The Spouter-Inn

60. The Two Towers.


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‘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.

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.]

...more
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The Spouter-InnBy Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma

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