Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats.

Our show is about to begin.

The Kingdom of Rohan is one of the richest and most important introductions made not only in the two towers,

but in the entire Lord of the Rings film series.

This is the soundtrack show. The Welcome back to the soundtrack show. I'm your host, David W. Collins, and this episode is our second in a series on The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, a film from 2002 directed by Peter Jackson, with a film score by Howard Shore.

In our last episode, we discussed the challenges of bringing the Two Towers to the Silver Screen,

the need to create a satisfying beginning, middle, and end for a more cohesive story,

as the source material for Two Towers presented more than a few challenges.

We also discussed how the music, with its Vognarian light motifs or themes,

greatly aided in this task, bringing all of the separate

story elements together with musical cohesion. While this was very cleverly achieved by composer

Howard Shore, and we'll continue looking at that, there's yet another very important task

that they had on this second film in our trilogy. In expanding our

story and its complexity, they still had to introduce new characters and civilizations.

Yes, even our development section or middle section of the Lord of the Rings carries a need for even more exposition.

And when we look at the two towers,

it's somewhat easy to say that the biggest introductory task that our writers, actors, set designers, director, and composer faced was bringing the kingdom of Rohan to life for the first time.

Rohan, home of the horse lords.

There's something strange at work.

Some evil gives speed to these creatures.

Sets its will against us. Now, if you've listened this far into the series, you're probably familiar with

what the Kingdom of Rohan is, but it's worth going over just the same.

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