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the lord of the rings - Did Shelob Die?


In The Two Towers it reads:



Shelob was gone; and whether she lay long in her lair nursing her malice and misery, and in the 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 Shadow, this tale does not tell.

The Two Towers -- J.R.R. Tolkien -- chapter X, The Choices of Samwise Gamgee



The LOTR Wiki says it's unclear what happened to Shelob after Sam wounded her so severely, but I am inherently mistrustful of the accuracy of series Wikis. I don't have The Silmarillion so I thought I would ask here: Did Shelob die? Is there any canon information regarding Shelob's ultimate fate?



Answer



The only canon information regarding Shelob's fate is the passage you cited in The Two Towers, namely “this tale does not tell”. That, and we know that after the fight, as Sam enters Mordor with the Ring, “still at a distance he heard the bubbling of Shelob in her misery” with his sharpened hearing, so she did not die immediately of her wounds.



The Silmarillion tells of events up to the end of the Third Age. The events of The Lord of the Rings are summarized in a few pages, as the conclusion of the story of the rings of power. You will find a lot of background to The Lord of the Rings, but little if anything new about what happens during and after LOTR. Shelob is not mentioned in the story (a note mentions her as the last child of Ungoliant).


Af far as I know, Tolkien had no draft or plans involving the fate of Shelob. But she belongs to the past. Maybe she withers and dies, maybe she is one of the monsters of old who will be killed by heroes of the Fourth Age, but Tolkien never told this story.


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