Preview: The Two Towers

1/18/02 A quick introduction: Your local LOTR geeks at the Daily Digest (i.e., most of the staff) dug into the collection of pictures they'd gathered from various websites over the last year (chief among these: TheOneRing.net and French site Numenoreen.com. Good people), and realized that there are some hidden gems that have been floating around the internet the whole time. All pictures will be credited and linked back to the original sources; please feel free to send us any pictures not already here if you find them. Head geek Cleolinda numbered some of the pictures so it'll be less Where's Waldo? when you're looking for a character she swears she saw, but we do not mean to infringe on the rights of any of the source sites (or, for that matter, New Line Cinema, et. al.). If you think you've spotted something we missed, or disagree with us outright--as with the case of the Elrond-or-Arwen? debate on the "Fellowship of the Ring deleted scenes" feature, please feel free to email us your comments as well.

You might also want to check out the pictures we posted last week--with some actual original scans! Ye gods!--of Eowyn, Eomer, Theoden, etc., in Rohan. Updated: two images have been added.

So what's Helm's Deep, anyway?
In the second book of Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, it's a fortress that Aragorn and company--Gimli, Legolas, Gandalf (you heard us), and new Rohirrim companions Theoden, the king, and nephew Eomer--must defend from the marauding orcs in Sauron's command.

We don't currently have any pictures (that we know of) showing Gimli at Helm's Deep, nor of Theoden; we think we've glimpsed Eomer, though (more on that later). There's a picture on our Rohan preview page that many people have suggested is of Helm's Deep; how-ever, unless the storyline has been changed so that Eowyn comes with them this early in the game, we think she's at Edoras seeing them off. This is crucial, because it's her getting left behind that causes her to (swipe to reveal spoiler, if you haven't read the books) dis-guise herself as a man, "Dernhelm," to follow Aragorn.

Other LOTR features at the Daily Digest:

"Deleted scenes" from Fellowship of the Ring

Rings Things: More trivia than you can shake a stick at

One Cast to Rule Them All: Where else you've seen the FOTR actors

Cleolinda's review of the film

Arwen: The most controversial character of the sequence, she isn't even in the book. Our understanding is that she's been included here to flesh out the Aragorn-Arwen romance that's largely left to the book's appendices. Good call, in our opinion; however, actress Liv Tyler has not really done herself any favors among the hardcore Tolkienites with some off-the-cuff comments about her character to E! Online's "Force of Hobbit" feature (April 2000):

"I was with Viggo [Mortensen] and [sword-fighting coach] Bob Anderson, and I was surrounded by about 20 Uruk-hai who were all hitting me, and I had to attack them. It was terrifying! I just hid behind Viggo!"

Tyler continues a bit later, "Even her love affair [with Aragorn] is interesting because they're both so busy. I mean, she has her moments where she gets to say, 'Aragorn, kiss me!' But there's a war on, so she has to be patient and supportive and let him go off and do the things he has to do."

We say, give the girl a chance--wasn't her Arwen in Fellowship of the Ring something of a revelation in itself?

The top image was one of the very first of Arwen that was released; but, under the theory of Where There's a Change in Costume, There's a Change of Scene, we decided to figure out what was going on when this was obviously not a scene that appeared in Fellowship of the Ring.

So, on a chance visit to Numenoreen. com, we dug up the image below (click to enlarge), one of the early images that appeared on the official site (that's why half of it is blocked by that big blue swatch--lordoftherings.net likes to play it coy).

That, together with the third image below, cuts it: the same dark red dress, the horse (Asfaloth, in fact, you think?), the boxy armored shoulders--someone's ready to rumble.