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Tolkien's Dragon, Dwarves and Spider : Economy of Retention Minwoo Yoon (Yonsei University) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are all about the economy of losing, sharing, and forgetting. As an antithesis to the major theme of Tolkien's literature, the dragon, the dwarves and the spider all represent the desire to retain, thus standing antagonistic to that economy of expenditure. This economy of losing/possessing has much to do with the anthropological observation by Marcel Mauss that the donee's refusal to circulate a gift makes it come back as a poison to him, and Nietzsche's idea that the ‘weak’ never forget hurt or gift, and repay it on equal terms. Indeed, the dragons (Glaurung/Smaug) steal treasures only to hoard them without enjoying. The dwarves never forget their own treasure stolen by others such as the dragons; they swear revenge and nourish the “ressentiment,” awaiting a time to regain the treasure. Also, far from giving, the female spiders(Ungoliant/Shelob) devour everything entangled in their web, and their insatiable hunger goes as far as to consume even her own offspring and herself. The unforgetfulness can be said to have a close affinity to melancholia in Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Freudian melancholia is simply one's failure to forget the loss of an object, i.e., one's inability to break his excessive and subjective attachment to the object. Then, Freud relates the melancholia to the infantile oral and anal libidinal desires. The dragon's and dwarves' regressive desire for retention is analogous to the anal libido which comes from the fear that they may suffer from a lack. The anal libido is an infant's preliminary desire for possession and independence: by not conforming to the parents' call to discharge excrements, an infant experiences retaining something and resisting to parents. In turn, the spider is an embodiment of the great oral desire to engulf everything, even her own body. As Freud says in “Totem and Taboo,” the spider's sadistic destruction or eating of herself comes from her unforgetfulness of her own value―an extreme narcissism.