The Lord of the Rings: The two towers

"The Lord of the Rings is J.R.R. Tolkien's great three-volume epic set in the imaginary world of the Third Age of Middle-earth--a world inhabited by many strange beings, including hobbits, an ancient people smaller than dwarves, cheerful, peace-loving and shy. Since its original publication, this work has caught the imagination of readers of all ages and walks of life. It is an adventure story, an adult fairy tale, a classic myth, which Michael Straight has called one of the "very few of genius in recent literature." In response to the widespread interest and enthusiasm evoked by The Lord of the Rings, Professor Tolkien has prepared this second edition, making a number of emendations in the text and providing a new foreword, new appendices and an index. The Third Age of Middle-earth is a world receptive to poets, scholars, children, and all other people of good will. David Barr has described it as "a scrubbed morning world, and a ringing nightmare world ... especially sunlit, and shadowed by perils very fundamental, of a peculiarly uncompounded darkness." The story of this world is on of high and heroic adventure. W.H. Auden has said: "The first thing one asks of an adventure story is that the adventure be various and exciting ... Mr. Tolkien's invention in unflagging." And C.S. Lewis: "If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true." Lewis compared The Lord of the Rings to Orlando Furioso. Barr has compared it to Beowulf, Auden to The Thirty-Nine Steps, Naomi Mitchison to the Morte d'Arthur, Richard Hughes to the Faerie Queene. Each reader can find in it something he is looking for, but the book is sui generis--a triumph of imaginative genius, which exists within its own framework and on its own terms."--Book jacket of part 1.