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Ep 35- The Fandom Appendectomy
22 Plays2 months ago
We get our appendixes out! That is, we talk about the Lord of the Rings appendices. That's right, there's still more text to read! Join us as we pour over Arwen and Aragorn's romance, family trees, and the Book of Numbers, Tolkien Edition! aka a detailed timeline history of Numenor and the Second and Third Ages of Middle Earth.
Covers Appendices A-F, published at the end of Return of the King
Recommended
Transcript
Personal Reading Challenges and Kindle Deals
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, but you know what I did start? I started a new terrible book. Oh. We are recording this in February, and I decided to issue myself a little personal challenge, because as we know, I mostly do audiobooks, as you do as well.
00:00:19
Speaker
But occasionally Amazon, and this is not pro Amazon content, this is simply stating facts. Amazon occasionally has these stuff your Kindle days that they do, which isn' depending on the genre of books, there may be some stuffing happening.
00:00:35
Speaker
And basically there's these Kindle unlimited releases that you can get for free. And sometimes different authors guilds or other book groups will publish a list ahead of time of all the titles that are going to be on the stuff your Kindle day.
00:00:50
Speaker
so you can put them on your wishlist, whatever. And I have a lot of very, very stupid romance novels, stuff like The Omega's passion or, you know, oh God, their twisted desire, something
Entertainingly Bad Romance Novels
00:01:07
Speaker
like that. I have a whole bunch of those that I have not touched since I downloaded them, but I'm just going to see how many I can just mainline before Valentine's Day.
00:01:16
Speaker
And the one that I started today is a gay cowboy one called Commitment Ranch. which is so stupid as a title.
00:01:26
Speaker
This man who apparently grew up on the ranch, but now he's a lawyer, but now he's coming back to the ranch. There's a whole thing. He feeds a carrot to a newborn foal.
00:01:37
Speaker
And I'm not a horse girl, but I know that mammals need to be weaned from milk before they can eat solid food. So this man who grew up around horses should not be shoving carrots into the face of a baby horse. And I got very incensed about that.
00:01:50
Speaker
So clearly they know nothing about horses. How does your veterinary professional spouse feel about this? Oh, they haven't heard about it yet because I started it today while I was at work. So they'll get they get the updates.
00:02:02
Speaker
But the main man's name is Ford and the other guy's name is Stoney. And oh my fucking God, I just realized he's Stoney and his son's name is Quartz.
00:02:15
Speaker
which is also a stone, which is so stupid. And they were lovers in college. And then they broke up and Stoney left Ford and had a baby with his cousin. But now it's kind of implied that he didn't. With Ford's cousin?
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, he's bi, I guess, which is great. But Ford's being weird about it because of course he is because people
Disappointment in Queer Arthurian Retelling
00:02:37
Speaker
hate bi people. So there's intrigue. It is written so bad And I'm loving it.
00:02:46
Speaker
So the Commitment Ranch is my current, it was published in 2016. That's all I got. The quality of the writing is not good, but I am reading it and I have so many other things on the same literary caliber as Commitment Ranch. Wait, let me actually just open my Kindle app and see what else we've got title-wise.
00:03:12
Speaker
I got the art for Commitment Ranch. I do have some good books on my Kindle app, but mostly, yeah I have The Elven King's Captive, Fated Rivers, The Omega's Fate, Mated to the Alpha One. so that's the first in a series.
00:03:34
Speaker
I think the whole point of the Omegaverse is that they're always mated to the Alpha. I think that's the whole thing. The dragon airs Omega. Oh my god, it's a dragon fucking Omegaverse?
Exploring Arthurian Mythos and Media Memories
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, this one's just called Veiled and it has a skull with snakes and roses coming out of it that looks like maybe ai Yeah, so there's all kinds of literary masterpieces that I will get to enjoy for free.
00:04:04
Speaker
So if this whenever this is coming out, you should just Google when the next stuff your Kindle day is. And you can get these stupid, stupid books that somebody obviously put time and effort and love into.
00:04:17
Speaker
And I will still enjoy them. So this is no shade to the authors or to the readers because I am now one of the readers. But if you need something totally brainless, it's free. $3.99. I just finished Once and Future by e Capetta and Corey McCarthy, which is not good.
00:04:38
Speaker
it's the it's It's an Arthurian, it it sort of bills itself as like in our third a queer Arthurian retelling, but it's In like a hyper capitalist like sci fi society, future society, in which the main character she's the 42nd reincarnation of King Arthur.
00:05:01
Speaker
And Merlin shows up and he's been aging backwards. So he's a teenager now. Oh my god. he's said He's a gay teenager and he falls for Parsifal.
00:05:13
Speaker
And, you know, there's Queen Guinevere, who gets married to Arthur as a political marriage. It's a whole, like... Does she have to pull the chip out of the mainframe? How do they...
00:05:25
Speaker
No, she genuinely has Excalibur, which she pulls out of an oak tree on old earth when they crash land on it. It's... Fuck yeah, that rules. It does, but the narrative really just kind of... Like, you can tell it was written by two authors.
00:05:46
Speaker
o I feel like the narrative is not super consistent. We're kind of just pulling things out of nowhere. I feel like you could have been better off either just doing a ah sci-fi retelling of Arthur and the Roundtable.
00:06:07
Speaker
Or doing like a reincarnation thing, but not. it was It wasn't super well executed. I wanted to like it more. Because and't know whether I've talked about here before. I kind of would like to get more into Arthurian myths.
00:06:21
Speaker
Because it's it's sort of a major mythos that I haven't spent a lot of time with. Mm-hmm. you know i've I've read a lot of Greek and Roman stuff, like classical mythology. I've read shit ton of Norse myths and sagas and Eddas.
00:06:42
Speaker
I've you know read some Anglo-Saxon stuff. But the like Arthurian mythos as its own sort of separate grouping of legends is not one that I'm terribly familiar with.
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think we've talked about that before. but that seemed No, but yeah it is one that's like very commonly used and referenced in fantasy. isn And so it feels like something that I ah should have a base awareness of.
00:07:15
Speaker
um and And yeah, like I have a base level awareness Largely off of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. um And I think I read the Once and Future King, like, or at least the first half of the Once and Future King as a kid. And I definitely read one or two other like retellings.
00:07:37
Speaker
there was definite There was a piece in Once and Future which clearly referenced the, I think it was the Disney like Sword in the Stone. Mm-hmm. Talking about Merlin's happy place being Bermuda and turning Arthur into a squirrel.
00:07:52
Speaker
the only really salient memory that I have of anything King Arthur related that is just coming back to me now as we're talking about this is when I was probably eight or nine.
00:08:04
Speaker
There was some live action film TV adaptation of some King Arthur stories. And it was, i think, Lancelot and Guinevere?
00:08:15
Speaker
Maybe. I don't remember. i was nine. But they're the couple that I think of when I think of these stories. And they were having this very passionate ah repartee about how she was wearing a chastity belt and needed someone to cure her of her virginity. And then my mom like changed the channel really, really fast.
00:08:38
Speaker
But I was like, hmm. Okay, Guinevere, what are we talking about? Fascinating. so that's all I got is very horny TV exchanges.
00:08:51
Speaker
Now I need to find that. That'll unlock something in my subconscious probably.
00:08:57
Speaker
Guinevere was looking to get something unlocked too.
00:09:02
Speaker
Yeah, gonna my Google history is gonna be really interesting after this is I just type horny King Arthur early 2000s question mark.
00:09:14
Speaker
What your virginity chastity felt? Yeah, so when you find the King Arthur porno.
Introduction to the Fandom Apprentice Podcast
00:09:21
Speaker
The you think there's one. oh there's definitely more than one.
00:09:27
Speaker
Speaking of the one true king. And his fated love. Do we want to talk about some Tolkien? We can try. Hello, everyone.
00:09:58
Speaker
And welcome back to another episode of the Fandom Apprentice. Today we are getting out our appendixes.
00:10:11
Speaker
That makes it sound so casual. Getting your appendix out. You know, you think of a surgery, but getting out our appendixes.
Diving into Tolkien's Appendices
00:10:20
Speaker
That's like getting out a book, getting out ah snack from the cupboard.
00:10:24
Speaker
Here it is. Here's my appendix.
00:10:27
Speaker
I have read over 150 pages of incredibly tense Tolkien in the last, like, 18 hours. I have skimmed 150 pages of incredibly dense Tolkien. Some of us were religion majors who did this regularly, and some of us were STEM majors who were, like, reading? What the fuck's that?
00:10:54
Speaker
Well, also... I had a feeling that this would be, to use a phrase that we have not used in a while since Council of Elrond, derogatory.
00:11:05
Speaker
Very Book of Numbers core in some aspects. And I know that there are things that I can just glaze right over. I don't actually need to read every single name in the lineage of Numenorean kings or whatever. I'm sure they're very interesting.
00:11:19
Speaker
But I just kind of let my eyes wander until I saw something that looked interesting or a word that I recognized and then read that part and then wandered some more and read that part. So it was not...
00:11:31
Speaker
the closest reading but i did pick out some things that i thought were interesting and we'll have plenty to talk about yes so to do our full intro hi i'm ryn i read the lord of the rings as a child and it had a profound effect on me and my love of fantasy and how I've approached stories and literature ever since.
00:11:58
Speaker
And during the deepest, darkest parts of the pandemic, I started sharing that love of Lord of the Rings with my best friend, Sam. Hello, I'm Sam. I'm the other one.
00:12:11
Speaker
Exactly what it says on the tin. I'm the apprentice. Now we have fully made our way through all of the main body of the books. And we went and looked at the appendices today to see what other little nuggets of wisdom are in there. And there's a lot.
00:12:26
Speaker
There's no shortage of information. Oh, no. This is what makes Tolkien Tolkien to me. um We also went back to the prologue to read through some of that too.
00:12:40
Speaker
um We'll talk about all that in a moment. But this is, you know, the extra information, the mythology additions, the history additions, all those little moments throughout the podcast where I was like, oh, we should know about this mythology. We're expected to know certain stories and references that are being made where the footnotes are like C appendix X or C appendix y This is what we've got for that.
00:13:06
Speaker
Now, just for timeline purposes, right? The prologue concerning hobbits and very, very base information, pipeweed and hobbits and elves, that was included in Fellowship of the Ring.
00:13:21
Speaker
But that's not a lot of information. And then when Return of the King came out, that's finally when the appendixes were included. Right.
00:13:33
Speaker
However, that is all the information that the general public would get until after Tolkien's death in 1973. He references in the appendixes the Silmarillion on multiple occasions, as if it's another text in this world.
00:13:49
Speaker
But that text wouldn't come out until 1974. I didn't know that. oh i didn't know that Or maybe you've mentioned it and I've forgotten. Yeah, it was published posthumously. And so so the audience still doesn't have a ton of context.
00:14:04
Speaker
However, that said, this is what gave me my love of world building, I think. I have wanted this from every other fantasy book that I have ever read. Every other sweeping large fantasy with intense world building, I have wanted this kind of information.
00:14:24
Speaker
And yeah, it's a lot drier and more like academic in tone than the rest of the book itself, which I know is saying something.
00:14:34
Speaker
But I want to know about the history, the fauna and flora and kings and myths. And it's so rare that we get something like this. You know, you sometimes will get like short history or a dramatis personae, but not like anything to this extent. This is over 150 pages,
00:14:52
Speaker
intense information. This is why Lord of the Rings fans are like that, TM, because there is all of this information just there. And this is what I thought all of Lord of the Rings was like before I started reading it, just to pick a random passage from a random paragraph that just sort of gives you the vibe from...
00:15:19
Speaker
Against the will of the Valar, Feanor forsook the Blessed Realm and went in exile to Middle-earth, leading with him a great part of his people. For his pride, he proposed to recover the jewels from Morgoth by force.
00:15:31
Speaker
Thereafter followed the hopeless war of the Eldar and the Aedain against Fangordrim, in which they were utterly defeated. It's... That's the kind of shit that I thought the entire...
00:15:43
Speaker
Thank you. That's what I thought these books would be like beginning to end because I just assumed that that was the way that Tolkien wrote. And thank God that it's not. That's also a contributing factor to why I skimmed so much because holy shit, that's one of the more comprehensible passages.
00:16:00
Speaker
Oh, yeah, there is... a lot of this. And some editions and translations omitted parts of these or published them as a separate volume. The Swedish translation published them as a separate volume, I believe.
00:16:14
Speaker
There was apparently a lot of argument between Tolkien and his publishers and translators over what was to be included and how. Ultimately, A lot of this information, while it might have been present in various notes and things that he had written for himself, was not in this finished form until after Return of the King was finished.
00:16:35
Speaker
Mm-hmm. The compiling of the appendixes and deciding what was to be included in the appendixes actually delayed the publishing of Return of the King.
Significance of the Shire's Prologue
00:16:45
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And so when he was discussing with other translators about what was to be included in the translations, he mentions basically that the most important parts are the story of Aragorn and Arwen and the information about the Shire calendar.
00:17:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm. There, he says, you know, he notes some specific parts that you could excise. i think there was some stuff in the Dutch translation that was removed, some stuff in the Swedish translation that was removed, and I...
00:17:25
Speaker
The piece of the letter I was reading, I believe, was from his conversation with the Swedish translator. But he does say that, you know, a good portion of this is essential to the narrative. He thought it was essential that readers should have access to this information to fully get the most out of his story. Yeah.
00:17:47
Speaker
Now, granted, it wasn't given to the readers until the story was fully complete, but then they could go back just as sort of i mentally was reading through some of this and being like, ah, yes, I remember this. But now that I'm actually reading it again, having done this deep, intense reading of Lord of the Rings, i'm I'm slotting in little pieces of information here and there.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah. and And that's really, they're appendices. That's how they're meant to be used. You're not supposed to do what we did and just sit down and read them. I mean, you can if you want, but they're meant to supplement other things. And I had the luxury of just having you bring up stuff that was relevant so I could just sort of breathe through the story. But if I was doing this completely on my own, and especially if I was doing it without the internet,
00:18:33
Speaker
To explain how to pronounce things or why certain things were related or important. They would be invaluable. As much as I sort of gripe about how dense and impenetrable they are, they're really valuable.
00:18:46
Speaker
important to have and really useful. I'm sure there were so many arguments between nerdy little friend groups before Return of the King came out about official pronunciations or theories about why certain things were the way they were. And then to have them finally canonized and set in stone, I'm sure there were some people who were just like, yes, I fucking told you.
00:19:08
Speaker
Oh, a hundred percent. The fandom discourse. Yeah. All of the little fandom apprentices talking about the teachings of of the professor.
00:19:19
Speaker
Anyway, we also went back and discussed a little bit of the prologue. um And specifically, I wanted to go back to Concerning Hobbits because of the scouring of the Shire.
00:19:36
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Because in the prologue, we learn about the mayor, his duties, the post office, and the sheriff's before Sharky and Lotho got to them. We also learn about the Bounders.
00:19:47
Speaker
um We get a quick rundown of the Finding of the Ring, the Hobbit. And so in the prologue, we we sort of get a sense of what the Shire is supposed to be like, isn which makes it all the more stark because we don't get a ton about the Shire in the actual text of the book.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah. And so having gone through Scouring the Shire so recently, i wanted to go back to that beginning and and be like, what what was Tolkien setting us up with?
00:20:24
Speaker
And then come to the end here, where he does both the prologue and the appendix refer to points from the whole story.
Heroes' Evolution in Tolkien's Mythology
00:20:34
Speaker
And so it's it's interesting to read them both together now having just finished the whole story and sort of see what he was trying to make sure readers had access to either before or after the story was finished.
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing I feel like that comes up in both the prologue and the appendices that i i won this that I was keeping an eye on throughout these was the transition of our heroes from warriors and adventurers to like poet philosopher kings.
00:21:09
Speaker
Ooh, yeah, that's a good observation. Yeah. Because that is something that features in a lot of mythology, right? Of, you know, the young valiant warrior who eventually hangs up the sword when his conquering is done and becomes the great king, the great storyteller, the great philosopher.
00:21:35
Speaker
A soldier poet king, if you will.
00:21:39
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Did you have any thoughts from the prologue that you wanted to bring up? Not really specifically. it was just kind of interesting to brush up on basic hobbit facts. Like there's three main hobbit ethnic groups and they all settled the Shire at different times. and it Just sort of basic background information.
00:22:03
Speaker
They apparently learned reading and writing from the Dunedain and building either from the Dunedain or from the elves. It's debated. But there was some talk, I think in the prologue specifically, about hobbits not really being much for book learning in general.
00:22:22
Speaker
And they do have some kind of basic literacy, but to really be interested in poetry or be interested in learning languages or formal study of history is not common.
00:22:34
Speaker
It's not typical. And I think we had some offhand remarks earlier in when we were discussing the story about what would hobbits know about the history of Gondor or the history of Mordor?
00:22:46
Speaker
Not very much, because they don't seem to have a lot of formal education, which just makes it extra weird that Bilbo and Brodo are both so into history and knowledge and books and things.
00:23:00
Speaker
So going into the appendices, Appendix A is titled Annals of the Kings and Rulers, and is broken down into several parts and predominantly deals with the history of Middle-earth and how it became what it is. And at its core, the history of Middle-earth and particularly of its ruling factions is really the story of two half-elven families and their struggle against Sauron.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, Sauron comes up a lot, very frequently. Right. The half-elven lines of Beren and Luthien and Idril and Tuor, right?
00:23:54
Speaker
Beren and Luthien, their granddaughter Elwing, and Idril and Tuor's grandson Yervindil... Got married. And that's Elrond and Elros's parents.
00:24:08
Speaker
Tolkien at that point mentions the Silmarillion for the first time. I misspoke earlier. The Silmarillion wouldn't be published until 1977, 74. not seventy four So my thought was by mentioning it here, he may have been trying to get his publisher to publish it because he had Silmarillion written more or less at this point, not edited, but written because he tried to submit it to his publisher, to Alan and Umwin after the success of The Hobbit.
00:24:39
Speaker
And they said it was, it was too much. Give us something else about Hobbits, please. Yes, I remember you telling me that. And if the Silmarillion is anything like this, yeah, you gotta work up to that.
00:24:52
Speaker
Truly, truly you do. Being half-elven in this world seems to mean you can choose whether or not you want to die. And when.
Numenor's History and Downfall
00:25:04
Speaker
Like, being of that line. So in this case, Elros decides to be mortal. And Elrond decides to be immortal. And Elros gives rise to the line of kings of Numenor.
00:25:19
Speaker
He fights with the Adain, who are a race of men against Morgoth, and they found the kingdom of Numenor.
00:25:30
Speaker
Reading this about the rise and fall of Numenor, i was like, this is some Tower of Babel shit. Tell me more about that.
00:25:41
Speaker
Their only command from the Valar was not to seek immortality. Like, you can come to this island that we have raised for you in the West, but you cannot come any further West. You cannot come to the Undying Lands.
00:25:55
Speaker
You cannot seek the power that the Eldar wields. Damn. you You are subject to the doom of men. You must die in the end, even though your lifespan is thrice that of a normal man.
00:26:11
Speaker
And ultimately, they tried to invade the realm of the gods and the Undying Lands. The Valar aren't gods. voedooh it Yeah, okay, fine. No, because only one true god.
00:26:25
Speaker
Eru, the one who in Arda is known as Iruvatar. Anyway, Numenor was struck down, the world was curved so it's no longer flat, and only the elves can sail the straight road to get to the Undying
Founding of Arnor and Gondor
00:26:37
Speaker
Lands. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
00:26:40
Speaker
After the fall of Numenor, that's when Elendil and his sons come to Middle-earth and establish Arnor and Gondor. And this is when we hear more names that we know. Elendil and Isildur and Anerion, we've all heard.
00:26:54
Speaker
um And that's when the war with Sauron starts. He's overthrown. The ring is taken. And then there's so many names. Yeah, there's a
Complexity of Tolkien's Naming Conventions
00:27:04
Speaker
lot. there's For my subsection for the realms in exile, I just wrote lots of names and then no other notes.
00:27:11
Speaker
Because I'm sure that's all very interesting and you can dig into it and find out more about all those names. But I did not care about the names and so I just glazed right over that.
00:27:23
Speaker
Keeping track of this has never come easily easily to me. um This was honestly my downfall, I think, when I first tried to read the Silmarillion was all the fucking names. I feel like I need a murder board to keep track of this thing with all the little red fucking string and, like, tacked on little note cards and be like...
00:27:42
Speaker
Which king equals ringwraith? question mark I need someone else to make this podcast, but for the Silmarillion so that I can listen to it and do none of the work.
00:27:54
Speaker
I'm sure that somebody has. Yeah. Which if you have and you're listening to this podcast, come talk to us. Yeah. But that is what I think Tolkien gets that some other fantasy writers don't.
00:28:09
Speaker
his His names are like consistent in his world lore. They often repeat as if they're
Desire for More Dwarf Lore
00:28:17
Speaker
real fucking people. like How many goddamn Edwards were king of England?
00:28:22
Speaker
How many Williams? ah like There's so fucking many of these motherfuckers. So for the fact that there's you know seven Durans, yeah, that makes sense.
00:28:36
Speaker
It's annoying as all, fuck, but it makes sense. The one thing that has me really wanting to read The Silmarillion is the promise of more dwarf lore, because the appendices are very cagey about dwarves.
00:28:51
Speaker
They allude to there just not being a lot of information about them and them being secretive people. I want to know their secrets. And also just in general, Tolkien is so careful explaining how he's citing all of these different imaginary sources that he made up and saying, these things will be in italics and these things will be in quotes and these things
Detailed History of Arnor and Gondor
00:29:12
Speaker
will be in brackets. And I have done my utmost to do a faithful translation, but in some cases I may have made errors.
00:29:18
Speaker
And it's just the the scholarly... I guess the academic rigor, i don't know, the the integrity make sure that every single source is properly attributed to its made-up person is delightful.
00:29:35
Speaker
After Isildur dies and the Second Age ends, we have the heirs of Isildur in the north and the heirs of Anarion and Gondor. We get a history of Arnor and its conflict with the Witch King, the trials and tribulations of the three kingdoms it ends up splitting into, Arthedain, Rudor, and Cardolan.
00:29:55
Speaker
We learn about how Celebrion, Elrond's wife slash Galadriel's daughter slash Arwen's mother, was captured and poisoned and rescued by her sons Eladan and Elrohir, because everyone has to have an EL name.
00:30:08
Speaker
Naturally. And yeah, again, this is why it's so fucking hard to keep these names in your head. For example, have Elros Tar Elendil,
00:30:24
Speaker
Tar-Meneldar, Tar-Aldarian, Tar-Ancalame, Tar-Anarian, Tar-Saurian, Tar-Talperian. By the way, that Tar-Elendil and Tar-Anarian are not the Elendil and Anarian that eventually come to Middle-earth, but a different one.
00:30:40
Speaker
I also noticed later when we're talking about the stewards of Gondor, there is a Boromir, son of Denethor. Oh my god, it's not our Boromir? It's not our Boromir and it's not our fucking Denethor.
00:30:53
Speaker
Because I noticed there was another Baragond and I wrote down, oh, our Baragond must be named after this one from the myths. Hate. Hate. Like, it makes sense. It makes the world feel very rich and it it makes the world make logical sense.
00:31:11
Speaker
i You could easily step into Middle Earth. And yeah, sure, there's definitely logical ands inconsistencies in places.
Aragorn's Laws and Legacy
00:31:23
Speaker
Because it was made up in the mind of a Catholic English professor. Mm-hmm. There's going to be some fuckery, as we've noted throughout the podcast, but compared to fantasy stories where authors are like, I'm never going to repeat a name. You are always going be able to identify the characters and where they are in time. It's sort of like, okay, cool.
00:31:50
Speaker
But the world is so much more messy than that. And I As much as it irks me sometimes when I'm trying to remember certain details or learn more about it, Middle-earth feels messy.
00:32:05
Speaker
An appropriate amount of messy. Yeah, it feels like real history. There's a long and very detailed history of Gondor. one of the things that I seized on with familiar names, oh, these are people that we actually know.
00:32:19
Speaker
Aragorn makes a law that big people will not enter the Shire, and so he abides by his own law, but occasionally hangs out at the Great Bridge and Marion Pippin and Master Samwise the Mayor, which I had to stop and text you in all caps about.
00:32:35
Speaker
They all go and hang out with him, and we find out that Eleanor becomes Eleanor the Fair, and she becomes one of Arwen's ladies-in-waiting, which is really sweet. I did do some math when we got the timeline later.
00:32:50
Speaker
<unk> um Eleanor becomes one of Queen Evenstar's ladies-in-waiting at age 15. Oh, baby.
00:33:01
Speaker
So she is like a kid kid. Yeah. Because as we know, hobbits age slower. She ends up getting married at age 30, which as we know is really young for hobbits.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that's not even... Do they come of age at 33? Yes. Yeah. So that's, you know, she got married at 17.
00:33:26
Speaker
Basically. I'm just imagining Sam and Rose getting mad at her and saying, no, you're too young. You're going, well, this is not as dangerous and irresponsible as you carrying the ring up Mount Doom, dad.
00:33:44
Speaker
Oh, you were fucking your boss when you were my age. At least he's not my boss. you know
00:33:51
Speaker
I'm sure she has so much dirt on both of her parents. Yeah, I mean, because Sam was of age by the time that they went off on the quest.
00:34:03
Speaker
But he and Frodo were together
Aragorn and Arwen's Love Story
00:34:04
Speaker
before that. Yeah, clearly. Pippin, however, was a child. So she can she can you know truly be like...
00:34:14
Speaker
Well, Uncle Pippin left on the quest when he was 28. Dad. I'm not even killing anyone, Dad. Come on. What a face. This is who I really am.
00:34:26
Speaker
Arwen said it was okay. But was years old when she got married, late bloom air and Speaking of age, Aragorn lives to be 210.
00:34:41
Speaker
Good for him. i know that i was very sad when i realized he would not return to Lothlorien as a living man. And I'm now even sadder about that for reasons that we'll get to. But at least he has a long, happy life. So good for him.
00:34:57
Speaker
Yes. Before we get to the tale of Aragorn and Arwen, because that is coming up momentarily. Get your tissues. we got some issues that we start to recognize during this very, very long and detailed history of Gondor.
00:35:16
Speaker
um Because Arnor falls fairly early in the Third Age, relatively speaking. It splits into three kingdoms, and then eventually the three kingdoms um go away. Fornost is sacked by ah the Witch King of Angmar, who at the time it wasn't known that he was a Ringwraith.
00:35:33
Speaker
Whole thing. But I started to get some things that we recognized. I started to hear about Turgon. who was steward of Gondor when Sauron rose again and returned to Mordor.
00:35:44
Speaker
Turgon's son is Ekthelion II. That's a name I recognized. And he starts fighting Mordor. At that point, Sauron moves into Isengard. Ekthelion II is advised by a man named Thurongil, who comes from the north and counsels against trusting Sauron.
00:36:02
Speaker
And he ends up clashing with Denethor II, who we met. He's the son of Ekthelion. Okay, so this this is our Denethor. This is our Denethor. Okay.
00:36:14
Speaker
Thurongil says to trust Gandalf, so of course Denethor doesn't. So this is the origin of Denethor and Gandalf's beef. Mmm. Okay. because Denethor clashed with Thurongil, and Thurongil and Gandalf got along.
00:36:30
Speaker
So this is revealed slightly later. But do you have any thoughts on who Thurongil is? Wait. Hmm. He'd be like in his 20s or 30s at this point. He's a big friend and he's a good friend Gandalf, doesn't trust Saruman.
00:36:46
Speaker
This isn't Thorin yet. No, he he is a man. He's a man. Fuck, I don't know. Aragorn. Aww.
00:36:58
Speaker
As a youth, Aragorn, in disguise, goes down to Rohan and serves in the court of Thengal, Theoden's father. And serves and advises Ecthelion, Denethor's father.
00:37:14
Speaker
Okay. It's all the pieces that are all coming together. Yeah. It's suggested that Denethor figured out who he was. Damn. Which was part of why Denethor clashed. Because even at that point, Denethor was like, oh, you're coming to usurp power.
00:37:30
Speaker
You're coming to take power back. But like, your line has never ruled Gondor. Yeah. you know Sure, you're technically the rightful king because the line of ah Anarion died out generations ago.
00:37:44
Speaker
But like you've lived up in the north. this is you know My family's been ruling Gondor. We know what we're doing. We have guided this city. Who the fuck are you?
00:37:57
Speaker
But it does, in some ways, lend some legitimacy to Aragorn's later rule. The fact that he was actually there and actually aiding in the ruling of the city in his youth.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, that' so he's not like a stranger. Right. Despite the fact that, you know, nobody still living really remembers that. Because we have to remember he's almost 90 by the time of the quest.
00:38:25
Speaker
But speaking of Aragorn... Do we want to talk about Aragorn and Arwen? I would love to. And I would love to take point on summarizing their story because this was one that was actually just ah straightforward narrative that was really easy to follow and it was very beautiful.
00:38:43
Speaker
Go for it. so We start with Aragorn's background and his parents apparently had a forbidden romance and his dad was a lot older than his mom, but they got together anyway. His dad died tragically. It was very sad.
00:38:57
Speaker
And so Aragorn and his mother come to live with Elrond, who takes him in as basically a foster son. And he gets a new name, which how are we pronouncing? Estelle?
00:39:09
Speaker
Estelle? I said Estelle. Estelle. Estelle, that sounds more Elvins, we can say Estelle, which means hope, which is really sweet. And his true name and lineage were kept secret, even from him, until he comes of age.
00:39:22
Speaker
At which point Elrond calls him by his true name and gives him the heirlooms of his house, gives him... um the shards of the broken sword and I think some other things that I didn't write down and so he is thrilled about this and he's walking in the forest and he's singing songs about Baron and Luthien and the scene where the Baron sees Luthien for the first time and then he goes holy shit it's Luthien she's here must must have learned the traditions of the great elf minstrels and I can make the things I sing about real because that is the only explanation for the most beautiful woman I've ever seen appearing in front of me it's Luthien and I am nothing compared to her i'm ah I'm but a worm she is amazing she's radiant um and it's it's love at first sight yeah it but it's not Luthien it's her great great granddaughter Arwen because we have to remember Arwen is Luthien's great great granddaughter
00:40:23
Speaker
And he tells her that she looks like Luthien and she says, yeah, i get that a lot. but so
00:40:31
Speaker
Apparently people say that to her all the time, which is so fucking funny. And apparently she had been living in Lothlorien with her mother, which is why they hadn't met up until this point. Her grandmother. Her grandmother, excuse me.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah, it ah that avoids any sort of weird stepbrother nonsense.
00:40:51
Speaker
good Good thinking. Yeah, it avoids it becoming a weird stepbrother porn. Yeah. And so he tells his mom and he tells Elrond about meeting her and how he's in love and she's amazing.
00:41:02
Speaker
And both of them agree that he's aiming pretty high and he might need to find someone who's a little more attainable because he's so far below her. She's not going to want him.
00:41:17
Speaker
Well, and Elrond is like, you have to stop mooning over my daughter. you have a destiny. yeah also I love her and yeah, I love you, but she is my daughter and if she marries you, she'll die and I will not be happy with you about this.
00:41:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's like the super ultra version of no dating till you're 30. No dating till you fulfilled your destiny. Go become king. And then maybe we'll talk.
00:41:47
Speaker
Maybe if you become king, just go ahead and do that. And then he's like, okay, fuck. He's never going to become king. I'm good. Meanwhile, Aragorn labors for 30 years fighting and getting awesome at everything. then just doing this epic training montage to eventually become king one day, which also just adds so much to everything he does throughout this journey. Because, yeah, he cares about the world and he cares about Gondor and stuff. But also...
00:42:14
Speaker
He just really wants to marry Arwen. He's been working hard for this. He's putting in the hours. But after all of his laboring and toiling and stridering, he comes to Lothlorien to rest with Galadriel's permission, of course.
00:42:30
Speaker
And she gives him a cutie patootie little makeover montage totally knowing what she's doing oh she absolutely was like like i don't care what my fucking son-in-law says about this shit i am setting up my granddaughter granddaughter have you met this nice young man it's like to pull a very specific reference from my childhood like the fairy godmother makeover scene in shrek 2 excellent scene very funny
00:43:03
Speaker
I think about the song from that scene at least once a week. That's a fun fact about me. ah Probably because it included the word sexy, which felt very raunchy for a children's movie. But yeah, she totally knows what she's doing. Dresses him up in a little elven cloak.
00:43:18
Speaker
So he just looks like a perfect elf lord. And he is just this perfect vision when Arwen sees him again conveniently. She's also there. And I know that you had thoughts about this part. I had thoughts.
00:43:33
Speaker
I had thoughts about this part. because it Because it says that like she couldn't tell him apart from an elf lord. young elf lord. Yeah. So first of all, I have questions about how often elves reproduce and like how often are there elf children and like how much are the elves aware of new elves, etc., etc.
00:43:57
Speaker
Also, how much do elves and humans look alike? Okay. Tolkien doesn't describe the physical features of elves very much in these books. He describes them as fair and beautiful.
00:44:09
Speaker
And he might talk about some of them having dark hair and others having blonde or red hair at various other points. Arwen, I know, is mentioned to have dark hair.
00:44:20
Speaker
is There's no mention of, like, pointy ears or any of, like, those features that we associate with fantasy elves. Yeah.
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah. so I have the question of do it humans and elves just look alike? or if elves look different from men, do men of Numenor look alike?
00:44:46
Speaker
look like elves to more of an extent but Aragorn doesn't stand out as different from other men so it would make sense that he that men perhaps look like elves yeah but also people can seem to identify elves on site like Legolas never gets mistaken for a man Yeah.
00:45:12
Speaker
But setting discussions of look aside, they fall in love and they get engaged. There's a lot of extremely wholesome, chaste wandering in the woods. and It's beautiful.
00:45:30
Speaker
They fall in love and they do reckon with the fact that Arwen will have to choose him or her family and she chooses him. And Elrond is very sad about this.
00:45:43
Speaker
He's like, I asked you to do one fucking thing, which was stop mooning over my daughter.
00:45:53
Speaker
but fine, she's a grown woman. She can make her choice. But if she's going to make her choice, you're going to be king of fucking Arnor and Gondor, motherfucker.
00:46:05
Speaker
That is how he's recounting this to Bilbo, several glasses of elf wine deep after this moment. Because we know that Bilbo's been privy to all of this due to his friendship with Elrond.
00:46:16
Speaker
So there have been so many bitch fests about this. And this is where he gives Aragorn the ultimatum about, okay, you you've got to become king to become king. My daughter will not give up immortality for anyone less than the king.
00:46:31
Speaker
And so she starts secretly weaving away her royal standard for him. And it's all very cute and a little bit forbidden, but very sweet. The War of the Ring happens and ends.
00:46:41
Speaker
Who cares about that? We already talked about that.
Aragorn's Death and Arwen's Choice
00:46:43
Speaker
In detail. Listen to our previous episodes. But the one line about that section that still got me was, yet grievous among the sorrows of the Third Age, well, it just says the age of the Third Age, was the parting of Elrond and Arwen, for they were sundered by the sea and by a doom beyond the end of the world.
00:47:03
Speaker
That's fucking rough. Well, and shortly thereafter, there's a line that I had written down. After, after elrond leaves. But Arwen became as a mortal woman.
00:47:15
Speaker
And yet it was not her lot to die until all that she had gained was lost. What the fuck? Yeah. So Aragorn and Arwen lived together for 120 years.
00:47:29
Speaker
And Aragorn knows the time of his death is approaching. The kingship passes to his son, Aladrian. Very cool. Good for him. And so we have, again, this like choosing the time of your death kind of thing.
00:47:43
Speaker
And also apparently when we find this out, he either outright says or implies, i was kind of confused about this, that he might be able to restore Arwen's choice to go to the Havens saying, I'm going to die, but you can still go be with your family if you want.
00:48:03
Speaker
But her mind is made up. And so he dies. And then she basically becomes a shell of her former self and turns all just sort of gray and empty and goes back to Lorien and lives and dies alone.
00:48:21
Speaker
Well, and I think she... it It's implied from the text that like one Aragorn chooses when he's going to die.
00:48:33
Speaker
And I think probably he could have held on longer and then had sort of like a slow decline. And so I think the, I think the implication is if she goes over to the seat of the undying lands, she won't die then.
00:48:49
Speaker
But otherwise her choice to remain in middle earth specifically with him is a choice now that the rest of the elves have left to die, to become mortal.
00:49:02
Speaker
And it's implied that when she goes to Lorien and she chooses her own final resting place, that she also chooses to die then. And it's it's not like suicide so much as it is they just choose to stop.
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah. Is the implication of the text, which is a very interesting power that the elves don't seem to have, but half elves can choose to accept the gift of men, that being death.
00:49:39
Speaker
She says it's the gift of men is bitter to receive. And Aragorn before he dies reminds her, but it is still a gift. Yeah. The other piece that hit me was as he falls into sleep, she calls him Estelle for the last time.
00:49:57
Speaker
missed that. And she chooses her place to die on Karen Amroth, where she got engaged to Aragorn.
00:50:08
Speaker
And that also gives a whole new fucking meaning to Aragorn speaking to her on Karen Amroth in the Lorian chapters where he never again would come as a living man.
Intertwined Histories of Rohan and Gondor
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's the part that I was like... Because that's where he fucking engaged. And where she dies. that's fucking rough. It's beautiful. It's poetic.
00:50:31
Speaker
Oh, but it's so sad. Anyway, that's that's the story of Arwen and Aragorn. Real quick to breeze through, there's ah some history of the House of Aeorl, so the Rohirrim, which is the...
00:50:47
Speaker
gondorian name for them but really the piece that i wanted to hit on towards the end of this unless you had anything but i didn't see anything in your notes was aemir aemir marries the daughter of prince imrahil wouldn't that make her like his cousin or something So, um, or no, Imrahil's related Faramir.
00:51:15
Speaker
Okay. Okay. you Yeah. i'm I'm about to get to that momentarily. So Aemir gets married to Lothiriel, the daughter of Imrahil and their son Elfwine the Fair ruled after him.
00:51:28
Speaker
So, and Faramir, who is the nephew of Imrahil, the son of Imrahil's sister, marries Eowyn, who is Eomer's sister, which I believe, I didn't do out the actual mapping, but I believe that makes... So Elfwine the Fair and any other children of Eomer and Lothuriel would be Imrahil's grandchildren.
00:51:57
Speaker
Mm-hmm. any children of Eowyn and Faramir would be the grand nibblings of Imrahil, which I believe makes them Both first cousins through Aemir and Eowyn, and also second cousins once removed ah because of Faramir and his aunt.
00:52:20
Speaker
um And I love a royal family tree that more closely resembles a bush. and A wreath, if you will. Yeah, go look up the Habsburgs at some point. It's bad.
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah, I was gonna gonna say, yep, royal families, they don't change.
Dwarves' Secretive Culture
00:52:40
Speaker
Even when they donpe really should. They should change. And well, and this this is significantly less bad than some of the royal families of our day.
00:52:53
Speaker
You know, the only the only problem is if Elfwine the Fair gets married to one of Faramir and Eowyn's kids. No. Then there's an issue, but we don't have that information.
00:53:07
Speaker
Anyway, we come to Durin's folk. My first note for this section was, give me Gimli or give me death. I need my boy. i was so ready for, i think I have the words Gimli girly at least four times through this section and referring to you.
00:53:24
Speaker
yes Yeah, i enjoyed it. There was still, there's a lot of history stuff that I was not super interested in. i was, like I said before, very intrigued about all of the mystery surrounding the origin of dwarves.
00:53:40
Speaker
We know that Durin, the original Durin, was one of seven fathers of the dwarves, and he kept having heirs that looked exactly like him, which is very funny. But we don't know who these other six guys were.
00:53:52
Speaker
We hear about Thrain and Thorin, which I initially thought were our two from The Hobbit, but I think are actually more distant ancestors, if I'm correct. Yep. Because, yeah of course, they are.
00:54:05
Speaker
And we hear about getting the Arkenstone, which, if we remember from The Hobbit, is like my favorite part. I love the Arkenstone. I love everything that happens with it. There's an age of prosperity. There's dwarf rings. There's a war with the orcs. There's a big one named Azog. They kill him. That's great.
00:54:21
Speaker
And... Then i think we get to our Thorin... Yeah, so Azog is the father of Bolg, who has a whole fucking feud with Thorin and his cousin Dane.
00:54:37
Speaker
Our Thorin is the son, who is Thorin II, is the son of Thrain II, who is the son of Thror, who I believe is the one who has the who gets killed by Azog.
00:54:53
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That tracks. We learn, ah i initially thought it was ah the first Durin that was killed by the Balrog. No, it's Durin the Sixth.
00:55:05
Speaker
Of course it is. Yeah, which killed Durin and his son Nain, which then led to Thrain the First leaving Moria and founding the kingdom under the mountain and finding the Arkenstone.
00:55:22
Speaker
On the Balrog... Tolkien has a footnote there that it might not actually have been Durin that awoke it. It might have already been awake because the timing coincides with when Sauron was starting to gain power. So it might have woken up due to Sauron's growing power.
00:55:41
Speaker
And it was just imprisoned there after the last war with Morgoth because the Valarukar, the Balrogs, were servants of Morgoth.
00:55:54
Speaker
And so the dwarves may have just accidentally released it rather than waking it up and unleashing it on Moria. So more fucking dwarf slander.
00:56:04
Speaker
yeah Anyway, Thorin's grandfather had one of the Seven Rings, which he gave to Thrain, which is eventually taken from him by regrowing Sauron and Dol Guldor.
Gimli and Legolas's Unique Friendship
00:56:20
Speaker
There's a big war with the orcs, and that's where Thorin gets his name Oakenshield, because he uses a branch of an oak as a shield during the fight when his gets broken. We got a little bit of information on the dwarf ring.
00:56:34
Speaker
The seven rings of the dwarves, they don't turn them into ringwraiths, they just make them sort of greedy and restless and desiring of gold and sort of lacking caution. And Thrain suffers from this corruption and he actually goes out on an adventure with Balin and Dwellyn, which makes the Hobbit so much sadder because Balin and Dwellyn had already been on an adventure with Thorin's father and now they're going on an adventure with Thorin.
00:57:03
Speaker
And there's there's so much. So many layers. these They're old as fuck. Dwarves live a long time. Dwarves live truly a fucking long time.
00:57:14
Speaker
Anyway, the events of The Hobbit happen. Battle of the Five Armies. Thorin's cousin Dane Ironfoot, who was eventually the one who killed Azog, becomes king under the mountain. That same summer, Gandalf and the White Council drive Sauron out of Dol Guldor in Mirkwood, and he goes to Mordor and starts building problems and power down there.
00:57:35
Speaker
So that's the summer of 2941. We'll have years until ah shit happens I also want to talk about dwarf women because this at this point is when dwarf women come up. The only dwarf woman named is Dis, who is Thorin's sister, the mother of Fili and Kili.
00:57:57
Speaker
Tolkien says, quote, according to Gimli, there are very few dwarf women, and less than a third of total dwarves. And they look such like dwarf men that non dwarves can't tell them apart.
00:58:09
Speaker
Mm hmm. They also mate for life and only will ever marry one person. And many, both men and women don't marry or don't want to be married due to either jealousy or being engrossed in their crafts, which a whole new meaning of married to his work.
00:58:27
Speaker
I'm gonna go biologist here for a minute. Let's talk about sex ratios. Yes, please. I would love to hear about sex ratios. Tell me. So according to Fisher's principle, if both male and female young cost an equivalent amount of energy to produce, then the following applies.
00:58:44
Speaker
Assuming. Assuming male births are less common than female births, then a newborn male has better prospects of mating than a newborn female, which means he can expect to have more offspring.
00:58:57
Speaker
Therefore, parents with a genetic predisposition to produce males have a higher fitness. More of their offspring will survive to adulthood and reproduce, which suggests that male preference births become more common.
00:59:19
Speaker
But as that ratio, the one-to-one sex ratio is approached, that advantage of producing male offspring goes away, which means the preference will start to go away.
00:59:34
Speaker
The same holds true in reverse. So that one-to-one ratio in a sexual species will generally apply. When this ratio is skewed, there tends to be a few possible reasons.
00:59:48
Speaker
One, when we're talking about male and female ratios too, we're talking specifically in non-hermaphroditic species, except in the case of sequential hermaphroditism, like clownfish, which are all born male and change their sex if there's not a breeding female part present, or the reverse in Blue Street cleaner wrasse, for example, or where there's a large population of non-sexually active individuals, like in a bee or ant colony where there's only a few individuals that are capable of reproduction.
01:00:18
Speaker
Or in a colony where there's a dominant breeding pair, like in Canids, and the remainder present are their non-breeding family and help raise young. Certain birds act this way, marmots.
01:00:29
Speaker
The non-breeding family may start breeding if the dominance of the pair wanes or if one of them dies. This is infinitely more thought than Tolkien put into this.
01:00:41
Speaker
Then let's not get into dwarf gender.
01:00:46
Speaker
There's always the possibility that Gimli, when asked, is like, I don't understand the question. What the fuck do you mean? You know, yeah what's a quote unquote woman?
01:00:59
Speaker
Oh, you have like roles. Oh, you just mean the people who their role in society is to raise children? Oh, yeah. We only have a few of those. Good fucking point.
01:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, of course we all look the same. What do you think? um Our concepts of gender are too complex for your tiny fucking minds. So dwarf women?
01:01:23
Speaker
Who the fuck knows? Speaking of Gimli. It's not mentioned on the family tree that we're given, but do we think he has siblings?
01:01:35
Speaker
Because every single other dwarf that we have like lots of information about has siblings. Yeah, I would be surprised yeah if it's not on the family tree, which I did not look at closely enough to really question it. But yeah, I would be surprised if he didn't have siblings.
01:01:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it's never mentioned, but like, yeah, Thorin has two siblings. Feli and Kili are obviously brothers. Balin and Dwallin, Oing, Gloin, Biffer, Buffer, Bomber, Dory, Nori, and Ori.
01:02:09
Speaker
ah Groin and Fundin are brothers. Thror has two siblings. Like, it seems to be that when dwarves have kids, which perhaps is not terribly common, but when they do, they have a bunch of them.
01:02:25
Speaker
Yeah. And so Gimli being an only child stands out. Yeah, that's a good point. Anyway, Gimli Gurley, do you want to take away ah what happens to Gimli?
01:02:41
Speaker
Of course I do. After the events the War of the Rings? Yes. So Gimli gets everything he deserves. He becomes renowned among dwarves. He's lord of the glittering caves. He's named an elf friend. Historians will call them elf friends. We'll get to it.
01:02:58
Speaker
And he makes, along with his people, these gates of mithril and steel for Minas Tirith. And it's amazing and it's beautiful. And then there's a section Gimli's, don't know part of the appendices that also mentions Legolas, which, you know, just bro things, just buddy things.
01:03:21
Speaker
ah Where it says Legolas, his friend, also brought south elves of Greenwood and they dwelt in Athelian and it became once again the fairest country. but Just hilarious that Legolas also just gets mentioned during Gimli's biography.
01:03:34
Speaker
And Around the same time that Aragorn is giving up his life is when Legolas decides to go to the sea. But unlike Aragorn and Arwen, these two will not be separated.
01:03:49
Speaker
We have heard tell that Legolas took Gimli Gloin's son with him because of their great friendship. greater than any that has been between elf and dwarf.
01:04:00
Speaker
If this is true, then it is strange indeed that a dwarf should be willing to leave Middle-earth for any love, or that the Eldar should receive him, or that the lords of the West should permit it. But it is said that Gimli went also out of desire to see again the beauty of Galadriel, and it may be that she, being mighty among the Eldar, obtained this grace for him.
01:04:20
Speaker
More cannot be said of this matter. So there is so much here. and i mean, he's doing it for love. Obviously, the word love is there. ah Galadriel playing matchmaker again.
01:04:32
Speaker
Love that for her. She totally, totally knows what she's doing. The more cannot be said on this matter implies to me that whatever record the professor is translating here for our benefit. just devolves into the most graphic sexual description all of the things that Gimli and Legolas do, did, planned to do Just so much.
01:05:01
Speaker
The acoustics in those glittering caves, bestie. So I think that was just a bit of a demure British professorism.
01:05:12
Speaker
More cannot be said on this matter. That's enough. That's enough. Great friendship. Great friendship. The end.
01:05:21
Speaker
Oh, man. That's what I choose to believe. And... Historians will call them elf friends. Wasties. Shipmates. Colleagues.
01:05:33
Speaker
We're shipping them, all right. ah But yeah on a more... more serious literary note. I really like this as a parallel to Aragorn and Arwen and also just the general morality story that we always get in everything having to do with immortality. That immortality is bad, actually, because you'll watch everyone you love die and it'll be horrible and sad.
01:05:58
Speaker
No. In this one, the gay lovers just get to be together forever and it rules. like They just get to enjoy eternity together And it's awesome.
01:06:09
Speaker
And that's it. And they're super happy. And I love that. That is the opposite of bury your gaze. That is the make your gaze immortal and let them annoy the fuck out of everyone on this ship for however long it takes to sail to the Grey Havens, make them insufferable.
01:06:25
Speaker
i love it.
Middle-earth's Historical Timeline
01:06:27
Speaker
Yeah. I feel like if also if Galadriel interceded on their behalf, like she she gets the official title of matchmaker of Middle-earth.
01:06:39
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Like, she set up Arwen and Aragorn. She set up Frodo and Sam. She, like, she's doing the work of true love.
01:06:49
Speaker
Truly. you had said in our Discord server for the podcast, fellas, is it gay to bring your dwarf with you to the Undying Lands? Me. You know, like no one has ever done before in history, and you have to get special permission from your god queen to bring him into the sacred land of your people. know.
01:07:08
Speaker
No, genuinely, though, like Legolas had to go across the sea, but he straight up was like, but I'm not doing it if I can't bring my husband.
01:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, I will resist my destiny. And he will come with me. This is my emotional support dwarf.
01:07:31
Speaker
Do you want to be stuck with me for eternity hearing me complain about not having Gimli here? No, let me bring him. Listen, this man has blown my back out too many times. I can't stand without him next to me. Yes.
01:07:47
Speaker
He provides a critical structural function. Would you like a demonstration? No, no, no. That's quite enough. Good enough. More cannot be said on this matter. It's okay. He can come. He will.
01:07:59
Speaker
As many times as he would like. And they will keep will keep score.
01:08:07
Speaker
It's beautiful. It's poetic. but And the undying lands, the days keep coming and they don't stop coming. Ha ha ha ha.
01:08:19
Speaker
Anyway, that's all Appendix A. Yeah, these, they're very, very long. um They're very long. I don't have a ton of other notes for the rest of them. I have a little bit for Appendix B, but nothing, like not a lot for the others.
01:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, Appendix B is the tale of years, and it basically breaks down major events of the first, second, third, fourth ages. I did not write a ton of notes for this part.
01:08:50
Speaker
Random trivia. Faramir and Sam are the same age. They were born in the same year. That's fun. We get a little tiny bit about the origins of the wizards in the Third Age, that the Istari or wizards appeared in Middle-earth. It was afterwards said that they came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron and to unite all those who had the will to resist him.
01:09:14
Speaker
But they were forbidden to batch his power with power or to seek to dominate elves or men by force and fear. And apparently Saruman used to be a good guy and he was up there with Gandalf as the highest of the order, which just makes everything about him sadder.
01:09:31
Speaker
But then there's just like a bunch of random trivia summarizing events that we already know. We do get some later events concerning the members of the Fellowship of the Ring. I don't know if you had any notes on that part.
01:09:44
Speaker
I think we'll work up to that because I have a few other notes sort of throughout this section. Yeah, yeah. Hit me. I was sort of noting where we see Sauron. Frequently. most Everywhere. Yeah.
01:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, all the time. this mostly deals This section mostly deals with the Second and Third Age and then the beginning of the Fourth Age. The One Ring isn't forged until Second Age 1600, roughly.
01:10:13
Speaker
And then the war between Sauron and the Elves starts in 1693 and ends in And then there's in 2251 the Second five hundred years apiece until we start to see ringras in twenty two fifty one of the second age And then we don't see more of Sauron until almost a thousand years later in Second Age 3262, when he gets brought to Numenor as a prisoner and starts causing problems, which leads to the downfall of Numenor in 3319.
01:10:44
Speaker
And then it's not over, it's not until over a hundred years later that the last alliance of men and elves is forged. And then there's a seven year siege from 3434 3441 when the second ends, when takes the one when the second age ends when isilaldor takes the one ring Also, so many of the events of the Third Age I fully thought were in the Second Age and I just kind of like shifted everything in my brain.
01:11:08
Speaker
But I forget that there's there's thousands of years in here. Just for some context, if we were to go back, you know, roughly 5000 years, so from when the ring was destroyed back to when the ring was forged, if we were to do that today, there were still mammoths walking around on Wrangell Island in Russia. Damn.
01:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, the the pyramids were starting to be built. Like, this is These are timescales that we, as non-Numenoreans who do not have 300 years to live, just simply cannot fathom.
01:11:59
Speaker
Anyway, after... Sauron falls at the end of the Second Age, we don't start hearing whispers of evil again for 1100 years until there's evil sensed in Dol Guldur.
01:12:14
Speaker
Again, for context, the English royal family has not existed for that long. Like, we can trace the roots of their family back to 1066. Jeez. Mm-hmm.
01:12:29
Speaker
So, like, know, when William the Conqueror came over from France... Anyway, there's a war with the Witch King and the Corsairs of Umbar and the Wainriders. And we know from earlier that Wain is a wagon. So I'm like, are these like charioteers?
01:12:46
Speaker
Nothing more is explained about the Wainriders. Also, there's multiple conflicts with the fucking Witch King, who they don't know is actually Lord of the Ringwraiths. The Balrog doesn't show up until Third Age 1980.
01:13:00
Speaker
Oh my god. Sauron shows up again in 2060 of the Third Age, and then disappears again for 400 years until shortly before Smeagol finds the One Ring.
01:13:11
Speaker
Which, if the ring was lost at the end of the Second Age, it's just been gone for 2500 years. just just just gone at the bottom of a river somewhere and so like it might have responded to sauron's growing power anyway smog takes over the mountain in 27 2770 in 2941 the events hobbit at point faedan isn't even born yet in twenty nine forty one the events of the ha occur at this point faadin isn't even born yet
01:13:42
Speaker
um my god He won't be born until 2948. Frodo's born 20 years later. Boromir's born 10 years after that. When Boromir was two, Aragorn got engaged.
01:13:55
Speaker
Jesus.
01:13:58
Speaker
In 3001, Bilbo leaves the Shire for one last adventure and shit starts getting real then. And
Final Journeys of the Hobbits
01:14:07
Speaker
then we have a super detailed day-by-day breakdown of 3018 to 3021, which we will not go into because we just read those books.
01:14:17
Speaker
isn This is where I got the math on when Eleanor becomes a maid of honor and when she marries 30. And then Rose eventually passes away in 3082, or by Shire reckoning, 1482, because um they have a slightly different calendar.
01:14:35
Speaker
And do you want to talk about what happens to Sam? Yeah, so... In that section that I mentioned, later events concerning the members of the Fellowship of the Ring, Pippin gets married to Diamond of Longcleave and he becomes the Took and Thane.
01:14:50
Speaker
Good for him. Merry the Magnificent becomes Master of Buckland. Good for him. Sam is elected mayor six times.
01:15:01
Speaker
You know, there'll be event, event, event. Samwise is elected mayor of the fifth time. Samwise is elected mayor the sixth time. It just every couple of years will be punctuated by a re-election. He's very popular, as he should be.
01:15:13
Speaker
One of his daughters marries Pippin's son, good for them, and he passes on the red book to Eleanor and gives her the task of maintaining and passing on the story.
01:15:25
Speaker
And then he goes off to the sea. His wife passed away and he followed his husband across the sea. I didn't even write down a specific quote about it. I don't even have commentary like I did for Legolas and Gimli because it's just too much...
01:15:44
Speaker
In my heart, in my soul, the feelings are too raw and fragile in there. But yeah. Well, because of that, I'm going to stab you just a little bit because I have a quote. Okay.
01:15:54
Speaker
Hit me. I'm ready. I can take it. So Sam gives the the book to Eleanor's family, the Fairbairns, and among them, the tradition is handed down from Eleanor that Samwise passed the towers and went to the Grey Havens and passed over sea, last of the ring bearers.
01:16:12
Speaker
Which, and it won't be for another hundred years almost that Legolas and Gimli will finally pass over the sea and Aragorn will pass away, but that Samwise is going to the Undying Lands is truly the end of the rings in
Hobbit Family Trees and Language
01:16:33
Speaker
Middle-earth.
01:16:33
Speaker
The end of the story of the rings that has spanned 5,000 years. isn Because all of the dwarf rings were either taken or destroyed. The ringwraiths died with the one ring.
01:16:51
Speaker
The elf ring bearers went over the sea with Frodo and Bilbo. And Sam, having borne the ring for just a short time, lives out his days in Middle-earth until his family no longer needs him.
01:17:07
Speaker
And then he goes to find... his love on the other side of the ocean. Also, just to continue stabbing our hearts, when they grow old, Merry and Pippin go south to Rohan and are with Eamir when he passes away.
01:17:28
Speaker
And it sounds like they passed and were buried in the halls of kings in Gondor, and eventually Aragorn was laid to rest beside them. Which, fuck me, i guess.
01:17:41
Speaker
ah
01:17:44
Speaker
Let me, i kind I can spin this. I can make something happy out of it. I mean, it doesn't have to be spun. It's beautiful and poetic and perfect. um But also thinking about When Frodo initially leaves Sam, when he talks about how Frodo, he's broken and he's never going to be right again, but Sam still has a chance to live a full normal life and be healed and be happy.
01:18:10
Speaker
When Sam makes that journey to go join Frodo, that I think is maybe Frodo's chance to really be healed and to be whole now that Sam is with him again forever.
01:18:21
Speaker
And so even though he had totally given up hope of his own happiness or his own recovery, he still gets that in the end and he deserves it.
01:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's really sweet. Just to breeze through the rest of that, that's the end of Appendix B. Appendix C gives a bunch of family trees of all the hobbits.
01:18:46
Speaker
There's not a ton to say, it's especially because they're very visual. But we do learn that Sam has a bunch of siblings, which we never heard shit about. Also, Pippin has three older siblings.
01:19:00
Speaker
Of course he's a, is he the youngest or is he just little? He's the youngest. Yeah. He's the baby. Of course. Of course he's the baby. The family trees are very funny. There's a lot of really good little quips under people's entries, which I, we don't have time to go through.
01:19:17
Speaker
But if you have a copy of Return of the King, go look at the family trees. There's some good, funny little snide remarks in there about the various people. No children.
01:19:28
Speaker
Died young. Took up with his cousin. Went on an adventure. Yeah, went off on a journey and never returned. It's just fucking wild.
01:19:42
Speaker
And also, like, all of the big families are intertwined. The tree of Samwise Gamgee is not linked to all of the others, but like the Boffins, the Bulgers, the Bagginses, the Tooks, the Brandybox.
01:19:57
Speaker
There's so many intertwining things and names connected and like Bilbo appears on three of them. Yeah.
01:20:08
Speaker
I think Frodo and Pippin and Merry are on another like four. Like, it's ridiculous. But the connection doesn't come in for Sam's family because it's it's very class stratified.
01:20:20
Speaker
until Goldilocks, his daughter, marries Faramir, the son of Peregrine. And that is the merging of Sam's family, which has you know become new money, more or less, with the landed gentry.
01:20:40
Speaker
Appendix D, E, and F are the most like academic in nature, Yeah. They're a little circle jerky.
01:20:53
Speaker
They read like academic papers, for sure. They do, but it's very much Tolkien being like, I have uncovered all of this literature and struggled to translate it for you. And I'm like, sir, you made this, like, this is this is your creation. Yeah.
01:21:16
Speaker
you're talking about that you're like You're citing your imaginary sources. and like tell him me wrong it is beyond impressive.
01:21:26
Speaker
you know like I have spent a bunch of time world building calendars, um especially, and like trying to make linguistic consistency in place names and things.
01:21:38
Speaker
And yeah, sometimes I'm being unnecessarily complex about it. And then I think back to Tolkien and go, no, actually, I'm fine. ah Especially Appendix F, the languages and peoples of the Third Age.
01:21:52
Speaker
We have to remember he was a philologist. He studied language. Like that was his thing. And so reading about the languages and how they emerged and how they evolved and why certain ones were dominant how pronunciations came in and like why certain places were called certain things and... And the familiar tone and the deferential tone and that being why the speech of the Shire folk is strange.
01:22:20
Speaker
It's so much, it's so granular. It is clearly what he was thinking about the entire time. And it is clearly something that he wanted readers to have access to.
01:22:39
Speaker
But this from the person who I think we can now officially call ourselves professional Tolkien nerds.
01:22:48
Speaker
35 episodes into this podcast i mean following gossip girls rules we still haven't ever been paid for this but cheetah girls have never watched sorry have never watched a gossip girl either um i just am a gossip girl a gossipy i just know go piss girl
01:23:11
Speaker
anyway As a more or less professional Tolkien nerd who has spent literally two years reading these books at a very granular level, you don't need this to just enjoy the books.
01:23:28
Speaker
Yeah. The language stuff is fun if you're a nerd, particularly a language nerd. And I'm a language nerd. like I took some some anthro classes and we talked about linguistic anthropology and I do ah do have so much beef with Edward Sapir.
01:23:49
Speaker
We're not going to get into it. um I'll be for after the podcast. You can tell me about that. the Point is, Appendix E is useful for pronunciation, as ah as a pronunciation guide.
01:24:01
Speaker
But these these three sections are the most, like, nitty-gritty, granular, very much the professor's special interest.
Tolkien's Linguistic World-building
01:24:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:12
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So approach with caution. And again, in a pre-internet world, to have access to all of this information, tasty, tasty lore.
01:24:24
Speaker
And also, like I said earlier, you're not meant to read the appendices like a continuation of the book, just, you know, one page after another. It's not really how they work. They're reference material.
01:24:36
Speaker
And... You can just kind of go to things that seem interesting or things that seem relevant, pick that out, and then get what you need from it and go back to it another time. I think that these sections definitely benefit from being revisited, but also they don't necessarily unlock the secrets to the rest of the story.
01:24:57
Speaker
Sammy, did you have anything else you wanted to talk about for the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings? Yes. Yes, actually. um From just brief little tiny tidbits that are really more like trivia, but things that I thought were interesting.
01:25:15
Speaker
i guess it's kind of going backwards. In the language section, there's no specific Hobbit language. They just speak Western, which I thought was interesting. I don't know why they wouldn't have their own language with the professor being so into that, but okay.
01:25:30
Speaker
And in the Shire calendar... and The Shirefolk apparently don't do much to commemorate the events of the War of the Ring, which kind of makes sense given how... disinterested they were in Frodo especially they liked the pomp and pageantry especially of Merry and Pippin being these big military commanders and they're tall now and they have cool outfits and they ride horses okay but in terms of the actual details of the adventure not super interested to know and like we've learned about their general lack of interest in history
01:26:07
Speaker
Kind of makes sense. But they throw parties every April 6th, which, depending on who you ask, could be because of Sam's birthday, the day the golden tree first flowered, or the elvish new year.
01:26:19
Speaker
And they also blow the horn of the mark at sundown every November 2nd, which is the anniversary of the day that they had the big... uprising and the scouring of the Shire. So those were the only... Oh, oh my god.
01:26:30
Speaker
And one more thing from the languages and people section. I am so sorry that I forgot the bit about dwarves. Dwarves have secret names. They have secret names that they don't reveal to anyone and they don't even engrave it on their tombstones.
01:26:43
Speaker
Why? We don't know. It's a mystery, but I am very intrigued. I need to know the secret dwarf names. But that's really all I had for the rest of the appendices. Yeah, it's sort of, it's discussed kind of that, like, the dwarves keep their language very close to the vast, like, the only bits of dwarven language that we learn are, like, place names from Gimli.
01:27:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And I'm sure Legolas has learned many curses and ah other ah various terminology.
01:27:20
Speaker
More cannot be said on this matter. More cannot be said. But the dwarvish... ah like Khuzdul, the language, is is it's a closed practice. they They keep it to themselves.
01:27:37
Speaker
And it's sort of discussed throughout that Tolkien kind of considers the dwarves a mysterious people. And in some ways, it's because they're pulled from an entirely different series of mythos in inspiration from the rest of the stories.
01:27:52
Speaker
The rest of the stories are very Celtic, very Anglo-Saxon English in origin. Whereas the dwarves are pulling pretty much straight out of Nordic myth.
01:28:08
Speaker
And then their language also is utterly unrelated to the other languages spoken, which again, have a lot of influence from Celtic languages, from Anglo-Saxon, um from Germanic languages. And Khuzdul has its origins in ah Semitic languages.
01:28:28
Speaker
So Tolkien was very much setting dwarves apart from... elves and men And there's more about this in the Silmarillion, but their language being secret is just another one of these pieces of setting them apart.
01:28:46
Speaker
Also on the Hobbits only speaking Western, I think that's just another... example of hobbits being the everyman, specifically representing the the people of the English countryside, because Western is meant to be English. like he He translates it as English. He says, like obviously, this is what I had to translate it as.
01:29:11
Speaker
But that's his... that's his sort of speech of the everyman hobbits are you know you're hard-working folk out in the English countryside yeah who cares about the war we still have to put food on the table and so them just speaking Western like they don't they don't need anything more they're just here to eke out a living on this land
Completion of Tolkien's Text and Celebrations
01:29:40
Speaker
anyway I enjoyed reading these it did feel a little bit
01:29:44
Speaker
like, you know, my, my old, like anthropology homework.
01:29:51
Speaker
I was talking to my roommate last night about the Eowyn Faramir, Eomer, Imrahil relationship. um And, you know, how their kids would be related. And I was like, I'm,
01:30:07
Speaker
I've read too much Tolkien, like Tolkien lore specifically, not even story in the last, you know, a couple of hours.
01:30:17
Speaker
And then I kind of like stopped and went, I make the assignments.
01:30:23
Speaker
This is my job for the podcast. You are the one who decides what we will read. Uh-huh. So, you know, assigning us this much reading for this episode was fully my fault.
01:30:39
Speaker
And we have approached a longer episode here. But ah hey, more podcast. Yeah. I don't have anything else for this. And that completes our read of the text.
01:30:53
Speaker
Hell yeah, bestie. We did it. the Lord of the Rings. Fuck yeah. Yeah. This is a big achievement. I'm really proud. Yeah, it is um Well done, my love.
01:31:08
Speaker
We did it. I will have to consider what I'm going to choose for my commemorative tattoo of this experience after i think after we do the movies.
01:31:22
Speaker
And I've been able to see some visual imagery. But there will there will be something Tolkien-y going on my body forever after this season of the podcast is done. Because this is a major fandom accomplishment, friendship accomplishment, podcast accomplishment. This is it's a big deal.
01:31:43
Speaker
And i am extremely proud of both of us. I've been thinking about a Tolkien tattoo for some time and I love the movies. I don't want movie imagery on me.
01:31:55
Speaker
I think the movie imagery is incredible. I think it's so well done. Mm-hmm. But that's that's not what I'm personally referencing. um But i can talk about that all the time.
01:32:07
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think I want movie imagery specifically necessarily. I just need to have all the data points. I need all the information to make an informed decision. But that being said.
Podcast Announcements and Listener Engagement
01:32:18
Speaker
All that being said, in some order, in the next few episodes, we'll have some more bonus episodes on poetry and the effects of Tolkien on modern fantasy and on Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien and the movies, of course. Those are coming up very soon.
01:32:39
Speaker
Where we are sitting right now recording this, we haven't watched them yet. But we're going to start that very soon, and I'm very excited. But until then, you can find us on our social media, at FanAppPod, wherever you get your social media.
01:32:57
Speaker
You can type it in wherever you get your social media. We might, hey, or may not be there.
01:33:04
Speaker
But if there's a social media site, and we're on it, it'll be under at FanAppPod. F-A-N-A-P-P-P-O-D. F-A-N-A-P-P-P-O-D.
01:33:16
Speaker
Also, you can always email us at thefandomapprentice at gmail.com. um You can leave comments and reviews on our podcast, depending on the podcast platform you're listening on. You can leave us a five-star review if you like what you're listening to.
01:33:30
Speaker
You can go back and listen to our ever-expanding back catalog. As always, you can subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to get updates on new episodes as soon as they come out.
01:33:44
Speaker
But until you hear from us again, have a wonderful a couple of weeks and we will see you next time. See you next time. Bye.
01:33:57
Speaker
The Phantom Apprentice is produced and edited by Rin and Sam. Our music was composed and performed by James, and our art is by Cassie Turgeon. This podcast is created for non-commercial entertainment purposes, and the opinions expressed therein are our own and are not reflective of the opinions of any other person or organization.
01:34:14
Speaker
The content discussed is the property of the Tolkien Estate and is used here under fair use.