Finished reading: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚

The Two Towers was great. I enjoyed it much more than Fellowship of the Ring. The pacing felt better, and the characters (both major and minor) seemed more distinct in voice and personality.

This book is also benefits from the massive world-building Tolkien is known for. Since Fellowship follows the linear path of one group of people, all the talk of history and legend and foreign people can come across as superfluous and boring. But in this book, with the gang split up, traveling long distances, and meeting all sorts of different folk, the lore transforms into something that ties the narrative together.

This book also had a very strong theme of ecological awareness. The race of the Ents speaks clearly to beings existing One with nature, and they decry ecological devastation in their words:

“It is the orc-work, the wanton hewing without even the bad excuse of feeding the fires, that has so angered us; and the treachery of a neighbour, who should have helped us.”

And apart from all the tree love, I really enjoyed the passage of Gimli praising the beauty of caves, and expressing the Dwarves’ balanced approach to resource extraction:

“My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful […] one of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock”

The language of ecological plunder is also used to describe Frodo and Sam’s journey: “They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion”.

So, anyway - people say Dune is an environmentalist book… I’m here to put The Two Towers into the ring (ha) as well.

There are several surprising ways in which the book series differs from the movies, but I’ll hold my tongue until after I read Return of the King to see if those differences bear out.

Looking forward to seeing how this series ends!