I like the idea of Shelob being an heir of Ungoliant. And her handling in the text makes it feel that way to me.
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She was specifically described as a child of Ungoiliant. Although, what with being burned by the phial of Galadriel, it seems that she might not have inherited Ungoiliant’s hunger for light.
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It’s been a few since I last read LotR, so, but yes.
At least maybe not that light, given with a particular purpose.
Ungoliant did feed upon the Two Trees from when came the light of the silmarils, from whence came Venus, from whence came the phial of Galadriel.
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I meant putting on the whole production, with the constant movement from scene to scene in the story and its sheer scale, it seems it would be difficult to produce.
Making Merry a woman makes sense in the context of the wounding of the witch king.
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That might be so, perhaps I should have written non-negative fantasy female characters, or perhaps he was not great at character development at all.
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That actually makes a lot of sense, and I think I get where you were coming from.
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Baroness Sackville, Vita’s mother, was not a very nice person, and avaricious, so maybe she was the inspiration for Lobelia?
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You angel. I am at the beginning of what promises to be a long graveyard shift, and you float this giant time sponge in front of me. Many thanks.
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The opposite of HG wells then.
I think of it as a sort of payback package from Galadriel.
We did it in three consecutive years, which made it more plausible. The scale was pretty crazy, however. The monsters were realized as huge puppets (the Balrog was about 25 feet high) but since this was on stage, we had to sort of get impressionistic with the huge set pieces such as Pellenor Fields and Minas Tirith. I didn’t envy the director!
There was actually a gigantic LotR musical put on a few years back in London that condensed the entire epic into one four-hour stage piece, and I have no idea how they pulled that off.
I found a few photos from our Two Towers production, including Treebeard, who was a very tall costume/puppet. Note that our female Gandalf was recast and no longer female by this point.
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A relevant recommendation would be to read Naomi Mitchison’s “Travel Light” which came out of the same Oxford group exploring how myth could be revitalized that also led to Lord of the Rings (of which she was a proofreader).
Just another reminder that any author or artist I liked from “long ago” was probably an asshole.
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I understand your point and disappoint, but… that’s only if you stick to Hobbit/LOTR. In the Silmarillion and other background materials published later, almost all these characters get their own narratives. (It’s been decades since I read any of them, but this is my memory…)
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@theodore604 …and on that note it maybe worth noting that Vita Sackville-West was an enthusiastic supporter of Oswald Mosley in the early days (though she and her husband left the New Party before they re-badged them selves as explicitly Fascist) and, according to her son, had a marked dislike of Jews and black people. 
Looks fabulous, three consecutive years sounds more achievable, must have been hard work still.
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She certainly had a mess of classist, bigoted and Orientalist attitudes at times, and the memory of them those shouldn’t be erased, but it’s not fair at all to call her “an enthusiastic supporter of Oswald Mosley” based on the actions of her husband, who made his own ugly mistakes that had nothing to do with Sackville-West’s politics.
By the reports I’ve seen, Sackville-West (correctly) loathed Oswald Mosley.
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That’s how I feel as well, and it’s a lot like that old saw, “Never meet your heroes.”
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Aside from Turin and Húrin, The Silmarilion does not really do character development: it’s all mythic stuff.
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