1. The Departure of Boromir; 2. The Riders of Rohan; 3. The Uruk-hai
With the second book in the trilogy, The Two Towers, the novel becomes a more traditional adventure story: Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli set out to pursue the kidnapped Merry and Pippin, they encounter the Riders of Rohan, later the king of the realm, a great battle follows at Helm’s Deep, after which they reunite with their hobbit friends in the ruined Isengard. The story takes on the character of a chivalric romance, while the intuitive and wondrous elements that colored The Fellowship of the Ring fade.
In other words, the story becomes less symbolically charged, but from our perspective, significant encounters still occur: Treebeard, the White Rider, Théoden, Saruman, and others. A corresponding shift happens on Frodo’s side – while we have Gollum, Faramir, and Shelob, for example, which we will explore – the abundance of symbols that characterized the first book thins out as the author increasingly strives to drive the adventure forward, now that he knows where they are all headed.
Nevertheless, as we will see, the author himself is surprised by symbols that emerge even in this book. For example, he had no idea that Ents existed until he encountered them at the tip of his pen.[1] These types of symbols are particularly interesting because they travel so unfiltered from the inner archetypal depths to the paper Tolkien writes on. So, even still, we have plenty of fascinating encounters, places, and events to discuss.
One of the major changes that occurs with The Two Towers, as the title suggests, is that while we follow Aragorn, we enter the masculine world and meet the Tyrannical Father. In the second part of the volume, where we follow Frodo, we remain, however, with the Terrible Mother; such are the respective fates of Aragorn and Frodo.
1. Boromir’s Departure
The Two Towers begins with Aragorn finding Boromir leaning against a tree, dying from multiple arrows with black feathers. His sword is broken, as is his horn. He has slain at least twenty orcs. He is a great warrior, but also human. He is himself broken. He shows remorse and confesses his sins, his weakness, before he dies. For a man with a masculine identity and drive, the feeling of having failed to meet the expectations he has placed on himself is a devastating blow. He could not fulfill the inflated heroic ideal, and its opposite takes hold (as the enantiodromia we mentioned in an earlier comment): negative inflation. Regardless of one’s history as, in this case, a “great man,” one is now, in one’s own eyes, only wretched and worthless. So he sits, dying and remorseful, with a broken sword and broken horn, and the black arrows of the Terrible Mother in his body. “Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed,” he says. “No!” Aragorn protests, “you have conquered,” “Minas Tirith shall not fall!” Boromir smiles at this vain reassurance and breathes his last.
Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli place the fallen warrior in one of the boats, with his broken sword and horn, and send him out on the river as a burial. According to later legends, the author recounts, the boat travels all the way to the Great Sea beyond Gondor on a starry night. Thus, even Boromir, the warrior of Minas Tirith, is ultimately united with the Great Mother.
But what should they do next? Follow Frodo eastward toward Mordor or go west to pursue Merry and Pippin, who have been kidnapped by orcs? After some hesitation, Aragorn chooses the latter. “The fate of the Bearer is no longer in my hands,” he says. “Forth the Three Hunters!” he cries, and with battle-ready zeal, they set off westward.
2. The Riders of Rohan
When Aragorn gazes south toward Gondor, he longingly calls out its name. Then he recites a verse describing Gondor “between mountain and sea,” and repeats the question, “Shall Men behold the Silver Tree?” Aragorn’s association with mountains and sea – which, as we have seen, represent the masculine principle, or yang, and the feminine principle, yin, respectively – and his implied hope that the tree in Minas Tirith will flourish again, differ entirely from Boromir’s descriptions, which were one-sidedly masculine. As mentioned, Aragorn represents the potential union of opposites, aware of and honoring both sides.
Similarly, the landscape they now hurry through is balanced – not dark or light forests, not Moria’s barren stones, nor the Shire’s green hills, but a varied terrain of rocky ridges, rolling fields, valleys, heights, streams, starry skies, moon, and sun. The extremes that previously characterized the story are, in other words, leveled out. That Aragorn is accompanied by an elf and a dwarf, who have also become good friends, is another hint at the balancing or leveling that has begun. This image is reinforced by the fact that the first beings Aragorn’s company encounters in Rohan are ordinary humans. Aside from Boromir, they have not met any humans since leaving Bree. On Aragorn’s journey, the fantastical elements largely cease (until the Paths of the Dead in the final book) because he belongs to the world of men, the domain where opposites can be reconciled. Compare this to Frodo’s journey in The Fellowship of the Ring, which constantly oscillated between extremes. As mentioned, Aragorn symbolizes the ability to find balance.
After a long sprint, they stop and discuss whether to rest or continue through the night. Legolas and Gimli argue that Aragorn should decide, as he is their leader. “You give the choice to an ill chooser,” Aragorn says, adding a curious detail: “Since we passed through the Argonath, my choices have gone amiss.” Could it be that the masculine inflation represented by the gigantic king statues has thrown him slightly off balance?
Eventually, they meet Éomer and his riders. When Aragorn mentions that they came to Rohan via Lothlórien, where they received their cloaks from Galadriel, Éomer remarks that “few escape her net” and adds that perhaps Aragorn and his companions are themselves “weavers of nets”? Éomer shares Boromir’s ignorance about Lothlórien and projects the Terrible Mother onto Galadriel, portraying her as something dangerous and spider-like. We discussed this image in the chapter “Farewell to Lórien,” where we had reason to note Galadriel as a weaver. Éomer’s association illustrates the ambivalence of the symbol; it also shows how Tolkien’s intuitive writing creates connections between beings, places, and events that at first seem random but, upon closer inspection, reveal patterns with recurring central themes.
A third detail to note about the riders is their association with the wind. Tolkien describes how the horses’ tails and the men’s hair flutter in the breeze, and says they ride like the wind. The wind recurs in descriptions of the swift Shadowfax, the horse Gandalf received from Rohan. In mythology, we see several examples of horses riding on the wind, like the Valkyries’ ride. Furthermore, Tolkien describes the horses’ charge as thundering, while Odin’s Wild Hunt stormed along the ground and across the sky. The winged Pegasus and the recurring image of horses pulling the sun chariot across the sky further show how the horse, as an archetypal image, has always been linked to the wind. (In “The King of the Golden Hall,” Éomer says of Gandalf’s horse: “If the West Wind could take visible form, it would look like that.”) This intuitive connection is likely why the Black Riders, after their horses perished in Elrond’s flood, ride winged monsters instead. Having been repressed, they return as something even more terrifying and explicit.
Finally, Éomer recounts that Rohan’s king, Théoden, and Saruman were friends, but everything “went wrong” since Gandalf was there last summer (i.e., after he escaped from Saruman’s tower), and not just because the wizard took the best horse. We will return to this, but Gandalf acts as a disruptor. Everything was peaceful at Bag End until Gandalf showed up, and similarly, Éomer imagines that harmony between Rohan and Isengard would have continued if not for Gandalf. He functions as an impulse from the unconscious that disturbs consciousness like a symptom. Things are not as right as the ego believes, which the inner self points out. Neurotic symptoms, as they were once called, are very troublesome and often mistaken for the cause of one’s troubles, when in fact the true, underlying issue prompting these symptoms remains unknown.
In any case, Éomer and Aragorn part as friends, and the three resume their hunt for the hobbits.
3. The Uruk-hai
There isn’t much to say about this chapter either, where Merry and Pippin, captured by the orcs, are marched at a relentless pace toward Isengard. At first reading, the chapter is something of a shock; Tolkien vividly conveys the orcs’ malevolent nature. But the image is nuanced by the fact that the orcs themselves are driven not only by aggression and hatred but also by fear and pain. No one wants to be an orc, just as no one wants to be Gollum.
As the hobbits are forced to run with the monsters, the scene becomes a dark, grim version of their first encounter with the elves. The reader may recall that when Pippin walked with the elves, he was so tired he nearly fell asleep and stumbled, but each time, a maternal hand reached out to restore his balance. The same happens here, but in the orcs’ company, the hobbits stumble and are yanked up by dreadful, clawed hands and forced to keep running. Just as they were refreshed by the elves’ food and drink, the orcs give them stale bread and unappetizing meat and force them to drink a vile brew that makes them endure more. Thus, we see again how opposites are mirrored in the story.
Pippin is the smallest of the four hobbits, and we noted in an early chapter, when he anxiously asked why the big folk were after them, that he most prominently embodies the childlike state they are leaving behind. But now, having undergone the initiation at the Barrow-downs and a series of adventures, Pippin has developed. His childlike traits remain, but now as trickster impulses. Sometimes these impulses are foolish, like when he dropped a stone down a well in Moria out of sheer curiosity, but sometimes they are clever; such is the nature of the trickster. It is thanks to Pippin’s resourcefulness and ability to spontaneously seize an opportunity that he and Merry manage to escape – to Fangorn.
Footnotes
[1] Tolkien, Letters, p. 211-212. We will return to this matter in the next chapter.