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Originally Posted by Thinlómien
I have a nasty habit of making every powerful being whose origin is not clear a maia (fg. Tom Bombadil, Ungoliant). Otherwise they don't fit into my image of Arda... 
The latter part is probably true, though it was actually an accidental suicide by Shelob... Poor Sam. |
Actually, it was not accidental suicide. We aren't told if Shelob dies.
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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.
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Ungoliant cannot be considered Maia. She existed, possibly,
outside Illuvatar's creation, coming from the Void. Possibly She and He existed there together? As
SaucePanMan says, her origins are ambiguous. And those of Shelob simply replay with slightly more detail a similar kind of ambiguity.
in a rush. will return...