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after all, if you live a good neighborhood, and there's a really bad neighborhood located a pretty fair distance from you, do you decide to to start a difficult and very dangerous crusade to clean up the bad neighborhood, or do you simply avoid going there? ...99% of the population would probably just say "Don't go to that neighborhood and you'll be fine." They probably wouldn't see any reason to go fight and kill her, risking and losing lives in the process, when all she was doing was hiding out in an area almost nobody went to, guarding a land that nobody cared about visiting. Easier just to let it lie, they would think.
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How true is that? I completely agree, I mean, why should the men of Gondor put themselves at risk when the threat is (relatively) distant? They had a great sense of self-preservation is all. After all, fighting a giant spider (no matter how old she is) can't be very conducive to living a long life.
And, to another point, if they did decide to do something about Shelob, who's to say they could actually beat her? In TTT, the very last chapter when Sam is listening in on Gorbag and Shagrat, the orcs
say that no one has ever injured her (or to use orc-slang, "stuck a pin in Shelob"). Apart from giving the impression that Hobbits are tough little creatures, this statement goes to prove that Shelob is extremely resiliant. I highly doubt, even if they did try to do anything, it would have much of an effect, except to give Shelob an exceptional amount of food to put in her "storeroom". [img]smilies/evil.gif[/img]
[ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Sapphire_Flame ]