[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]: This is going to be one of those episodes, where I basically quote the entire section that we're covering today, because this is the moment where Gandalf reveals to Frodo who smiggle is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, of course, Frodo knows the story about Gallum and the ring, but he didn't know anything about who Gallum might have been before that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gandalf has discovered some things that are now revealed both to Frodo and to the reader.
[SPEAKER_01]: about Golem's actual identity, his history, and some of the things that we otherwise wouldn't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of this section, a lot of the knowledge that is gained by Golem about smiggle, is because of the events that happen between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, and this becomes the
[SPEAKER_01]: Centerpiece, this is the focus of the new movie that they're actually working on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to be going over every little detail in this section, and it is not a very long section, but there is a lot to parse out here about what Gandalf discovers, how Tolkien writes it, and why these details are important, and why they're here at the beginning of the story as opposed to later on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's get into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about smiggle and the things Gandalf knows.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this section continues right after the last one where Gandalf explained how the ring disappeared into the river and then out of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, time moves on, and this section begins with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Long after, but still very long ago, they're lived by the banks of the Great River on the edge of Wilderland, a clever handed and quiet-footed little people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, immediately, the very first sentence we already have lots of things to cover here.
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, this was long ago, but still a considerable amount of time since the ring was lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what exactly does that mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, so let's go back in time.
[SPEAKER_01]: When was the battle of the last alliance?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was basically the end of the second age.
[SPEAKER_01]: That ushered in the beginning of the third age, and how long did Isolder actually have the ring before he was killed, and he lost it?
[SPEAKER_01]: only about a year or two.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the second year of the third age when the ring was lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when does Gallum find the ring?
[SPEAKER_01]: Not for almost two and a half thousand years later.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is 2461 years that that ring sat at the bottom of the river.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, you may also be wondering how long did golem have the ring?
[SPEAKER_01]: How long did he survive his extended life due to the power of the ring and hide underneath the mountains?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, 478 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: until the year 2941 when he lost it to Bilbo in the riddle game.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now let's put this in context a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: The amount of time that Sauron possessed the ring before losing it with his finger getting cut off was 1,841 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ring has been sitting at the bottom of a river for hundreds of years longer than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another way to conceive of this is how long ago did this happen?
[SPEAKER_01]: In the context of our own world, let's go back in time, 2,500 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was going on in the world, 2,500 years ago?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what
[SPEAKER_01]: the Roman Republic was just being founded.
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't even a Rome yet, really.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, the Greeks and the Persians were fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know those stories about, I don't know, the Battle of Marathon and the invasions of the Persians into mainland Greece, the stand of the 300 Spartans and the rest of the different people from Greece trying to hold back the Persian Empire?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was 2,500 years ago, roughly.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when Gandalf says, long after he lost the ring, but still very long ago, this was an incredible amount of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Many world empires have risen and fallen in our own world.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it makes sense that empires like Gondor, or Arnor would have been established, roughly, and then also de-established, is that a word?
[SPEAKER_01]: Either destroyed or fallen into decline places like Rohan didn't even exist at the beginning of the third age.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the amount of time that has passed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there are some other details here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the banks of the Great River.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the edge of Wilderland.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a phrase that we know from the Hobbit.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means that part of the world beyond the Misty Mountains, and when you picture the events that happen here, think about the part of the map that's between the vertical running or at least north and south running Misty Mountains, and Merquwood, and the river that runs between those.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for those of us who are familiar with the Hobbit, that means this is where Bjorn was.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is where Bjorn's people are.
[SPEAKER_01]: still to this day, reestablished since the events of the Hobbit, and there are different types of people who have lived in this part of the world and migrated and moved and reestablished themselves, and the people that Smeagall came from are one of those groups.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, Gandalf notes here that he was clever-handed and quiet-footed.
[SPEAKER_01]: and a little people, come from a little people, and he goes into this further.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, I guess they were of Hobbit kind akin to the fathers of the fathers of the stores for they loved the river.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, in one of our bonus episodes, we went over the different types of Hobbits and where they came from, the stores are probably the Proto Hobbits.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're probably the ones who established and eventually moved further to the West.
[SPEAKER_01]: and established what eventually became the shire.
[SPEAKER_01]: So these are people that Frodo and Sam and Bilbo and Mary and Pippin were all roughly related to.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're ancestors go back to this time period most likely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is another piece of the puzzle that shows both the differences of these people, but also similarities to Frodo, because Gandalf says here that they loved the river, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reads.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, most hobbits are afraid of the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can't swim.
[SPEAKER_01]: The stores could, though, and they loved the river.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this reminds me of Frodo's parents and the fact that they died in a river accident, and that also makes me think, and this is me just kind of speculating a little bit here, but this is drawing similarities between Frodo's own parents and the stores and smiegle specifically.
[SPEAKER_01]: that they are not as different as we might think, not just because they're Hobbit like stores being kind of the biggest group of Hobbits.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of in-between Hobbit-sized and man-sized.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe closer to dwarves, something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: They are similar, they like the water, and although Hobbits can't swim, we don't know if that's so much of a cultural thing, or is it a size and ability thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's a size and ability thing, because children can swim, and children can be hobbits sized.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's probably more of a cultural thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Hobbits of the world that we are now in at the end of the third age are just not swimmers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not that they couldn't learn to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this part was just off the top of my head.
[SPEAKER_01]: If there is some pre-fout there that they are just incapable of swimming for some reason, like I don't know, maybe the hair on their feet bugs them down.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't, that doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, but yeah, comment, let me know.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my point is that Frodo's family was a little bit odd in the fact that they actually like to be on the river in boats and the stores and smieggles people actually enjoy the river as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now this is important because the ring was lost in the river, so if they were people who couldn't swim or
[SPEAKER_01]: avoided the river, then of course they never would have found it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we do get some other details here.
[SPEAKER_01]: We know that smiggle came from, I guess the closest thing you could say to, as the royalty of those store people at the time, is grandmother ruled the largest wealthiest family among those people.
[SPEAKER_01]: This also feels very similar to a lot of the hobbits that we've heard about so far.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bill Bo, it's fairly wealthy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pippin, Mary, also come from wealthy families.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the families in these stories are wealthy, or the aristocracy, or the literal king who's going to return to Gondor, so similarities there as well, but then we find out more about Smegle, the most inquisitive and curious minded of that family was called Smegle.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was interested in roots and beginnings.
[SPEAKER_01]: He dived into deep pools, he burrowed under trees and growing plants.
[SPEAKER_01]: He tunneled into green mounds, and he ceased to look up at the hilltops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air.
[SPEAKER_01]: his head and his eyes were downward.
[SPEAKER_01]: So not only does this set up the understanding of how somebody like smiggle could become gallum and want to live underneath the ground and be okay with diving into the water to get the fish that he eats and all of that, but it also establishes something from Tolkien's perspective that he talks about or at least hints at a lot is this love of nature
[SPEAKER_01]: How many times does he take time to describe the trees?
[SPEAKER_01]: How many times does he reference something like the wind or the sky or the sun and the moon and the stars?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's probably an essay here about the difference between the characters who tend to look up or the peoples who think about the elves looking up at the stars when they are brought into existence and the characters who tend to look down and into the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the ground, our dangerous spooky old mysterious and, I don't know, horrific monsters.
[SPEAKER_01]: Up in the sky is the place that was made by the Valar, the trees, the winds, the stars, heck, even the sun in the moon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, they also did create the ground and the mountains and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But those are dark places where once they created them, they no longer went, because you have to tunnel down into them, who else tunneled down into the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: every dark lord ever who has created some form of fortification where the orcs and they and their minions dwelled.
[SPEAKER_01]: Usually it was some sort of on top of the ground fortress that then dug and burrowed deep into the earth and the majority of the structure was actually underground.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Gandalf has now established that Smeagl is different from the other stores and was already the black sheep of the family in some ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now there's nothing wrong in being curious or inquisitive.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, those are features that we can also connect to Frodo and Bilbo and even some of the other Hobbits.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's most of the other Hobbits that we actually bring together the Fellowship Hobbits are kind of curious and inquisitive in ways that most of the other Hobbits in the Shire just aren't.
[SPEAKER_01]: but his focus was downward and that's the difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: Frodo, when he's curious, he goes out and he finds the elves.
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes out and he looks at the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's looking up and outward, not downward.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then Gandalf shows us the rest of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says he had a friend named Degol.
[SPEAKER_01]: of similar sort, sharper eyed, but not so quick and strong.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, he's setting this up.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's sharper eyed because he's the one who notices the ring, but he's not quick and strong enough to defend himself, but we'll get there.
[SPEAKER_01]: On a time, they took a boat and went down to the Gladon Fields, where there were great beds of iris and flowering reads.
[SPEAKER_01]: Notice the reference to nature again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Setting the scene, but also these are flowering plants.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is setting up something that is good that is about to turn not so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their smiggle got out and went nosing about the banks.
[SPEAKER_01]: A dangle sat in the boat and fished.
[SPEAKER_01]: Suddenly, a great fish took his hook and before he knew where he was, he was dragged out and down into the water to the bottom.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he let go of his line for he thought he saw something shining in the riverbed, and holding his breath, he grabbed at it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now this is seen for seeing the same in the movie as far as I recall.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then up he came sputtering with weeds in his hair and a handful of mud, and he swam to the bank and behold, when he washed the mud away, there in his hand lay a beautiful golden ring, and a shone englittered in the sun, so that his heart was glad.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I'm going to pause there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does he need to be behind a tree or does that just make it feel more sinister?
[SPEAKER_01]: I pretty sure it just makes it feel more sinister.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's not like he snuck up on his friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: They went there together.
[SPEAKER_01]: They knew they were both hanging out.
[SPEAKER_01]: One was in a boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: One was on the land.
[SPEAKER_01]: But nope, he's now peaking behind a tree because he's a creepy dude, I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as Diego glowed it over the ring, Smiggle came up softly behind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I'm going to stop here.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get to the conversation that they have, which again, is pretty much word for word in the movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: But something else to note here is that Gandalf is telling the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you think back to how Gandalf gets this knowledge, it has to do with he and Aragorn tracking, smiggle down, interrogating him, getting him to give them whatever information they possibly could.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet the way Gandalf tells the story here is very flowery and it's very expressive in a way that Gallum never would have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's this feeling of this is being crafted, either intentionally by Gallum to be easier to consume and more enjoyable by Frodo.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or more likely, by talking, in order to bring us into the details of the story, rather than just giving us a list of facts about what happened in the past.
[SPEAKER_01]: So keep that in mind as we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: This does feel a little artificial, but it's intentional.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could argue that Gandalf is doing it for Frodo too.
[SPEAKER_01]: So here, let's get into the conversation, though.
[SPEAKER_01]: Give us that deagle, my love, said Smegle, over his friend's shoulder.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, being creepy, why said Deagle?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's my birthday, my love, and I once it said Smegle.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care, said Deagle.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have given you a present already.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than I can afford, I found this, and I'm going to keep it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, are you indeed, my love, said Smegle.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he caught Dagle by the throat and strangled him because the gold looked so bright and beautiful, then he put the ring on his finger.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now notice some details here.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're arguing over the ring and we know that the ring can begin to affect people in proximity and make them do things they otherwise wouldn't do.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: This happens multiple times in the stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fact that we've already established smiggle as being kind of a creep and selfish and sneaky and all the other language up to this point is already pointing to that shows that he was already ill-intentioned from the beginning and the ring just made that worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, that's what the ring does.
[SPEAKER_01]: It takes the natural qualities in somebody and it makes them
[SPEAKER_01]: more powerful, but often in a dark and twisted sort of way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when we get to the end of the conversation, we're told that he strangled his friend because the gold looked so bright and beautiful, then he put the ring on his finger.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't strangle his friend because the ring convinced him to murder his friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smingle was already seemingly by the way this text is laid out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody who was already willing to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, maybe he would have been pushed over that last limitation, maybe smiggle without the influence of the ring would have waited and kind of snuck around and stole the ring from his friend because he really wanted it rather than murdering him, but in this case.
[SPEAKER_01]: He murders him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is not just on the ring alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smiggle was already not a great person.
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, off continues the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, no one ever found out what had become of Diggle.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was murdered far from home and his body was cunningly hit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now remember, Smiggle likes to dig in the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knows about probably caves and other places, recesses.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere where you could hide a body far from home or most people would never
[SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense, but Smingle returned home and he found that none of his family could see him when he was wearing the ring.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, we know that that already is a feature of the ring, so that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was very pleased with his discovery and he concealed it and he used it to find out secrets and he put his knowledge to crooked and malicious uses.
[SPEAKER_01]: This reminds me of the warning of when you ask, like a group of people, if you could have any superpower, what would you have?
[SPEAKER_01]: always be careful about the people who say invisibility because the number of good uses of invisibility as compared to malicious uses of invisibility is significantly different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm not saying that you can't come up with some good reasons why you would want that, but the majority of the ones that naturally come to mind are pretty bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the next line is very interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It became
[SPEAKER_01]: This feels like, and this is just me speculating here, that this is the line that seems to imply the alternate version of himself, the gallum to the smiggle, the stinker to the slinker, that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the personality for lack of a better word of the ring, a manifesting
[SPEAKER_01]: In this case, he very specifically was looking for things and listening for things that were hurtful, not particularly beneficial to himself, not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Adventigious, or not, something that would increase his wealth, or his status, or his popularity, or his good looks, or, I don't know, any of those kinds of things, but things that were specifically hurtful as if there was some enjoyment in that in and of itself, which feels more like a ring,
[SPEAKER_01]: Because on it says, the ring had given him power according to his stature.
[SPEAKER_01]: That line also super important.
[SPEAKER_01]: And why somebody like Gandalf or Galadriel would never be able to actually control the ring.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would make them too powerful and twist it in dark ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're already establishing this right at the beginning of this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not to be wondered at that he became very unpopular and was shunned when visible by all his relations.
[SPEAKER_01]: They kicked him and he bit their feet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that makes a lot of sense, but you might be wondering why the kicking and the biting of feet.
[SPEAKER_01]: This feels almost like like old-timey biblical language or something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes
[SPEAKER_01]: Tolkien writes things and they feel like they're out of, I don't know, an ancient line of scripture or just a really old document, almost as if they've been translated or almost, I mean, think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If somebody's kicking at you, are you going to catch their foot and bite?
[SPEAKER_01]: bite it like that it seems odd like in our own world if you're kicking at somebody why even if you kicked out their face why they couldn't just bite at your foot while they were kicking your face like like the logistics of it are a little bit weird and so it's not the logistics it's not even about the picture that it's paints in your mind it's establishing that this person is odd and weird and terrible in almost animalistic ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: he bit at their feet, like a creature on the ground, like a dog or a snake, something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what's going on here is that those types of lines in ancient works aren't so much about being factually accurate about what was happening and more about establishing an analogy and setting this character up to be like something else so we have that framework in our heads.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took to heaving and going about muttering to himself and gurgling in his throat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, he's turning into somebody who's terrible, he's doing these terrible things, people are shunning him, and that makes him lean more into this animalistic kind of dark side of what he's becoming.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they called him Gullum and cursed him and told him to go far away, and his grandmother desiring peace expelled him from the family and turned him out of her hole.
[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, he was kicked out.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was told, you cannot stay here.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to leave.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm guessing they didn't have some sort of, I don't know, prison system or something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't just lock him up, and so they told him he had to go away.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wandered in loneliness, weeping a little for the hardness of the world, and he journeyed up the river.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to pause there, weeping a little for the hardness of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: He already understands, or at least feels in his core that he is in some ways of victim.
[SPEAKER_01]: And victimhood is a complicated topic, and it goes into all sorts of different directions.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here it seems to reveal something about him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He understands that, even though he was a terrible person to begin with, he wasn't a necessarily good person, he hadn't yet become a murderer, and openly a regular thief who was a pariah on his community.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was sneaky and maybe deceitful.
[SPEAKER_01]: the ring had turned him in that direction and made the world even more difficult for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he may not have really fully understood that or even had the capabilities of putting this together that it was the ring that was influencing him and ultimately causing him or at least pushing him to do things that are worse and making the natural ramifications of those things his reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet there's a piece of him that suffers from it and mourns that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are multiple times in these works that talking, it's upon things that feel very similar to the things that people with neurodivergences or psychological impairments have to deal with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that a lot of people with
[SPEAKER_01]: not fully being in control of their own minds, their own natures, and then suffering because of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: This feels like that sort of parallel, so he journeyed up the river till he came to a stream that flowed down from the mountains, and he went that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: He caught fish in the deep pools with invisible fingers and ate them raw.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the first mention of him eating fish raw, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is his transformation into gallum, eating the fish, raw, as opposed to cooking them the way that regular people would, and leans into that analogy of him becoming more animal like.
[SPEAKER_01]: One day, it was very hot, and as he was bending over a pool, he felt a burning on the back of his head, and a dazzling light from the water pained his wet eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wondered at it, for he had almost forgotten about the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then for the last time he looked up and shook his fist at her.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so a few things here.
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, of course he's been outside and been in the sunlight and felt like it was hot or been in a place where the water was reflecting the sun and it was bright and it hurt his eyes before.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he's finally at the point of his transformation where that becomes unbearable.
[SPEAKER_01]: he cannot deal with that anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the line that he almost forgot about the sun is very interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not so much that he forgot there was day and night.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was living in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not something that you can just forget unless you go down in a hole and then never go up on the surface again, which he hadn't done yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in this case, he had almost forgotten about the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: What does the sun represent?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a construction of the valor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is something
[SPEAKER_01]: life to the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are all now things that he could care less about.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, we were just told that the light was burning his eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: He can't even stand to be in the sunlight anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then for the last time he looked up and shook his fist at her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now notice the gendered her.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's because the sun is piloted by Aryan, the female Maya, who is also the spirit of fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to refresher on that one, you can go back to the Silma-Rillian episodes that talk about the establishment of the different sources of light.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the trees and the orbs and the sun and the moon and the different ways that the valor attempted to light the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a whole part of the early mythology.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you haven't listened to those episodes, go check those out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is when Golem decides to leave the area that he's in and find shelter under the mountains.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as he lowered his eyes, he saw far ahead the tops of the Misty Mountains, out of which the stream came.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he thought suddenly, it would be cool and shady under those mountains.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sun could not watch me there, notice the use of the word watch, as if there's a person in the sun, which there is, who would be looking down at him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The roots of those mountains must be roots, indeed, there must be great secrets buried there, which have not been discovered since the beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: This goes back to the earlier part where Gandalf was talking about how he liked to dig in the ground and find secrets in the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he journeyed by night up into the Highlands and he found a little cave out of which a dark stream ran and he whirmed his way like a maggot.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we're reducing from person to animal to worm or insect like creature in our analogies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so he whirms into like a maggot into the heart of the hills and vanishes out of all knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ring went into the shadows with him, and even the maker when his power had begun to grow again could learn nothing of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks again for tuning in, and this week's bonus episode I will probably haven't done it yet, but my focus right now I think will be on answering some of the questions that some of you have posted as comments on the Patreon, so get ready for that if you are one of our patrons and you have access to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course you could be if you go to patreon.com slash lotr-lawcast and sign up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, you could get your shout out, like my name is Austin August.
[SPEAKER_01]: I almost messed that up.
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is August West.
[SPEAKER_01]: You just signed up recently.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Alderian was right, a very old Party Snack single and looking for handwives, Norway Genius, Bruce W. Chris H. Artemis, Kira C. Doss S. Hunter, Therumbar, Silverstar, and my name is August West.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for your support.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, you can help out by leaving reviews on Apple podcasts like these two that came in with one of them as a good question I'm going to answer here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is from Gaga who wrote classy and insightful.
[SPEAKER_01]: After listening to this podcast since the Silmarillion days, it's easy to say that robots is second to none when it comes to dissecting Tolkien's extensive world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a class act with his insight and peaks my love of these stories even more every time I listen every week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much Tom for all your hard work and natural talent, P.S.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you think the hunt for Gollum will turn out?
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, yeah, that came up in today's episode a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, I've stated previously when I'm answering this, I don't remember where I answered this.
[SPEAKER_01]: That, um, I get why they're doing this topic, but it also is not as interesting to me as some of the other things they could have done.
[SPEAKER_01]: like hack, do in the story of Torin, the children of Hoorin, you do the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can do Baron and Luthian.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a bunch of other stuff, but I also get that they want to capitalize on the fact that they still have actors who could replay those roles.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if they don't do this now, we're going to miss out on seeing Ian McKellen again as Gandalf because he's a treasure and who knows how much longer we're going to have him around, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that's kind of dark, but that's the feeling I get from this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess you do it now and then maybe do the other stories later.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's definitely more out there they could make movies about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So hopefully they do it well.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just not 100% sure how you write a story about that time period and make it interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Especially since we already know how it's gonna end but that's always the prequel problem anyway, so I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess you could say I'm skeptical but optimistic.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, and then this one comes from Doc Rod DO7 who writes amazing podcast or I love robots radio.
[SPEAKER_01]: I followed him along with the Elder Scrolls podcast and fall out Lord podcast to this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazing storytelling tells it how it is and gives you the stuff you really want to know.
[SPEAKER_01]: We love your robots radio.
[SPEAKER_01]: Keep doing what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: And thank you for continuing to be here
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to go record the Patreon episode and I'll either see on the other side, or I'll see you next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Have a wonderful week.
[SPEAKER_01]: See you then.
[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.