Arguably one of the most nerve-wracking, teeth-clenching scenes in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is when we see Samwise the Brave fight Shelob, the spider demon who lurks in the cleft of Cirith Ungol, at the entrance to Mordor. The giant spider is a cruel and hideous creature, who likes to sting her victims and drink them dry in a slow, agonizing death.
Luckily for Frodo, she never gets the chance with him, because his most loyal and true companion battles to protect him, even though he fears he may already be too late. Shelob is an unusual creature, because despite her cruel and evil nature, she seems to have no heed of the alluring voice of the ring. Many of the evil creatures in the world go straight for Frodo, like the Watcher in the Water outside the Mines of Moria, or the cave troll he gets stabbed by in the underground tunnels, as if they can sense that he is the one who holds some sort of evil enticing object, even if they don't know exactly what that object is. However, Shelob doesn’t appear to have any sense of the ring being in her proximity, she is too concerned with her own appetite, and seems to live only for the joy of sucking blood from her victims. She wants only for herself ‘a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness could no longer contain her.’
She has been around for thousands of years of Middle Earth. She is thought to be as old as Treebeard and Bregalad, the ents, though not quite as old as Tom Bombadil, who exists in the world almost before time itself. Shelob came from before the time of Melkor, the first dark lord, long before the reign of Sauron, and was the evil spawn of Ungoliant, the first demon to take shape as a spider. Ungoliant gave birth to Shelob, and Shelob likely gave birth to the host of spiders that infest Mirkwood during The Hobbit books and movies. They of course have some unusual differences. For example, Shelob is isolated, and selfish, and eats any who are near her for long enough (including her own offspring) whereas the spiders who have migrated to Mirkwood have formed a colony and live in family groups. They are not as cruel as Shelob, but they also hate the light like she does, which is why they spin vast webs and block out the sun in Mirkwood.
But more interesting than where all of these spiders came from perhaps, is where they end up. When the Fourth Age of Middle Earth begins, and Aragorn takes his rightful place on the throne of Gondor, he brings about an era of peace. He gives safety and refuge to many creatures who were used against their will during the War of the Ring, for example the trolls who were forced to fight in the battle of Minas Tirith, and the poor, elephant-like creatures beaten and brutalized by the Haradrim, known as Mumakil for the purposes of battle, but originally called Oliphaunts in their own, peaceful lands. But the spiders of Mirkwood are not among those given refuge. In fact, by the time Aragorn comes to take the throne, Galadriel has already cleansed the wood of the foul creatures who live there, using the light of her elven ring Nenya to restore clarity to the wood, which is then renamed the ‘Wood of Greenleaves.’
As for Shelob herself, she brings about her own downfall when she battles with Samwise Gamgee. He manages to find his way underneath her, hoping to stab her in the soft underbelly, ‘but Shelob was not as dragons are, no softer spot had she, save her eyes.’ However, in her own fury, she slams her body down onto him, trying to crush him beneath her vast weight, but he still has Frodo’s glowing sword pointed upwards at this time, and she impales herself upon it.
Injured for the first time, she cowers away from him and makes her way to her hole where ‘squeezing down, leaving a trail of green-yellow slime, she slipped in.’ It is unknown precisely what becomes of her, Tolkien writes ‘whether she lay long in her lair, nursing her malice and her misery, and in slow years of darkness healed herself from within, rebuilding her clustered eyes until with hunger like death she spun once more her dreadful snares in the glens of the mountains of the shadow, this tale does not tell.’
But it is believed by many that she either ate herself from her own insatiable hunger, like her mother Ungoliant, or that she was tracked down and vanquished by men of the Reunited kingdom, for such a foul beast would never have been allowed to roam free to continue eating elves and men, and she is never seen again or mentioned beyond this point. As is the case of the waning of the elves, as the world passes into a new age, many species just fade out of existence in Middle Earth, and perhaps Shelob is one of them, passing in her own time, and fading into a long ago, seldom recalled, unpleasant memory.