The forgotten Spiders of Mirkwood

[Nar]

Birdland, about those 'pointers,' would they have been barbed, steel-tipped pointers, coming right back at Shelob's clustered eyes? You do have a way with words! [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

Gwaihir, good question. I think part of the reason Tolkien didn't choose to mop up the mirkwood spiders or say if Shelob was killed or not:

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, ... until with hunger like death she spun once more her dreadful snares ... this tale does not tell.

was to leave some adventures for the fourth age to 'enjoy.' (!) I think there's a letter with a quote to that effect, but I can't find the quote. I'm not sure why the Mirkwood spiders did not appear in the Tale of Years, RotK, 'battle under the trees of Mirkwood, Thranduil repels the forces of Dol Guldur.' It's so compressed I can't tell if the spiders were just too cowardly & debased to get involved, or if they joined in as they could. They would have felt no more loyalty to Dol Guldur than Shelob did to Mordor, but I'm sure they would have emerged for spoils had Dol Guldur won. Ungolient, mother of all these spiders, was very good at keeping her many-eyed head down while big bad Morgoth took the heat.

Considering Beren's, Bilbo's and Frodo's and Sam's encounters, Tolkien liked sicking giant spiders on his heroes so they could defeat the spiders cleverly and/or heroicly; I think he'd have liked the idea of future Shelob/Mirkwood-spider adventures in Middle Earth.

There's a Lost Tales version of Beren and Luthien's story in which they deal with spiders twice: not only does Beren make it by them to come into Doriath and meet Luthien, but after facing down both giant werewolf Carcharoth (sp) and Morgoth himself, they are trapped by spiders a second time. In that version, they're rescued by the hound Huan instead of the Eagles, but Tolkien seemed to have settled on the Eagles rescue/no spiders. It's a shame he didn't write more about Beren vs. the spiders in the mountains, I liked that part.