What was Shelob?

a sexy piece of ass

A random mook leftover from a higher level campaign

What was Ungoliant? Is she dead?

Emergent property of creation. She wasn't an intended creation, but rather a required byproduct of making the universe.
You can't sing a song without having pauses or taking breathes. Ungoliant is basically just the pause in a song.

And that somehow make 'her' evil? Shity world building if you ask me.

As for Shelobe she rule Upsidedown Continent of Straya and wage war with Emu King.

Not a character from a traditional game, that's for sure.

Ooo I like that even better than my theory (the Darkness the predates Light given existence and form by the ensuing contrast). Might steal it for something else.

Going by the 4 corners of the text, impossible to determine; she doesn't cleanly fit into the cosmology and nobody seems to know who she is or where she comes from.

Personally, I think she's an artifact of the fictional composition of the legendarium. You're not reading "what happened" for a given value of happened given that it is fiction after all. You're reading a series of stories writtten both in and about a fictional setting, medical style "history" with all the ignorance, bias, translation errors, and flat out lies that implies. Ungoliant (and I hold similar views for Tom Bombadil), is probably something that was originally from an unconnected story or series of stories and got squished in somehow along the thousands of years of composition.

No, the hunger makes her evil. She drank basically the sun and moon's dad and mom, and was kinda rude to morgoth.

A hot lady

A fictional character

>Not a character from a traditional game, that's for sure.

For "sure" sure?

You're so retarded they named a disease after you.

A lesser primal spirit of hunger.

Shelob is cute! Cute!

I like how you think.

Veeky Forums

What the fuck sort of pretentious bullshit are you even trying to say?

WB unironically did that didn't they?

Those absolute motherfuckers

fucking shadow of war, its a fun game but an abombination lorewise

She's sometimes a spider.

Sexy.

The entire point of the books is they're an at least partially fictionalized retelling of some earlier set of events that happen in the setting. The text of the books attributes the writing to characters in the story, but that's supposed to be something you understand as a reader is either an intentional fabrication or some kind of historical/literary flourish that's mean to reflect the period the entire work is being created in.

wat

...

Sweet dude, so is ungoliant a giant spider or not

When did Aragorn here give her a ring? And why?

The fact that something confuses you doesn't make it pretentious.

Nah that response was pretty pretentious. The guy wanted a simple answer not a fuckin essay.

Atlach Nacha's retarded kid sister.

that's not "the entire point"
but it is part of it

Imagine a Renaissance historian compiling some kind of collection of Greek myths. They would emphasize some things and omit others, and maybe embellish things here and there, or twist elements of a story to defend or attack a political position that they favor, or etc. Even if you don't understand the details, you can see that there are details. The books are meant to be understood like that. Sometime, maybe a very long time after the events described, in another part of the fictional world of the books never directly described, some kind of historian or religious scholar or something is picking through myths or histories or songs or other texts, and putting together the actual book you're reading. You can never actually know if Ungoliant was a spider because you only have the text itself. And the 'actual', as in 'actual in the fiction of the text' historical context that might let you tell which parts are real in the text and which are misunderstandings or bad translations or intentional lies by the editor within the fiction are all out of reach. There's no answer. That's the point of the story.

I'll be honest, dude, that was a pretty simple answer.

Here is a translation of for the mentally slow:
>Just going by the books, we don't know. She doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the gods and nobody seems to know what she is.
>Personally, I think she's fictional. The Lord of the Rings exists in-universe as its own book, and at some point in history Ungoliant just sort of wound up getting written into it. This has happened in real life with old medieval texts and things like that, too, so Tolkien probably did this intentionally.

tl:dr

>is ungoilant a spider
>who fucking knows

It's Talion (who is basically Aragorn, but not a secret king), and he didn't give her the ring, she basically stole it from him. She later gives it back, because Shelob's entire character in this game can be summed up as "vaguely evil Galadriel".

Well, if fire spirit can be an old man then hunger spirit can be a chick.

that kind of thinking about the legendarium sets a dangerous precedent, don't do it

Oh yeah. And Isildur is one of the Nine but was killed for reals and replaced by a new guy.

Horse shit, the Silmarillion is nothing but the actual events of the world.

The Silmarillion is Bilbo's "translation of Elvish legends of the Elder Days." If anything, it is less reliable than the core trilogy owing to additional links in the chain of transmission.

Nope.

Fellowship of the Ring, Prologue, section 5 "Note on the Shite Records"

>But the chief importance of Findegil's copy is that it alone contains the whole of Bilbo's "Translations from the Elvish". These three volumes were found to be in a work of great skill and learning in which, between 1403 and 1418, he had used all sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days, no more is said of them here.

The actual Silmarillion, the book where Ungoliant is introduced, the collective books of Ainulindalë, Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabêth, and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, has no in-universe author.

You are incorrect, see Those collective books are part of the volumes of the Red Book of Westmarch, allegedly authored by Bilbo. Everything in them is stuff that Bilbo either read about or heard about in Rivendell.

So not the Silmarillion then. The ORIGINAL book has nothing in it suggesting it was written in-universe.

That IS the Silmarillion. The entire legendarium is stuff that is fictionally translated or derived from the Red Book.

Ungoliant is a spider as much as Fenrir is a wolf.

I think it's probably a wash. You could think of it either way. The more whimsical and metaphorical option seems like the more "Tolkein" one though I think, it ties in with the fact that hobbits are really conventional creatures in an unconventional world and the story focuses mainly on how they go out and interact.

A Greater Bebilith.

The only real canon is the Last Ringbearer, it tells the true story of the noble communalist orks struggle against the fascist totalitarian elves and their complex schemes to ensure their eternal dominance of the world. All of the Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion and the Hobbit are propaganda fabricated by the expert storytellers of the shire to justify the conquest of Mordor and the genocide of it's native peoples by the imperialist Elven forces who came from across the sea and bent the humans, dwarves, and hobbits to their will.

Shelob was a matriarch of a resistance group within Mordor who worked against the Elvish conspiracy and so was demonized.

So very much so.

Yeah, but with enough mystical elements as to render the physical appearance and abilities essentially only aesthetic.

>Written by russians
Who would have thought

The new Middle Earth game made her a sexy woman. Celebrimbor is also Sauron.

Why is Shelob played by Stoya?

You just know that the guy read it, was extremely offended in russian

>"vaguely evil Galadriel"
So just regular Galadriel then.

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Ungoliant is basically a Chaos God/Great Old One in the form of a giant spider.
Shelob is her latest and most washed out descendant

>its a fun game
No it isn't. It's literally a button masher that doesn't even demand proper timing from the player.

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A hot piece of ass

Honmonstrets lår

I want to fuck that spider!

Sounds like a buncha commie bullshit

It's accurate to the original intent of the author, though. Tolkien was a philologist by profession, and he made a definite point of writing his works with all the little flourishes and quirks you find in actual old tales that have been compiled and passed down and recompiled and retold over and over through the ages. He wasn't just trying to write a story, he was fabricating a *legend*, with all the marks of age he, as a philologist, was familiar with from actual real world legends.

His approach to writing is sort of like the chronological equivalent of the use of perspective in painting. A painter is producing a 2D image, but he uses tricks of perspective to give it a sense of three-dimensionality. Tolkien was writing a new story, but he uses tricks of composition to give it a sense of age.

>Elves leave
>STOP OPPRESSING ME
>STOP OPPRESSING ME ELVES

>That Stinger
Whew boi
10/10 would slay.

>a couple of sentences amounting to nothing more than a short paragraph is equivalent to a "fuckin essay"
I'm guffaw'ing real hard rite now mate.

Come on bro. lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Shelob

Dunno why everyone is saying she's a washed out Ungoliant spawn, she is in many ways his most powerful child.

the game is set in its own alternate universe, why is it triggering everyone that they do gamey shit in a game

It's deadlights from IT

I'm pretty sure god could sing a song on one breath with no pauses.

But can his angels? Especially when one of them fuck melody up?

A miserable pile of secrets!

>not a fuckin essay
Perhaps Twitter is more your speed, user. 150 characters or less per post.

A miserable pile of hunger.

She used to be cute before drugs and cigarettes completely destroyed her

the literal translation of his name (at least from modern Swedish) is The Fenris Wolf. He's a giant ass canine. There's no ambiguity going on

A highly pattable spider.

Tolkien attempted to construct a synthetic mythos. One that resembled a real mythos, down to the way cultures absorb and integrate foreign stories that don't mesh with their monomyth.

More like a greater Babe-olith, if you know what I mean.

Spider.

I believe it's explicitly stated that Ungoliant is not the result of Morgoth's meddling.
I'm skeptical of this "gaps in the Song" thing as well. I would argue that the rests in a song are part of the rhythm of the song, so saying that Ungoliant is the result of these rests makes it sound like Eru created something evil -- which I don't think would mesh with Tolkien's sense of religion. I might be wrong there. It's also possible that this was an in-universe interpretation, but I don't see any evidence in the text that would suggest it was. Nobody emphasizes the rests.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Anyway, if you had a whole choir of people, there's no reason you wouldn't be able to make a song without any pervasive rests. Just have other people sing while other people take breaths. You don't even have to be divine to do that, eh?

So the Lion from the North was a lion?

I don't know of many wolves that can eat the moon and were born from a giant and a shapeshifter.

ur mum

His parents are jötnar. Saying there's no ambiguity is a stretch.

She doesn't look bloated and fat with endless

Hivemind kinda