can be translated thusly:

O! Queen who kindled star on star

White-robed from heaven gazing far,

Here overwhelmed in dread of Death

I cry: O guard me, Elbereth!

The words are strange to him. Inspired by those memories of Elvish singing? Given to him by one of the Valar, perhaps Elbereth herself? Who can say? Sam apparently didn’t know. To emphasize the descent from this exalted state he is called Samwise (‘half-wise’) son of Hamfast (‘home-fast’ or ‘stay-at-home’) the next minute. But (in universe) he must have remembered the words and had someone translate them for him.

And of course ‘in universe’ nobody can say whether Shelob died of her wounds or lived to weave another day. Although later Sam, his senses enhanced by wearing the Ring, hears her ‘bubbling in her misery’ somewhere far away in her lair.


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