Episode 60
October 1, 2022
The Two Towers
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari
‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see,’ said Treebeard. ‘I am honoured by your confidence; but you should not be too free all at once.... I’ll call you Merry and Pippin if you please – nice names. For I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.... For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.’
The Two Towers is the middle section of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings. It separates the people who formed the first book’s fellowship into two groups: Most head west and encounter the tree-ish ents and the horse-riding Rohirrim, while Sam and Frodo try to enter Mordor, with Gollum as their guide. It begins a cluster on Other Languages, as Chris and Suzanne tease out how Tolkien distinguishes and connects peoples through carefully constructed language families.
![[Episode artwork]](/images/podcast/art/s/spouter.png)
Show Notes.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Two Towers. [Bookshop.]
Our episode on The Fellowship of the Ring.
By-The-Bywater, an all-Tolkien podcast here on Megaphonic, recently had an episode on Tolkien’s constructed languages.
Tolkien’s major essay on language construction, A Secret Vice, has been republished in a lavish critical edition.
Next: Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue. [Bookshop.]