Tolkien really does not like spiders, he consistently depicts spiders as unpleasant, Bilbo’s first kill in The Hobbit is a spider and he proceeds to kill a bunch more evil giant spiders to rescue his friends, Shelob tries to eat Frodo and she may not be the scariest thing in the trilogy but she is definitely the most repulsive, and then the Silmarillion reveals that the sun and the moon are pale remainders of the Two Trees of light which were eaten by a spider so huge and so evil that the literal devil is a bit scared of her. I am also scared of spiders, but I respect them, and I’m not happy with a worldview that says nature’s great, trees are great, forests are great, but spiders are somehow always evil. Spiders are a type of nature! Trees and forests are supposed to have them!
As a reparative reading, let me offer my headcanon that Vairë the weaver is a spider, or at least that she often takes the shape of a spider. She’s a weaver, her tapestries cover the walls of her husband’s halls, her husband who is lord of death. We barely know anything about her, but by omission, I’m fairly sure she’s the goddess not only of literal weaving, but history and storytelling, and many aspects of craft and art and fate not in the purview of other deities. And also she spends most of her time as a great big spider weaving a beautiful web in the house of death, a wondrous tapestry, comforting shroud, a cocoon promising rebirth.
