Ungoliant
the Great Spider; the Devourer; the mother of darkness
Name and Nature
Ungoliant — “the Gloom-weaver” — is the great primal spider, a being of the primeval dark whose origin the Elves could not tell: — the Quenta’s suggestive sentence: “and… there was in that dawn… the first of them” — she was “a creature of the void, of the Unlight” — she — she — Tolkien leaves it deliberately vague: some said she came from the shadow of Melkor’s evil itself, some that she was of “the forms of the world spontaneously”. She dwelt in the deeps of Avathar, the dark southern shore of Aman, “a thing of the night”.
The Darkening of the Trees
- The pact with Melkor: When Melkor (paroled, veiled in seeming-grace) plotted his revenge, he sought her out, promising her “the vine” — the prospect of feasting on the Light — he promised — and she agreed to do his terrible work.
- The deed: At the hour he chose, Melkor pierced the Trees on the Green Mound (Ezellohar), and Ungoliant drained the light of Telperion and Laurelin — she swelled with the stolen brightness, and the world was darkened (the “death of the Two Trees”).
- The quarrel for the Silmarils: Filled with an insatiable, growing hunger, she demanded the Silmarils that Melkor had taken; when he refused, she “assailed him” and wrapped the Vala “in her webs”, and was about to slay the Lord of Darkness — until the balrogs came with their fire and drove her off.
The End of
Her Story She She “fled” away into the mountains south (to Nan Dungortheb — the “valley of dreadful death”, where her broods bred the fell spiders), and of her final fate the Quenta says only that — “it is said that in the end, in the uttermost hunger, she devoured herself”. Her descendants — the great spiders that breed evil in the later ages, from the “Spiders of Mirkwood” to Shelob — are her legacy.
Significance
Ungoliant is the pure principle of devouring darkness — even Melkor’s ally whom he could not master, the hunger that consumes light and, ultimately, itself; she is Tolkien’s horror-image of the absolute negation (the “Unlight”) and the fount of all the spiders’ darkness in the later tales.