Her hide is tough enough to resist sword-strokes, and the strings of her webs are likewise resilient to ordinary blades, though the magical Sting manages to cut them. She has a powerful bite to inject her venom and paralyse or kill her victims. Her exact size is not stated, but she is significantly larger than her descendants, the Great Spiders of Mirkwood, and her hobbit opponents.

Although she resided in Mordor and was unrepentantly evil, she was independent of Sauron and his influence. last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world', living high in the Ephel Dúath mountains on the borders of Mordor. Shelob is described in The Two Towers as an 'evil thing in spider-form. Shelob's appearance in Peter Jackson's film trilogy was based on the New Zealand tunnel-web spider.

Scholars have noted her opposition to the Elves, and in particular her adversary, Galadriel, whose light helps the hobbits to defeat her darkness. Others have interpreted her as symbolising a sexual threat, with multiple sexual allusions. Some scholars have stated that Shelob is in the literary tradition of female monsters. The plan is foiled when Samwise Gamgee temporarily blinds Shelob with the Phial of Galadriel, and then severely wounds her with Frodo's Elvish sword, Sting.

The creature Gollum deliberately leads the Hobbit protagonist Frodo there in hopes of recovering the One Ring by letting Shelob attack Frodo. Her lair lies in Cirith Ungol ('the pass of the spider') leading into Mordor. Shelob is a fictional monster in the form of a giant spider from J.

Lord of the rings gollum left for dead