The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 will reportedly feature another major villain from The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Shelob, the nightmarish great Spider that Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee were nearly devoured by in the mountain pass of Cirith Ungol. According to the rumor from Fellowship of Fans, “Young Shelob” is the character concept that Amazon Studios is going with for The Rings of Power Season 2, which still suggests we’ll see some truly frightening moments when the dreaded monster appears. It’s said that Young Shelob will have a “small” or “limited” role in the season, but will be “featured.”
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Who Is Shelob in Lord of the Rings?
Shelob is a great Spider who is known as the greatest child of the primordial spider, Ungoliant. Shelob’s story in The Lord of the Rings finds her living in a lair on the border of Mordor, in the pass of Cirith Ungol. It was said that Sauron knew of Shelob and welcomed her as a guard for the mountain pass, sometimes feeding her food in the form of prisoners he’d captured.
In the Third Age of Middle-earth (during LOTR), Shelob captured Gollum during his escape from Mordor and set him free in exchange for him luring a better meal into her lair. That meal came in the form of Frodo and Sam, who were passing through Cirith Ungol in order to sneak into Mordor and destroy the One Ring. It was during the back-and-forth battle with the hobbits that Shelob was significantly injured by Frodo’s sword Sting, and fled, never to be seen again.
Some giant spiders that were known as the “Children of Ungoliant” appeared in The Hobbit movies and were said to be “relatives” of Shelob. They took over a section of Mirkwood, where Bilbo Baggins and his Dwarf companions battled them.
Why Is Young Shelob In The Rings of Power Season 2?
Like so many of J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters that Amazon is using in The Rings of Power, Shelob has a careful balance of characterization for the showrunners to play with. Thanks to LotR and its supplemental lore, Shelob has a general origin and timeline of backstory to provide a solid framework – while also having a wide gap of mostly empty narrative space between the Second Age and Third Age of Middle-earth to fill in with new material.
The established Tolkien lore says that by the Second Age, Shelob was making her lair in the pass of Cirith Ungol in the Mountains of Shadow, before Sauron had even conquered and created Mordor. At the time The Rings of Power takes place, Shelob was known to feed on her own children or anyone who wandered into the growing network of webs she spun in the caves. It is conspicuously noted that if Shelob thought there was a particularly good meal out there, she would sneak out of her lair, and “silently pursue and kill it.”
It’ll be interesting to see if The Rings of Power fleshes out the relationship that Sauron has with Shelob, as Halbrand/Sauron (Charlie Vickers) starts to carve out his evil kingdom on Middle-earth. Hopefully, we get a great spider-attack sequence – possibly one that sets the groundwork for Shelob’s ultimate defeat at the hands of Hobbits.
The Rings of Power Season 2 is now in production.
