《The Two Towers》- My Belated Big Read (2/3)

Slightly over a month after I read The Fellowship of the Ring, I also finished reading The Two Towers, the second book of the three-volume epic novel The Lord of the Rings authored by J. R. R. Tolkien. I'm very happy about the progress I've made in my self-learning journey of English literature because in the interim I also completed studying two of Shakespeare’s plays.

I have to confess, though, that the genre of the novel is not my favorite.  However, with Tolkien's great talents and the wide readership it has achieved, I, as a highly motivated reader of English literature, have to read it any way, and it's better to do it sooner rather than later.  

To this end, again thanks to useful and free study guides abundantly available online, I was able to quickly scan through my paperback copy, while reading the on-line study guides thoroughly to better understand the plots, themes and other literary devices of this volume.

The volume consists of Book III and Book IV, each containing 11 and 10 chapters, respectively. At the end of the previous volume the Fellowship broke up into three groups, with two of them later merging into one while the remaining group proceeding alone, towards their destinations where the evil powers are represented by two towers. That's how the volume was named.

Unlike how a protagonist usually appears, Frodo, along with Sam, doesn't show up until Book IV, the second half of the volume. Thus, stories in the first half of the volume revolve all around the other two groups: Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Dwarf and Aragorn the human warrior for one, and Pippin and Merry, the two hobbits that follow Frodo all the way from Shire, as the other. Tolkien's genius in plotting, with the protagonist missing for half of the volume, has increased the suspense and made the book a page-turner indeed.

I'm amazed by the characters representing the races of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and Men, as well as many other creatures appearing in the novel. Replicating these characters perfectly in other media, say, films, is no easy task, in my view. For one thing, in the film The Two Towers that premiered in 2002, the protagonist Hobbits all look like ordinary humans to me, similar to their appearance in its prequel The Fellowship of the Ring. 

Though commercial considerations may play a role, and it might not be wise to make the protagonist look too realistically strange, this may reflect the limitations of visual arts compared to the novel, where one's imagination is limitless.

In particular, I was amused by the descriptions of how Pippin enjoys his pipe, even at the time when he's surrounded by uncertainty and danger, and my imagination is far more entertaining than how it looks in this snapshot of the film.

The visual arts did a great job in depicting other characters, though. For one thing, due to my limited exposure to fantasy novels before, I had problems imagining how orcs, the monsters populating on the evil land that the Fellowship has to fight against constantly, look. Images like this gives me some idea about what they might look like.

The other character that I'm equally impressed, thanks to the visual arts, is the Nazgûl, the nine messengers of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, who soar above Middle-earth on fearsome winged horses, constantly searching for the Ring. They intimidate and strike fear into the hearts of those who see them flying above.

Another frightening, evil, and giant creature is Shelob, an ancient female spider that lives in the tunnels near Mordor.  Shelob guards one of the entrances to Mordor and is always hungry for prey, but she eats only living creatures. At the end of the volume, Frodo is stung by Shelob to unconsciousness but still alive, and is likely to become the next meal of Shelob.

Gollum, a froglike character, also interests me a lot. He once carried the Ring himself, but lost it, and now attempts to get it back. In the latter part of this volume, Gollum accompanies Frodo and Sam in their journey all the way to Mordor.

The first climax of the volume is the  reappearance of Gandalf the White, a wizard of supreme good  after seemingly being killed, then as Gandalf the Grey, in the previous volume, The Fellowship of the Ring , when he falls into a chasm. The Hobbits are greatly aided in their quest ahead with the return of this enormously powerful wizard.

The last character of interest to me is Fangorn, one of the Ents, a race of giant, mobile, treelike creatures. The fourteen-foot-tall Fangorn is one of the oldest creatures in Middle-earth, showing great hospitality to Pippin and Merry, who are given food by him at his Ent-house.

Interestingly, through the study guide I learned that Tolkien probably drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s play to create the character Fangorn: the mobile Ents join the Fellowship to fight against the good-turn-evil wizard Saruman in Isengard, just as Macbeth imagines the woods moving all the way from Birnam as the witches have profesied, per his soliloquy at the end of Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth.

Another interesting inspiration is hidden behind a brief passage, in which Frodo, Sam, and Gollum stumble upon a great, headless ancient stone King of Agornath, whose head is on the ground and crowned with a flower wreath. 

It's said that Tolkien's inspiration came from Ozymandias, one of the few poems that I know and love, famously composed by the British Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, and I can't help quoting it here:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition

Elsewhere, through extensive reading I learned that the major inspiration of Tolkien's epic works come from Beowulf, an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend, consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines, and one of the most important works of Old English literature. 

Tolkien also drew  inspiration from Camelot, the legendary castle and court in Arthurian mythology (The Matter of Britain). I haven't read either one yet, and it may be a good idea to include both in my future book orders.

Finally, I want to end my post with this map, ingeniously created by Tolkien and reproduced for better sizing with the paper version of the book. It illustrates the geography and the places the Fellowship journeys through in this volume, including Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor, as well as the namesake Two Towers: Minas Morgul in Mordor and Orthanc in Isengard (not shown but to the left of Rohan).

What a journey with The Two Towers! I look forward to my next journey with Tolkien: The Return of the King.