The one question this valley never answers: What was Ungoliant?
Camp 1 — She was a Maia, a spirit of the world corrupted by Morgoth in the beginning, no different in origin from a Balrog.
Camp 2 — She was something older and outside the Music altogether, a hunger that descended from the Darkness before Arda and served no one.
The texts say the Eldar never knew where she came from. So we're asking you: Maia, or something Arda was never meant to contain? Make your case. ⬇

Another place I’ve never even heard of. It’s truly incredible how larger than life Tolkien’s world building and story telling is! Would love to see a video about the Two Trees of Valinor if you could make that by the way!

Ok, I'm going out on a limb and saying Ungoliant was Vala, one who was made manifest by Iluvatar shortly after Melkor and who never did take part in the music of the Ainur. She would have been a partner to Melkor, much as the other Valar were male & female partners, but she was a kind of fish wife partner who was a glutton for light. She kept after Melkor to provide light for her to consume, which he did in order to keep her off his back. As Morgoth, he kept her stashed in NanDungortheb as long as he could and when she finally got him to help her get to the trees, she got way out of control, causing Morgoth no end of contention till he gave up and cast her out to eat herself into oblivion. Now, that's just me giving my own spin on the whole thing, but I can't help being amused at the idea of old Morgoth having a nagging Spider for a wife.

Lets not forget that also there was supposed to be a very old village somewhere there deep lost in the valley where also lived eerie odd people worshipping OLDER DARK GODS than Melkor/Morgoth alone too, although that was an idea that appeared in older Turin Turambar versions that got discarded too, but there´re hints about it being either some further mystery within the valley,  or the actual origin of the Spider beings that Ungoliant mated to sire a bigger spawn of them infesting the valley - and from which indeed came Shelob too before she fled into the East about the timing of War of Wrath and the destruction of Beleriand along it - and well it´s likely the corrupted rivers and the same origin of the Spiders she mated might have been the people of that old village somehow or part of it, and so the valley got corrupted by the wandering spirits wraiths of the former inhabitants there, and maybe the other deities they worshipped were just the Spiders who mated Ungoliant or/and Ungoliant herself. (Another side of the Nameless Older Dark Gods might have be linked to the Nameless Things mystery in the deepest of Moria.)

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I think she was something that existed completely independent of the Music but in a way that possibly supersedes and/or predates Eru Illuvatar. For some reason, when imagining or contemplating the nature of divine beings, humans seemingly need to impose our own limitations upon these concepts. To me, the idea of there being a single being that is the source of everything there is; a supreme will that just…..exists, one that always has and always will, and that everything else there is flows froms silly. In my opinion, the infiniteness of the axiom: as above, so below points to there being no end and no beginning to anything. In other words, while Illuvatar was the supreme being, from which flowed all things and every single thing, no matter how discordant, ultimately served His will and contributed to the uniqueness of the Music, all of that was just its own closed system. And it’s that either Illuvatar was just one being among others, all operating their own closed systems where all things contribute to theirs own respective tones as it were and in turn each of these supreme beings collective “Music” each amounted to being just a single instrument in an even bigger symphony. OR……there was some greater system of group of beings that predated and stood even greater that Illuvatar but had risen and fell through the eons and Illuvatar was simply an inheritor of what was left, much the same as we are simply inheritors of much of what our narrative gives us credit for creating/establishing.