Ah, the cross-postiness. But Ple -- don't you think that's a reasonably accurate description of a spider from someone who is phobic of them? (I.e. heavy on the yucky.) I mean, if you blew up a normal garden spider to gigantic proportions, I would probably have described it mostly the same way. Without the genedred pronouns, I suppose, because normal garden spiders don't have consciousness or a major part to play in a novel.

Can you interpret for me specifically what makes that passasge disturbing to you?

If you switch everything to "he", does it lose any coherence past the biological?

To me? It seems to, but I've been filtering that passage through Freud for so long that it's hard to take that filter off.

That's the particular passage I'm thinking of, Nutty.

So the analysis is that this is his wife or his mother and not his attempt to describe a horror of the ancient world, channelled through his singular scholarship of the norse sagas? Ick. And no thanks.

Heh. X-posty with the avowedly freudian analyst

FWIW, I never interpreted Shelob as a manifestation of Tolkien's gender issues. Just his spider phobia.

I get nothing inherently feminine from that description, PMM. Nothing at all.

FWIW, I never interpreted Shelob as a manifestation of Tolkien's gender issues. Just his spider phobia.

Me too.

So the analysis is that this is his wife or his mother and not his attempt to describe a horror of the ancient world, channelled through his singular scholarship of the norse sagas? Ick. And no thanks.

No, it's just a feminized threat, using feminine signifiers. Which, of course, you see at least in the Irish sagas as well, IIRC, though it's been years since I've had to read them. (They have a lot of sex in them, though, and I've found that Connor the character maps fairly well to some of the main men.)

An actual garden spider blown up would remain stink-free and not squishy in the midsection. The rear of a spider, and my skin is crawling just typing this, so I hope you appreciate that my fear of spiders is about to send me into hysterics from picturing one in my mind, is firm, and larger rather than bloated, because bloated has different connotations.

Well, it's more than blown up -- it's horrorized. But I don't see the horror as being tied to its gender, and I'm curious to see where you do.

(and yes, sometimes a spider is just a spider. ) (Which almost scans if you change the emphasis to the final syllable.)

Ple, you know critters better than I do. I would have said bloated was just the right word, if it were a critter 8 feet in length. Also, true, to my knowledge spiders do not stink, but then, this is an Evil spider. And thus far in Tolkien, everything Evil has been stinky. Note how he never actually describes Strider as stinky, only hard-worn and liable to sleep in a hedge.

If Tolkien had described it as a spider that smelled kind of fishy, or something I could directly attribute to something feminine; and if she had been, I don't know, extremely moody or protecting her spawn or something stereotypically feminine, rather than just bloated, I think I would be moe willing to go with the monstrous-feminine approach.