The Two Towers

I am in the middle of reading The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien, the second book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The book follows each little group of travelers through their journey after they split apart in the first book. One group is off to destroy the ring in Mordor, one group is chasing the orcs to find the last group, and the last group finds a way to break away from their capturers. I think that the most significant part of the book so far is when Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn find Gandalf after they perceived him dead and lost in the mines of Moria. I thought that this is an important part of the book because it takes a lot of the pressure off of the team. But I think that the story would have been more original if Gandalf was, in fact, gone forever.

The architecture of the story suggests that Gandalf will return again before he actually does. I could predict that he would reappear because of his name repeating many times in the beginning of the book and in the end of the last one. The groups always depended on him and he brought them to where they are now. He was bound to return and help them or they would never have found their way to wherever they are going (I am not quite sure where they are going specifically yet from the information given to me in the story). Gandalf is a major part of the story and it would be drastically different without him as a character. He is very important in the story but I think that it helped the story quite a bit to lose him for a while. Do you ever get sick of a character? I know that I do and I definitely was a little tired of Gandalf. When he fell, I knew that this would be hard for the characters, but I know that it will help the reader.

The return of Gandalf after he is presumed to be dead, in my opinion, worsened the story. This is because I thought that it was unoriginal. I have read countless stories where a character of force is gone and then returns. On example is The throne of Fire by Rick Riordan. The two main characters, Carter and Sadie must preclude the rising of Apophis which could result in destroying the world. In the story Apophis reverts from being dormant for many years. This is somewhat the same context as in The Two Towers, where Gandalf comes back from “the dead”. This sequence occurs in many other stories so in this book, I think it made the story less original by using this format.

I think that so far the book is really well written and the story line is incredible. I am excited to continue reading it. There are, like most other books, a few tweaks I might make to it to make the story more unique and interesting. In this case it is the return of Gandalf. I think that there are two ways Tolkien could have done this. The first way is to not make Gandalf fall in the first place. The second is to not make him come back. I am pretty sure that Gandalf will be helpful later in the story so my second idea would more than just tweak it. I do now think that the fall of Gandalf had much effect on the book so I suppose that Gandalf could never fall. Maybe instead, he could just get injured terribly and not function correctly for a while. I think that a man with as much imagination as J. R. R. Tolkien could come up with a more original way to bring Gandalf back to life.





*If this made it sound like I do not like The Two Towers, it is not true. It is just this one aspect of the story that I think could have been changed.