The Lord of the Rings: The Choices of Master Samwise (Part Four and Last)

The Tale

Shagrat is antsy. He and his lads from Cirith Ungol were called out an hour ago because the Nazgul were uneasy and spies were feared on the stairs.

Gorbag tells him that two days ago their ‘Silent Watchers’ around Minas Morgul (perhaps the invisible eyes that Gollum feared; perhaps evil spirits bound to the stone of the statues guarding the bridge to Minas Morgul) were uneasy too. But with the Witch-King leading the army out to attack Gondor the higher-ups were too busy to pay attention to the reports. But what was Shagrat up to? Wasn’t he supposed to be guarding things anyway?

Shagrat retorts that they knew funny things were going on: lights and shouting and all. But Shelob was ‘on the go.’ They saw her and her Sneak.

What is the Sneak? A ‘little thin black fellow; like a spider himself, or perhaps more like a starved frog.’ Gollum, of course. Shagrat reveals that Gollum was let go from the Dark Tower years ago, and they were ordered to let him pass. And he seems to have some sort of bargain with ‘Her Ladyship’. Anyway, Shelob was very active. Perhaps her ‘Sneak’ had brought her a present. The Orcs didn’t dare interfere. Nothing gets past her when she’s on the hunt. And she got the spy in the end.

Got him? Gorbag asks. That little guy? There’s obviously another one that was with him and is still at large. Somebody cut the cords, and somebody ‘stuck a pin in Her Ladyship’. Someone is on the loose, worse than ‘any other damned rebel that ever walked since the bad old times’.  Shagrat asks him what he thinks it is.

‘By all signs, Captain Shagrat, I’d say there’s a large warrior loose, Elf most likely, with an elf-sword anyway, and an axe as well maybe’ … ‘Sam smiled grimly at this description of himself.’

Shagrat thinks Gorbag is taking too pessimistic a view of things. Anyway, his job right now is to take a look at the fellow they have got. Gorbag thinks they won’t find much on him. His companion just went and ‘left him lying: regular elvish trick.’ He claims dibs on him if there’s any ‘fun’ to be had with their find. But Shagrat has his orders. ‘Any trespasser found by the guard is to be held at the tower. Prisoner is to be stripped. Full description of every article, garment, weapon, letter, ring, or trinket is to be sent to Lugburz at once, and to Lugburz only. And the prisoner is to be safe and intact, under pain of death for every member of the guard, until He sends or comes Himself.’

‘Stripped, eh?’ said Gorbag. ‘What, teeth, nails, hair, and all?’ No, he’s to be kept safe until Lugburz can have him. What good will that do? asks Gorbag. He’s dead; he might as well just ‘go in the pot’ for supper. Shows how much you know, retorts Shagrat. Shelob doesn’t eat dead meat or drink cold blood. When she binds her victims with cords, she means to have them later. But first she gives them a dab of poison to stop them from struggling. This fellow isn’t dead!

Sam reels at the news, as if the world has been turned upside down. He chastises himself for the mistake, for not having enough hope. ‘Don’t trust your head, Samwise, it is not the best part of you.’ But what can he do now but listen to find out more?

The same thing happened to old Ufthak, Shagrat continues. They found him hanging up, awake and glaring. They left him there; no sense meddling with Shelob’s prey. The ‘little filth’ will wake up feeling a bit sick, but otherwise alright … if Lugburz would leave him alone. Gorbag laughs. If they can’t torture him themselves, they can at least torment him with tales about what awaits him.

Sam’s fury is growing, both at himself and at the ‘filth’ who have captured Frodo. ‘Never leave your master, never, never: that was my right rule.’ He bangs at the door with Sting, to no avail, but by its blazing light he can see a dark blank space above the stone door, a way over it’s ponderance, only about twice as high as himself. He leaps up and scrambles over and rushes down the tunnel, weariness forgotten and sword blazing.

He hears the two Captains ahead, and they sound quite close. Shagrat says that he’s putting the prisoner right at the top of the tower. He doesn’t trust all his lads, or any of Gorbag’s, or Gorbag either ‘when [he’s] mad for fun.’ He’ll be safe there.

Sam yells that they’re ‘forgetting the great big elvish warrior that’s loose!’ He races around a last corner but finds he’s misjudged the distance. The orcs are still some ways ahead of him, just silhouettes in the red glare beyond. The path runs straight up at last, to great wide double doors at the base of the tower. The others have already taken Frodo in, and Gorbag and Shagrat are almost there. There is a burst of blaring horns and clanging gongs and harsh voices singing. Sam’s shouts are drowned out. The orc captains pass the threshold.

‘The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.’ 

‘Here ends the second part of the history of the War of the Ring.

The third part tells of the last defence against the Shadow, and the end of the mission of the Ring-bearer in THE RETURN OF THE KING.’

Bits and Bobs

There is some speculation about whether the ‘Silent Watchers’ near Minas Morgul are the same sort of thing as the Watchers at the gate of Cirith Ungol, which we will see later, or simply unseen presences. There is some later example in the Legendarium with how the Druedain (Woses) can place a kind of awareness in a statue, with their Watch-stones (see Unfinished Tales).

Here we have confirmation that, despite what Gollum himself believes, Sauron let him loose on purpose, perhaps to just let him do some mischief, but more likely to be followed to see if he would lead them to the Ring. That Gollum was able to elude his trackers, however, is a tribute to his craftiness.

Some have speculated that Gorbag talking about the ‘bad old days’ of the last great Siege means that they might have been alive since then, and that therefore Orcs live as long as Elves. But it seems to be just a way of saying things, as we might say “It was the bloodiest battle we have known since Gettysburg.” And Tolkien has stated elsewhere that Orcs actually live shorter lives than the lives of ordinary Men.

For the Orcs, of course, ‘Elvish’ is the worst term of calumny. Elves are traitors and rebels.  To leave Frodo lying is a typical ’Elvish trick’, even though they have done the same thing with ‘old Ufthak’, though he was still obviously alive. Tom Shippey has noted that Orcs do have morality: they just don’t pay attention to it or apply it for themselves. Like a lot of humans.

Gorbag judges what the ‘warrior’ must be like by the damage that’s been done, and rates Frodo by his size. This leads him into some seriously wrong evaluations.

The Orcs use two Cockney colloquialisms: ‘Garn!’ (‘Go on’ with you!)  and ‘Nar’ (never).

Sam needn’t have berated himself: if he had stayed with Frodo, they would have both been captured, and the Ring found. I wonder if the fact that Shagrat’s instructions explicitly mention to look for any rings is significant. Might Sauron have had some inkling that a new Ring-master might sneak up and try to attack him? I also wonder if Sam’s tricky hearing of how far away the Captains were has something to do with the augmented hearing the Ring has been giving him.

At this point Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher: “I have got the hero into such a fix that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty.”

And that brings me to the end of the ‘labour’ and difficulty of The Two Towers. Looking back, I see I’ve been working on this stretch (from ‘Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit’ to ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’) for about six months and ten days. I’m going to take another break again, until the end of July, I think.

And what is that figure behind Sam? The idea of 'the great elven warrior'?

 

The Lord of the Rings: The Choices of Master Samwise (Part Three): Bits and Bobs

 

Bits and Bobs

          So Sam sees how the world looks when you have the Ring on, how the physical world becomes shadowy and ‘spiritual’ things gain definition. The Orcs become ‘a phantom company’ and their torches ‘pale flames,’ while the Ring, charged as it is with Sauron’s power, is an ‘orb of hot gold’ and Sauron’s probing will is acutely felt.

          Tolkien continues to give his Orcs unpleasantly suggestive names: Shagrat sounds like ‘a shaggy rat’ and Gorbag is a ‘bag of gore (blood)’. But they refer to themselves as Uruks, not Orcs or Goblins: Uruk is the singular, Uruk-hai the name for Orcs in the Black Speech.

          Shagrat hails Gorbag with ‘Hola!’ which is not of course the Spanish greeting. The use of hola and its variations was in origin just a word easy to shout to get someone’s attention. Hello was just such a word, until it was decided it would be the way to answer a telephone; then it became an all purpose greeting. Before that greetings were more like Good Day or God Bless You, but now we ‘will answer to Hi or to any loud cry.’ Variations of hola have been listed as “halloo, hallo, halloa, hello, hillo, holla, holler, hollo, hollow, and hullo." Give me a holler.

Other Orc exclamations are Hai! Hai yoi! Ya Hai! Ya Harri hoi! Ya Hoi! Since the Ring seems to give ‘understanding of tongues’ and Sam does not translate them, they may be just meaningless exclamations, similar to the goblin cries in The Hobbit: Ya hey! Ya-harri-hey! Ya hoy! As the Orcs ‘gabbled and yammered after the fashion of their own kind,’ they are said to be ‘a babel of baying voices.’ The word is, of course, from the biblical story of The Tower of Babel, where God confused the languages of the people trying to build a tower up to heaven. It seems an odd cultural intrusion into the Middle-earth mythos, like Tolkien’s use of dryad earlier.

Sauron tried to devise a single language for all his minions at one time, called the Black Speech, but with the passing of time and separation of tribes the Orcs were soon divided into their own tongues, and used a debased form of Westron (Common Speech) when they needed to communicate with each other.  With the Ring translating, there’s no telling what the Orc leaders are using here.

As The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion points out, ‘[Sam’s] weariness was growing but his will hardened all the more’ is an echo of the Northern ethic expressed in The Battle of Maldon, which Tolkien translated as ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.’

The power of the Nazgul lies in fear, not only bringing it to their enemies but using it to motivate their troops. Gorbag says they give him the creeps. His comment on what the Nazgul do for punishment reminds me of the Witch King’s threat to Eowyn later in the story: ‘He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye’, a fate he assures her would be worse than death.

The Orcs have to be careful about their treasonous talk of setting up on their own. They fear spies and squealers in their own ranks, and one gets the feeling that, if necessary, they would rat on one another if it came to be in their best interest. They have no faith in the propaganda of their higher ups, or in their competency to handle affairs. Tolkien notes elsewhere that Sauron was aware of such traitorous thoughts, but merely laughed at them. But the Orcs are right. ‘Something has slipped.’ And, in their busy plans, the higher-ups have not been paying enough attention yet.

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

 

The Tale

‘The world changed, and a single moment of time was filled with an hour of thought.’ With the Ring on, Sam’s sight is dimmed, but his hearing grows more acute. He can hear the crack of stone and Shelob bubbling in misery far away in her lair and the cries of Orcs getting nearer. But around him shapes are no longer dark but grey and hazy. Everything except the Ring, which hangs heavy on his left hand and glows like an orb of fire. ‘He did not feel invisible at all, but horribly and uniquely visible, and he knew that somewhere an Eye was searching for him.’

Sam cowers against the wall as the Orcs grow clamoring near him, ‘grey distorted figures in a mist.’ And they pass him by; he is invisible. He cowers as this group of Orcs meets the group below. And he finds that he can understand them as they greet each other. ‘Perhaps the Ring gave understanding of tongues or simply understanding, especially of the servants of Sauron … Certainly the Ring had grown greatly in power as it approached the places of its forging[.]’ But it does not confer courage. He lies low and listens carefully.

The troops are led by Gorbag, from lower down, and Shagrat, from the tower, who is in command as the pass. The two trade insults and challenges for a moment, but then the other Orcs discover something: Frodo’s body. ‘Lying right in the road. A spy, a spy!’

Sam is suddenly snapped out of his cautious posture. He belongs at Frodo’s side; he never should have left! Even though he is sure Frodo is dead, he’s heard tales of Orcs doing terrible things, even to bodies. There are only a hundred and fifty of them! [Maybe a little exaggerated, but close.] He’ll probably be killed and the Ring found, but the Council will have to understand.

But Sam is weary, very weary, and he finds he cannot rush up upon the Orcs. He sees them gathered around something and searching bent down near it like dogs seeking a trail. He just drags forward, and is about to draw Sting, even knowing that its fire will reveal his presence, when the Orcs suddenly lift up a body and carry it away with cries of ‘Ya hoi! Ya harri hoi!’ They have Frodo and they are carrying him back to the tunnel. They have no fear of Shelob appearing tonight.

Sam cannot catch up with them; Orcs travel fast in their tunnels, and this is one they know well. They are hastening back to the tower, happily gabbling over the wounding of Shelob and their prize. Two voices seem closer to him as Sam struggles forward. The two leaders, Shagrat and Gorbag, are hanging behind to have a private talk.

The lads are making too much noise, but that’s all right; ‘[Shelob’s] sat on a nail, it seems, and we shan’t cry about that.’ Shagrat thinks they’ve had a stroke of luck, they’ve found something Lugburz [the Dark Tower] wants. Gorbag wonders why; the spy looked Elvish, but puny. What’s the harm in such a creature.

Shagrat suggests that they take a look for themselves, but Gorbag nixes the idea. He says something’s gone wrong, something they’ve not been told about. Even the ‘Top Ones’ can make mistakes. The Nazgul, and even Lugburz, are troubled. But they should go a little further and talk in private. There are snoops and informers everywhere.

There is a rumble and Sam tries to follow them, but he suddenly finds a stone blocking the way, just as he and Frodo had found before. The Orcs got through somehow, but he can’t. He listens at the stone, desperate to follow his Master’s body, and hears the two conferring together. Gorbag (who seems to be from Minas Morgul) is talking about the fast communications between all of Sauron’s towers, faster than anything can fly. But he asks no questions about the Nazgul. ‘Those Nazgul give me the creeps. And they skin the body off of you as soon as look at you, and leave you all cold on the other side.’ But they are Sauron’s favorites. Working in Minas Morgul, city of the Ringwraiths, is no fun. Shagrat says he should try it up here with Shelob for company.

Gorbag wishes they could go off and set up on their own, like the old days, just a few trusty lads and plenty of loot handy. No big bosses. Shagrat agrees, but Gorbag says it’s unlikely. And the other side hates them even if they aren’t with the bosses. But even the Biggest Boss can slip, and then it’s the poor Uruks who have to set things right.

Note (Not Bits and Bobs Yet, Just a Note)

I had meant to get to the end of the chapter today, but I'm just too tired, too tired to even write up Bits and Bobs. Perhaps I will do that this evening, or I may wait until I get to the end of the chapter (and, even more tantalizing, the end of The Two Towers). At any rate, when I do reach the end, I mean to take a break from LOTR, at least until the end of July. To that end, I may have even more LOTR posts during the week, instead of just on Monday. It's all kind of up in the air for now.  

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

The Tale

In the waning light of evening, Sam crawls back to check on the fallen Frodo. As he was running eagerly forward, Shelob had ‘stung’ him swiftly in the neck. Now he lies pale and motionless, not responding to Sam’s call of ‘Master, dear master!’ Sam listens a long time without any answer.

Then he quickly cuts away the binding cords and lays his head against Frodo’ chest and lips, but can hear neither heartbeat nor breath. He rubs Frodo’s hands and feet and feels his forehead, but all is cold.

‘Frodo, Mr. Frodo!’ he called. ‘Don’t leave me here alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo! O wake up, Frodo, me dear, me dear. Wake up!’

Anger overtakes him and he starts stabbing the air and hitting the rocks and yelling challenges, until his anger wears out. He comes back to Frodo and looking at him, suddenly recognizes his vision in the Mirror of Galadriel, where he thought Frodo was sleeping. But now it’s obvious that he was dead. At the thought Frodo’s face seems to go ‘a livid green’. Black despair overwhelms Sam and he bows down, night coming into his heart and for a while he knows no more.

When Sam looks up again there are complete shadows around him; he can’t tell how long he was out of it. ‘The mountains had not crumbled, nor the earth fallen into ruin.’

Sam wonders what he should do now. Then he remembers something he had said at the beginning of the journey, something he hadn’t understood himself at the time. I have something to do before the end. I must see it through, sir, if you understand. Should he leave Frodo behind, unburied, and go on?

He begins to compose Frodo’s body, folding his hands and wrapping his elven cloak around him. Sam lays his own sword, the barrow blade, at Frodo’s side, with the lebethron staff on the other side. He leaves him the mithril coat but must take Sting and the Phial of Galadriel with him if he is to go forward. After all, Frodo did lend him the ‘star-glass.’

But Sam can’t leave him just yet. If only he can find the strength to tear himself away. If once he could, he’s chase Gollum to the ends of the earth for vengeance and then kill him. But that would accomplish nothing. He briefly considers killing himself, but ‘that was to do nothing, not even to grieve.’ But he has a long, lonely journey ahead, all the way to the Cracks of Doom. To do that, he must take the Ring from Frodo. That is why the Council of Elrond gave Frodo companions, so the Quest wouldn’t fail. He wishes he wasn’t the last left.

But he has been thrust forward. If he doesn’t, the Thing will be found on him, and that’s the end of the Shire and all the good places he’s seen on their journey. He can’t go back for advice. He has to make his own choice. ‘But I’ll be sure to go wrong: that’d be Sam Gamgee all over.’

He stoops and undoes the clasp of the chain that holds the Ring, kisses Frodo’s cold forehead, and slips the chain over his master’s  head. There is no change in Frodo’s face, and that more than any other sign convinces Sam that Frodo is truly dead and has ‘laid aside the Quest.’ He bids Frodo farewell. If he has one wish it would be that after all is done, he could return and find Frodo again. ‘And then he’ll not leave you again.’

He puts the Ring on its chain over his head, and the sudden weight drags his head down. ‘But slowly, as if the weight became less, or new strength grew in him’ he stands up and finds he can bear the burden. Sam lifts up the Phial in tribute and in its gently burning light ‘Frodo’s face was fair of hue again, pale but beautiful with an elvish beauty, as of one who has long passed the shadows.’  With that bitter comfort he turns, hiding the light and stumbling into the dark.

He goes forward a few steps, and then he is right under the shadow of the orc-tower. Before him is the Land of Mordor, and behind him is the blot of darkness where Frodo lies. He takes a few heavy, reluctant steps onward, but suddenly stops. There are orc-voices, both ahead and behind, and the sounds of tramping feet and harsh shouts. There are red torches coming out of the tunnel behind him. He is caught. He has delayed too long.

‘How could he escape, or save himself, or save the Ring? The Ring. He was not aware of any thought or decision. He simply found himself drawing out the chain and taking the Ring in his hand. The head of the orc-company appeared in the cleft right before him. Then he put it on.’

Bits and Bobs

Frodo is ‘stung’ (bitten? True spiders don’t have stings, but then Shelob is only ‘most like a spider’ in form) on his neck, right where his invulnerable mithril mail can do him no good whatsoever.

In his panic and fear, Sam forgets to address Frodo formally as Mister. In The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, it is noted that ‘me dear’ is a Cornish form of address, used by everyone to everyone and not a special endearment, although Frodo is obviously dear to Sam. The real-life ‘Gaffer Gamgee’, on whom Sam’s father is based, lived in Cornwall, so this informal address would come naturally to him. Sorry, shippers.

Also it is noted that Sam’s period of unconsciousness lasts from morning until almost evening. The Orcs have waited a good long time before they decide it’s safe enough to investigate. I’d be cautious around Shelob myself.

In his despair Sam briefly considers suicide, either by stabbing himself or throwing himself into a chasm. ‘But that was to do nothing, not even to grieve.’ This is a direct repudiation of the Anglo-Saxon custom of faithful retainers ‘joining’ their masters in death. Sam also rejects vengeance on Gollum as an adequate motive to go forward. Tolkien admired many aspects of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but as a Christian rejected these pagan motivations. Sam does, however, leave Frodo ‘grave goods’, of staff and sword, cloak and mail.

Sam seems to have come to think of Galadriel as some kind of genie, able to grant all wishes. ‘If the Lady could hear me’, he’d wish to come back and find Frodo again.

Frodo’s face being ‘beautiful’ in death echoes a rather Victorian motif, that ‘Death is the Mother of Beauty.’ Leonard Wolf, both in his A Dream of Dracula and The Annotated Dracula, remarks how it had long been noted that ‘weathered faces lined in pain’ will relax into peaceful lines after the struggle of life is over, restoring a remembrance of youth and calm, especially in cases of ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis). The Ring has certainly been ‘consuming’ Frodo. But that seems past. When he doesn’t respond to the Ring being taken from him, it convinces Sam more than ever that he is dead.

Sam puts the ring on rather abruptly, without thinking too much about it. He is, of course, driven to it by necessity, but it seems a rather easy decision. Is it perhaps part of the Ring’s secret prompting? Here come some more Orcs again. 

 

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.