Ungoliant: Is She Still Alive? | Tolkien's Four Endings Explained
Is Ungoliant still alive? What happened to the spider who drank the light of the Two Trees? This Tolkien deep dive follows the answer across fifty years of drafts, because the Silmarillion gives her one sentence and the famous line about her fleeing south was never printed at all.Tolkien wrote four endings for Ungoliant, and they can be dated. Eärendil hunts her down in 1926. She abides yet in 1951. She devours herself in the late 1950s. For a few weeks in May 1944, the creature waiting for Frodo and Sam above Cirith Ungol was still named Ungoliant, until a letter to Christopher Tolkien split…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.