'Inside Tolkien's The Two Towers' Documentary

[Music] [Music] hello i'm graham mctavish and I've come here to rural Warwickshire in the heart of England to explore the background to one of the most famous works of literature in the world the Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien's great work as its roots firmly steeped in this landscape this is where toking grew up and it is these fields and farms which form the inspiration of the Shire from which the whole adventure begins Tolkien consciously felt himself deeply rooted in the village life of the Midlands where he spent the early part of his childhood he was very open eyed about it and in his portraits of various hobbits you can see different aspects of the English character as he felt it existed in that English setting on the one hand plucky down-to-earth courageous when pushed to it on the other hand parochial country bumpkin ish and very set in its ways and he has great pleasure I think in both the Hobbit and in the Lord of the Rings in playing with both sides of that coin one couldn't really engage him in conversation you couldn't make him follow your conversational needs at all it was mainly that some chance remark might strike him off I remember some reason mentioned in the Marx Brothers and being astonished that he was prepared to talk at some length about them I didn't know that he'd actually had seen their films but he obviously thought he had yes well he was a really absent-minded professor and at the post office in High Street the old lady there was rather a dragon but he won her over by posting his false tree through the screen and putting his envelope in his mouth similarly the bank used to keep all the things he left there I once went with him to the bank and they opened the drawer and gave him back his last two or three pipes and grubs and things he was essentially a Victorian and Victorians had skills in the arts of either of you in doing amateur music or in doing amateur art I had a grandmother who was a water colorist she wasn't a great water colorist but she did it as a lady's occupation and in a sense Tolkien had picked up this Victorian habit of practicing an art and he practiced watercolor and pastels very effectively by the time the tale has reached the second book of the trilogy the two towers the peace and tranquility you see around here has been left behind in a journey which is fast descending into nightmare the two towers opens in the aftermath of the ferocious fight between Boromir and the orcs Aragorn Legolas and Gimli come upon the dying volunteer with his last words Boromir confesses that he tried to take the ring from Frodo hoping to use it for the defense of Minas Tirith he tells Aragorn that the orcs have captured the two hobbits Merry and Pippin although you know he's done a lot of wrong you know at the end he dies repentant and confessing the orc trail leads Aragorn Legolas and Gimli on a desperate pursuit on foot north and west across the fields of Rome and a punishing journey of over 165 miles after two days of the weary chase with little hope of gaining on their quarry Eragon Legolas and Gimli encounter a party of horse warriors returning from a successful battle against the orc band their leader is Ian nephew to King Theoden of Rohan his people are the road the roarin or the Riders of Rohan are a warrior society Tolkien patents the speech and society of the raw rim on those of the anglo-saxons whose literature formed one of his academic specialities in the hangings on the wall in you know in Meadow selled Fair dancehall you know the it's all very much and even quoting Old English poetry where now is the horse in the rider you know which is and tokine adapting an old english verse so yeah their Old English by placing the apparent archaism of rerum culture against the far greater antiquity of Gondor and Numenor Tolkien creates a very effective sense of the vast stretches of past time that lie behind the narrative of the Lord of the Rings Tolkien felt he'd written the Lord of the Rings as a free-standing book that readers ought to be able to appreciate on its own he certainly did not expect all of his readers to share his fascination with languages or with their historic settings and with their histories as languages that said it's clear to most enthusiastic readers of Tolkien's work that the history of middle-earth stretching back to its very creation and its first age is a crucial backdrop to what's going on in the Lord of the Rings where Sauron comes from where the ring comes from where characters other characters such as Elrond and Galadriel come from remains a matter of dim and distant history by the time you're in the Third Age no Tolkien often claimed that that was a specific effect that he was looking for he wanted to write the story with just a vague sense of historical immensity stretching out behind them and that to achieve that effect it was rather like doing a painted backdrop in the theater scene you didn't need actually miles of landscape in your theater you only needed a reasonable representation of those on a backdrop to achieve the effect that said he was an obsessive enough scenery painter if you like that he brought far more detail to it than was absolutely necessary Tolkien's scholarly accomplishments as a critic of medieval English literature was grounded in his training in philology the linguistic science that looks particularly at how languages change and evolve over time his deep study of the history of European languages inspired him to try his hand at creating a language of his own and having created a language talking felt compelled to give a cultural and historical setting to that language and it was in this way that he began to write a series of legends that eventually formed the basis of The Silmarillion the stories continue to grow to expand Tolkien often use the metaphor of a tree spreading his branches sinking down roots constantly expanding exfoliating branching was one of the reasons he was never able to finish was that it kept splitting off new narrative strands and expanding in his in his mind and he was either unable or I suspect unwilling to prune it down to something more manageable that could produce a single book I have a feeling if he'd had another 50 years he probably would never have got to the end of it and his son would still have been editing it the languages of middle-earth form the seed out of which came all the stories that talking wrought now although talking uses language fairly sparingly in the Lord of the Rings the ones that do appear our depth and color to the whole world of middle-earth the vast majority of the peoples of middle-earth of the time in which the Lord of the Rings is said use the common tongue or Westar on as a universal lingua franca it is the language represented by modern English in Tolkien's texts the raw room speak an extremely archaic form of the common tongue untouched by the elvish influences that entered the language of númenor as a result their language bears the same relationship to the common tongue that Old English bears to modern English so token represents their language as Old English see Odin is an old English word meaning ruler made you celled an old English word meaning mead-hall youma and neo in our old english personal names and theoden's word for hobbits halibut ler is a made-up Old English compound which means hole builder and had it existed in Old English and survived into modern English it would have taken a form very like Hobbit [Music] [Music] the resourceful nasaan by merry and pippin during their captivity amongst our man's orcs is the direct result of their plucky resistance to the despair their plight could be expected to induce in them merry and pippin erased north and west by their orc captors for two and a half days across the east m-net of rohan to the edge of the forest of Fangorn the forest of Fangorn extends east from the southern ranges of the Misty Mountains the river and wash emerges from its southern edge to empty itself to the south and east into the Anduin while the river limb light flows east from the mountains through the forests northern reaches along with the forests of Mirkwood Lothlorien and the old forest between the Shia and revin Dell Fangorn is a remnant of a much larger forest that once covered middle-earth from the Blue Mountains in the West to the iron hills in the east throughout his work talking represents forests as places of renewed all and anyone familiar with talking's biography will be aware of the great regard he had for trees his letters are peppered with angry denunciations against tree felling to clear way for modern life he quite rightly associated another of his grace which is modernity with the destruction of nature and trees in particular so it's not surprising then that trees and forests play a special role in his work the trees you know they're not there just for timber trees have an existence in themselves don't ask what purpose is a tree you know what's a tree for a tree is a tree the forests are clearly sentient and to the point where of course some of them are able to move around not only the ants but in Fangorn as well trees move around unaccountably and there are strong individual trees in the Lord of the Rings that have their own that are their own characters though nominally allied with Sora sour man's own desire to possess the ring causes him to direct his orcs to bring the captive hobbits to Isengard rather than directly to Mordor and the quarrels that arise between the orcs of Isengard and those of Mordor during their forced march towards Fangorn offers merry and pippin the chance to escape when Talkeetna was writing this he didn't know what was going to happen the end and he's got this idea that they should have an encounter with giant a giant you know probably an unfriendly world and and of course is an old English word meaning giant calling themselves the Shepherd's of trees the ents have tendered the dwindling forests of middle-earth since its earliest ages of the language of the ents Tolkien gives no direct examples in his text the few strange words and phrases used by Treebeard are actually series of elvish words strung together in fashion when Treebeard playfully objects to the word he'll is the name of such a topographical feature he notes that the N Tisch word for the same thing will be a record of its entire history the linguistic embodiment of the thing itself rather than a generalization how such a language might actually work tolling leaves to our imaginations at the time of the events narrated in the Lord of the Rings the ents have suffered a long slow and irrevocable decline the ends and their end wives have become estranged the ends are not immortal so their numbers have steadily dwindled with no hope of increase Treebeard predicts that their action against Saruman could in fact prove their last three beards Forester Fangorn has been suffering particularly grievous injuries at the hands of seramins orcs with merry and pippin on his shoulders Treebeard leads the ends on a great march to Isengard the single-minded obsession of Sauron and Saruman with extending their power leaves them fatally vulnerable to threats that approach them from unexpected quarters Solomon's impatience with the slow processes of nature lead him to overlook the fury that overtakes him a on trees of course can't fight back in real life but in the fictional world of middle-earth talking can give them a power of their own so when the ants attack Isengard he he memory bleed ascribes their demolition of its walls as being like the action of tree roots over the centuries but accelerated into a few moments it's a very powerful image and talking is clearly on the side of the trees and against the forces of modernization since Saruman has done the open green spaces of Isengard into an industrial age wasteland the scene can be seen as a bit of a rebuke directed at all of those that change and clean away the natural world this is rarely nature getting its own back on civilization in a sense uncertainly on urban civilization and certainly on you know the sort of flesh postmodern buildings with glass elevators and so on here the southernmost peaks of the Misty Mountains divide to form a valley known as nan cornea the Wizards veil this is where the men of Gondor built the fortress of Isengard originally it was a grassy park surrounded by a great wall with a single gate to the south in it was the tower of orthanc a lofty structure comprising four massive piers of stone that meet to form most of its length and then separate into four sharp teeth at the summit its name in elvish means mount Fang Saruman populated it with orcs wolves and wild men who were to serve his own ambitions there are a number of different races in the two towers but the or are the most noticeable squat ugly and bestial orcs are filled with a deeply ingrained hostility towards all living things including their own kind and their masters and they have formed the largest portion of any army mustered by the forces of evil throughout the history of middle-earth other peoples have have the choice you know they are moral beings oak sod orcs and just nasty autonomy you know they're nasty you know what is an orc it is nasty you know you you don't get ox pondering it's you know should I do something nice today you know if a breakfast the few virtues they've got are these are very basic military virtues of teamwork but even then you know they're always betraying each other and they always represented something in the theological problem for Tolkien because he felt obliged to as it were believed that all things ultimately come from God so anything evil or bad in the world is merely a a corruption of something that was originally good at the same time when the works actually are walking I mean when we actually as it were meter works in the in the story they're not they don't sound completely alien or four and they're not like the Black Riders they are recognizable in some way and I know lots of readers who have this sort of perverse affection for for the orcs actually and for example might admire their independence of spirit so there they too are a bit more complicated than they might appear at first Forks first appear in the Fellowship of the Ring but it is in the two towers that we really gain an insight into this hideous race in Tolkien's mythology Hawks were created and bred first by Morgan and subsequently by his left hand Sauron in a brutal parody of the elves grace and beauty the orcs speak a bastardized version of the common speech laced with elements of the black tiger the language of mobile device by Sora here tokine uses more impressionistic detail creating a language full of dark backgrounds you own and heavily stocked consonants k gene to create a tongue whose few examples sound both alien and unlovely to English ears Aragorn Legolas and Gimli searched the site of the orcs last and with little hope of finding the hobbits alive until they discover Hobbit footprints leading into the forest of fennel they follow these but a stopped before long by a wandering old man in a tattered grey cloak suspecting at first that he is Saruman the white they raised their weapons but he throws off his cloak and they recognize Ganon the wizard has returned gandalf is much the same as at the end as he wasn't beginning only more powerful and Gandalf the White he's gone up you know he's been promoted as it were given the fact that he represents an order of being far higher than that of any other character in The Lord of the Rings it is remarkable that Gandalf should display any recognizable character at all still more that we should see a develop in any way although he has supernatural provenance and power Gandalf is in many ways the most fully human of all Tolkien's characters by turns he is grave playful irascible and enigmatic his responses to other characters into events run through a wide range of human moods and emotions he can be tenderly solicitous of humble characters like the hobbits or show the irritation of a grumpy grandfather he can speak on equal terms with elf Lords such as Elrond or Glorfindel or chastise at need Kings and stewards such as Theoden of Rohan or Denethor of Gondor he can take unaffected delight in the most trivial matters of shire gossip while remaining a formidable master of arcane wisdom his mere presence lends hope to characters otherwise falling into despair and the true measure of his mastery of his formidable powers is how sparingly he uses them he's the most powerful probably the most single powerful individual on the on the good side so to speak in the Lord of the Rings but he makes it very clear and and through him Tolkien makes it very clear that Sauron is stronger still and it's significant that although he's very powerful magically in and in other ways he can't use force directly to fight Mordor somehow to the extent that you go too far in that direction you become what you're fighting the great change he undergoes during the course of the Lord of the Rings is of course his death in the mines of Moria followed by his return to middle-earth on the one hand such a transformation marks the matters are being far beyond the human experience yet the key note of his character after his return is amplification rather than change as such Gandalf says I was sent back doesn't say who by or where he was but he was sent back the Lord of the Rings is not a religious book in that it's not about God and the angels and so on oh but in fact it's a very religious book in tone and he knew this while writing it it's ready um it's it's a book which tries to convey the feeling of religion to a world which is not actually a believing well a non-religious world this I think is largely why it's been so popular in America in what is on the whole I got a godless modern world it particularly appeals because it's it's it's bringing it's bringing religion back into fiction in the world of middle-earth the month of February has 30 days after their meeting with Gandalf on February the 30th they turned south across the West eminent of Rohan to reach a duress the principal seat of Theoden in his kingdom on March the 1st [Music] there are a number of scenes in the two towers that dramatize a a universal sense of melancholy there's an awareness of the inevitable process of decay and decline I'm take for example tree beards lament for the lost aunt wives or aragorn's meditation as he passes the burial moans of the kings of ruined and theirs theoden's despair for his kingdom it all has in it something of the wider sadness at the inevitable passing of all earthly things and that marks the poetry of the anglo-saxons better ass is the city of the roarin essentially a hill fort enclosing the Great Hall of meadow cell than its outbuildings which in the language of Rohan means the courts built into the foothills on the northern flank of the White Mountains era ass commanded the approaches to Gondor through the gap of Rohan between the White Mountains to the south and the last of the Misty Mountains to the north he leads them to made yourself the Hall of theoden king of Rohan at the doors have made yourselves they are greeted with some suspicion by the guard the country is on a war footing Theoden addresses the wizard with cold contempt seconded by Grima Wormtongue who constantly advises caution and restraint gandalf exposes Wormtongue as a spy in the pay of serra man and Theoden is awakened for all the the vast military forces Sauron marshals against ganda his single most potent weapon is the dis fear he can induce among his enemies the fate of Rohan hangs in the balance while feared and sits immobilized by despair and he can take action only once he's thrown off the debilitating effects of his despair at last he pulls himself together and announces that he will himself ride to the defense of his beleaguered western frontier to confront Serra man again you have to remember that in his young manhood he went through the battle of the somme he went into the war came out at the end of his four best friends only one was alive at the end and we have various bits of this filter cool but yeah he he was not somebody who was just completely gung-ho about war as if intervention he was very very conservative Daily Telegraph reader who never supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War very very right-wing very unattractive therefore to many modern readers of his books actually this wasn't really fascism he wasn't really deeply right-wing he was many somebody who had been born into a world where those were the accepted values and he never really rejected them it's probably worth noting that talking led most of his adult life as a married Oxford Don who kept his home life with his wife and children was very very separate from his very full life that he led with his colleagues such as CS Lewis and others at the University of Oxford and it is not a world into which at that time women moved very easily for perhaps obvious reasons and so the question of tokens treatment of women in his books inevitably gets colored by that I think you don't see a lot of them for starters they're simply not present in the narrative to any great extent and they represent very different aspects of Tolkien's consciousness of female characters see you dan dan Elmer lead the riders to the defense of Helm's Deep an ancient stronghold on the northern flank of the White Mountains of Gondor now surrounded by seramins forces it comprises an outlaw defending the mouth of a deep and narrow ravine in the northern flanks of the White Mountains a crenellated battlements the main line of defense behind it is a keep to serve as the defenders final refuge behind the keep deep caves have been delved into the ravines sheer slopes they arrived just in time to confront the first overwhelming waves of seramins Arnie in a ferocious night long battle [Applause] [Music] as the Sun rises both sides are surprised by the spectacle of a great forest that appears to have sprung up in the rear of the attackers lines overnight these are the horns semi-sentient trees with an implacable hatred of horns Treebeard has dispatched them to help the relevant sour man's forces caught between the charge of the rural rim and the Hurons take to flight and no Hawk escapes one of the charges constantly leveled at the Lord of the Rings by its detractors is that it's characters lack depth and development but what such critics are often mistakenly reacting to is the fact that Tolkien does not use the same techniques most 20th century novelists use to signal their characters psychology or development to put it simply Tolkien was not trying to write a 20th century novel deeply steeped in the literature of the Middle Ages which he both analyzed as an academic and loved as a reader Tolkien almost never allows us to intrude directly on the thoughts and inner deliberations of his characters instead like many of the medieval walls as he read and studied he reveals character in action in what his character say and do in the choices they're compelled by circumstance to make and in their outward responses to the moral dilemmas they must confront a good example of Tolkien's methods of characterization of work is the changing relationship between the dwarf Gimli and the elf Legolas who were sent with the fellowship when it sets out from Rivendell the history of relations between elves and dwarves in middle-earth as narrated in The Silmarillion records a succession of misunderstandings antagonisms and murderous hostilities which lie heavily on the psyches of Legolas and Gimli the elf though unfailingly polite impatient does little to assuage the dwarfs prickly sense of grievances both historical and personal after all Legolas is father Thranduil had once imprisoned gillies father groin in The Hobbit the most powerful of the five wizards sent from the undying lands in the West to help the peoples of middle-earth in their struggle against Sauron Saruman has made a special study of surrounds devices and been seduced into emulating them seeking to coerce where he cannot persuade and using guile deception and violence as elements of policy where it suits his purposes this is sad man being tempted by the very idea of power SATA man is somebody who decides to choose the dark force decides to go the way of evil his fall offers him a further opportunity for redemptive change but this he refuses his character dramatizes the plight of a soul festering in its own evil incapable of receiving freely offered grace and the petty malice with which he exact sees tawdry revenge on the inhabitants of the shire up to the moment of his murder by the aggrieved worm town is particularly effective gandalf leads a small party to Isengard for a parley with the Defiant's our man during the negotiations Wormtongue hell's down a heavy missile from a high window which mrs. Gandalf and rolls off unheeded to one side Pippy rescues the large round crystal ball that night tripping overwhelmed by curiosity sneaks it away from the sleeping Gandalf his sudden anguished cry wakes that the ball is a Palantir one of a number of ancient seeing stones used in past ages to communicate over great distances through it Pippin was confronted by the Dark Lord Himself the pollen tears in the Lord of the Rings serve a couple of purposes there are a piece of basically old technology if you like they are relics of past ages when the great elf writes like fan or and calabria more who are mentioned in The Silmarillion knew how to make things that could no longer be made in the Third Age and so they have a kind of historical presence because of that although that's only briefly mentioned by characters like Aragorn and Gandalf and isn't leaned on very heavily in the story what they really do is to move the action on gandalf announces that he was right at once to condor taking Pippen with him on Shadowfax the others proceed to the muster of Rohan Gandalf and The Hobbit right east and south for several days along the northern flanks of the White Mountains to Minas Tirith which they reach are March the 9th while the others return to address with the rim for their great muster on March the 7th Frodo and Sam of course take a different path parting from the rest of the fellowship at their last resting place above the falls of Arras On February the 26th at the entrance to the ravine stand two enormous statues carved from the rock of the cliffs the two figures stand facing north one on either side of the river with their left hands held out palm upward in warning and an axe in their right hands the colossal crowned figures were carved in the likeness of Isildur and anarion the first kings of Gondor to mark the kingdom's northern frontier Frodo and Sam crossed the Great River and then proceed on foot across the rugged Hills of the MN mule for 50 miles heading northeast there they are delayed for several days by the rough terrain they were in fatigue and the need to deal with golem who they met on February the 29th Frodo begins in classic Hobbit territory unaware of the great world without him bit bemused and puzzled when forces from the outside begin to affect him and yet he very much rises to the occasion through that native Hobbit hobbit pluck he both his courage and his humility serve him very very well on the question in fact are his salvation in the end Sam on the other hand is from even further along the rustic end of the hobbit spectrum and although he never achieves quite the same broadening of his horizons that Frodo does his character too is greatly expanded by his experiences in his own more comic country bumpkin ish way the Gollum eventually leads them East out of the hills and into the Dead Marshes a maze of stagnant pools and treacherous paths thick with the stench of decay its waters cover part of the battlefield on which the last alliance of men and elves fought and defeated saurons forces many centuries before the events narrated in The Lord of the Rings strange lights flicker and play beneath the surface illuminating the faces and forms of dead men elves and orcs all in states of horrible decay further compels golem to guide them into all he he leads them because you know because he doesn't have a lot of choice and he is bound to the ring he you know he cannot escape from the ring you know that the fact that Frodo has got the ring you know that draws him Gollum has a complexity that many readers feel is lacking in some of the other characters he's he's a character who is in a moral quandary given the circumstances of the narrative he develops an attachment of Frodo that is very much in conflict with his deep hatred of the Baggins is who have stolen his precious which he desperately wants to get back at all costs and in the way of a good modern antihero he's ultimately destroyed by his internal conflicts once through the marshes Frodo and Sam approached them more anon the black gates of Mordor so heavily guarded they can see no way of entering Gollum urges the hobbits to allow him to lead them into Mordor by a more secret way and he leads them around the black gates into aphelion a wooded valley that follows the western slopes of the mountains of shadow Frodo and Sam's brief stay in Affiliate is the other major forest seen in the two towers to the reader the rest bite that Frodo and Sam enjoy as they take some rest and COO Camille comes as a pretty welcome relief after the images of decay and poisonous pollution that have dominated the hobbits passage of the Dead Marshes and the dagger lad in the forests of aphelion Frodo and Sam are captured by a party of warriors led by Faramir brother of the late Boromir who has been conducting a guerrilla campaign against saurons forces after Frodo and Psalms are just track into the woods of Fillion following Gollum their chance encounter with far Amelia and his party offers unlooked-for a refreshment to both body and spirit that neither had expected to find between leaving the company and arriving at Mount Doom so again we see this pattern of unexpected help piecing itself Faramir soldiers also captured golem as he tries to catch fish in a hidden pool their family is refuge but Frodo pleads for golem to be spared and allowed to accompany him his betrayal Faramir grants photos request and sends the travelers on their way the two hobbits and Gollum then make their way eastward into the Morgul Vale as a great roof of cloud issues from Mordor blotting out the Sun and casting the whole land into a perpetual gloomy Twilight by day the secret paths Gollum wishes to use lies near - Morgul a place of decay and lingering horror they are forced to shelter when the King of the Ring wraiths leads the main body of the forces intended for the siege of - tilith the ring wraiths almost perceives Frodo in the ring but distracted by his more immediate mission he presses on without discovering them we have to keep reminding ourselves that the Lord of the Rings is not allegory nonetheless talking wrote much of the book against the background of the Second World War and as Frodo and Sam journey through the forbidding wasteland of the emyn muil and the Dead Marshes they labor against a constant undertow of despair and terror that's caused by the appearance in the skies of the flying ring Rhys talking had experienced comba in the trenches of the Great War and in his letters he left a very vivid passage describing his own thoughts as thousands of bombers flew over his house on their way to bring terror to Germany so he had a personal experience of the fear and the Menace that terror from the skies can engender I don't know because he was Tolkien was much more influenced by the first world war than the second when he was actually writing the Lord of the Rings during the Second World War it's true that it was an unfolding as he rode but he was writing out of a great accumulation of ideas that had been much more strongly influenced by the first world war in which he actually participated golem then leads the hobbits of a steep and narrow mountain pass partly natural partly carved out in staircases known as sitteth under at the top he leads them into a long tunnel where he runs ahead leaving the hobbits on the wrong there they are attacked by a monstrous spider Shelley whom Gollum has occasionally served by luring victims into her dwelling this is golems at a plan to lead them that way because she lab might get Frodo up there that when she's eaten him throughout the way he leads a little away from the Blackgate you know he leads them down through is Elia but then he leads them up took through killeth of God in a way that would fulfill his own end verda was stung and falls sam driven by rage at his friend's injury attacked shell of in a fury and drives her off going back to Frodo he finds him lying lifeless Sam is forced to choose between abandoning Frodo or the quest grief-stricken and uncertain he takes the ring from proto's body and says farewell intending to carry on to Mount Doom with again to his horror he soon finds that Frodo isn't dead just stunned by shell up sting Sam determines to rescue Frodo from the party of orcs who were hurrying back with their prisoner but the gate is closed and barred before Sam can reach it leaving him utterly alone to ponder his next action like his friends Frodo merry and pippin The Hobbit Sam Gamgee faces perils and griefs in his adventures that have a profound effect on him in his speech and attitudes he is at the outset the least educated and most provincial or rustic of the hobbits something of a country bumpkin he embodies the hobbit tendency towards the parochial and the insular to the fullest degree possible he also possesses the Countryman's capacity for sizing up new situations shrewdly within his familiar terms of reference once he passes beyond the boundaries of the Shire however his judgments proved often comically premature and ill-informed the ring bears first of all were all three hobbits Bilbo Frodo and Sam because Sam did have the ring for a while and they responded to the ring in somewhat different ways Bilbo wasn't aware of the power of the ring he didn't have to be he just knew it could help him disappear and then of course towards the end through Gandalf he became aware that it was actually affecting him more deeply more strongly that he found it very difficult to do without it so the addictive nature of the ring and the Rings power starts to become apparent Frodo obviously was the main ring bearer and he always had this terrible temptation to use this power which would have resulted in the defeat of everything he loved and everyone he loved and all that he held dear but he had to constantly if you remember that what happens in the book his hand always creeps up too to put on the ring and voluntarily as it were because not just it would help him disappear but also because it would give him this kind of power if he put the ring on but of course his power would be insignificant compared to Sauron so he would be immediately spotted and crushed with Sam of course it was it became a very simple issue I mean Sam is a simple Hobbit it's sometimes infuriating ly simple I mean even Tolkien found Sam irritating sometimes and but Sam realized using this metaphor of a garden that what he Sam really needed or wanted was actually his own garden not to rule all others in this enormous garden of which he was the king and he was very clear that that wasn't his role that wasn't his place and once he realized that that's what the ring was offering him as it were then the temptation wasn't at all appealing to him and he found it very easy not to use the ring yet Sam I think doesn't develop all that much but he does develop it's when you see his horizons being borned he learns a great deal from the many other characters he encounters and the change in his character is starkly dramatized in his final encounter with Gollum on the slopes of Mount Doom as we see Sam grow in strength to such an extent that he becomes a genuine hero from the hobbits perspective in particular the two towers carries on the Fellowship of the Rings packing of opening out as Frodo Sam merry and pippin whose lives have previously taken them nowhere outside the Shire itself encounter a bewildering variety of persons and powers in the wider world beyond in the Fellowship of the Ring these include the ring wraiths and orcs Tom Bombadil Rivendell and Lothlorien while in the two towers they encounter Fang horn and the ends the roar in Saruman Gollum and Faramir and witnessed some of the larger actions in the Wars of the Ring the destruction of Isengard the rearguard defense of aphelion the riding out of saurons hosts for the siege of Gondor a large part of the sense of wonder common to both books derives from how Tolkien juxtaposes the hobbits narrow domestic perspectives against a far larger world of marvels and horrors whose existence that's scarcely suspected [Music] [Music] [Music] one of the recurring literary devices throughout the Lord of the Rings is the inexplicable appearance of help from unexpected quarters as the company sets out from Rivendell in the Fellowship of the Ring Elrond advises them that they may well find unlooked-for help along the way and the Fellowship of the Ring and the two towers both repeat this thematic motif the forests that figure prominently in both books service the settings for many such episodes to help in Lothlorien of the ends from Fangorn comes as a surprise to all but Gandalf Marian Pippins reception by Treebeard is certainly the last thing either of them could have expected after their ordeal among the orcs after Frodo and Sam's arduous trek into the woods of Athenian following Gollum the chance encounter with fara me and his party offers unlooked-for refreshment to both body and spirit that neither had expected to find between leaving the company and arriving at mountain it is difficult to talk about sources for Tolkien's narrative in the technical sense of the word the story is almost wholly his own invention though a number of literary and historical precedents have done a little to shape his handling of certain elements CS Lewis famously said that Tolkien was about as easy to influence as a Bandersnatch and but if you look for it you can see where he's coming from in a number of ways the sort of thing that you get in in the works that he academically was very much involved with - mentioned Beowulf in Beowulf Hrothgar's Hall has been reduced to a state of despair which parallels Theoden in the tale of two towers the quest motif the chivalric bond develops between Eragon and humor the gallantry of farmer and even Gimli surprising devotion to Galadriel although something to the the middle English Romantic tradition and that was another area of talking's academic expertise beyond medieval influences however other possibilities appear far more tendrils in their totalitarian aspirations Sauron and Saruman bear more than passing resemblance to Hitler Mussolini and the glimpses we get at the Society of their orcs snarling Lee echoes the brutal psychology of the fascist regimes over which those two dictators presided some have even suggested that the ring itself might symbolize the atomic bomb a weapon of frightening power too potent to be used talking himself stoutly denied there weren't any allegorical intentions he insisted that he'd conceived of the ring long before the advent of nuclear weapons and he always pointed out that if it were an allegory the ring would have been taken and used against Sauron now as far as these conscious intentions went he insisted that the story followed its own logic and he himself often found himself marveling at how history seemed to sometimes be shadowing his fiction as a devout Catholic Tolkien was far more likely to be influenced by the Messianic strand in Jewish and Christian tradition when shaping aragorn's part as a redeeming Savior figure and we know from his letters that his depiction of Galadriel owes a little to the Marian devotions that were part of his own practice as a Catholic well the first time you get elves coming on the scene in the Lord of the Rings they are singing a hymn to L Bharath who is a sort of almost Virgin Mary character there's very little explicit but when you when you know there was something again of a Christian ethos in this because it is one of sacrifice I think the only time you actually get any actual religious ceremony or anything is the standing silence in a window Faramir and his men you know you know so the equivalent of grace before meals where they turn to face the West there is an idea of fate running through the Lord of the Rings Gandalf discusses it sometimes by saying things like perhaps it was meant to be that the ring came into your possession and not somebody else's but it's not a kind of fate that does anything for you it's the kind of fate that if you are doing everything you can it might then help you and that's an idea of fate that comes from northern mythology which Tolkien obviously was very very familiar with and that's the kind of idea of destiny or fate that lies behind who ended up with the ring in a way it's more powerful than the ring itself because the ring itself was obviously trying to get back to Sauron this shadowy fate wants something else to happen but it can't intervene directly it totally depends on the characters doing everything they can and then maybe it can act he was deeply moved and grateful for the fact that so many people responded with great appreciation to the book and although it was a heroic task I think he greatly appreciated being able to reply to or to be in contact with so many people who read to him the letters were enormous but instead of the postman the van used to arrive each morning with the morning's post which he couldn't get through the door and in the beginning my father tried to answer them all it used to come in at a phenomenal rate towards the end of his life it still comes in it ranged from the purely lunatic to the highly informed critical analyses he was also sent curious presence mushrooms which went bad in the post and tobacco and clay models of this or that which bamboozled him completely he didn't know really what to make of it all so in the end we took more and more of this onto ourselves on his behalf and I think he was quite relieved there were all kinds of horrors sprung on him in the years when the book was being successful the Lord of the Rings my favorite was the American film company which turned up in Oxford wanting to film Lord of the Rings and they'd written this wonderful storyline or scenario for it in which all the kind of delicate things of the original story had been Hollywood if I'd interestingly a carrot who in Tolkien's story is called Boromir was called by the American film writers barri more you know shades of ethel barrymore the elves sustained themselves and fellow travelers on long journeys by something called LEM bass or whey bread which is or any rather holy thing it's a bit like communion wafers actually and then the Christian Church it's got that kind of overtone the Americans described as a food concentrate there were worse things to come after his death the Lord of the Rings has been filmed I think fairly acceptable by an American and there was a horrible film of The Hobbit on American television and various other nasties like that fortunately he didn't live to see those they've of course twisted his own conception quite had a recognition the thing has been Disney fide or worse they're also of course been all kinds of toys and and such like most of that happened since since his lifetime there was nothing quite so often in his lifetime the last years were spent in trying to finish the silmarillion the big work of mythology of which the Lord of the Rings is just sequel he went on and on and it in fact he never got anywhere near finishing what he would do would not be simply to continue writing the story in his head's done all that years before but he was always trying new versions of old bits or was trying to rewrite older versions of newer bits or something by which I mean that it got terribly complicated textually actually he never wanted to finish this is quite clear he never wanted to finish I think he never wanted to publish it it had been the necessary background to the Lord of the Rings in The Hobbit he didn't feel that seeing close up to by readers it would have the same excitement as it certainly doesn't despite very skillful editing by Christopher talking if Tolkien is a nostalgia monger it's a very special and empowering and I would say precious guided nostalgia that we could use a lot more of in this world and that's his legacy as I see it the two towers is a text that can be approached on a number of levels as a piece of pure narrative art it is an accomplished performance in which Tolkien marshals the increasingly divergent and complex threads of his story into a satisfying hole it is also richly textured a pastiche of Tolkien's wide learning and storytelling zest in which he makes use of his linguistic and literary scholarship as well as the earlier history and mythology of middle-earth which he'd been developing and expanding for decades without either overwhelming the story in hand not a modern novel by any standard but something rich strange and for those susceptible to its charms supremely successful [Music] you

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Length: 60min 7sec (3607 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020