'The Two Towers': A Review

How Do You Top The Greatest Novel Ever Written? Split It into Three

Aragorn sped on up the hill. Every now and again he bent to the ground. Hobbits go light, and their footprints are not easy even for a Ranger to read, but not far from the top a spring crossed the path, and in the wet earth he saw what he was seeking. 

These are the opening lines of the second book in The Lord of the Rings. It starts exactly where the Fellowship ends, and just where you might expect the next chapter of the book to pick up, if it were all one book. And it is, actually. It was broken up into three volumes, the first two of which came out in 1954, and the third the following year. To be most accurate, I suppose, it’s six books in three parts telling one story. The Two Towers is Part Two, and it contains Books III and IV. The first one follows Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas, and all the other members of the Fellowship as they deal with the world of Men and Orcs and the War of the Ring. The second part follows the Ringbearer and Sam on their journey toward Mordor, along with Gollum. 

Tolkien became unhappy with the title of this second part before it was published. The year before, 1953, he wrote to his publisher in March suggesting the title The Ring in the Shadow. In August he suggested The Shadow Lengthens. Then, a week later, The Two Towers. For some reason by January of ‘54 he had come to dislike it, feeling it was too ambiguous. The original reason for it was the “widely divergent” character of Books III and IV.¹ They had so little in common that they needed a pretty vague title. He was at first glad that it could “be left ambiguous”. But by that January letter he came to see this as “misleading”. He figured readers would be likely to assume that Minas Tirith and Barad-Dur were meant, when in fact neither of those towers appear in Part Two.

For myself, I like the title. I’ve never been bothered too much wondering which towers were meant. This turned out in my favor, since Tolkien himself didn’t seem to have any two fixed in mind. Orthanc and Minas Morgul are I think the best candidates, since each is the location of an intense scene at the ends of Books III and IV respectively. 

The thing about Part Two that has always stood out to me is how much happens in it. There is so much material. The plot beats come thick and fast. When you look at all three side by side, it is usually the thinnest, even though it’s a bit longer than Return of the King. That one is filled out by the Appendices at the end. Even so, we start with the Fellowship still basically together but scattering along the banks of the Anduin, having only recently left Lothlorien, and just three chapters later, the Fellowship is totally disbanded, with Merry and Pippin sitting on the shoulders of a tree shepherd who is older than Elrond and whose true name would take days to say, while Aragorn, Legloas, and Gimli meet a resurrected Gandalf who sweeps them up into the war  between Rohan and Isengard—the former of which we barely heard of in the First Part. 

Peter Jackson and his writing team felt the weight of just how much actually happens in The Two Towers, and they dealt with it by chopping off the end of Books III and IV and putting them into the third film. Book III ends with Gandalf and Pippin riding like the wind toward Gondor, after Pippin has looked into the Palantir. Book IV ends with Sam, with the Ring on his finger, helplessly watching as Orcs take Frodo’s spider-bitten body into the Tower of Cirith Ungol. For those who have only seen the films, this will be jarring, since all of that feels very much like Return of the King material—iconically so, even. 

When I last finished it, which was the beginning of last year, I wrote a tiny review in Goodreads, in which I noted how often Tolkien uses the word ‘noisome’ to describe stenches in Book IV. It was something I had never noticed before. It looks like a word that should mean loud or something. But apparently it comes from Old French and is related to the word ‘annoy’. When you think about it, it’s quite useful for what Tolkien is after. For one thing, he wouldn’t have wanted to keep using multiple words like ‘foul smelling’ or ‘dreadful smelling’ when one word could do. He also wouldn’t have wanted the longer and cumbersome ‘malodorous’; it’s a bit too French-sounding or Latin-sounding. Even though he’s using a word with a French root, he opted for one with an Old English suffix: -some. Words that end that way (wholesome, toothsome, buxom) have a richer, earthier, English sound to them, which is exactly what’s needed for maintaining the aura of high fantasy that he’s creating. 

Chapter 3, “Treebeard”, is one of my favorites in the book. There we meet the Ents of Fangorn, one of Tolkien’s best creations. They are ancient tree-men, who are as much like trees as they are like men: tall, slow-talking, and slow-moving, until they are really roused to anger. The old leader of the Onodrim, as the Elves call them, has eyes like deep brown wells with a green light in them, and (a brilliant touch, this) he objects to the hobbits using the tiny, hasty word ‘hill’ for a thing “that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.”

The world of Middle Earth opens up dramatically in this volume; the world of Men in particular. The Fellowship was very linear and very Elvish; The Two Towers is wide-ranging, multi-perspectival, and Man-ish. 

It’s also in this volume that Sam really comes into his own as a character. His loyalty, his doggedness, his defensiveness of Frodo, his shrewdness and common sense, all make him the perfect companion for the Ring-bearer. And Tolkien clearly favors him. The reader spends more time seeing through the eyes and hearing the thoughts of Sam than of Frodo. By the second chapter of Book IV this starts to set in. “The Taming of Smeagol”, as I page through it again, doesn't seem to favor one hobbit over the other for perspective. But right as “The Passage of the Marshes” begins, Tolkien goes with Sam. I’ll say more about why I think that is when I write on Return of the King. Some of it is probably a keen authorial device; Frodo is more and more being lost to the Ring, his life a bit less grounded in this world, bleeding into a wraith-world, due to the Ring and due to his wound. Seeing less of the inside of his mind conveys this well. But Sam also makes for a better natural protagonist. Frodo is interesting on paper: a hobbit who is also an Elf-Friend, wise beyond his years and his race. But he is not interesting to see Middle Earth through. He is not such a sympathetic character as Sam. 

Turning back to Book III, there is a scene in “The Riders of Rohan” that is one of the more chivalric, knightly moments of Part Two. It’s one of the places that reminds us we are not reading about characters who are very like us. Eomer, having just met the three companions of the Fellowship who are pursuing Merry and Pippin, refers to the Lady of the Golden Wood  as something of a net-weaver and a witch. Gimli insults him in defense of the lady’s honor, and probably the hospitality she showed the Company. Eomer, in turn, threatens to cut off the Dwarf’s head for his disrespectful words. This sort of “honor”, the kind that was quick to violence provoked by words, was part of the High Middle Ages Tolkien is evoking (not that this is all he’s evoking). And it’s interesting to see him love it and also emend it to his own more Christian and more modern palate. Even Tolkien, disciple of the past though he was, did not fully approve of Gimli’s rudeness or Eomer’s (and then Legolas’) rashness. He has Aragorn wisely jump in between them and broker peace. 

One doesn't get the sense that Tolkien thinks they are wicked or even stupid for being so offended and wanting to back it up with their weapons. It’s just that they are a bit short-sighted, not seeing the big picture enough to know that the other ought to be an ally in the war against Saruman and Sauron. On another occasion, the courtly ethic says, it would be perfectly fine for Gimli and Eomer to duel—the former to defend Galadriel’s honor and the latter his own and his right to speak as he chooses in his own land in front of foreigners. For Tolkien, one feels, the courtly honor ethic is not the problem. Or rather, to the extent that it is the problem, the solution is not modern moral anemia and drawing-room niceness; it’s kingly honor, which at bottom is Christian, and therefore always comes with humility and wisdom, and the ethos to command deference. Aragorn has all of these. 

The Two Towers, along with its predecessor and successor, is a tale of mighty imagination and stupendous creation; a fully believable myth. It’s something that feels like it had to exist. In this way, it reminds us of history. As myth and as history, it is like the Ents, moving slowly but powerfully to its goal. It doesn't so much strike as mesmerize; not so much spasm as pulse, with a life that has roots in our own world and the world that lies beneath ours and upholds ours.

1.  The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 136 and 139, pp. 166-170; 143, p. 173.