starting lotr: two towers today and the entwife shit is even more nuts than i was led to believe. the entwives worked hard and cultivated the land, eventually teaching farming to men, while the enthusbands just decided to be nomadic and walk around, hoping to encounter them again. literally the "how do you lose a woman" "you forget to cherish her" thing.
they didnt just "lose" them, they walked out on their wives and were confused when they decided to just go do other stuff.
im near the end of the book now where the hobbits get to shelob's lair and i think its really neat how the narration implies that she's an ancient and ever hungry personification of darkness before it makes her physically manifest as a huge disgusting spider-like monster.
i dont think its neat as im skim reading some scholarly analysis of shelob and these people that get paid too much have written a lot of stuff that says shelob is some kind of archetypal female sexual threat or some kind of metaphor for evil maternal femininity castrating the masculine. like not be too reductive here but shes literally named "she + lob (archaic word for spider)" and sam stabs her with a sword.
we already had what we'd eventually call cosmic horror as a concept at this point, and i think shelob's descriptions lean much easier into that as an interpretation, which makes it wild that people immediately jump to "this monster is a representation of why women are evil". like im not gonna give tolkien too much credit here but to say that he did this with any intentionality is just mad fucking stupid.
