[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast.
[SPEAKER_00]: The show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world, from the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back, friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a different episode this week because I decided that we're going to answer some questions that I posted on the Patreon.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, you can sign up for free on Patreon in order to answer queries like this for questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: These go to everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to be a paying member.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would appreciate the support if you can do that, but if not, that's totally fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: You could still participate.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I got a number of really good questions from the community.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you might be wondering, why are we taking a break?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're right at the point where Bilbo confronts Smellg.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are you doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's been kind of a crazy week.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot going on this last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: My son is back in school.
[SPEAKER_01]: My father has had a major surgery, including operations on his brain.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, hopefully you can grant me this, the ability to just do this, and it's going to be like an extended episode, an extended episode where I take on some of your questions and some of your thoughts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we, although I've totally prepped the episode, I have my notes on it and everything's ready to go with Bilbo and Smog, I'm going to push that back to next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: So instead we're doing this, but we're also doing a thing where this is going to be a longer episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: So instead of breaking this up into the main episode and a bonus episode just for patrons, this is going to be an extended episode, basically for everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you were looking to get some insight and the kinds of things that go on in the patron episodes, this may give you some insight into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So here we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get into the questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's dive right into the deep end.
[SPEAKER_01]: This question is from Eru Eluvitar equals Jesus with an exclamation mark, who writes, several evil Myr turned into bellrogs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a creature that the good Myr like Gandalf can turn into?
[SPEAKER_01]: If there is, why don't they?
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a very good question.
[SPEAKER_01]: We do see my R and Valar change forms.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is something that happens fairly regularly.
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens a lot more in the Legendarium, especially in the early sections of the Silmarillion than anywhere in the published novels.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't really see this happen in the Hobbit or in the Lord of the Rings.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are some mentions of Salron being able to change form, and that's sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we don't really see a whole lot of that in the novels.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this becomes less and less common as time goes by.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a reason for this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have to go way back to the beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the Valar and the Myar were sent into Arda, or decided to go into Arda, they were angelic spirits.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not have forms in the physical sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we were told that they could take on forms and they did so especially in order to interact directly with the children.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see this happening with the elves and with men.
[SPEAKER_01]: An example of that would be Ulmo approaching tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: He rises up out of the sea and is this gigantic human looking anthropomorphic kind of being.
[SPEAKER_01]: But tour knows that he's a Valar.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knows exactly who he is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he takes on that form in order to directly speak with tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see this a lot and the way this is described in Tolkien's work is that they are basically choosing to put on a form, almost like changing clothes, and many of them can do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that makes this possible is the fact that they are not corrupted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And corrupted can mean something like influenced by morgoth or changed from their original state by some means.
[SPEAKER_01]: It also could mean that they have invested enough of their power into something to weaken themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see this happening as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the story of Baron and Luthian, we see Sauron turning into a werewolf.
[SPEAKER_01]: He can actually change forms at will in order to make himself even more intimidating and more threatening and more physically imposing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this happens regularly.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are variations on this.
[SPEAKER_01]: In those stories, it's like they can just change clothes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can take on the form that they want.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's still in the early days, relatively speaking, the first age being a lot, thousands of years before the third age.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are some kind of issues with this, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you bring up some some good questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: What about ball rocks?
[SPEAKER_01]: What about the Atari?
[SPEAKER_01]: So ball rocks decided to follow melcore or morgoth originally.
[SPEAKER_01]: And their forms took on the nature of their own beings, like that their own spirits were dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: and terrifying and shadowlike.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's some implication there that they may have been corrupted by morgoth in order to be more like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he brought those things out in them and those things eventually took them over.
[SPEAKER_01]: It also could mean that they were corrupted by him.
[SPEAKER_01]: and reduced to being servants and no longer able to make decisions on their own or to change their forms.
[SPEAKER_01]: The main point here is that by choosing or becoming that form, they become bound to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can no longer just turn it to a spirit and float away.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are now ballerocks.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are now demonic looking beings that exist in a physical space for a purpose in order to help conquer Middle Earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, when it comes to the histori, that's a kind of a different thing because the histori, as we know, were my are.
[SPEAKER_01]: They lived in Valinore.
[SPEAKER_01]: They studied under or worked under different Valar.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole section of that stuff we've talked about in the past.
[SPEAKER_01]: And while they were there, they were spirits.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure sometimes they would take on physical guises in order to physically interact with the world or to speak with the elves that lived there, those kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when they were sent into middle-earth in order to combat Sauron, they were guised in the bodies of old men.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was something that they took upon themselves and limited themselves intentionally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of that was because it was, well, from a meta perspective, it makes the stories more interesting if these characters are limited and are not gods who can just swoop in and save the day.
[SPEAKER_01]: But from the concept of inside the universe and inside the lore, they weren't supposed to use their powers directly in order to confront Sauron and take him down.
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea was that they were going in order to connect with people, the peoples of Middle Earth, in order to rally them.
[SPEAKER_01]: In order to bring about their best version of themselves so that the men, especially because the elves were withdrawing from Middle Earth, the men could rise up and find that they had it within themselves to become greater than they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the story goes that a number of them get lost in the things that were their interests, basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rattagast goes off into the wilderness, and although he does good things, he kind of spends a little bit too much time talking to animals and being among the trees.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sao Ruman gets corrupted by the power of knowledge and that sort of thing, and so we kind of lose him for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blue wizard's disappear, but Gandalf
[SPEAKER_01]: primarily, his focus was on connecting with people.
[SPEAKER_01]: His focus was on relationships.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because of that, he succeeds.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that entire time, they are bound to the bodies that they are in.
[SPEAKER_01]: If that body dies, it dies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And those bodies were limited.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had to eat, they had to breathe.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not magical mystical creatures that could avoid the effects of the physical world.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were more hearty than say regular human being in a lot of ways, even though they looked like old men, but they were still very limited and could
[SPEAKER_01]: simply be killed as we see with Gandalf.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now Gandalf gets killed in a battle with a bowlerog so it's quite the the enemy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just like some infantryman with like a spear who happens to get a good hit at his chest or something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they were still bound to those bodies and his spirit leaves and as far as we know it went to where the spirits go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm assuming that is initially the halls of Mandoos and then
[SPEAKER_01]: Errorulivutar decides to reach into the world and make things different because as we know in the song at the beginning of the Silmarillion, this is what happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Morgoth does evil things and then Errorulivutar reaches into the earth into the world into the song and makes changes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Takes those changes and uses them against the evil, in which case Gandalf becomes, who Saruman was originally supposed to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for his death.
[SPEAKER_01]: That resurrection makes him more powerful.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope that answers your question.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are kind of limitations around this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they can be a little bit fuzzy at times.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's also this feeling.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is just more of me talking.
[SPEAKER_01]: This feeling that
[SPEAKER_01]: In the earlier stories, things were more mythical and fantastical, and in the later stories, especially as you get into the third age, things feel more grounded and literal.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that could be because the world continues to change and develop and go from a more magical, mystical, spiritual kind of place into something that's more physical, but it also could be the fact that
[SPEAKER_01]: elves are the ones passing down these stories and they're telling these amazing tales of a time where it would have been very very hard to even interpret some of the things that were happening and those stories passed down like telephone from one group to the next eventually to the men and to our modern age.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the way that all that'll work.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very good question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful question to start us off.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Eru.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, let's move on to the next one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Single end to looking for end-twives.
[SPEAKER_01]: These names are so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, it's high-tom.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, if this has been already been mentioned in the show, but I'm curious about how else like Elros and R-Win choose to be mortal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a process that removes the oven qualities in them?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it magical?
[SPEAKER_01]: Does it happen at the exact moment that they declare
[SPEAKER_01]: that they want to live a mortal life, appreciate any insights, thanks for everything you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I have addressed this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has come up a number of times in episodes, and I believe I answered a question very similar to this on a bonus episode at some point.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is a great question, because, again, just like the previous question, the lines here are a little fuzzy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Elrond and Elros are the sons of
[SPEAKER_01]: Aaron Dell.
[SPEAKER_01]: His parents were a man in an elf, so he was a half elf.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because of he and his wife's great deeds, the children of the pairing are given the option.
[SPEAKER_01]: They get to choose to be elf or man.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like, if I recall correctly, the default is elf.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they can choose to be Manish if they want.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something has to be considered in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The concept and the idea of elves being the default is because elves are of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: They die.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they die, their spirits go to the halls of Mendes, in Valenor, and they stay there until the end of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the world is done.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the elves and their spirits are done as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is an end to their existence just like there's an end to art to middle earth and everything else in the sphere of that song and story and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Men, however, have the gift of Eluvitar.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which means that their spirits initially go to the Halls of Mendes, but then they leave the world, and they seem to go back to dwell with Eluvitar beyond time and existence and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: There seems to be some greater heaven or something, and that is always vaguely described.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not very clearly stated what actually happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's supposed to be a mystery.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a way of balancing the two groups of children.
[SPEAKER_01]: The elves seem greater while in middle-earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have greater health.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have greater resistances.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have years and years of living, which gives them greater knowledge and skills.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they don't die from being a diseased or old age or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas humans don't have any of those benefits.
[SPEAKER_01]: They seem like the lesser of the two in
[SPEAKER_01]: Arda, but they are given this blessing so that their spirits go on somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a mystery around that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They seem more limited, but they also can exist eternally.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's kind of this weird balance between the two.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your question specifically says, when did they get to make the choice, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Elros chooses to be of mankind, and eventually that turns into the kings of Numenor and the descendants that go all the way down to Erragorn.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Arwin is the son of Elron.
[SPEAKER_01]: Elros and Elron were brothers, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So Arwin is just one step down from Elros in the family tree because Elros is Arwin's uncle, even though he's a man in dies and doesn't live forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when do they get to make that choice?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: The choice seems to be able to happen when they commit their will in their spirits to the decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: By default, they seem to be elves in at some point they decide to will themselves into that choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: The descendants of Elrose, after he makes his choice, are born as mortal.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're born as humans, as men.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they don't really get the choice from that point on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Elron's line, because they are born as elves, then still have the choice because they are descendants of Erendel.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, that means that Arwin has the choice to then be mortal, and she makes that choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see that happen, and that's when she decides to commit her spirit to that decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that means that she no longer has immortality.
[SPEAKER_01]: She will age, and she will die if we use L-Rose as an example, that he's still lived a very long life several hundred years, so Arwin could continue to live on a significant period of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: She will die.
[SPEAKER_01]: And is her elfinist taken from her?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in that sense, it is because she's no longer immortal, but so much of what makes an elf an elf is their long lives, their knowledge that they've gained.
[SPEAKER_01]: They tend to be more magical, but as I've discussed in previous episodes, magic is more of the ability to affect reality and bend nature and the natural world to their will than it is casting spells or something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she would still maintain certain qualities that make her who she is, but she would simply be now mortal.
[SPEAKER_01]: That seems to be the way it works out, but again, this is one of those places where it is pretty fuzzy.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are, sometimes there are even examples of encounter examples that make you go away, how do these two things fit together?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Tolkien spent so much of his career writing, trying to go back through and flesh a lot of this stuff out, and some things he just left a mystery.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for the question, single end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, let's move on to this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one's from Sweet Peter, who writes, do you think Elron did a mistake in not killing Islder in Mount Doom to destroy the one ring?
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you do in this position knowing about the consequences if the ring was not destroyed and Salron endured?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a tricky question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so first of all, the movie portrays them in Mount Doom as if easled or had the intention of going and dropping the ring in the fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason why they did it that way, which is not the way it happens in the books, is in order to give the audience, it foreshadows, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives the audience the idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: that the way to destroy the ring is to drop it in the flames, which we then can understand moving forward that Frodo needs to try to do the same thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It sets it very visually in front of us to say that somebody needs to succeed exactly where Izildur failed.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not how it happens in the books.
[SPEAKER_01]: Isolder takes up the ring after cutting it off of Sauron's finger and Sauron has now been reduced to a spirit and leaves the battlefield.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is a confrontation there between Elrond and Isolder.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Elrond, in that situation, says, you should destroy it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Isolder says, no, I'm going to take this as an heirloom because I earned it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're led to believe that Islder is already being corrupted by the ring in that moment, and that's why he makes that decision and justifies it in that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: The corruption is already there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, they are on the battlefield, surrounded by all of their soldiers, who have just fought to destroy Sauron, and it feels like they won.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from Elrun's perspective, he could fight Islder in order to try to take the ring, which he knows would corrupt him as well, because he knows how powerful it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: or he could try to confront Isldor in make him destroyed in the moment, which he knows he's not going to convince Isldor to do that because he's under the sway of the ring already, or like you're suggesting he could simply kill him.
[SPEAKER_01]: But think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If he were to attack Isldor in midst all of Isldor's men over something they don't fully understand, they would see that as if the elves were attacking and assassinating their king.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would see it as a
[SPEAKER_01]: attempt to grab power in a tricky, I guess, a fragile situation, and that would have been terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, Elron still would have had to pick up the ring and been corrupted by it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had no good choice in that situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like he could have just pushed Islder over the side, and made sure that both he and the ring were destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if they were in Mount Doom, and he did that, it would be seen as an assassination of their king.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he had no good choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no version of that story in which he would have left that situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, sure, maybe the ring would have been destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the kingdom would have been in peril.
[SPEAKER_01]: The relationship between the elves and men would have been completely destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: There probably would have been a continuation of wars now against those between those two groups.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was not a good choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so L Run simply had to let matters lie and figure out how to save things and do things different in the future.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can see, and they portray this pretty well in the movie that he's torn by this.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not at rest about this at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And carries around a certain amount of guilt.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't say it explicitly if I recall, but it feels that way in the performance.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, the seriousness in El Ron that this weight that he carries.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really feels that way and they portray this pretty well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's just no good answer is really the answer and so it plays out the way it does.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, we Peter.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to get to another one of yours in a little bit, but let's jump over to John Son of John who writes, Hey Tom, keep doing what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I look forward to these episodes every week.
[SPEAKER_01]: My question is how different do you think things would have went in the Hobbit if Bilbo never found the ring?
[SPEAKER_01]: Would they have even been able to succeed?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: My sense of it, and I'll get into this as we get into the confrontation between Bilbo and Smauge, is that no, I don't think they would have been able to succeed at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: As quiet as a Hobbit can be, we will see how very, very clearly perceptive and powerful Smauge is.
[SPEAKER_01]: If it weren't for the invisibility of the ring, he would've been destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smalg would not have thought given it a second thought at all, especially once he is labeled a thief, because Smalg in his response is to leave Eribor and fly around for the rest of the day burning the countries of the whole night, burning the countryside around searching for the thieves who stole a single cup
[SPEAKER_01]: There is no version of this in my mind where Bilbo without the ability of the ring could have survived that scenario, especially when they are up close having the conversation later.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no way he would have survived that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, we have to remember that the ring not only keeps smug from being able to specifically detect and kill Bilbo, but
[SPEAKER_01]: It also aids in the rescue of the spiders and the elven kingdom.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this feels tricky because we know the ring is evil, especially later on once it was redacted to be Sauron's creation and the one ring and the most evil thing in the world at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it kind of works against Sauron.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's part of the irony here is that if it weren't for the success of the dwarves in being able to
[SPEAKER_01]: remove a dragon from the chessboard of Middle Earth, then the northern section of the world would have been conquered.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sauron was sending forces to the north and we don't see them in the Lord of the Rings because they were happening off-screen and putting this in quotes, but outside the bounds of the story and the characters we were following in that book, but there were battles happening up in the north.
[SPEAKER_01]: If there were a dragon among those fighting in the north, then
[SPEAKER_01]: Sauron would have won that part of the fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: How quickly he wins that, is he able to then send the forces down back to the south in order to attack Rohan or Gondor and completely keep the party from even getting to more, maybe, you know, but that's all speculation.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the point being that the ring itself betrays Sauron in more than one way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's really cool and intentional, once you think about the way Tolkien kind of fits that all together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, John.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is another one from Sweet Peter, who writes, what would you ask Professor Tolkien himself if he was still alive?
[SPEAKER_01]: My joking answer is, how do you make a marriage?
[SPEAKER_01]: last and be so wonderful for so many years because we know that he loved his wife dearly and that they seem to have a very very strong relationship and deeply deeply loved each other until until she passed away and then he I'm sure he continued loving her until a few years later when he passed away and Baron and Luthian are written on their graves
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the, I don't know, most inspiring love stories as far as I'm aware of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that doesn't mean that my wife actually is wonderful as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a wonderful relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: We just celebrated our sixteenth anniversary, so things are going very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a joke from the perspective of like, oh my marriage sucks, but so many people do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to see somebody as inspirational as Professor Tolkien and his wife, a couple like that, who are able to make that work with children and careers and everything else going on in the world, is inspirational.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though it happened a long time ago at this point in the world, it feels very different.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be a good question.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think what you're trying to get to here is when it comes to his writings and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a good question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there are some things I definitely wouldn't ask, although people would probably assume that I would want to know the answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Things like who is Tom Bombadil, which we'll get to in a minute, because that comes up in another question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is he really?
[SPEAKER_01]: or what happened to the entwives that these kinds of classic questions that are not answered and so all we have is speculation and trying to piece together the little I don't know the little hints about what may or may not have happened I don't want the answers to those because I feel like the mystery about them is greater than the answer would provide it's more fun to have a mystery to make the world feel bigger than sometimes it is to have an explanation I think
[SPEAKER_01]: This is something that we lose when in Hollywood or wherever they take something like, I don't know, the alien franchise and then they dig too deeply in the lore and they give us all these answers, kind of ruins some of the mystery behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once you know what something is, it's always not quite as satisfying as
[SPEAKER_01]: wondering about the mystery and all the potential ideas.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've now reduced all the options just down to one.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if that is your favorite option, the number is less.
[SPEAKER_01]: The speculation is less.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mystery is less.
[SPEAKER_01]: The feeling of the world being a big mysterious place where you don't have all the answers, which is how the world actually works, goes away.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's were reduced by that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would not ask that question.
[SPEAKER_01]: What I would ask
[SPEAKER_01]: is where did you plan to go with your story about the fourth age?
[SPEAKER_01]: Then I talk about this a little bit in one of the bonus episodes from like a year or two ago, but Tolkien started writing another story and he got through about, I don't know, the beginnings of a first chapter and it's not a whole lot there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he did seem to have an idea for a way to continue the story of Middle Earth into the fourth age, the age of man.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a return of the shadow.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was something that was coming about and coming back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now whether that was Sauron returning, which I don't think it was, or it was something that he had corrupted some evil that still lurked in the world and had come back and was now threatening humanity
[SPEAKER_01]: in a new and interesting way.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is that?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know where I would go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oftentimes I try to predict where stories are going to go or movies are going to go based on what I know about those worlds to see if I can get into the mind of the author.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know what the solution to that is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where was he planning to go?
[SPEAKER_01]: If he had lived another thirty years and been inspired to continue writing and expanding this legendary
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you do, Professor Tolkien?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you make this work?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it seems like, at some point, he felt like he had an answer to that because he started dabbling in that solution.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we don't know what that is.
[SPEAKER_01]: That, to me, is a more interesting mystery because it doesn't ruin for us what happened to the antwives or who Tom Bombadil actually is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't shine a lantern on something that's supposed to be unknown.
[SPEAKER_01]: It simply continues the story and gives us an even more detailed look at the full history of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that would have been really cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, we're going to take a quick break and we will be back for the second half of this episode where I go over even more of these questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: So don't go anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will be right back.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for this next section, I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that it has been a absolutely crazy week and I've spent a lot of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does car line for school and commuting?
[SPEAKER_01]: I drop off my son and pick him up every day as I've mentioned previous on the show like a year ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does that always take longer the first week of school?
[SPEAKER_01]: I've spent a lot of time just sitting in a car.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yesterday, I brought my portable mic with me and I answered some of these other questions while in the car.
[SPEAKER_01]: the audio is best I can actually sounds pretty good to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I hope you enjoy the answers the audio does.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a little bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a
[SPEAKER_01]: So a few things there, yes, I absolutely wrote about Tolkien and his writings as often as possible starting in high school.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember having, and this is, so I graduated college in two thousand one.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is going way back, but I remember a, I think it was a English
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a assignment I had to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or no, it was a creative writing assignment I had to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember working in talking into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there definitely were at least one or two other assignments in high school.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in college, where I was able to, the flexibility of this assignment was such that I was able to,
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of choose the topic and melded around the concept of the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, this is so long ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even remember what the topics were, but I do know that I did this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also know that back before, well, modern current date times, you would write papers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, of course, I had a computer in those kinds of things, but you would print it out and you turn in a handed in printed out version of the thing you wrote.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I definitely do not have
[SPEAKER_01]: the digital versions of these anymore, those are long gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as for keeping the papers that I wrote, I know that I kept some of them around most of them I threw out because I just, I wasn't, they were early stuff and it wasn't all that important and I wasn't really breaking new ground or, you know, class assignments and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think there might be one or two that
[SPEAKER_01]: ended up in a box somewhere with some of my really old stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although I've moved multiple times, I might have pitched that stuff at some point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or the other thing is that I maybe didn't keep any of the Tolkien stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: I kept probably some of the last papers I wrote for my bachelor's degree.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like in my senior year something like that because I was actually proud of those and I felt like I was doing something that was interesting at the time Who knows?
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to go see if those even exist anymore and I'd probably roll my eyes at this point and go wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was so profound and deep But that's a great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: I but to answer it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I absolutely did I worked this stuff in as much as possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I've been thinking about things
[SPEAKER_01]: in this way for a very long time now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for that question, Ray.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ray has a second question here.
[SPEAKER_01]: My friends and I were also discussing Tom Bombadil, and someone really wanted him to be Eruit Uluvitar, but, alas, I had to disappoint them.
[SPEAKER_01]: What about Tom being the personification of nature, or nature, nature?
[SPEAKER_01]: Today is a nature, nature, or art itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, yes, that is another one of the predominant theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would probably classify, at least in my experience, the two theories that I seem to see happen the most often are Tom Bombadil as a root eluvitar, like he decided to come visit his creation and he's just kind of hanging out doing his thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why the influence of, say, Sauron's ring
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't really affect him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has no real needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: He seems aloof and separate from the world, although he's in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as I've discussed him before, there are some flaws with that justification.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that as a perfect explanation, although I don't know if any explanations are truly perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other being that
[SPEAKER_01]: If the spirit of art like you're saying here were a thing, it would be Tom Bombadil.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it would probably be Tom and Goldberry together as is kind of alluded to in the rings of power because when
[SPEAKER_01]: The stranger, Gandalf, meets Tom Bombadil in season two, you can hear Goldberry, but you don't see her.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's as if she's a piece of him or she's a spirit that is there as well and is maybe invisible or not presenting itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he acts like there was nothing odd going on or there wasn't even another voice or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her Tom specifically in the episodes if I'm recalling that correctly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a fun theory.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, it's the kind of theory that can be implied by the evidence, but there's no direct statement by talking about that as far as I've come across.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is a fun idea that the spirit of the world itself is represented in an individual or two people.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that they be because of that also are not influenced by the ring.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that also has some of its own problems because we know that Morgoth corrupted the world and was able to corrupt the world and able to influence the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if that were the case, then wooden Tom Bombadil also be partly corrupted by Morgoth because he poured his power into art itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: That seems like it might be a problem with the justification there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess you could say, well, Tom is the pure spirit of the world that is yet to be corrupted or could never be corrupted because of its core nature being something beyond the influence of Morgoth.
[SPEAKER_01]: You could say something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, it's something that is just kind of implied and speculated about and doesn't really have any hard evidence for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: that kind of puts a kink in that justification.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tolkien, if I recall and I know I've done some of the episodes where we actually saw the interviews with him and I've definitely read through some of his writings about this in the past and if I recall correctly he
[SPEAKER_01]: He kind of avoids stating and answering these questions, or they just didn't get asked in the way that we ask them now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that leaves it open ended, which I think is fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fun to have questions like this that are just kind of left to our imagination.
[SPEAKER_01]: One other explanation that I came across, or at least I saw maybe have gained more
[SPEAKER_01]: Evidence for is probably the wrong way to say it, but maybe have more respect for the idea is that he is simply a character from a previous story that Tolkien liked and wanted to insert into his story, but didn't have a
[SPEAKER_01]: a good lore background reason for doing so more than he just enjoyed the character.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like an author going, well, what am I going to name this character?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I like this name, so I'm just going to use it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't have to necessarily have any deeper meaning than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the adventures of Tom Bombadell do predate some of his other writings, so it kind of makes sense and predate specifically the lore of the rings.
[SPEAKER_01]: If he liked the character and the character kind of evolved in these other writings and he wanted to use the character in a way because it added a little bit of mystery.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a ghost in the machine kind of solution to the old forest and what the hobbits were going through at that point in the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: then that might have been enough and the fact that he was not influenced by the ring is seems like a powerful being is enough to make a speculated about what he might actually be even though he doesn't show up in any other places in the legendary and other than these other writings, the adventures of Tom Bombdo.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which would be fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I should go through those.
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to get through the Hobbit before we can do other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'll plan to get through those in the future.
[SPEAKER_01]: That'll be fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for that question, Ray.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to hear any other speculation about Tom Bombadil.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of an endlessly interesting thing to speculate about because there's no hard and fast answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really comes down to just how we perceive these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: That version of it seems like it actually is the simplest and in the Arkham's razor sort of simplest explanation is usually right justification kind of holds some water because of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know, let me know your thoughts.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, we got this one from double O dynamists.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one's for Smeagull, Smeagull, dear Smeagull.
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't done another Smeagull episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, getting through even just twenty minutes of that was very, very hard of my throat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm having a disagreement with a housemate about decorations in a common area.
[SPEAKER_01]: Any advice.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's Smeagull, are you here in the car with me?
[SPEAKER_01]: Smink, sminger, swooping on the back seat, and taking the mapsils.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, smiggle.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have any advice here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Double O is asking about disagreements, about decorations in a common area, any advice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does the common area allow a clove?
[SPEAKER_01]: Cloves?
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't need very normal decorations.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just droopy rars and stalactites.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I don't think it's a cave.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's probably like a living room or, you know, like somebody's house or apartment.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's in your apartment?
[SPEAKER_01]: Process.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, it's a place for people to live.
[SPEAKER_01]: They rent it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They pay you pay money to somebody.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they let you live in a place that they don't live in, but they just own the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you pay for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: speaker thinks that's silly, silly humanism, punty money, every, every, how often, but like every month.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone bounces to live in a place when I just get a hoe, her and the grounds are full.
[SPEAKER_01]: You just dig a hole or go down in the caves, and then move a nice spot and a place to sleep, and a place to stir your fishes.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're getting kind of off the point here, Smeagull.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is about decorating.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smeagull doesn't know our declarations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smeagull just lives as fishes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Toasty, juicy, sweet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, thanks, Mmeagull.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can go go back to sleep in the back seat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, double loaf.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope Smeagull was helpful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we have a fiction that Smeagle rides around in my car with me, which is not intended, but that's fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for the question there, and Smeagle, thanks for that help.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, don't throttle me while I'm driving.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Smeagle will have to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smeagle smells.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, go back to sleep.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so a sweet Peter says, what stories from the Tolkien Legendarium would you like to see be turned into a movie?
[SPEAKER_01]: Love your podcast from Sweden Peter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, sweet Peter.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to go to Sweden.
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't been to Sweden before.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would love to live in a place.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know this is not answering question right away, but I would love to live in a place unlike Florida.
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't so hot and so bright.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I have travel to northern countries like Sweden, it has been wonderful because the weather is colder and the sunlight isn't so glaring and terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm kind of like smiggle in that way, I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, keep sleeping back there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so other stories that I'd like to see turn into a movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the Silmarillion has so many good stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: Baron and Luthian is the first that comes to mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a Baron and Luthian story could be amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you would have to absolutely focus in on the fact that this is a myth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is magical.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't have to not everything has to be explained.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fact that who on can talk at one point doesn't have to be explained.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you do it like I don't have any great references that come to my eye.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't maybe like the green night.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't see the green night, but from the trailers it gave me that impression of this is being done like almost like
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those old nineteen seventies and eighties, uh, fantasy films.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are a lot of really bad ones from that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't mean like the bad ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean in the way in which the movie makers didn't always feel the need to explain the world down to every detail.
[SPEAKER_01]: If something weird just shows up, it just shows up.
[SPEAKER_01]: They just allow it to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this need to overly explain everything and make everything so rational.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you see that in some of the changes that Peter Jackson made to Lord of the Rings in the Hobbit, you see it in some of the changes that the show runners have made for the Rings of Power.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I get it, I get this idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, you can even look at the trend in comic book movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fact that the original X-Men film from like the late nineties put them all in black leather.
[SPEAKER_01]: This idea of like, well, if they run around in comic book costumes and spandex or whatever, nobody's going to believe it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have to make it feel more real and grounded.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's maybe they just wear these cool black leather outfits like the Matrix or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's still, in some ways, just kind of feels like a movie thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're really wearing black leather.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they were a team that was going out somewhere, they would probably be wearing cargo pants and jackets and gear on a belt and backpacks and military garb and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Back to my point, I would love something like Baron and Luthian, but
[SPEAKER_01]: a completely magical mystical world.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, I would start the story in the forest following Baron as he is basically trying to avoid
[SPEAKER_01]: the dangers of orcs in the world and those kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then we see him kind of starving and he's he's starting to lose his mind a little bit because of the enchantments of the forest and then all of a sudden it goes the tone shifts from some dark scary confused location to him witnessing Lutheran singing and dancing in the forest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that it feels like a dream, and it is dreamlike, it's not something that needs any other explanation other than, this is a human man, somebody that we can relate to through this idea that he's like us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he goes from a very real spooky kind of forest situation into something that is just magic, just magical.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the story moves on from there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can imagine that version of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, does that work for a large audience?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know in today's movie landscape that something like that can.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course it gets more fantastic from there, especially as the story progresses.
[SPEAKER_01]: but it would be freaking amazing to see some of the sights from their story, especially once he gets to the crown of Morgoth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure modern audiences would be like, what, she just, she put some to sleep.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's the most powerful dangerous thing in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they solve the problem by singing a song and he falls asleep really.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure the internet would get upset about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: People who haven't read the song really and would be like, well, that's a really, well, that's no way that that happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think if you establish it as a myth,
[SPEAKER_01]: as something that does not need our real world justifications to make sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you can frame it like that enough, then I think it could work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I don't know that it works for a mass audience and that might be part of why those stories have never been turned into film or TV shows or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that there's
[SPEAKER_01]: definitely something there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the children of Huren would be a really cool story.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you'd have to probably streamline it to primarily Huren's part of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not to say that you couldn't turn it into something like
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, a two or three season show of six to eight episodes each.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, flesh out some of the details there, his relation to the elves, the curse that he's under, mim the dwarf and that whole section, him being an outlaw, the fall of what was in Nargathrand.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that you could probably do something there too.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would just have to work better as kind of a longer darker story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus it would end really tragically.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I don't know if modern audiences want a really tragic end of a story.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, look at the way they wrapped up Game of Thrones.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Game of Thrones was always tragic.
[SPEAKER_01]: From season one, season one, spoilers, I guess, on a TV series that's one over a decade old at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Ned doesn't survive the end of season one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's tragic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that gripped people, but it became, I don't know, it's like it went too far once they hit the final season and then you had to even more tragedy and what some people would consider character assassination.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think if you tell the story of two and in a way where that
[SPEAKER_01]: actually is I don't know a core component of the story from the beginning that it could work but maybe there's not enough
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, yay, he's winning in it to keep people's attention because people have a hard time watching things that are just constantly tragic, constantly tragic, constantly tragic, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like every time he gets back up, he gets knocked back down, and that might be difficult.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those would be my two leading stories I would like to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking about
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish we had more fleshed out about the fall of Gondolin.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that could be a really cool thing to do as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or I guess you could take a broader perspective and just look at the first age in general.
[SPEAKER_01]: The begin with something like
[SPEAKER_01]: The fanor's death in the oath.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't even have to do the valenor stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: You could just kind of frame that in a backstory the same way that like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings films starts and then go from there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe something like that could work as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it would have to be a much longer kind of seasons of TV show kind of thing rather than a series of movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it might be a little bit too complex into, I don't know, each season would feel very distinct and different from the other, plus you have all of these different names and characters and it gets very, very complex.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know, you look at the first four or five seasons of Game Thrones and you might be able to do something like that and make it actually work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be tricky.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would take the right riders and showrunners to really nail it and do it in a way that both works for common audiences but also stays true enough to the source material to kind of weave it all together.
[SPEAKER_01]: From a, like, a graphics standpoint, from a technology standpoint, I think you could totally do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I could totally picture somebody like two in fighting, uh, galaurong, and it being on screen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could, they could nail that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of the really cool battles, the battle of a number of tiers would be epic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we've had glimpses of that and rings of power.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's a lot you could do with all of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's where I would go with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, I don't know that I have a perfect solution for how you would make it work.
[SPEAKER_01]: If that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you, Sweet Peter, for that final question and for all of you for sending these questions in.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you have any other thoughts on any of the things that I've responded to on this, please comment on the discord or on the Patreon.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to hear your thoughts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you've got a better idea for a movie than I do, or you've got a better question for Tolkien, any of the stuff that we talked about.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love hearing from the community.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for being here and being a part of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also,
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Patreon.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember if I call out all of you, I think I did last week, all of you, Tony, BoB, Mufasa, and Gami are our newest patrons.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Patreon.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as usual, I have to shout out all of our VIP patrons.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's see if I can get through the whole list without missing anybody up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Also, we have a new review on Apple Podcasts that I can see.
[SPEAKER_01]: Leave a five-star review.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll read it out on a future episode of the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one says incredible podcast is from Denny, seventeen, seventy, six who writes the host is pleasant to listen to.
[SPEAKER_01]: A must considering the hours we live in our years.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has a sense of humor and takes good feedback from his listeners.
[SPEAKER_01]: He also doesn't mix the details of the subject matter and he does mix up the words when he's saying things though and presents the content that was my edit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Faithful faithfully and in context to situations that make sense to most listeners.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is an incredibly professional production.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you are a fan of Tolkien, consider his Patreon to keep this podcast alive and building.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank goodness.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took this on and thank you very much for such a great podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, thank you so many you guys are so nice to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: You really do make my day.
[SPEAKER_01]: in my week and have all sorts of longer time periods.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, thank you everybody for tuning in and enjoying this episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hopefully, and if this is something you'd like me to do more of, please let me know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will be back next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: We will be confronting Smauge.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't wait for it because we are getting to the climax of the Hobbit and it gets so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have so much to say about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's happening next week and until next time, stay safe out there in that crazy world and
[SPEAKER_01]: And let me know if you had a question for Tolkien, what would you ask?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to find out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, I'll see you next time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening to the Lord of the Rings lorecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you'd like to learn more about other fantasy worlds, check out my other podcasts.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Elder Scrolls lorecast, the Witcher lorecast, and more at robotsradio.net.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you'd like to reach out, I'd love to hear from you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Send me a note on Twitter at robots underscore radio, or join our amazing community on the robots radio discord.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are links in the show notes, or just search robotsradio discord, or find the link on robotsradio.net.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll see you next time.