Then, he wrote that he was attempting to decide on specific towers, but was waffling between three different options. According to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, he initially wrote to his publisher Allen & Unwin that the towers the title referred to should be left ambiguous. At no point did these these two sections intersect.Įventually Tolkien settled on The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, so that the titles of all three books could be included in the first printing of The Fellowship to entice the satisfied reader. Section IV leapt back in time a week to pick up with Frodo and Sam and then continued for over two weeks of time. Section III followed linearly from Section II, covering about a week of the adventures of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf, Merry, and Pippin in Rohan. The second book in the trilogy, containing sections III and IV of the 6-section epic, proved to be a challenge. This meant that Tolkien had to come up with names for the three parts. But his publishers were wary of the high price of paper in post-war England and thought that readers would balk at the sight of a thousand-page tome, so they mandated that it be split into three parts with two sections each. Tolkien envisioned The Lord of the Rings as a single book told in six named sections, not a trilogy. But then, it was never supposed to have a name at all. When you really get down to it, The Two Towers just isn’t a very good name for the middle installment of The Lord of the Rings.

And it came back to plague Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh when it came time for them to convert The Lord of the Rings into three movies. Tolkien waffled on for the majority of the time he was writing The Fellowship of the Ring. In another setting, perhaps, this would be an easy thing to figure out, but the geography of Middle-earth nearly bristles with spires of one kind or another, from Saruman’s tower at Isengard to the steeples of Minas Tirith, capital city of Gondor to Barad-dûr, the perch of the Eye of Sauron - and all of them play large roles in The Lord of the Rings.īut it’s a valid question, one that even J.R.R. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.

Lord of ring two towers