2 Towers 2 Towering

That Mordor trip finally makes it out of the group chat | Vol. 3 Iss. 3

Travelling with friends can be soooo rewarding but also there’s just so much drama. Some people want to go to Mordor, some people want to ride horses. Some weird guy is here who no one even invited, but he’s the only one who knows the directions. It’s a mess.

When you don’t have an itinerary in place, and the dad friend is off finding himself and changing his whole color palette, sometimes you have to just split up for hundreds of pages.

Or maybe, J.R.R. Tolkien was writing one book, or six books, and someone told him he needed to make it into three books, and that’s how we got The Two Towers. (Confession: it is not entirely clear to me which two towers this refers to. More than two towers appeared in this novel!)

Spoiler warning: Does this have spoilers for The Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers? Yes. Are you allowed to tell me spoilers for later than that in the series? Absolutely not.

Journey Part 3 - The Two Towers

Allison, you might be saying to yourself, why did it take you so long to read this book?

1. I’m tired. My job has weird hours and the world is a mess.

2. I got distracted and read some other books in the middle.

3. This book gets really battle-y for a while in the first half and I missed the hobbits.

For those of you who haven’t (recently) read this book, our heroes make a classic horror movie mistake and split the group. So the first half of the book is about Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry, Pippin, and (spoilers) Gandalf. Then, the second half of the book is devoted to things that were happening at exactly the same time to Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. I vastly preferred the second half, for reasons that we’ll get to. 

Did they actually choose to split the group? Only kind of. In the last book, Merry and Pippin were kidnapped by orcs, Gandalf fell in a pit, and Sam and Frodo set off to go to Mordor without putting the others in more danger. 

But Tolkien made a choice to not alternate chapters between these two adventures, and I think it’s to the detriment of the pacing of the book. There are some really tense sections here, and it could have been effective to have to wait to see what happens because you’ve gone back to the other group for a chapter. 

And I think Tolkien knew that, because there is a section where we hang out with Merry and Pippin and the Ents for a bit and then don’t hear from them for several chapters. And I was worried about our little buddies! 

However, when we do find them, we get another download on a huge important thing that happened (the Ents sacking Isengard) instead of it happening on page. I cheated a little bit and know that in the movies they save some of the events of this book until the third movie, and I wonder if that’s to leave room to have more of the really important events actively happen on screen instead of being discussed over a nice lunch. (No shots at lunch.) (Or at the Ents, who were great and I hope get their screen time in the movie.)

Horse Girls

I read slowly in the Rohan/horse stuff/battle sections. In part I think the issue here is that the stakes are too high. Do they need to stop Saruman? Absolutely, because he’s extremely evil and will help Sauron win. But I don’t think the book gives us enough of the small scale stakes for our characters. They don’t know the king of Rohan, except for Gandalf. They don’t even participate in the sacking of Isengard. Perhaps most galling is the bit where Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli decide that Frodo and Sam are kind of no longer their problem, and then again when Gandalf shows up he’s like “Merry and Pippin will be fine we have to go see the horse king.”

[Aside: I’ll reread it, but I do not understand what happened to Gandalf. He got a new color of karate belt, I guess? I assumed, from my osmosis knowledge of this story, that he died and came back to life. However, his explanation seemed more like he went on a sort of magical journey through the Moria pit and onto a mountain and then… got more powerful? I imagine this will be clearer in the movie. It’s also a little anticlimactic to kill off a key character and then he just turns back up when it’s convenient, and he knows everything and has a new outfit. But back to stakes.]

Nice Hobbitses

When we got back to Frodo and Sam, I felt such a relief. At the very end of the book we get the best example of the difference between these two halves. Frodo is looking super dead, and Sam has to decide if he should take the One Ring to try and throw it in Mount Doom. And the fate of their entire world hangs on that mission and the fate of the ring, but Sam is legitimately really torn because he cares most about Frodo and his friends. So the mission suddenly feels less important to him because he feels like everyone he cares about is lost.

Which makes it all the more impactful when he does take up the Ring and decide to carry on (even though this is reversed when it turns out that Frodo is not, in fact, dead).

The stakes/tension with Gollum also seem so much more immediate than the threat of Saruman or the orcs. Sam and Frodo are absolutely terrible at staying awake when they’re supposed to be keeping watch, so every night that passes it seems possible that Gollum will strangle them in their sleep.

But at the same time, Gollum is far and away the most interesting character the book has going. So even though he’s dangerous, I also found myself wishing for more time with him. 

The best moment of this was also near the end of the book. Sam has once again fallen asleep when he’s supposed to be keeping watch, and Frodo’s asleep with his head in Sam’s lap, and Gollum finds them like that, and you realize that Gollum is lonely. Does that justify trying to feed them to a spider? Of course not. But it’s so dynamic to see this creature that has lost 99% of his humanity, but still wishes for a friend.

(I’m not going to google it, but there’s gotta be Frodo/Sam slash fic out there, right? They’re so cute! And Sam is so devoted to Frodo. I will even set aside the workplace romance of it, because I think they are friends first.)

Legacy and/or Copy Cats

I was struck, particularly in this book but in the series overall, by how foundational this story is for the fantasy genre as we know it now. George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling (boo, hiss) were copying Tolkien’s homework left and right. (Which I think is mostly a compliment, and how genres work, especially for a story that’s this big. But it’s striking to have read Game of Thrones and Harry Potter first and then come back and realize where so much of that came from.)

Martin absolutely suffers from the same problem of how to balance stories that are happening at the same time in different places. A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons take the series’ increasing number of perspective characters and simply split the same time period into two books, covering one group of characters and then the other. It was just as frustrating there, especially because it meant spending an entire book away from characters who are emotionally so vital to the story. The Thrones books also rely on much the same wandering around style plotting, though I think the objectives are usually clearer in those stories than they were in Fellowship.

Harry Potter-wise, there is no Dobby (or other house elves) without Gollum, down to the distinctive speech patterns and even the character designs in the movies. And perhaps more strikingly, the locket horcrux in Deathly Hallows has so much the same effect for the wearer as the One Ring, which Frodo is even wearing on a chain around his neck for much of this book.

Plus, and this is just fantasy in general, all these books love a sword! Oh, this sword is old and belonged to someone important? And the person who wields it now is also important and their presence probably portends a change for this community? Groundbreaking

A Certain Number of Towers

Between one and four towers might be the two towers referred to by the title of this book. They include:

1. Orthanc

I think one of the two towers is probably Saurumon’s house at Isengard. This would make sense given the book being split in half, and the first main story basically ending here. However, this half of the book’s tower could also be…

2. Helm’s Deep

The argument against this is that it’s a wall more than a tower, but I think there might have been a tower behind the wall.

3. Barad-dûr

It still seems likely that at least one tower is from the hobbits/Gollum section of the book. The main candidate here is Barad-dûr. In the first book/movie it definitely seemed like they were setting up Saruman as an Intermediate Bad and Sauron as the Big Bad, so it would make sense for Orthanc/Isengard and Barad-dûr to be the two towers. However, Frodo and Sam only look at Baradur. They don’t even interact with it. So the hobbit section tower might be…

4. The tower at the back door to Mordor

The hobbits approach the tower at the end of the spider tunnel, which is then where a bunch of orcs come from and kidnap Frodo who is not, in fact, dead. So this tower actually has more of a role to play in this book, even if it’s ultimately less important.

However again! My understanding is that the Two Towers movie stops before Helm’s Deep and the journey through the spider tunnel. If the movie follows the order of the book, that would also mean that it leaves out the sack of Isengard, which would leave the film version of Two Towers with perhaps as few as one tower, which is not important to the plot of this book at all.

What Else

Watching

I recently saw the Michael Fassbender/Cate Blanchett spy movie Black Bag and loved it. It’s witty, sexy, and stylish. This is a dialogue spy movie, not a pew pew one, and every single character in this movie is messy. Michael Fassbender’s whole spycraft is just telling other people’s sex secrets. His hobbies include: 1) Loving his wife and 2) mess!

Reading

The main book that I got distracted by in the middle of Two Towers was Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners. I’ve read some of Lauren’s other books and she’s consistently doing great work, including in putting grounded characters in absolutely bonkers situations.

The plot here is ridiculous, depending on an entire wedding getting a horrible virus from a seafood buffet and our two main characters being saved by 1) a seafood allergy and 2) a belief that buffets aren’t good food handling safety. That by itself is ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous is that they then take the honeymoon the couple won for themselves at the couple’s request, because they are the siblings (and in one case, twin) of the couple.

And what is most ridiculous is that I didn’t care that the plot was absurd. I liked the characters. I liked the enemies-to-lovers banter. And I liked the beautiful Hawaiian setting. Sue me. I wish I were at the beach.

NYT Style Section Nonsense Part 1000

If you’re new here, hi! Welcome to everybody who found me through Nikhil’s excellent substack. Mine is significantly less self-reflective and much more likely to make fun of rich people on the internet.

My very first post was about things the New York Times Style section pretends are normal, including having a specific dishwasher for your dog.

And today I bring you: $3K high school spring break trip.

There is no way these kids aren’t making everyone else at this resort abjectly miserable. High schoolers are terrifying, with their matching outfits and their still-burgeoning understanding of social norms. Imagine hundreds (?) of them running around without their parents, in a country that says they’re old enough to drink and gamble. This is my nightmare vacation scenario.