Tolkien and Victorian Spiders

Earlier this year, I re-read George MacDonald’s ‘The Giant’s Heart’ [first published in 1864], in preparation for my viva. Something about the description of the giant spiders struck me: their laconic objectivity, and the contrast with Tolkien’s Mirkwood spiders in The Hobbit. The Mirkwood spiders are well known: gratuitously violent (even accepting that giant spiders need to eat, they really don’t need all thirteen dwarves and one hobbit) and spinners of dark webs. Readers of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion will know that they are the offspring of Shelob, herself the daughter of a primordial spider-monster – Ungoliant, a demonic being who chose spider form in order to weave webs of darkness against the angelic Valar. (Apparently Ungoliant and Shelob mated with ordinary spiders – which they later consumed -- to produce [smaller] monstrous offspring; this sent me down a tangent of wondering whether such matings would be physically possible – and, considering that the male spider puts his sperm on a special web for deposit in the female’s genital opening, it is less of a stretch than one might think.) We are now accustomed to spider/giant spider = evil monster (see J.K.Rowling’s Aragog & Co, Stephen King’s It, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline).

'The Other Mother' revealed in monstrous spider form from Neil Gaiman's Coraline

But MacDonald’s spiders, though monstrous in size, are not monstrous in personality. Their webs create beauty, not darkness: ‘At last they came to the foot of Mount Skycrack [ . . .] The whole face of it, from top to bottom, was covered with a network of spiders' webs, with threads of various sizes, from that of silk to that of whipcord. The webs shook and quivered, and waved in the sun, glittering like silver.’ Compare these webs to the ones in The Hobbit: ‘[Bilbo] had picked his way stealthily 'for some distance, when he noticed a place of dense black shadow ahead of him black even for that forest, like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away. As he drew nearer, he saw that it was made by spider-webs one behind and over and tangled with another.’ MacDonald’s giant spiders have a quality of beauty which Tolkien’s spiders do not. Though MacDonald’s spiders are ‘huge’ and ‘greedy’, they catch giant flies, not humans. When the child-heroes of ‘The Giant’s Heart’ encounter them in their quest to destroy a wicked giant, the spiders first ignore them, then assist them after one of the children helps a spider who has fallen over: "My dear child," answered the spider, in a tone of injured dignity, "I eat nothing but what is mischievous or useless. You have helped me, and now I will help you." This statement does suggest a certain amount of didacticism – do unto me as you would have me do unto you – but it’s intriguingly human as well, what with the spider’s tones of ‘injured dignity’. All this made me wonder: what did the Victorians think of spiders? Did they have the same evil resonance that spiders have today? Was Tolkien inspired by MacDonald’s spiders?  After all, as his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ shows, he was familiar with MacDonald’s work.

Frontispiece to The Poor Artist, by R.H.Horne

 I posed some of these questions to the Reading the Fantastic reading group I’m co-organizing, in the form of another text: R.H.Horne’s The Poor Artist. (Our reflections on this and other text opened our eyes to the beauty inherent in spider-tradition, as well as the monstrosity.) In Horne’s science-fable, the spider is one of various creatures who lend their eyesight to an artist in search of inspiration, evoking Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s animal-fables. ‘Mrs. Spinster’s ‘[f]ive hundred and eleven different visions, without including all the powers of my diphthong eyes’, are able to present the artist with an arachnid experience of wonder: A monumental slab of dull gold was the central object of the picture. It was encircled with ancient letters and numerals [ . . .] worn by time into rough breaks and honey-combs and the surface in some places presenting a heap of straggling lines and ridges, like broken insect-legs, and which the narrator herself compared to spider-limbs after a battle between two females against thirteen males. The predatory nature of the spider is not ignored; an Ant, Captain Mandible, argues with Mrs. Spinster about how ‘[s]he has strangled many of my comrades [ . . .] I have found their empty suits of armour on the ground underneath her web.’ But Mrs. Spinster points out that ants have stolen her webs, as well, and the two descend into something resembling a children’s quarrel. Paradoxically, it is through anthropomorphism that we are able to view spiders beyond the monstrous, and as part of biological nature – albeit red in fang and spinneret. As to what the Victorians thought of spiders, and whether MacDonald’s monstrous spiders have any connection to Tolkien’s, I still don’t know, but my opinion of spiders is a least a little improved. However, my favourite spiders are in one of Don Marquis’s ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ poems – ‘Pity the Poor Spiders’. ‘Yours for less justice and more charity’ is a sentiment I can get behind.

Alice Through the Reading Group

Whatever my week has been like, my Saturday contains an energizing burst of Victorian fantasyː the chance to read  Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871) in a community reading group that I facilitate (helpfully funded by the Arts Engaged project at the University of Leeds).  This group is made up of people from a range of backgrounds and a range of English-speaking levels, all of whom possess the faculty of bold and insightful criticism.  These critical abilities have come to the fore in the discussions which follow each weekly excerpt from Alice,¹ as I find everything from my perceptions of social categories to my choice of literature challenged. (See footnote below for edition details.)

            In the past few weeks, I’ve been adding to the weekly recipe of reading and discussion by including collaborative poetry writing. A passage from Alice provided the idea for our first attempt at this, and it proved so enjoyable  that I’ve decided to write about it here. Alice’s journey through Looking-Glass Land is full of alienation and bafflement, but there is one brief scene of almost idyllic tranquillity in chapter 5. Though this chapter ('Wool and Water') forms a wider context of disorientation as Alice stumbles from a wool-shop to a rowing boat and back again, accompanied by an incomprehensible sheep, Alice encounters some enchanted rushes.

So the boat was left to drift down the stream as it would, till it glided gently in among the waving rushes. And then the little sleeves were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep to get the rushes a good long way down before breaking them off -- and for a while Alice forgot all about the Sheep and the knitting, as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her tangled hair dipping into the water -- while with bright eager eyes she caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes. (214)

Unfortunately, these dream-rushes begin to vanish from the moment she picks them, but the experience of seizing this transient beauty even briefly is inspiringː

What mattered it to her just than that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while -- and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet -- but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about.  (215)

In his notes to the Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner extends Carroll’s associations of transient beauty still further to the rushesː ‘They are, of course, consciously intended symbols of the fleeting, short-lived, hard-to-keep quality of all beauty.’ (Note 16, p.215)

Well, I thought, why not join Alice in collecting symbols of beauty, transient or notʔ So in the creative writing session which followed, we all took turns writing down our own brief perceptions of beauty – taking our inspiration from anything -- in the room, in our lives, in the window – which was beautiful to us.  Despite the dark tone of some of the imagery, the act of writing itself was rather joyous, as we took turns trying to outdo each other with our images!

Collecting Rushes

Happiness is like scented-rushes.

The snow lies on the trees like icing-sugar.

Lilies are spread in the meadow like gems.

The city glows from the wall behind me.

Horses gallop with their flowing manes, showing their pride

My mother’s eyes give a chocolate-coloured warmth.

Horses gambol with children like magical toys.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel all the world wake up.

 I breathe fresh air and fly with my opinions, and thinking so, I am always singing with the birds, wind, clouds; so my happiness is sharing every thing in nature.

Uncertainty clouds my mind, reminding me of failing love.

I carry many faces in my heart; they speak a language of both joy and pain.

My heart always opens for new feelings, but just nice feelings, and in my heart are living a lot of nice people, and I remember them all the time, so my heart sometimes is tired.

My heart flutters like a shivering bird, seeking fondness, grace and love.

1I've been working from Martin Gardner's edition of Carroll's work: The annotated Alice: Alice's adventures in Wonderland, and, Through the looking-glass , by Lewis Carroll and ed. Martin Gardner (London: Penguin, 2001). This edition includes the original illustrations by John Tenniel.