Shelob

Before Sauron

Shelob lived in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol, the high pass over the Ephel Dúath into Mordor, and the pass and the tower above it were named for her. She was a descendant of Ungoliant, the last of that line to trouble the world, and she had the same shape and the same hunger: a bloated spider-body, clustered eyes, a beak, and a lust for living flesh that nothing could satisfy. She was there before Sauron. Before the first stone of Barad-dûr was laid she had come to the mountains out of the South, fleeing the ruin of the Elder Days, and had made her lair in the dark under the pass. In the Second Age, when Men and Elves still dwelt in the lands that became Mordor, she fed on them; afterwards she fed on Orcs and the occasional prisoner, and when nothing came she devoured her own young.

Her lesser offspring had long since spread from the Ephel Dúath across the mountains and north to Mirkwood, where Bilbo met them; but she herself never left the pass. She served no one. Sauron knew of her and left her alone, finding her a more reliable guard on his western door than any garrison, and he sometimes sent her prisoners for amusement. The Orcs of the tower called her Her Ladyship and kept clear of her tunnels.

Gollum

Gollum, in his wanderings before the War of the Ring, found the pass and found her, and survived. He bowed to her and worshipped her after his fashion, promising to bring her food, and she let him go. The Orcs of the tower knew him as her sneak. When Gollum agreed to lead Frodo and Sam into Mordor by a secret way, this was the way he meant: he would bring the hobbits to Shelob, she would eat them, and he would find the Ring among her leavings, since she cared nothing for it.

Shelob's Lair

On March 12, T.A. 3019, Gollum led the two hobbits up the stair of Cirith Ungol and into the tunnel beneath the pass. The darkness inside was a thing of its own, thick and deadening, and the stench was foul beyond any they had known. Gollum slipped away. The hobbits groped forward with webs across the passage; Frodo drew Sting, and the Elvish blade cut the cords that no other knife would have severed. Then they felt her presence. Frodo held up the Phial of Galadriel, and in its light they saw two great clusters of eyes advancing and then retreating, for the light of the Silmaril was the one thing she could not bear. They ran for the tunnel's end.

She came round by another way. In the open, on the path below the tower, she rose over Frodo from behind and stung him in the neck, and her poison dropped him senseless. Sam, running back after Gollum had leapt on him, found her bending over his master to bind him in her cords, and attacked her with Sting and Frodo's own sword. He cut off a claw; he drove Sting into one of the eye-clusters; and when she lowered her vast belly to crush him, he held the Elvish blade upward and she impaled herself on it with her own weight, a wound deeper than any creature had ever given her. She reared away, and Sam lifted the Phial and called on Elbereth, and the light, blazing now like a star, drove her stumbling back through the arch into her tunnel, dripping green ooze from her wounds.

Fate

What became of her is not told. The narrator says only that she crawled back to her lair, and that whether she lay for long years in the dark healing herself from within, or died there, or bred again, is not part of the tale. The Orcs who found Frodo afterwards spoke of her as if she still lived, and suspected that the Elvish warrior who had wounded her was somewhere near. That is the last word on her in the histories.

Nature

Shelob is the only monster of The Lord of the Rings who is neither of Sauron's making nor in his service, and the narrator dwells on the point: she wanted nothing of the Ring or the war, only to eat and to grow, and she would have devoured Sauron's own Orcs as gladly as his enemies. Her power was old and her own. Her hide could not be pierced by any stroke from without, only by a blade she drove into herself; her darkness was a web she spun rather than a mere absence of light; and only the light of the Trees, carried in Galadriel's phial from the Silmaril of Eärendil, could make her flinch. In the encounter beneath Cirith Ungol the oldest good and the oldest evil in Middle-earth met by way of a hobbit gardener with a sword he had never used.

Crawled wounded into her lair after Sam's blade and the Phial; whether she lived or died is not told.