SOURCE: "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" by Lord Dunsany (The Sword of Welleran & Other Stories, 1908)

DESCRIPTION: "...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 further, 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..." ("The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth" by Lord Dunsany)

NOTES: Theodric comes to the Fortress Unvanquishable to kill Gaznak. Gaznak's first guardian is a giant spider. It is no match for the magic sword Sacnoth.

HISTORY: Tom Shippey in The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994) selects this story as one of the very first sword & sorcery tales in which a warrior takes on a wizard, a theme often attributed to Robert E. Howard twenty-five years later. Howard would use a very similar spider in "The Tower of the Elephant". Dunsany may also have inspired Tolkien's giant spiders.

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