LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 10 - The Choices of Master Samwise

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Bethberry

It seems to me impossible to dictate a right way and a wrong way of reading, first of all. Yes, some books do have ways to be read which are more rewarding than others, and some readings do become dead ends, but all in all reading is a creative process as well as writing, and why dictate that some things must be held off?

I agree that to read is a creative process, and we do bring to the text our own experience. I've said this before, but it fits in again with what is being said here. We all interpret what we read, and certain parts of a text will resonate more than others; to some extent, the readers construct meaning to a text. But this is not to say that what we read into the text is necessarily correct.

To take the current chapter as an example, I do not read Shelob as Lilith, rather I see her as an immense creature with all the nastier traits of female spiders magnified. To me, she is the ultimate in scary spiders. Relating her to non-arachnid comparisons, my own equivalent to what we see in Shelob would be the black hole, reducing matter to nothing (as Shelob does when she eats), indiscriminate in that she swallows anything just as a black hole does. Ungoliant, her mother, even swallows Light just as a black hole does.

The other example which I read differently is the passage about Sam challenging Shelob:

Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master's sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate.

Rather than suggest to me anything about Sam's feelings for Frodo, this instead seems to me to be a metaphor for Sam's courage. A small creature in comparison to Shelob, he is filled with rage as his companion lies apparently dead, and rage often does allow a small creature to launch a fierce attack on a much larger one. Here I see Tolkien bringing in a metaphor from the natural world to describe the ferocity and desperation of Sam's attack. This also serves to explain how Sam manages to pull off the deed. When I read this I often think of how a little cat when cornered by a big dog will suddenly transform from being a ball of fluff to a raging creature.

Just two examples of how the text might be seen differently. Much has also been said here of how Galadriel is equivalent to the virgin Mary, which is again something I do not pick up on. I can see why many parallels are drawn, and though I do not always agree with them, I do like to read what other people see. I suppose it would be impossible to always know exactly what Tolkien's intentions were, so we cannot expect to be reading the 'right' thing into the text all of the time.

From the other point of view, I can also see that it is not always good to delve too deeply; sometimes simple pleasure is what we ought to get from reading, to be carried along with the fantasy. I suppose that this is the danger with such in depth analysis as we have here, it is all too easy to spoil the pleasure of reading by extracting every last drop of meaning. I know for myself that to study literature brought me dangerously close to disliking reading altogether; it took me some years to shake off the theorising (funnily enough it was very much the fashion to look at texts from a Freudian perspective at the time, which is possibly why I dislike Freudian analysis of literature), and thankfully return to the simple pleasure of reading. Now I have a happy balance of being able to read for fun, and analyse when it suits me, and more importantly, find what meaning lies beneath a text for myself, and decide for myself if it is relevant. That's enjoyable, and why I like these discussions on the Downs - nobody is telling us we are wrong.




More on Shelob now... How did she come into being? That she does not have the greed for Light that her mother had, suggests that she was not as powerful as her mother, perhaps the offspring produced when Ungoliant mated with a lesser male?

Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew, spread from glen to glen, from the Ephel Duath to the eastern hills, to Dol Guldur and the fastnesses of Mirkwood.

From what is said about Shelob, she also mates, and her offspring have spread through Middle Earth. Do these males come seeking her, or am I correct to read into this that she could in fact have mated with her own offspring from time to time? It does seem that she killed, maybe even ate, her mates and her offspring.