The Two Towers
Novel by John Ronald Reuel TolkienWikipedia
24
MENTIONS
8
EPISODES
8
PODCASTS
Search complete. 24 mentions across 8 episodes found for "The Two Towers".
Sep 19, 2026
speaker_4HOST
You're talking about J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
speaker_5HOST
Yes, published between 1954 and 1955, presented in three volumes, you know, Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, Return of the King.
speaker_4HOST
Right, following Frodo Baggins from The Shire across Middle Earth-
speaker_5HOST
Yeah
Paul AldHOST
So I wanted to kind of like reread these books a little bit.
Paul AldHOST
Actually, I've never finished reading The Two Towers and I've never started reading The Return of the King.
Paul AldHOST
So those two will be new for me.
Paul AldHOST
So I guess we're going to work on The Two Towers next.
Paul AldHOST
Something else that's new is that I tried HelloFresh.
Paul AldHOST
So if you guys don't know what HelloFresh is...
Paul CleworthHOST
It has since sold more than 150 million copies in more than 50 languages.
Paul CleworthHOST
Today, we're taking the first two volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.
Paul CleworthHOST
Next week, we'll take the third one, which I'm sure you know is called The Return of the King.
Paul CleworthHOST
And I've split it that way because these two volumes ask one continuous question.
13 MINS LATER
Paul CleworthHOST
And first, a small pleasure, which two towers? Tolkien genuinely didn't know for a while.
Paul CleworthHOST
He wrote to his publisher offering three different pairs and said the title could be left deliberately ambiguous.
Paul CleworthHOST
The two towers.
Paul CleworthHOST
He settled it in a note in February 1954.
J. F. MartelHOST
Our episode on the Fellowship of the Ring dropped in February of this year.
J. F. MartelHOST
This one focuses on The Two Towers, although of course, many of our comments aim at elucidating the novel as a whole.
J. F. MartelHOST
Could The Lord of the Rings, this story that's become as familiar and benign to our eyes as a Cthulhu plush doll, count as weird fiction? Well, part of our jam on Weird Studies has been to insist that all fiction, properly considered, attains to the weird.
J. F. MartelHOST
What I mean is that there's something weird about fiction itself, if only because fiction pertains to life, and life is, again, properly considered, very weird indeed.
J. F. MartelHOST
In fact, this very idea recurs at several points in The Two Towers.
J. F. MartelHOST
As we discuss in the episode you're about to hear, it's at this stage of Tolkien's epic that the characters seem to realize that they're living in a story, or rather, that life itself is a storied business.
J. F. MartelHOST
At one point, Aragorn, Ranger of the North and rightful heir to the throne of Gondor, meets a group of horsemen on the plains of Rohan.
8 MINS LATER
Phil FordHOST
If God ever figured out anything better, He's keeping it to Himself.
Junius JohnsonHOST
um because of moving out of the end of fellowship of yeah the fellowship and then we have the whole of book three is entirely to do with mary and pippin and and the aragorn and strider and legolas
Wesley WalkerHOST
i'll say pacing pacing wise the movies uh maybe make a little more sense in the way that they divvy up the material because it does feel like i think the back stretch of the two towers is kind of Yes, I feel the same way.
Wesley WalkerHOST
I'm actually
Junius JohnsonHOST
really glad to hear you say that because I feel the same way.
Wesley WalkerHOST
So the way the movies do it, where they kind of split, like, you know, they go back and forth between what's going on with Strider and Legolas and Gimli, and then it goes to Sam and Frodo, and then back and forth.
Wesley WalkerHOST
That is a much more varied structure in a way that makes the thing move along.
Wesley WalkerHOST
And, you know, I think Peter Jackson didn't feel like he had to fit everything that's in the book, The Two Towers, in the movie, The Two Towers, because there are things that he pushes to Return of the King to kind of even out the back and forth.
Wesley WalkerHOST
And so...
Jay UnderwoodHOST
them oh there's the thing that I knew
Gareth Ryder HanrahanGUEST
yeah so work in Tolkien is there's a line in Two Towers where Gimli's describing the different caves he's dragged around where he goes we would tend those flowering glades of stone one cautious hammer chip at a time And that's what I keep trying to basically very, very, very carefully build stuff and try and like either draw everything you do from Tolkien or from Tolkien's own sources.
Gareth Ryder HanrahanGUEST
So it's by far the most research because you're going back and like reading like William Morris and things to Tolkien and trying to like draw from that.
Gareth Ryder HanrahanGUEST
So Hands of the White Wizard is like the or seventh book i've done for the line so at this point i've gotten um i'm very familiar with it and the one before that was moria and moria was just like such a big project both in terms of the length of it but also the sort of psychic weight of it because like you know even people who don't know lord of the rings know moria everyone's seen like you know the movies everyone ever has their own ideas of it And that was fairly well received.
27 MINS LATER
Jay UnderwoodHOST
Yes, you can.
Jay UnderwoodHOST
By choosing Dungeon Master, you inherently save all the unicorns at the same time.
Jay UnderwoodHOST
Silmarillion, The Hobbit, Two Towers.
Jay UnderwoodHOST
Which of the Tolkien books? Jesus
Delvin CoxHOST
Now we're cooking.
Delvin CoxHOST
Two Towers is 16 hours and 40 minutes.
Delvin CoxHOST
See, like, that's a lot.
Delvin CoxHOST
That's a
Phil DragashGUEST
And once I finished Fellowship of the Ring, I did not think I would do Two.
Phil DragashGUEST
I would, I did not think I would do Two Towers because I didn't know if I could do...
Phil DragashGUEST
This was funny, 'cause this is the catalyst.
Chris SmithHOST
Mm.
7 MINS LATER
Chris SmithHOST
[laughs]
Phil DragashGUEST
...
Phil DragashGUEST
The Two Towers in the book.
Phil DragashGUEST
And, [clears throat] and well, of course we didn't have the legal rights to do anything with Lord of the Rings, of course, so that's why I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a little d- I'm not, I don't wanna say distancing myself, but I'm not like-