Ungoliant

The name by which the Eldar knew her, Ungoliant, is not a name of kindred or lineage but a description of the shape she wore. Its longer Quenya form, Ungoliantë, stands beside it in the Elvish traditions, and both rest on the element ungol, the word for a spider in the Grey-elven tongue, an element that recurs in place-names far to the east of Valinor. No parentage, no people, and no earlier name are recorded for her; where other powers of the Elder Days are set within the ordered hierarchies of the Ainur, she is left outside them, named only for what she seemed. The absence is deliberate rather than accidental, and the accounts that survive are careful to mark the limits of what was known.

On her origin the loremasters preserved two answers without choosing between them. Some held that she came down out of the darkness that lies about Arda, drawn thither when Melkor first looked with envy upon the realm of Manwë; others reckoned her among the earliest spirits whom he perverted to his service. What the traditions agree upon is that she had long since cast off any allegiance to him, wishing to be mistress of her own appetite and to draw all things into herself. She was hungry rather than malicious in any ordinary sense, and her hunger was for light, which she craved and hated together, spinning it out again as webs of strangling gloom. Fleeing the assaults of the Valar upon the north, she withdrew to Avathar, the narrow and lightless country between the eastern feet of the Pelóri and the sea, a land shunned even by those who knew of it, and there she took the form of a great spider and grew.

Her name survived into the Third Age chiefly through her descendants, and in the account of Frodo's journey the greatest of the spiders of the eastern mountains is reckoned the last of her brood still troubling the world. The same element appears in Cirith Ungol, the high pass that the hobbits attempted on the borders of Mordor. On the sounding of the name, the rule given for Elvish words applies without exception: the g is the hard consonant of English get, never the softened sound, and the stress falls on the second syllable.

For long ages after she withdrew into Avathar, Ungoliant is absent from the histories, and the accounts resume only when Melkor sought her out. Released from the halls of Mandos after three ages of confinement and feigning reform in Valinor, he had at length been driven from the city of the Valar, and he came south along the coast into the shadowed land to look for an ally whom the Valar did not reckon among their enemies. He found her weakened by a long famine, for the light of the Trees never reached that country and she had spun her hunger into darkness rather than fed it. She was unwilling at first, fearing the danger and preferring her own hiding, until he swore to give her whatever she might demand that his hands could seize; the oath was made without reservation, and its terms would return to trouble him.

Together they climbed the Hyarmentir, the highest peak in the southern reaches of the Pelóri, Ungoliant weaving a cloak of darkness about them so that the eyes of the watchers on the walls did not perceive their passage. From that height they looked north over the fields of Yavanna and saw the Trees at the hour of the mingling of the lights. They descended into Valinor at a festival ordained by Manwë, when the Noldor and the Vanyar were assembled on the Ring of Doom above Valmar and the plain below lay empty of the greater part of its people. Melkor struck the Trees with his spear, and Ungoliant drank the light that flowed from the wounds and then drained the wells beneath them, so that both Telperion and Laurelin withered and died. Swollen with what she had taken, she vomited forth a blackness that was not merely the absence of light but a thing that light could not pierce, and it spread over the plain and over Valmar.

Under cover of that Unlight Melkor turned north to Formenos, where Fëanor's house had been exiled and the Silmarils were kept. He slew Finwë at the doors, took the jewels and all the other treasure hoarded there, and fled with Ungoliant. The pursuit ordered by Manwë failed, for the darkness confounded even the Valar, and the two passed north through the Helcaraxë and came into the northern lands of Middle-earth. There the alliance broke. Ungoliant demanded the fulfilment of his oath; he yielded the lesser gems, which she devoured, but he would not give up the Silmarils, and she had grown so great upon the light of the Trees that she cast her webs about him and was near to overcoming him. His cry of pain brought the Balrogs out of Angband, which had lain ruined but not wholly destroyed since the Valar had cast him down, and their whips of flame drove her off. From that hour he was called Morgoth by the Noldor, and the encounter left him with a fear of her that the histories record plainly.

The place where the Balrogs rescued their master was afterwards named Lammoth, from the echoes of Morgoth's cry that lingered in those hills. Ungoliant escaped southward through the passes and came at length into the valley beneath Ered Gorgoroth, the Mountains of Terror on the northern march of Doriath, and the ravine she took for her dwelling was called Nan Dungortheb, the valley of dreadful death. There she bred with the spiders that were already in that country, and her offspring, misshapen creatures who wove their own nets of shadow, made the region impassable to all but the most desperate travellers; the darkness of that place is set down as a compound of her presence and the sorcery that Melian's power had not reached. In time she left even that valley and went further south into lands of which the Eldar had no knowledge.

Within the structure of the legendarium Ungoliant occupies a place that no other figure of the Elder Days holds. She is not one of the Ainur as the accounts define them, nor a creature bred in the pits of the north, nor a servant of any power; the traditions set her outside every ordered rank and describe her only in terms of what she consumed. Her function in the narrative is correspondingly narrow and decisive: she is the instrument by which the light of the Trees was ended, an act that neither Melkor nor any of his servants could have accomplished alone, and the pivot upon which the whole history of the Noldor in Beleriand turns. That she required an ally to reach her prey, and that the ally required her to finish the deed, is the shape the accounts give to the event, and neither party is presented as sufficient without the other.

Her powers as recorded are few but of an order the histories rarely attribute to anything outside the Valar. She could consume light itself and grow upon it, and what she took she rendered into a substance the accounts distinguish carefully from ordinary shadow: not an absence but a positive thing, through which the eyes of the Valar could not see and in which even those who had made the world lost their bearings. Her webs bound flesh and spirit alike, and were strong enough, once she had drunk the Trees, to hold Melkor at the height of his strength and bring him near to destruction. She was capable also of climbing sheer heights and of cloaking whatever she chose from watchful eyes, and her breeding produced offspring that inherited her form and her appetite without her stature.

The limits are marked as plainly as the powers. She was subject to hunger and could be reduced by it, and long famine in Avathar had left her diminished before Melkor found her; she was fearful of the Valar and unwilling to act until security was promised her. Fire she could not master, and the flame-weapons of the Balrogs were sufficient to break her hold and drive her away, which places a definite ceiling on what her strength could withstand. She had no dominion, no armies, and no designs beyond her own consuming, and once she had withdrawn southward she took no part in the wars that followed, so that her whole effect upon the history of Arda rests on a single night's work and one broken alliance.

Of the figures with whom Ungoliant is shown in direct dealing, Melkor is the one the accounts dwell upon, and the terms between them are set out as a bargain rather than a fealty. She had been reckoned his once and had abandoned that service long before he came south, so that he approached her with something to offer rather than an order to give; the traditions are careful to record that she mistrusted him and required security before she would stir. What bound them afterwards was a debt, and when it fell due she pressed it as a creditor and not as a rival, wanting no share in his dominion and no part of his wars, only the thing he had pledged. The association is the one occasion on which the histories show him brought to open terror by another being, and it left a distance between them that was never closed.

With the Powers of the West her relation is one of mutual avoidance. They knew of the country she inhabited but did not number its tenant among the enemies they watched, and that omission is precisely what made her serviceable to Melkor; when they did move against her, it was her darkness rather than her strength that defeated them, and no further reckoning between her and them is set down. The instructive comparison is with Melian, who belonged to the order of being that one tradition assigns to Ungoliant herself, and who likewise settled at the margin of a realm she had no hand in making. One wove an unseen girdle about Doriath that turned strangers aside and held a kingdom safe for an age; the other filled a valley on that kingdom's northern march with webs that killed whatever entered. The two boundaries lay close together, and the contrast between them is the whole distance between a power that shelters and a hunger that cannot.

Kinship, in any sense the histories recognise elsewhere, she did not possess. The spider-creatures already dwelling in the ravine beneath the Mountains of Terror she took as mates and afterwards consumed, so that her line was continued by an act not distinguishable from feeding, and nothing indicates that she ruled the brood which came of it or that they knew her for their dam. The pattern outlasted her: her last surviving descendant in the eastern mountains is described as using her own offspring in the same fashion, and as serving no master and keeping no company, whatever the power that held the land below her pass may have believed of the arrangement. Appetite is the only bond the accounts allow her, and it consumed even the relations it created.

In the earliest form of the mythology the spider of the south is a considerably stranger figure than the one the published tradition preserves, and she carries a cluster of names since abandoned. There she appears as Ungwë Lianti and Ungweliantë, and is called besides Wirilómë and Gwerlum, both rendered as the Gloomweaver, and Móru, a name glossed as the primeval night. That last title marks the chief difference of conception: in the early tales she is not merely a being of unknown origin but something close to the personified darkness itself, an ancient night given shape and appetite, and the texts speculate that she was born of the outer blackness before the world was made rather than corrupted within it. Her dwelling is placed not in Avathar, a name of much later coinage, but in Arvalin, also called Eruman, the waste beyond the mountains where the shadows first gathered.