Latest / Mythmakers / She Had Many Exits From Her Lair - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 4 Ch 9

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She Had Many Exits From Her Lair - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 4 Ch 9 · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to MythMakers.
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  MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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  creators brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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  My name is Julia Golding and
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  today we have one of our sidecasts as we take an author's journey through The Lord of the
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  Rings.
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  And as an author, I'm looking at what I think J.R.R.
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  Tolkien is doing with this story
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  from the point of view of craft.
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  We've got quite a long way through because we have reached
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  chapter nine in book four of The Two Towers.
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  And the chapter title is Shelob's Lair.
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  So we're in
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  for a very dark time indeed.
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  Now, this chapter is relatively short.
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  And if you're looking at it
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  structurally, it is structured by the journey.
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  They approach and go into the tunnel.
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  They have
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  this nightmarish time inside the tunnel.
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  There's a kind of false dawn and a final battle on the
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  other side of the tunnel.
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  So it's basically in those three blocks.
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  Before we get to the tunnel,
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  though, how the chapter starts is we have this kind of nightmarish landscape that Tolkien is
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  describing as they reach the top of the stairs.
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  And what I want to sort of draw out here is,
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  notice how he is depriving us of so much.
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  This whole chapter is about deprivation until the
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  point at which light bursts in.
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  It's that contrast which is key.
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  And so we have an opening paragraph
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  describing a place that has no colour, other than sort of grey and black, no sound, and even
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  the view is shut out.
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  So it's like we're entering into this grey box.
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  What we do get is smell.
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  and that smell which becomes synonymous with a spider and with malice is key in this chapter.
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  So when they get to the tunnel entrance and we have a very ominous note here because Gollum
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  is speaking softly.
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  It's a very sinister touch.
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  A whispering villain is in many ways far more
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  sinister than one who shouts at you.
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  If you think about how Voldemort, for example, is characterized,
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  it's that high whispery voice that is used.
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  The person who bellows orders at you and shouts is
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  far less scary.
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  We have in this particular passage a rare editorial sort of interpolation.
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  So we are told something that Frodo and Sam are not.
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  So Gollum says where they are, but he did not speak its name.
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  And then the editorial touch here is Torek Ungol Shelob's lair.
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  Actually, Torek Ungol means, in translation, Tunnel of the Spider.
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  Now obviously, because they speak a bit of Elvish, if he'd said that, it sort of connects
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  back to that missed moment in the Faramir section where they talk about the Ungol is
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  mentioned and nobody picks up on it.
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  Here it's sort of better handled because they don't know the name of the tunnel.
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  If Gollum had said, oh yeah, we're going down the tunnel of the spider, they'd say, what
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  do you mean?
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  down there.
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  So they withhold that knowledge.
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  But the conceit is that this is put together
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  afterwards by Frodo and with the help of the other hobbits and his friends.
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  So that editor
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  in that framing device is, of course, the later Frodo, but we're not told he survives at this
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  point.
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  So that's just what's going on there, a sort of a nice bit of meta framing.
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  What I like here as well, just before we enter the tunnel, is the way that Gollum, who disappears
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  shortly, is still doing a wonderful deflection of what he's really up to by playing the martyr.
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  He tries to make everybody, particularly Frodo, feel that he is the victim.
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  So he has a final
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  flourish of his full wonderful Gollumness.
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  Now we get a line break before we actually
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  embark and then in fact it's done with drawing a deep breath they passed inside.
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  It's in
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  they go.
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  The weird thing about this section, a weird memory of it coming up in an English
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  exam of all things where we had to comment on his passage of English prose.
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  And I came
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  across this and it really threw me because I already knew the passage really well and
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  it's the first time I'd ever found that.
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  So whenever I read that, my own association
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  takes me back to that young person of, I suppose I was 16, writing their O level exam.
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  And
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  even then what I remember writing about is how this passage of description is noteworthy
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  for all the things it takes away from you.
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  So how does he do that?
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  Well, the first of
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  all is Tolkien has been ringing the sort of similarity between places all the way through.
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  Here, what he reaches for is Moria.
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  The last time they were somewhere so dark was in Moria.
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  But of course, they had the fellowship with them at that time.
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  And Tolkien goes on to say, there, there were airs moving and echoes and a sense of space.
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  Here, the air was still, stagnant, heavy, and sound fell dead.
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  So if you look at the structure there, you've got this mirroring structure.
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  Over there, it was like this, but here it's like that.
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  And this chapter is full of these mirrors between light and darkness, but this one is
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  between two kinds of darkness.
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  And I really liked the touch here that he makes you think of what the space around you is.
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  And there's a kind of revving up Tolkien's prose here.
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  It's really worth going back and reading the way through because he sort of starts
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  going into this language about how it was veritable darkness.
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  And it ends with this,
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  this little paragraph ends with this phrase, night always had been and always would be
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  and night was all.
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  There's a vegetarian cadence to that.
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  There is a religious cadence to it too.
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  It feels like a kind of litany.
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  Um, so sort of very heightened language here.
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  What is this doing as an author?
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  Well, I think it's underlining again and again, and yet again, and I'll do it a
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  bit more for you as well, that this is an extraordinarily dark, tough place.
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  I'm going to tell you it every way I possibly can.
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  bleak air.
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  And that's why I think we can really remember it for that.
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  If I had asked you,
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  what do you remember about She Loves Lair?
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  One of the, you might have said the smell
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  and it was dark.
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  And we really are plunged by the way the language kind of wraps around
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  us in the same way as the experience is wrapping around the characters.
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  So whilst we've got the sort of description of just the bleak, you know, the darkness
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  and the smell, we also have got the way the characters respond to it in the way that their
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  own senses are being stripped away.
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  It's like a cumulative effect.
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  And it sort of builds
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  and it builds.
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  I'm looking at page 327 for those of you who are reading along with me.
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  And we build and it builds until this point where they almost break with it.
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  But how long was it?
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  How much more of this would they have to endure or could they endure?
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  So he doesn't say that at the beginning.
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  He's leading us through and he's putting that question in at the point where we are kind
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  of feeling it's got too much as well.
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  Don't forget, if you're writing, to add in your foreshadowing.
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  and where we get it here is this extremely creepy hint of the long tentacles or hanging growths
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  perhaps when i was reading this because i've been doing a lot of screenwriting recently
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  it reminded me of how you would structure a horror sequence
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  um or a passage from dante one of the circles of hell because there is this feeling of it gets bad
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  And it gets even worse and it gets worse again.
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  There's this sort of build and then we're coming to it.
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  But then there's also false relief before the really big scare.
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  It's like a breadcrumb trail that we are led on.
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  So here we go.
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  And still the scent grew.
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  It grew until almost it seemed to them that smell was the only clear sense left to them.
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  And that was for their torment.
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  that's Dante Dante moment the things that happen to the circles of hell is that the one thing
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  becomes your torment the one thing you can experience is your so it's a very bleak place
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  we have reached so how do the hobbits respond to this well one of the things I really want to
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  highlight here is this tender relationship between Frodo and Sam.
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  They respond by moving together
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  and holding hands.
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  There's something innocent, something human about this.
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  And also, as much as
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  Peter Jackson does many things right, he puts Frodo here alone.
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  That's not how it happens in
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  the book.
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  They are there together.
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  And the reason why that is important is Frodo here is
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  that maturity of Frodo that's absent from the film.
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  He's going to have an amazing moment of
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  being a brave hobbit and putting them together.
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  He feels responsible for Sam is part of that.
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  so we get the underlining after that that the reek and the malice are one and we reach this
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  beat of the most intense physical expression of as they reach this opening from which the smell
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  seems to emanate and this is where you get the horror sequence because passing that they think
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  okay, they're not exactly relaxing, but they think the worst is behind them.
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  And this is what you do before you give the jump scare.
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  You know, it's the sort of you go into the
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  room, it's actually empty, but then you see the reflection of the creepy clown in the mirror.
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  You know, it's that.
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  You stack it up like that.
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  You don't just open the door onto the creepy clown.
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  That is more scary because we're anticipating something awful happening.
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  We get them calling for Gollum or Smeagol.
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  Frodo is kindly still trying to call him Smeagol.
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  And then in this deprivation chapter, we're now deprived of him.
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  There was no answer,
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  not an echo, not even a tremor of the air.
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  And of course, Sam goes straight to the point,
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  really gone this time, I fancy.
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  I don't think Frodo disagrees with him.
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  Frodo has always been
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  saying, if his force is force.
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  So yeah, they realize they have been left.
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  And this is what
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  all of those fears have been adding up to.
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  But they still don't quite know the whole of it, do they?
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  Because at this point, when they're abandoned, alone, and they are without any of their senses,
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  except this very distressing one of smell left to them,
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  that's when we get some of them creeping back in along with Shelob.
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  It's worth looking at the architecture of how Shelob approaches.
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  First of all, we get sound.
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  So sound comes back into the picture.
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  And it's not a reassuring sound.
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  It's a gurgling, bubbling with a venomous hiss.
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  and they are in pitch darkness
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  and Sam touches,
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  so we've got touch,
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  he touches his blade,
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  which he got from the barrow,
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  which Tom Bombadil gave him
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  on that previous experience
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  of a dark and scary moment.
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  And this, by connected thoughts,
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  leads him to remember the light.
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  It's worth just reading that
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  because it shows how Tolkien works.
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  So first of all, Sam thinks, I wish old Tom was near us now.
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  Then it's like he's almost invoked the memory of Tom.
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  Then as he stood, darkness about him and a blackness of despair and anger in his heart,
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  it seemed to him he saw a light, a light in his mind,
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  almost unbearably bright at first as a sun ray to the eyes of one long hidden in a windowless pit.
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  Then the light became colour.
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  So we've got colour coming back in.
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  Green, gold, silver, white,
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  all the colours that aren't there.
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  Far off, as in a little picture drawn by elven fingers,
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  he saw the Lady Galadriel standing on the grass in Lorien, and gifts were in her hand.
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  Again, it feels like a religious moment.
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  The touch on the sword leads to the thought of Tom,
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  which leads to the thought of light.
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  It is like the answer to a prayer in a way, which
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  leads us to the Lady Galadriel and the memory of the star glass.
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  So in a way we've been
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  led down into darkness and we're being led back up to a memory of light.
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  And Frodo, who
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  is overwhelmed by this malice, when Sam prompts him, he says, and now indeed light alone can
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  help us.
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  The prose of the passage that follows as he pulls out the star glass comes as a
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  huge relief.
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  You've got to remember this mirroring effect in this chapter.
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  So we had that sort
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  of heaviness of the descent into the tunnel.
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  Now we've got this lifting up into the light
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  and it builds beautifully.
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  It doesn't come all at once.
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  Slowly his hand went to his bosom
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  And slowly, so that's repetition of slowly there, he held aloft the file of Galadriel.
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  For a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists.
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  You've got to earn this moment.
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  It's all the better when it comes if it's earned.
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  And then, as its power waxed and hope grew in Frodo's mind, it began to burn and kindled to a silver flame.
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  minute heart of dazzling light
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  as though Earendil had himself come down
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  from the high sunset paths
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  with the last Silmaril upon his brow.
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  So it's a pinprick of light
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  but it associates itself with one of the greatest stories
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  Earendil and the Silmaril
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  and who is the star in the sky.
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  That's where one of the Silmarils ends up.
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  So it's both small and vast.
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  And this prompts Frodo to sort of cry out in Elvish,
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  Ea Erendil Elion Ancalima.
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  Sorry if you're a pure speaker out there, that's my approximation.
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  and Tolkien himself links this to a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry
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  that started off this whole Middle Earth project.
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  A line which I really need Simon Horobin here to read
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  because he does it beautifully.
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  But in his letters, he mentions it's derived at a long remove
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  from Eäla Eärendil Engla Beorthast,
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  sorry about my old English pronunciation,
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  which is from an old English poem, Christ.
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  And it was that mention of Eärendil there
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  that led Tolkien to write a poem about Middle-earth,
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  which in turn led him to following his philological interest
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  and the rest is Middle-earth history.
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  So, it is a moment charged with all sorts of weight.
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  Remember the discussion in the last chapter about how they connect to tales?
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  We understand that what we're witnessing is not a small story of two hobbits.
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  It is a story that connects these larger tales and has gone back to one of the greatest myths and legends history of Middle-earth.
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  because of course Erendil is Elrond's father.
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  So he's both a mythic and a historical figure.
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  So there is lots going on.
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  This is what I love about looking deep, deeply into Lord of the Rings.
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  And what I hope you're also enjoying is how it feels like you,
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  if you do scratch the surface, you don't reach, you know, some cheap surface.
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  You reach further depths.
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  There is yet more beneath the surface.
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  and we have this sort of summation here frodo gazed in wonder at this marvelous gift
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  that he had so long carried not guessing its full worth and potency so he has touched the
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  file of gladiol before and it helped him drive a of the black rider but this is the first time
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  it's really shone out in this way and here we've got that old adage of chekhov's gun if you
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  give a gun in the first act you must fire it by the third and also the that elvish phrase
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  is experienced by frodo as another voice speaking through him it's it's like a counter to the malice
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  from shelog so it is a sort of channel for the goodness that's why the light shines brightly
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  in his hand and perhaps that's a sense of a kind of spiritual quality in him where powers beyond
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  him are using him or helping him perhaps we should say so unfortunately what this beautiful light
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  reveals is a horrendous spider-like creature um and the first thing that is noticed is the compound
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  eyes.
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  So the point is made, I think Tolkien pointed this out, that Shelob is spider-like,
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  not a spider, because I don't think spiders have these kind of eyes.
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  But anyway,
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  scary enough, we know what he's getting at.
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  But seeing this actually gives Frodo his bravest
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  moment since the barrow.
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  We've had the barrow just sort of evoked in Sam touching the sword
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  that he got there.
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  And he does hear what he did back in the barrow.
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  He chooses not to run.
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  He actually turns and says, running is no use.
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  and we get a heroic climbing of the language describing this little hobbit's moment
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  it falls on page 330 if you're following along in a book
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  and again it's slow he's not this sort of superman type thing who's just able to
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  whip into action he has to fight against his instinct to run
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  Galadriel he called and gathering his courage he lifted up the file once more
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  and so it goes on and then you get this wonderful image of him then holding the star aloft that's
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  the file and the bright sword advanced that's the sword sting Frodo hobbit of the Shire
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  walked steadily down to meet the eyes.
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  It's his greatest moments in some ways.
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  He has many great moments, but this is pure pluck.
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  And it's no surprise that Sam's response to this
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  is to connect again to the story making,
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  which they were considering in the previous chapter.
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  He says that elves should make a song about it
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  and he hopes to live to hear it,
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  which of course is why The Fields of Cormalin is such a,
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  it's the crescendo of the book for Tolkien.
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  Okay, so going back to this idea that Tolkien is structuring this like a horror film,
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  but we get now the false escape.
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  So there's several of them in quick succession, actually.
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  So they run because Shelob has backed away from the light
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  and they hit the webs over the exit.
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  And Sam tries three times, rule of three, to get through and fails
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  and says, oh, it's, you know, no use.
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  And then this is where Sting is brought out.
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  Sting is the finer weapon and the lineage of it is evoked here
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  because Frodo says that in the dark ravines of Beleriand,
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  there were spiders and this was made in Gondolin, which is, it's all part of that early history
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  of Middle-earth.
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  So, you know, they, the people who made it, the elves that made it would
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  know of this kind of web.
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  And here he is acting as mentor to Sam, the comforting commanding
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  officer.
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  He gives him orders.
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  Here, take the star glass.
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  Do not be afraid.
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  Really important.
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  telling Sam to not be afraid.
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  Hold it up and watch.
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  I don't think he means just watch me do this brave thing.
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  He means keep watch.
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  And of course his sword manages to get through the webs.
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  But Frodo, for having been this brave person who faced the danger,
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  forgets his own wisdom because he is struck by a fey mood.
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  that's never a good thing.
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  It's a sign of losing it in Tolkien.
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  He thinks that it's just a short race, a sprinter's course,
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  and he would be through.
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  He feels he's almost at the end of his journey.
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  And it's Sam who is now the one who is wary.
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  And you get, just before another ominous line break,
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  the narrator agreeing with Sam that she, Shelob,
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  had many exits from her lair.
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  Now, you would expect it to go straight on at this point.
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  But one of the things that you notice in horror films or any sort of scary passage in that kind of screenplay situation is you sometimes do a cutaway to make the suspense even more excruciating.
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  It's the filmmaker, or in this case the novelist, torturing the reader a little bit.
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  And here we go back, we cycle back, we get the history of Shelot and how she relates to Ungoliant.
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  Ungoliant, the spider, absorbed the light of the trees, the sort of wonderful light of the Undying Lands,
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  destroyed that age of one of the early ages of um middle earth this spider hates the light so
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  the lesser offspring but sure she's pretty bad it's a bit like melkor to sauron or morgoroth
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  to sauron it's that kind of thing that the mythic characters are even worse but we've got a pretty
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  bad one present in our time as well and we don't just get the the sort of description of
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  how she came here we also get a sort of description of of what she's about an evil thing in spite of
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  form and Tolkien actually knew that this character was intriguing lots of people and he has a sort of
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  letter where he says it's fine if people think that his
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  she-lob was down to the fact that he was bitten by a tarantula when he was little in South Africa.
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  But he does go on to say that he doesn't actually have anything against spiders and he rescues them
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  from the bath when he finds them there.
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  So yes, I think all of us would be scared of a spider if we
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  were bitten by a tarantula.
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  So we can allow that to happen, but I don't think it was any particular
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  phobia of Tolkien.
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  At least he's saying it isn't.
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  Anyway, so that's the spider, spider-like thing.
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  But we also get Gollum's point of view and what he's been thinking, how he's been experiencing
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  this journey with Frodo and Sam.
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  So remember our framing device.
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  This is a story put together
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  later.
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  So let's imagine in this sort of creation of how this story is written, Frodo and Sam are
• 27:24
  saying what Gollum thought, or it's just straightforwardly the narrator talking.
• 27:30
  But we see his point of view, how he's been plotting and how he thinks he can use the
• 27:38
  spider.
• 27:38
  There's this triangle here.
• 27:40
  So we've got Gollum thinks he can use Shelob.
• 27:44
  Shelob
• 27:44
  understands Gollum, Sauron thinks he can use Shelob and Shelob thinks she can use Sauron.
• 27:52
  So there's this sort of little smug little triangle of evil using each other.
• 27:57
  And in the
• 27:57
  case of Shelob and Sauron, the narrator says, so they both lived, Shelob, Sauron, delighting in
• 28:07
  their own devices and feared no assault, no wrath, not any end of their wickedness.
• 28:15
  That goes back
• 28:15
  to the idea that evil cannot imagine what it's like to be the other.
• 28:21
  That's their fatal flaw.
• 28:24
  Sauron assumes that Shelob is his pet.
• 28:30
  She is independently evil.
• 28:34
  And Gollum is sort of picking
• 28:36
  up his own he's got his own agenda as well which is to get the ring which is of no interest to
• 28:40
  Shelob in a way in in that sense Shelob is like the dark version of Tom Bombadil who also had no
• 28:47
  use for the ring who might have thrown it away because it didn't matter to him anyway with all
• 28:53
  this going on we go back to Sam who and here we've got that stance where it's like watching
• 29:00
  an accident happen before you and the powerlessness, the dreamlike dread that you can't stop it.
• 29:08
  He's seeing his master run off.
• 29:09
  He sees the spider come between them, but he can't get there.
• 29:12
  And
• 29:12
  he's trying to say, it is like a nightmare, isn't it?
• 29:15
  He's trying to say, watch out.
• 29:17
  And then Gollum
• 29:20
  leaps on him.
• 29:22
  This is necessary, isn't it?
• 29:24
  Because they've been rubbing up against each other,
• 29:27
  battling all the way through since he joined them many chapters ago.
• 29:34
  And they're finally coming to blows.
• 29:37
  And it's actually an extended fight scene here.
• 29:40
  A very well-described tussle.
• 29:42
  Do go back and read it.
• 29:44
  Action is really hard to describe.
• 29:48
  And Tolkien does do it very well here,
• 29:49
  the way he explains where everybody is,
• 29:55
  how the weight shifts between the two of them.
• 30:02
  And in fact, Sam resorts to a wrestling trick from the Shire,
• 30:08
  good old Shire, and falls back on Gollum.
• 30:12
  And there's this phrase of having a sturdy hobbit land on you,
• 30:16
  which puts Gollum out of the match.
• 30:20
  But how does the chapter end?
• 30:23
  Well, it's got a terrible end.
• 30:26
  Not terrible as in badly written.
• 30:28
  I mean, terrible as in
• 30:29
  frightening.
• 30:31
  Because by the time Sam has overcome Gollum, he turned back.
• 30:36
  We just get this sentence, he was too late.
• 30:40
  And we now have reached the final chapter in this book,
• 30:45
  which is the choices of Master Samwise.
• 30:53
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• 31:04
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