The Two Towers

The Lord of the Rings is composed of six "books", aside from an introduction, a prologue and six appendices. However, the novel was originally published as three separate volumes, due to post-World War II paper shortages and size and price considerations.[2] The Two Towers covers Books Three and Four.

Some editions of the volume contain a Synopsis for readers who have not read the earlier volumes. The body of the volume consists of Book Three: The Treason of Isengard, and Book Four: The Ring Goes East.

Tolkien's own design for the volume's cover shows the two towers as Minas Morgul, white with the symbol of the rising moon, and Orthanc, black with Saruman's symbol of the white hand nearby.[3]

The volume's title is ambiguous, as five towers are named in the narrative, and Tolkien himself gave conflicting identifications of the two towers.[4]

Tolkien wrote: "The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books Three and Four; and can be left ambiguous."[5] At this stage he planned to title the individual books: such titles have sometimes been provided, as in the Millenium edition.[6] The proposed title for Book Three was The Treason of Isengard. Book Four was titled The Journey of the Ringbearers or The Ring Goes East.[7][8]

In letters to Rayner Unwin, Tolkien considered naming the two as Orthanc and Barad-dûr, Minas Tirith and Barad-dûr, or Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol.[5][9] However, a month later, he wrote a note published at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, and later drew a cover illustration, both of which identified the pair as Minas Morgul and Orthanc.[3][10] In the illustration, Minas Morgul is a white tower, with a thin waning moon above it, in reference to its original name, Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Rising Moon; Orthanc is shown as a black tower, three-horned, with Saruman's sign of the White Hand beside it. Between the two towers a Nazgûl flies.[10]

The narrative in the volume is interlaced, unlike the largely linear narrative in The Fellowship of the Ring, as the Fellowship is broken, and the different groups pursue their own quests. The main quest is not forwarded at all in book 3; conversely, the other quests are not progressed in book 4 as Frodo and Sam continue their dangerous journey towards Mordor. The timeline is more complex than this would suggest, as many smaller-scale interlacings occur as the characters travel through Middle-earth and the story.[11][12]

Interlacing allowed Tolkien to weave an elaborately intricate story, presented through the eyes of the Hobbit protagonists, "underscoring [their] frequent bewilderment and disorientation". Most directly, this is achieved by letting the reader know no more than what one character sees as he struggles forwards, not knowing what lies ahead, where his friends are, or whether the quest has already failed.[13][12] The bewilderment of the reader is minimised by the use of synchronising 'narrative landmarks', such as the brooch dropped by Pippin and discovered by Aragorn.[14] Equally, interlacing enables Tolkien to create suspense and "cliffhanger" section endings, as when the Ents and Huorns appear suddenly and decisively in a eucatastrophe on the battlefield of Helm's Deep.[12]

The Tolkien scholar Richard C. West writes that every reader must notice to some degree "the apparently meandering manner of the plot", where things happen apparently casually, as in real life. West illustrates this by examining Merry and Pippin's meeting with the Ents. This causes the Ents to overthrow their enemy Saruman, who was also the enemy of the kingdom of Rohan. This frees up Rohan to go to the aid of Gondor in their war with Sauron. The two Hobbits would never have met the Ents unless Saruman's Orcs had captured them. The Hobbits would not have escaped the Orcs unless Éomer's band of Riders of Rohan, disobeying orders from the King, had hunted the Orc intruders down. West states that each group and character has their own motivation, but their stories interact. It feels natural, and may appear "loose", but "everything is interconnected."[15]

The interlacing allows Tolkien to make hidden connections that can only be grasped retrospectively, as the reader realises on reflection that certain events happened at the same time.[12] Interlace, West notes, can "show purpose or pattern behind change".[16] This can appear, Shippey writes, as luck, where in daily life it is uncertain whether this is "something completely humdrum and practical or something mysterious and supernatural".[17]

Donald Barr in The New York Times gave a positive review, calling it "an extraordinary work – pure excitement, unencumbered narrative, moral warmth, barefaced rejoicing in beauty, but excitement most of all".[18]

Anthony Boucher, reviewing the volume in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, wrote that The Two Towers "makes inordinate demands upon the patience of its readers" with passages which "could be lopped away without affecting form or content". Nevertheless, he lavished praise on the volume, saying "no writer save E. R. Eddison has ever so satisfactorily and compellingly created his own mythology and made it come vividly alive ... described in some of the most sheerly beautiful prose that this harsh decade has seen in print."[19]

The Times Literary Supplement called it a "prose epic in praise of courage" and stated that Tolkien's Westernesse "comes to rank in the reader's imagination with Asgard and Camelot".[20][21]

Mahmud Manzalaoui, in the Egyptian Gazette, wrote that the book "has not pleased readers of the staple modern psychological novel", but that it signified a new trend in fiction.[22][21]

John Jordan, reviewing the book for the Irish Press, wrote admiring its narrative "weaving of epic, heroic romance, parable, and fairy tale, and the more adventurous kind of detective story, into a pattern at once strange and curiously familiar to our experience". He compared the wizard Gandalf's death and reappearance to Christ's resurrection.[23][21]

• Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. (1981). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-31555-2.
• Hammond, Wayne G.; Scull, Christina (2005). The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 978-0-00-720907-1.
• Holmes, John R. (2014). "The Lord of the Rings". In Lee, Stuart D. (ed.). A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 133–145. ISBN 978-0-4706-5982-3.
• Shippey, Tom (2005) [1982]. The Road to Middle-Earth (Third ed.). HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0261102750.
• Sturgis, Amy H. (2013) [2007]. "Lord of the Rings, The". In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Routledge. p. 389. ISBN 978-0-415-86511-1.
• West, Richard C. (1975). "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings". In Jared Lobdell (ed.). A Tolkien Compass. Open Court. pp. 77–94. ISBN 0-87548-303-8.

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