10. The Choices of Master Samwise
When Sam arrives, he sees that Frodo is wrapped in spider silk from feet to shoulders. Shelob drags him toward her lair. Sam seizes Frodo’s sword and charges fearlessly at the monster, severing a claw, stabbing the beast in the eyes, and slashing the bright elven-blade across her. “Venom hissed and frothed from the wound.” The creature lowers itself to crush the pest but is pierced by Sting. It leaps back, glaring at Sam with “her beak dribbling a spittle of venom, and a green ooze trickling from below her wounded eye.” We learn that the monster now intends “to slay and then to rend.” We are given images of a “vast belly,” of venom, slime, and, ultimately, tearing apart—all images of the Terrible Mother. The latter recalls our discussion of the Black Riders in Bree, how they furiously tear things to pieces as if they were Dionysos’s maenads. One might also pause at the monster’s voluminous belly, which reinforces the maternal imagery and implies that Shelob, too, is a “bearer,” a monstrous vessel filled with all she devours.
Sam draws out the phial. “Galadriel,” he says faintly, recalling the elves under the stars in the beloved woods of the Shire. Frodo and Sam’s courage and determination may stem from their upbringing in the embrace of the Good Mother. Jung suggests that a man with a positive mother complex can be characterized by a striving for lofty goals, wisdom, magnanimity, and willpower—heroism.[1] Sam invokes Elbereth, and the phial blazes with a light unbearable to the monster. Shelob flees, leaving a trail of slime as she squeezes into a cave opening.
We do not know what becomes of her, but Tolkien described her fate earlier, how she swells from her voracious devouring until she grows too large for her own lair; thus, we can assume she does not die. This is fitting. The archetypal images in the saga, represented by ancient monsters, are eternal. This also applies to beings that are not monsters, such as Gandalf and Galadriel—but Sauron as well. They may vanish from the scene (consciousness) but cannot cease to exist, as they represent archetypes.
In a manner particularly relevant to our analysis, ever since the discussion of the Black Riders in the Shire, Jung writes the following about our relationship to the inner “numinous” content, or the archetypal:
”We readily assume that psychic contents can be completely disposed of by insight. This is true only of contents that do not mean very much anyway. Numinous complexes of ideas may be induced to change their form, but since their content can take any number of forms it does not vanish in the sense of being rendered wholly ineffective. It possesses a certain autonomy, and when it is repressed or systematically ignored it reappears in another place in a negative and destructive guise. … We neither can nor should try to force this numinous being, at the risk of our own psychic destruction, into our narrow human mould, for it is greater than man’s consciousness and greater than his will.”[2]
It turns out that Shelob has stung Frodo in the neck. Later, when Sam overhears orcs, it becomes clear that Shelob always stings the victims she intends to eat in that very spot. One might speculate that this is because the neck connects the head (spirit) to the body (instinct), suggesting a kind of fracturing of the victim’s humanity. Similarly, she always binds her victims from ankle to shoulder, encompassing the entire body except the head. The consciousness, so to speak, loses its body, which is thereby dedicated to the Terrible Mother; much like how modern man tends to become a kind of head with wings, striving for higher, spiritual, or intellectual heights. The body is carelessly left behind on the earth, where it merges into the darkness of the unconscious Mother and eventually turns against the ego that soars in its orbit. We are reminded of Saruman’s experience. The Mother, the earth, and the body are, depending on the context, nearly synonymous symbols.
Shelob has thus stung Frodo with her sting. We might recall the Ringwraith at Weathertop, who stabbed Frodo with a Morgul blade, not to kill but to paralyze the hobbit. Here, the spider monster stings him with a similar intent. Both the Ringwraith and the spider want him for something; that is, the individual himself—as we have noted several times—is important to the Terrible Mother. The threat he poses is his consciousness, his individuality, his ability to discern—the light he carries. That is what the Terrible Mother fears and despises, and seeks to extinguish.
Although it is symbolically fitting that Shelob paralyzes and binds Frodo to deliver him to the darkness, it is surprising that she possesses a sting. Real spiders do not have stingers, so why should this spider monster? Literarily, it would be more expected for her to inject venom with her jaws, as other spiders do. It would also be more plausible for her to catch up to Frodo and bite him in the neck with the same effect, rather than catching him and use her stinger. It is hard to imagine how this would occur without almost comical contortions. Nevertheless, our author, with his keen sense of dramaturgy, equips her with a stinger. Thus, it must hold symbolic significance.
The stinger is a distinctly masculine symbol, while the monster bearing it is explicitly feminine. To underscore this ambivalence, Shelob also has, unlike ordinary spiders, horns—another markedly masculine symbol. We may recall that it was not the first time Sauron was endowed with attributes of the Terrible Mother when Gollum, terrified that Frodo was bringing the Ring to him, despairingly exclaimed that Sauron would devour them.
The place they are in now lies between a cave and a watchtower, and we have noted how this mirrors Gorgoroth with the Black Tower and Mount Doom’s cave. In Mordor, this ambivalence signifies dissolution or massa confusa, a primordial state where opposites have not yet been separated because they have not been made conscious. That a distinction—cave versus tower—nevertheless occurs in the saga is a consequence of Frodo’s, or consciousness’s, entry. We will return to this symbol later.
Before leaving Frodo, Sam shines the light of Galadriel’s phial on his face—“it possessed an elvish beauty.” As the attentive reader knows, this is not the first time Frodo has been described as “elvish.” This attribute suggests that Frodo, by his nature, has a developed relationship with the Good Mother, much like Aragorn for instance.
Then Sam heads toward the watchtower but stops when orcs come rushing in the opposite direction. He puts on the Ring. The effect is that time shifts, his vision grows dimmer, everything becomes vague, the world a gray mist. The orcs pass by like “a phantom company, grey distorted figures.” As we have discussed before, the one who wears the Ring becomes a spirit among others in a Hades-like world, rather than powerful in the physical realm. The haziness that arises reflects the unconsciousness characteristic of the archetypal Mother image. Just as yang can be both positive and negative, as we have seen, so too can yin’s ambiguity be positive (moonlight) or negative (confusion).
The orcs find Frodo. Sam feels compelled to save his master’s body from their desecration. He realizes that, under any circumstances, his place is at Frodo’s side. “I cannot be the Ring-bearer,” he declares. This aligns with our understanding of Frodo as the light of consciousness. Even though it is not the only light—we spoke earlier of “nature’s light”—it would be madness to replace it with another.
Sam hurries toward them, sword in hand. The orcs are numerous, and Sam understands he is unlikely to survive. At the same time, he feels tired and afraid. Once again, the Ring grants no real power in this world; it gives him no tangible strength. The orcs lift Frodo and carry him through a tunnel toward their tower. Sam follows. One quality enhanced by the Ring is hearing. Though not mentioned in the book, one might assume that both hearing and smell are sharpened. Creatures associated with the Terrible Mother sniff out the hobbits, for example, like the Ringwraith in the Shire or Gollum when he came creeping down the cliff face. Both hearing and smell enable the detection of the invisible, which belongs to the bodiless spirit world Sam now inhabits.
In any case, this allows him to follow the orcs from a distance and hear what they say to one another. He learns that they intend to deliver Frodo to Sauron, per standing orders. He also hears them talk about the Ringwraiths: “… they skin the body off you as soon as they look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side.” Their gaze brings the nakedness, vulnerability, and helplessness that Neumann, in an earlier quote, associates with the presence of the Terrible Mother. We have previously touched on how the Ringwraiths, in their symbolic expression, represent this archetype in masculine guise.
The orcs also speak of Gollum, whom they liken to a spider, saying he has a pact with Shelob. From her tracks, they deduce that she was wounded. This is troubling, for no one has managed to harm her before. They assume a powerful elven warrior is prowling about. One could say that something has been disrupted in Cirith Ungol with the hobbits’ arrival; things are no longer as they should be, from the orcs’ perspective, and as they always have been. An unease has crept in here, just as the hobbits experienced an unfamiliar disquiet in the Shire when the saga began.
But most importantly, Sam realizes that Frodo is alive. Shelob has only paralyzed him. Since Frodo is “precious” and belongs to Sauron, the orcs intend to imprison him at the top of the watchtower, not in the usual dungeons below. It is noteworthy that Frodo is called a “precious,” linked to Sauron, and taken up to a tower (awaiting transport to Barad-dûr). The bonds between Frodo, the Ring, and Sauron become exceedingly tight on the border of Mordor.
Footnotes
[1] Jung, ”Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype”, CW 9i, par. 165.
[2] Jung, ”The Philosophical Tree”, CW 13, par. 437.