LOTR Read-Along: The Two Towers: Flotsam and Jetsam

With the Battle of Helm's Deep over and the Ride to Isengard completed, the story takes a bit of a break from the fighting and magic and madness. If you think about it, it's probably only been a couple of weeks from the actual breaking of the Fellowship to the reuniting of...most of them. Lest we forget, there are two other important members of the Fellowship that are wandering the vast and dangerous outskirts of their enemies homeland. 

While Isengard is being looked over by Gandalf and Theodan, Merry and Pippin want to catch up with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. So over a picnic, the Hobbits recount their time with Treebeard, the Ents and their battle on Isengard. Merry and Pippin hardly overlook anything in their story and tell it with great detail and their admiration for Treebeard and his kind are second to none. It is strange to think less than a year ago, these were two little creatures who never journeyed outside of their home. Now, he they are, proudly telling their friends of their first battle against the most powerful wizard in Middle-Earth.

The Ents may seem somewhat boring at first, but the more you read into them, the more they appeal with their strength and loyalty. Despite their old age, the Ents are formidable warriors and that's not lost on the Hobbits. Treebeard took them into his home, protected them, fed them, gave them shelter to rest and carried them for miles on his shoulders. He told them the Entish history and sang to them the songs of their long past. Treebeard was under no obligation to care for the Hobbits, but he did so anyway. Deep within the growing dark magic of Fangorn Forest, there is beauty and light to be found in generosity and hospitality. Treebeard exemplifies that perfectly. 

It's good to see most of the Fellowship back together again. What a strange sight it must be to the Rohirram to witness four different cultures interacting so casually together. As we've discovered, the peoples of Middle-Earth keep to themselves. The Hobbits in their holes, the elves in the forests, the dwarves in the mountains and the men...wherever they can't be killed at the moment. Then the threat of the Ring appears and the people must come out from their hiding. It's ironic how the fear of death and destruction can forge the most unlikely on companionships. 

Heidi's Questions:

• Merry says: "I don't know what Saruman thought was happening; but anyway he did not know how to deal with it. His wizardry may have been falling off lately, of course; but anyway I think he has not much grit, not much plain courage alone in a tight place without a lot of slaves and machines and things, if you know what I mean. Very different from old Gandalf." I don't want to push this too far/being respectful of Tolkien's insistence that his story is not a political allegory + his direct experience was more in WWI. Still, his life experience couldn't help but come into play a little bit and he did live through WWII. Do you think he might have had Hitler in mind at least a little when he wrote that?

- Quite possibly. However, Hitler was maniacal pretty much most of his life. His desire to defend his homeland (which wasn't even his seeing as he was actually Austrian) was immersed with prejudicial and anti-Semetic rhetoric. He had a plan of anhelations from the very beginning.

Sarumon actually was a good and moral wizard for centuries until he fell onto the path of evil. If you're going to liken Sarumon to someone in history, I would say Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's ideas of Communism were steeped for good intentions, however, power became more important and the people he intended to rescue eventually became his prisoners.

• And I'm trying not to delve into anything that will come up more in the next chapter, so I'll stick with this final thought: does Grima Wormtongue remind anyone else of Gollum? We haven't spent much time with the latter yet (so please disregard this question if it's your first time through the story), but for some reason I've always thought of them as being very similar and I'm trying to figure out why. Maybe it's just the cringing sneakiness?

- Or it could be the power of Sauron working through the both of them. With Gollum it was the Ring, with Grima it was Sarumon.