J. R. R. Tolkien
The Two Towers
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 56 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
The company is broken into three. Two hobbits are dragged across a plain by orcs; two more are led into a dead marsh by the creature the ring belonged to; the rest ride to a kingdom that has stopped listening to itself. A wall is held for one night against something that has never lost.
Why Gustave Doré
Helm's Deep is a Doré subject in the most literal way: a mass of figures against architecture at night, lit by fire, with the composition doing the arithmetic of how many. He did exactly this for the Crusades and for Milton, and nobody has done it better since.
Fangorn is the harder half and the reason the cycle is worth having — a forest that is awake, drawn by the one hand that never treated a forest as background.
What to look for
The Dead Marshes. Faces under water, lit from below, in a flat landscape with no horizon to rest on. It is the single most Doré passage Tolkien ever wrote and he had no idea.
