Lotr two towers writing the title
The significance of Warwick and Warwick Castle in the genesis of the Middle-earth books has also become clearer to Garth. He… liked the setting of a place of former battles.” At the time, though, Tolkien still didn’t have a clue where he was going with his story. “The excavations in Dorset were given an awful lot of space and I am pretty confident that Tolkien read it, especially as he knew Wheeler. “Wheeler, who invented ‘stratigraphy’, the study of archaeological layers, was a great populariser,” said Garth. In the year before Tolkien wrote this passage, major excavations in Maiden Castle had been chronicled in a newspaper column of archaeological highlights written by his friend REM Wheeler. It is one of his real talents as a writer.” “It is a former place of a battle with tombs, dating from a ‘deep time’ the place where the Barrow-wight captures the hobbits when they need to be released from his power,” said Garth.
It has its basis in the large earthworks at Maiden Castle in Dorset, he now believes, and is best known to readers in the shape of the contours of the atmospheric Barrow-downs in Lord of the Rings. One of Garth’s key discoveries concerns an ancient battlescape that reappears across Tolkien’s writing. Maiden Castle earthworks in Dorset may have inspired the Barrow-downs. He is unconvinced by a prior claim that The Two Towers in the title of the second book of Lord of the Rings were influenced by buildings in Birmingham, including Perrotts Folly in Edgbaston. I think it has been misleading just to visit places he went to and draw simple conclusions,” said Garth. “We have a good idea of when Tolkien was writing each bit, but he kept his cards pretty close to his chest when it comes to his creative process. It will argue that many assumptions previously made about the origins of scenes from the sagas are wrong. Garth’s book, The Worlds of JRR Tolkien, is published next month by Frances Lincoln and is to be translated into nine languages. “It’s the controversy surrounding its building that filtered into Tolkien’s writings and can be traced all the way to echoes in the scene where Gandalf is held captive in Saruman’s tower.” “Faringdon Folly isn’t a complete physical model for Orthanc,” said Garth.
Tolkien began to work this story into his developing Middle-earth fiction, finally planting rival edifices on the Tower Hills on the west of his imaginary “Shire” and also drawing on memories of other real towers that stand in the Cotswolds and above Bath.