: I somehow doubt the spider gods come directly from The
: Hobbit OR any other of the spiders of Tolkien fame; I
: would think that, if anything, it would be the spiders
: themselves that were inspired by the Tolkien's
: spiders, and if so, the Spider Queen from TFL would
: quite obviously be inspired by (oh, damn, can't quite
: remember her name... The one that Gollum lead Frodo
: and Sam to in the Return of the King, you know the
: one, she's also in Silmarillion). At any rate, even
: there it's obviously the case that the idea was played
: around with before the final version of spiders were
: placed in Myth, because the Myth spider's were quite a
: bit more vulnerable to "ensquishment" than
: the spiders of The Hobbit and others. ;)
As Martel already corrected, Ungoliant and Shelob were not the same spider. And I think that given the fact that Ungoliant was an accomplice of Melkor Morgoth and was able to help him lead the attack into Valinor against the Two Trees, that she must be some sort of deity herself. Though it is again one of the great unanswered questions of Tolkien's universe, not unlike Tom Bombadil: so where did this great and powerful spider-queen come from?
