The Monsters of the Hyborian Age 3: The Tower Spider

If you missed last time….

The gigantic spider, through the works of both Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, has become a standard monster of heroic fantasy fiction. I remember encountering spidery beasts of all sizes in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, monsters based on the stories of these two fantasy giants. But the first giant spider belongs to neither of them, but Lord Dunsany. In “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth” (The Sword of Welleran, 1908) we have Leothric, armed with the sword Sacnoth, encounter a giant spider:

Little light was there in the great hall through which Leothric ascended, for it only entered through arrow slits here and there, and in the world outside evening was waning fast. The stairway led up to two folding doors, and they stood a little ajar, and through the crack Leothric entered and tried to continue straight on, but could get no farther, for the whole room seemed to be full of festoons of ropes which swung from wall to wall and were looped and draped from the ceiling. The whole chamber was thick and black with them. They were soft and light to the touch, like fine silk, but Leothric was unable to break any one of them, and though they swung away from him as he pressed forward, yet by the time he had gone three yards they were all about him like a heavy cloak. Then Leothric stepped back and drew Sacnoth, and Sacnoth divided the ropes without a sound, and without a sound the severed pieces fell to the floor. Leothric went forward slowly, moving Sacnoth in front of him up and down as he went. When he was come into the middle of the chamber, suddenly, as he parted with Sacnoth a great hammock of strands, he saw a spider before him that was larger than a ram, and the spider looked at him with eyes that were little, but in which there was much sin…Thereat the black hair that hung over the face of the spider parted to left and right, and the spider frowned; then the hair fell back into its place, and hid everything except the sin of the little eyes which went on gleaming lustfully in the dark… (“The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth” by Lord Dunsany)

Critics like Tom Shippey believe this story inspired both authors. Tolkien would have large spiders in The Hobbit (1937) and then a gigantic one with Shelob in The Lord of the Rings‘ second volume The Two Towers (1954). Tolkien may have read Howard but the Texas Pulpster would not have read Tolkien since he died in 1936.

Howard’s version of the giant spider appears in “The Tower of the Elephant” in Weird Tales, March 1933. A young Conan is making his living as a thief. He and a Nemedian named Taurus break into the sorcerer Yara’s tower. They evade guards and lions only to fall to the giant spider:

He was in the centre of the room now, going stooped forward, head thrust out warily, sword advanced, when again death struck at him soundlessly. A flying shadow that swept across the gleaming floor was his only warning, and his instinctive sidelong leap all that saved his life. He had a flashing glimpse of a hairy black horror that swung past him with a clashing of frothing fangs, and something splashed on his bare shoulder that burned like drops of liquid hell-fire. Springing back, sword high, he saw the horror strike the floor, wheel and scuttle toward him with appalling speed – a gigantic black spider, such as men see only in nightmare dreams.

It was as large as a pig, and its eight thick hairy legs drove its ogreish body over the floor at headlong pace; its four evilly gleaming eyes shone with a horrible intelligence, and its fangs dripped venom that Conan knew, from the burning of his shoulder where only a few drops had splashed as the thing struck and missed, was laden with swift death. This was the killer that had dropped from its perch in the middle of the ceiling on a strand of its web, on the neck of the Nemedian. Fools that they were not to have suspected that the upper chambers would be guarded as well as the lower! (“The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard)

Conan kills the tower spider by crushing it with a chest of jewels. He goes on to encounter even stranger things in the wizard’s inner sanctum. Howard wasn’t the first to use giant spiders in Weird Tales but he was the first to use one in a Fantasy story. (H. Warner Munn’s is perhaps the most famous but his story is closer to Science Fiction.)

Marvel Comics adapted the story in Savage Sword of Conan #24 (November 1977). Roy Thomas scripted the story with art by John Buscema and Alfred Alcala.

In 1980, L. Sprague de Camp, who had been editing and pastiching Conan since the 1950s, wrote a Conan novel without his usual partner-in-crime, Lin Carter. This was Conan and the Spider God for Bantam Books. De Camp has Conan bent on stealing the jewels that are the eyes of a giant statue of the Spider God, Zath. Unfortunately for him (to steal a phrase from Lovecraft) the artist worked from life! Conan meets one of the Children of Zath:

…a living duplicate of the statue in the temple, save that this creature was covered with stiff hairs as long as a man’s fingers—was upon him. Reflections of the flame of his torch danced in the four great round eyes across the creature’s front. Below these eyes, a pair of hairy, jointed appendages extended forward like arms. As these organs reached out for Conan, he smote one of them with his hammer, feeling the horny integument yield as it cracked. The spider recoiled a step, folding its injured limb beneath its hairy body. Then the monster advanced again. It reared up on its six hindmost legs and spread the first pair, together with the uninjured palp, to seize its prey. Conan felt like a fly caught in a web, awaiting its fate.

Below the palps he could see the spider’s fangs, a pair of curved, shiny, sharp-pointed organs like the horns of a bull, curving out and then inwards, so that the points almost met. They, too, now spread horizontally to pierce Conan’s body from opposite sides; green venom dripped from their hollow points.

Between and below the fangs, the jointed mouth parts worked hungrily. For a heartbeat the pair confronted each other, Conan with his hammer raised to deliver one last crushing blow before he died, the spider with its monstrous, hairy appendages spread to grip the man in a last embrace. (Conan and the Spider God by L. Sprague de Camp)

Savage Sword of Conan #207-210 adapted the novel. Roy Thomas did the script while John Buscema and E. R. Cruz did the art. Roy got a chance to return to the ruins of Yara’s tower in Conan: Lord of Spiders (March-May 1998), having the villain of Conan and the Spider God, Harparus, return as the re-embodiment of Zath. A giant were-spider, he goes after Conan while he takes over Zamora. This one was drawn by Stefano Raffaele and Ralph Cabrera.

I don’t know all the writers who included tower spiders in their Conan pastiches but I did stumble on Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Great (1990). The wonderful Ken Kelly cover shows Conan fight the water spider that guards the secret entrance into a castle:

“Then, peering upward into the murky gloom, he grasped a truth that nearly made him spew out all the breath from his lungs and forfeit life at once: the bars he clutched were not metal rods, but living limbs, the armoured legs of a huge underwater spider that had been nesting in the archway. If once asleep, it was now awake; he could see two huge eyes, greenly luminous, glaring down at him from the rim of a blunt, spiderlike body. He could make out mandibles, too—a pale nest of them in the creature’s underside, stirring and writhing in what looked like newly roused hunger. As he watched, two jointed, medium-sized appendages extended downward. Their pointed tips flexed into hooks, making ready to rake him up toward the creature’s eager mouth-parts.” (Conan the Great by Leonard Carpenter)

Howard wrote the pseudo-historical essay, “The Hyborian Age” and included this little nugget: “Zamora with its dark- haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery”. I think we could extend the last part of that description to all the Hyborian Age. Giant spiders are a fine component of Howard’s fantastical world. And through him, and equally J. R. R. Tolkien, Fantasy fans have enjoyed all kinds of spider-haunted encounters. I have admit when I met Aragog in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) I nodded my head and thought of Howard and Tolkien. It was a “The Tower of the Elephant”/The Two Towers worthy moment.

Next time…Thog the Slithering Shadow…