ABSTRACT
The Lord of the Rings trilogy was not meant to be a trilogy; J. R. R. Tolkien envisioned it as a single, continuous narrative, with six subdivisions. However, the length of the manuscript and the economic pressures of the post-war era led his publisher to release the book as three separate volumes – which, in turn, forced Tolkien to invent titles for these new divisions, the titles by which the components of the ‘trilogy’ are now known.1 This was simple enough for the first division, which he called The Fellowship of the Ring; all the members of the Fellowship move more or less in unison; there is only one strand of narrative to follow, spread out over two books. And The Return of the King is a rather important plot point in both books of the third division, although for most of the division, each book follows different characters doing different things in different places. But at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Fellowship divides, with Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee taking the Ring east towards Mordor alone, and the rest of the Fellowship travelling on elsewhere, and occasionally breaking into even smaller groups. Finding a title to encompass all the different strands of plot at work in the second division was not an easy task, and in the end the best Tolkien could do was The Two Towers.
