Last week, I visited the Florida Keys and was able to climb to the top of the tower of the Key West Lighthouse. Despite living in mountainous country, I generally dislike climbing hills—yet I love climbing towers. There is something almost magical in never leaving the coordinates on the map where you began, ascending a tight spiral of stairs, and emerging to a different view than you had at the beginning. It's the same place but a vastly different perspective.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues to climb the stairs of various towers in Tolkien's works, both Middle-earth and not. This month, he focuses on the three inland "dark towers" of The Lord of the Rings and how they connect to the palantíri and other modes of seeing and imposing one's will in Middle-earth. These towers provide different insights than the tower at Elostirion, discussed last month, that looks out upon the sea. The dark towers—and later in the story, the Elf-towers as well—take on a different role that looks not outward to the numinous West but concentrates on the worldly machinations that will come to be preserved as the history of Middle-earth.

Simon's exploration of Tolkien's towers highlight the challenge that is the "Silmarillion" in the Silmarillion Writers' Guild. Tolkien's works are interlaced with each other such that the elements from one text or another are hard to isolate. The dark towers are a Hobbit story, but this story requires Fëanor and the Númenóreans; furthermore the tower in Tolkien's analogy in his 1936 lecture on Beowulf occasionally glimmers out of the mist on a far-off horizon. Each contributes its weight and meaning to the history we come to read as The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's ability to interweave so many elements from so many different places into a story is what gives us that sense that is a lot like climbing a tower: reading the same story yet, with a little effort, achieving vastly different perspectives.

You can read Simon's article "Seeing Stones in Dark Towers" here.