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.

Sometimes a [whitefont] is just a [whitefont]

You know we were all thinking it, and I still spewed coffee when I read it.

The adjectives used to describe the horror bring to mind images of horrific, specifically female threats in various texts from Greek myth to the Tain. I'm not sure I could describe it any further without getting frustrated, because I'd have to dig up a lot of other books, and I'm already feeling twitchy, because it's frustrating to *not* be able to remember specific passages I can throw out in my defense.

However, it's something that bothers me about the passage, and always sort of has, even taking into account the biological need for the creature to be female.

You know we were all thinking it, and I still spewed coffee when I read it.

Happy to be of service. Coffee is always best as a projectile.