There are at least a dozen songs or poems in The Hobbit. The
first time I read this book, I was a teenager with very little patience for
Tolkien’s poetry. Most of the ditties didn’t move the story forward (a must for songs as far as I’m concerned) and they simply didn’t captivate me the way the
prose and pictures did. One I found most annoying was “Old Fat Spider Spinning
in a Tree.” Bilbo sang this to irritate and distract the Mirkwood spiders who
were planning to make a meal of his dwarf friends.
Old fat spider can’t see me!
Attercop! Attercop! Won't you stop,
Stop your spinning and look for me?
It was many years before I learned attercop wasn’t just a
word Tolkien had invented. But it was an Old English word for spider, literally
meaning “poison-head.” Of course, the word was familiar to Tolkien, a professor
of Old and Middle English.
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