Some places are just...wrong. That feeling to us is something deep, but rarely do we take the time to think on why. But to Tolkien, the reason is clear and usually possesses eight legs and a multitude of bulbous, inhuman eyes. What is it about the lairs and nests of spiders in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that so effectively captures this sense of wrongness?

Effectively, everything about these places upends our normal, comfortable expectations of the outside world. Light, wind, birdsong -- these things we hardly ever notice, but their absence is impossible to ignore. So when we read of a place that "here the air was still, stagnant, heavy, and sound fell dead" instantly, that landscape in our minds takes on that abiding sense of wrongness (LOTR, The Two Towers). So too does a lack of light "like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away" conjure to mind a visceral, almost instinctual fear (The Hobbit).

And to us, just as it is to the hobbits in either tale, when something is wrong, danger is surely lurking closeby. In our world, such characteristics we intentionally ascribe to such places we wish the public to stay away from, manmade or natural. Unsafe caves and shores are kept lightless -- a darkened window brings no visitors, after all. So too do we keep prisons dark, quiet, and still.

But what is evil without stank? Shelob, arguably the second most evil creature on Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age, lived in a lair so horrid that "out of it came a reek so foul, a sense of lurking malice so intense" that Frodo and Sam physically recoil from it. I wish I could think of a place we intentionally make smell horrid so that people flee from it, but mostly, stench seems to be a side effect of evil in our world. Still, the smell of a place has definitely made me turn about face and run before, so never underestimate a strong funk.