The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien – The Long Dark Before the Dawn

52 Books in a Year – Week 12

Let me be honest with you from the start, because that is what we do here. The Two Towers is not my favourite of the three. Fellowship has that. Fellowship has the warmth of the Shire and the shock of Moria and Boromir on the riverbank, and that conversation between Frodo and Gandalf that I will carry around in my head until I no longer have a head to carry things in. Fellowship is where the story finds itself. The Two Towers is where the story starts to show the darkness of the conflict. And that is a different thing entirely, a harder thing, and in its own way progresses the epic tale and can stand on its own two feet.

Here is what Tolkien does in this book that deserves genuine respect. He takes a story that has lost its centre, Frodo and Sam have separated from the Fellowship, the group is broken, the quest is fractured, and he keeps it moving through sheer force of world and character and mythological conviction. There is no safety net in Two Towers. No comfortable anchor. Just the road, getting harder, and the question of whether the people walking it have what it takes to keep walking.

They do. And so, just about, do you.

The Split

The structure of Two Towers is the first thing worth talking about because it is genuinely unusual and took me a moment to settle into on this read. Tolkien divides the book cleanly in two. The first half follows Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pippin. The second half follows Frodo and Sam. The two halves do not intersect. You finish one complete strand of the story and then go back in time to pick up the other.

It is a bold structural decision and I think it is the right one, though I understand why some readers find it disorienting. What it does is give each storyline room to breathe and develop its own emotional register without constantly cutting away at the wrong moment. The Rohan storyline has its own pace and its own texture. The Frodo and Sam storyline has a completely different one, quieter and more interior and in many ways more frightening. Interweaving them would have diluted both. Tolkien knew this. He kept them separate and trusted the reader to hold both threads.

I respect that trust even when, arriving at the halfway point and having to reset, it demanded a little patience.

Rohan

The first half of Two Towers belongs to Rohan and I think it is some of the finest sustained world-building in the trilogy.

Where the elves of Lothlórien carry a grief that is almost too beautiful to look at directly, Rohan carries something earthier and more immediate. It is a kingdom in decline, its king diminished by a counsel he should never have trusted, its people scattered and afraid, its great hall still magnificent but hollowed out from within. Théoden, when we first encounter him, is one of Tolkien's most quietly devastating creations. A good man who has been slowly talked out of himself. His restoration, when it comes, through Gandalf's intervention and his own returning will, is not the most dramatic moment in the book but it is one of the most emotionally satisfying.

There is also Éowyn, standing at a window watching the riders leave, and I want to say clearly that Tolkien does considerably more with her in the pages available to him than he is sometimes given credit for. She is not passive. She is furious and capable and constrained by a world that will not let her be what she is, and she does something about it. What she does about it does not fully arrive until Return of the King, but the seed of it is here, in Two Towers, in the way she holds herself and the way she looks at the horizon.

And then there is Helm's Deep.

Helm's Deep

If you want to understand why Peter Jackson's film adaptation works as well as it does, read the Helm's Deep sequence in Two Towers and notice what Tolkien is doing with time and dread and the particular terror of a siege. The films expanded it considerably, gave it more spectacle, made it the centrepiece of the second film in a way the book does not. But the emotional architecture of it is all Tolkien. The sense of an impossible number coming in the dark. The walls holding and then not holding. The long wait for something that may not come.

It is a masterclass in tension built through restraint rather than escalation, which is a lesson a great deal of modern action writing could stand to learn.

Gollum

Here is where Two Towers genuinely surpasses Fellowship, and I want to be precise about why.

Gollum in Fellowship is a presence, a history, a shadow that Gandalf describes and that we understand to be significant. Gollum in Two Towers is a character. A full, complex, contradictory, heartbreaking character. And Tolkien's handling of him across the second half of this book is, in my view, the single greatest piece of characterisation in the entire trilogy.

He is wretched and he is cunning and he is, if you look at him in a certain light and with a certain generosity, tragic. He was a hobbit once. Not so different from Frodo. He found the ring and it took everything from him over centuries of slow corruption and he has been looking for it ever since with a devotion that would be touching if it were directed at anything else. He calls it his birthday present. His precious. The language of a child who has had something taken away and never stopped wanting it back.

What Tolkien does with the relationship between Gollum and Sam and Frodo is extraordinary because it is three-sided and all three sides are right. Sam does not trust Gollum and Sam is correct. Frodo shows Gollum a compassion that Gandalf encouraged and that compassion is not weakness, it is wisdom, it is the quality in Frodo that makes him the right person to carry the ring even as it is slowly destroying him. And Gollum, pulled between the remnant of what he was and the creature he has become, is genuinely trying, in those middle sections, to be something better.

He fails. But the attempt matters. It always matters.

The Weight on Frodo

I said in the Fellowship entry that Frodo is not the most obviously compelling protagonist. I stand by that. But Two Towers is where his particular kind of courage becomes impossible to dismiss.

The ring gets heavier. Not metaphorically. Literally, physically heavier with every step toward Mordor. Tolkien is describing something real about the experience of carrying a burden that grows rather than diminishes the closer you get to the thing that should end it. Every step toward the solution makes the problem worse. That is not adventure fiction. That is an understanding of what sustained moral effort actually costs, written in the language of myth.

Sam watching Frodo struggle and not being able to take the weight himself, only being able to stay close and keep going, is the most human relationship in the whole of the trilogy. It is not glamorous. It is not heroic in any conventional sense. It is just loyalty in its most fundamental and unglamorous form. Showing up. Carrying the pots. Making a bit of food when there is food to make. Being there.

Tolkien understood that this is what love mostly looks like. Not the dramatic gesture. The continued presence.

Shelob's Lair

I am not going to say much about Shelob's Lair except this. Tolkien builds it slowly, lets the darkness and the stench and the ancient wrongness of the place accumulate over several chapters, and then delivers something so viscerally horrible that it is remarkable it exists in a book that was originally conceived for children. Shelob herself is magnificent in the way that only a genuinely ancient and indifferent evil can be magnificent. She does not hate Frodo. She is simply hungry, and he is there, and that is considerably more frightening than hatred.

The ending of Two Towers, what happens to Frodo and what Sam does in response, is the kind of ending that makes you reach immediately for the next book. Which is, of course, exactly what it is designed to do.

Why It Earns Its Place

Fellowship is better. I said it at the start and I mean it. But Two Towers does something that only the middle of a great trilogy can do. It holds. It keeps faith with the reader through the hardest stretch of the journey, the part where the destination feels impossibly far and the beginning is too far behind to offer any comfort, and it finds within that difficulty its own particular kind of beauty.

Gollum alone would justify its existence. Rohan alone would justify its existence. Sam and Frodo in the dark, one carrying the ring and one carrying them both, absolutely justifies its existence.

The road goes ever on. Two Towers is the hardest part of it. Tolkien walks it without flinching and takes you with him.

Final Verdict

★★★★★ (5/5)

Because of course it is. Because whatever my personal preference between the three volumes, the idea of giving anything less than five stars to this book would be like complaining that the middle arch of a cathedral is less impressive than the entrance. The entrance is where you catch your breath. The middle is where you understand what you are standing inside.

The Two Towers is where you understand what you are standing inside. And it is vast.

Next Up: The Return of the King, my favourite movie of all time, will the book hold up.