Quote:
Originally Posted by Huinesoron
It's a nice thought, but Tolkien disagrees. From Of the Rings of Power...
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Alas! I have been tripped up. I think your second quote, from "Aldarion and Erendis" is probably at the heart of some of my foiled hunch.
Your speculation,
Huinesoron is rather fascinating: the idea that the towers are not martial in purpose certainly removes the necessity of finding a military purpose for them, which makes their location somewhat easier.
And non-military towers away from a populated spot are not without precedent in Númenórean history--I'm specifically thinking of Tar-Meneldur's astronomy tower in the Forostar of Númenor. Certainly the comparison to the Elf-towers in the context of the
palantír has some merit.
The connection to the meeting of the Númenóreans and the Men of Eriador as an explanation for there being three towers is far more speculative, as you no doubt know, and I disincline away from it myself, simply on grounds of chronology--more than two millennia pass between the meeting of those peoples and the time of Elendil.
Actually, a couple things occur to me: first, what if these towers ARE astronomy towers? We know that the Númenóreans had considerably advanced knowledge relative to the medieval-esque cultures we know better from the end of the Third Age. Could multiple oservation towers have allowed the royal astronomers to triangulate things? This was right after the reshaping of the world, and it seems to me that there would have been plenty of curiosity in the new Arnor to map the new cosmology--and perhaps it was originally in onnection with this that Elendil placed one of the
palantíri there.
Something about the Prologue that struck me marinating over it since I posted last is how it almost works best with the rest of
The Lord of the Rings in the explicit context of rereading.
It's a little bit weird, because the Prologue *is* an introduction: it sets up the world a bit and in the first few chapters there are lines (such as the reader being expected to know what a Stoor is in "The Shadow of the Past") that assume the reader has read the Prologue.
But, on the other side, the Prologue talks about Frodo and Merry and Pippin all contributing to the Red Book and talking about the Red Book's textual tradition (including references to Gondor and the King) that only make sense after you've read
The Lord of the Rings. It's an explicit reward for the
re-reader--and if you're someone who makes a big deal out of spoiler alerts, not at all safe for the first time reader.
I'm not a spoiler alert kind of person (for various academic experiences that would be navel-gazing to go into here), but it is still Appendix-y enough that I would not recommend a first-time reader begin with the Prologue. Indeed, the nuggets of information we get about the surviving members of the Fellowship feel like parts of the Tale of the Years.
That said, I'm pretty sure I read the Prologue in its proper place the first time I read the book, and I don't think I ended spoiled at all, because I'd forgotten most of the "spoilers" by the time I encountered the characters they referred to--I'm pretty sure we see the name "Aragorn" referring to Strider nearly half a dozen times before Bree, but I never put two-and-two together until at least the second read-through.
Which is perhaps my point: the Prologue is the tape on the moebius strip where the Appendices loop back into "A Long-Awaited Party."