The Two Towers Themes

The Two Towers Themes

Good vs. Evil

The Fellowship of the Ring is pretty clear-cut about who is bad (the Ringwraiths, the Balrog) and who is good (all those shiny elves). But in The Two Towers, it gets a little more complicated. You...

Love

In The Two Towers it is love that makes Frodo leave behind the Fellowship so they do not get hurt by the Ring's evil; it is love that keeps Sam following Frodo into Mordor when Frodo says he doesn'...

Loyalty

There is a huge difference in The Two Towers between loyalty on the Good Side and loyalty (or the total lack of it) on the Bad Side. Loyalty keeps the good people in this book together. But because...

Isolation

A few characters in The Two Towers have a bit of an isolationist bent (we're looking at you, Éomer and Treebeard). They simply don't want to become involved in the war with Sauron; sure, they can...

Suffering

It sounds callous to say, but it's only natural that as the War of the Ring heats up in The Two Towers, some of the characters in these books are going to suffer, big time. What makes this unavoida...

Power

It goes without saying that Sauron desires power. Why else would he try to conquer all of Middle-earth? But even if Sauron is a power-hungry maniac (and he definitely is), the interesting thing abo...

Youth

The elves in The Two Towers may look eternally young, but the characters who really symbolize youth—the innocence, the cheerfulness, the lack of experience—are clearly the hobbits in general an...

Race

The differences between Middle-earth beings may not look like the differences between people in our world. In fact, they're much more stark. Nevertheless, the interactions between all these creatur...