Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace and I'm here with my co -hosts, Leah and Alicia. Hey there. Hello. Thank you for joining us. Go ahead, pull up a chair, settle in with a warm drink and get ready to open the quick post as we bring you some updates from the wider world of Tolkien. In this episode,
Speaker: We'll interview Tim and Alicia about attending ALEP, a long expected party, and also debut our quick post segment, where we'll bring you news about what's going on in the world of Tolkien studies and Tolkien fandom from a progressive queer -led lens.
Speaker: Can you inevitably leave that in? Please like turn up the volume on the cat meow. That's just gonna be like the intro sound for the end of the introduction for all of these. It's like fill up a chair and get ready for our episode.
Speaker: So Tim and Alicia, first things first, what is ALEP? The way that I usually have been describing it to people who know that I am a huge Tolkien nerd is I'm going to go to this farm in Kentucky and larva hobbit for a weekend. Yeah, that's kind of it.
Speaker: ALEP stands for Long Expected Party, Bilbo's Long Expected Birthday Party, and it takes place at this Shaker Village in the mountains of Kentucky that just looks like the Shire, basically. I mean, it has actual buildings, not hobbit holes, but it's just this idyllic setting. It's a functional farm, so there's goats and sheep and ducks and turkeys and all kinds of animals.
Speaker: And just a verdant rolling hills. Yeah. Yeah. So verdant. Love that.
Speaker: It started in 2008 and basically spun out of the organizers attending, I believe, a Tolkien conference that they were just really disappointed in the organization of, but they met a bunch of great people there and sort of one thing led to another. They knew of this really great setting in Kentucky and were like, this, what if we could have an event there? It would be perfect. It feels, you know, very much like a Tolkien -esque kind of setting.
Speaker: and then they've been having them every three years since then so it's not like a you know annual con it happens every three years in the fall and then i think in between the last couple they started doing these like halfway events so a year and a half in between each in the spring.
Speaker: in between two of them, they have sort of a slightly smaller scale event that's a little bit less formal, I suppose. I don't know, we haven't been to one of those before. This was our first one and we had been told by a couple of our friends from Atlanta that have been coming to it for years that it's a lot of fun and just really kind of chill and that they always have a great time and so we finally went to one. Actually, we were supposed to go in 2020 and then fucking 2020 happened. Right, yeah, totally.
Speaker: It just kept putting off and put off and put off and then finally they had the event that was supposed to happen in 2020 this year instead. I do want to point out before we start talking about what happened there in depth that most of the people who are ALEP regulars told us that this year in particular was kind of weird. It was kind of halfway between a halfway and a full one.
Speaker: because of the uncertainty of COVID times. Okay, so like I guess in terms of like attendees or like how kind of like everybody was wearing masks and stuff. It mostly seemed to be like the programming. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it sounded like there was usually more programming than they had this time. They usually do have like sort of a scholar guest of honor kind of thing like sort of similar to what VidCon does.
Speaker: But in this case, that scholar guest of honor was intended to be Michael drought.
Speaker: And he pulled out at the last minute for sort of family release reasons for any of our listeners that hadn't heard. He had a tragic loss in his family of his son last year, I believe. And they're still kind of processing that. And they were about to get some information about that, about the passing of their son. And he didn't want to be away from his family at that time. So totally understandable, but it did mean that it sounded like
Speaker: It was somewhat different, and they did end up bringing in a couple of people, but it seemed like it was a little more last minute. So it sounded like there would have been a considerable amount more sort of academic -ish kind of programming than there actually ended up being in the long run.
Speaker: But some of the other programming was they had hikes where people just dress up in their ranger or hobbit costumes or whatever and walk on a hike. Because it's literally, like I said, out in the mountains, beautiful area, middle of nowhere kind of thing. So there are some really nice trails and waterfalls and rock formations and stuff. And a lot of it, it's also really just a massive photo shoot too. So you just go out and get all the pictures taken in your Tolkien cosplays kind of thing.
Speaker: Oh, that sounds so much fun. I would love to go tramping around in the hillsides dressed as a hobbit. That would be amazing. Yeah, the Rangers in particular are a big group of people who actually do go camping together and like do primitive camping.
Speaker: Yeah, like in their Ranger costumes with packs and stuff that like they try and get everything to look, you know, not modern sort of thing. So like wooden carved bowls and cutlery and stuff and like everything like lamps and stuff like that all sort of looks primitive. Tents are just like basically like pieces of canvas that are like stretched across some like wood stakes and that kind of thing.
Speaker: Oh man, they had a little rager camp set up as an exhibit so you could go by and talk to them about their back camping or their backpacking experience. Okay, very cool. That's amazing. Yeah, that's hardcore.
Speaker: Yeah, there was, there's archery competition and there were some of these people are clearly pretty serious into their archery and stuff. Like, you know, brought their own, own bows and arrows and everything. And the most involved that I got with things was one of our friends, if any of our listeners ever go to DragonCon.
Speaker: and are familiar with the elf choir that sings at the evening at Bree or does the elves at Dragoncon at some point do like a walking into the west where they walk from the easternmost hotel of Dragoncon to the westernmost
Speaker: hotel of Dragon Con singing the music from the Fellowship of the Ring where you see those yells passing into the West with with lanterns and stuff like that. So Kathleen is the one that organizes that and she also like sort of heads up the choir for ale up as well. And so it was a lot of great stuff like some of the stuff she writes herself the way that it was organized this year was it was
Speaker: art of through the ages. So it's three full days. The first day was first stage. Second day of second age. Third day was third age. And for the second age day, she did a rings of power medley of like the Valinor themes and then Wandering Day, which was really nice to be able to sing in front of everybody. And she does the arrangements and stuff. That's so cool. I'm fucking sick of that song already. And then in the third age day, we got to sing Misty Mountains from the Hobbit movies. So that was fun, too.
Speaker: Very cool. Very cool. I wasn't nearly as involved in actual programming. I went to one talk where someone was passing around the exhibit booklet from Art of the Manuscript. Oh, cool. Cool. And that was really cool. But other than that, I just like hung out dressed as a hobbit or a ringwraith and read Return of the King.
Speaker: Yeah. And then besides that, it was really just kind of hang around and cosplay or in the case of our ring race, cosplay is skulk around and cosplay. It was so much fun. Yeah. A lot of people don't really seem to cosplay villains. It's really more people like just trying to, you know, have a relaxing time. Hang in the shower.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. You know, a lot of people aren't even cosplaying like specific characters or anything like that. They just want to be some generic background Hobbit or something like that, you know, that doesn't have to fucking go on like a, you know, six month trek to Mordor or some shit, right? Like, they just want to be like... Use their fingers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'll just hang out in the Shire and, you know, have 18 meals a day kind of thing, so... Ah, the energy that I very much enjoy.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. And so we got to where our Ringwraith cosplay is for basically only the second time since DragonCon 2019 and sort of sneak around the Shire and sneak up on people and have hobbits, you know, take pictures with hobbits that were being menaced. Yeah, you know, recoiling in fear away from us. And then after dinner one night we hid, there's a walkway that's like totally pitch dark. We
Speaker: hit along that walkway and kind of like jumped out at people scaring them on their way back in her ring race cosplay. Nice. So costuming and cosplay is a pretty big part of this, right? It was for us.
Speaker: Yeah. And a lot of the cosplayers are like pretty serious. Like, so there are some of these cosplayers that are like people that enter competitions regularly and stuff. And, and some of the work was just, and the thing is nobody, there's no contest or anything. Nobody's going there, like, you know, to, you know, I guess to some extent to show off or whatever, but like really everybody's just going there because they love to, you know, dress up in their costumes in this world kind of thing, which is really neat.
Speaker: It was such a chill event. Like every night they have the basement of one of the buildings. It looks kind of like a pub, so they set it up like a pub. They call it the Dancing Pony. And everyone just kind of gathers there. I also can't actually pronounce their name, the Robnanigan Bards.
Speaker: Rob Dignanian bards. Rob Dignanian. Yeah. Yeah. So, so Mark Gunn and I think the other guy's name is Andrew McKee. They're there the whole weekend. They bring them there for the whole weekend and they, they play during dinner and then they come down into the pony, quote unquote, after dinner. And we basically, it's like a singing circle kind of thing. Like everybody just sits around and.
Speaker: you know, they probably play for a good like five or six hours a day. That's so cool. Yeah, if you don't want to sit around and sing, because that's not my speed. There's also just, you know, a bunch of tables that you can sit around with people. And then there are a ton of fire pits. So
Speaker: The fire pit happens basically every night. One of the nights we were there, someone brought their like crazy telescope, and this isn't like super Middle Earth related, but you know, we - It was an elf telescope time. Yeah, yeah. Elf magic. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah. And because there's, it's out in the middle of nowhere and there's like no light pollution. You can see all kinds of really cool stuff in the sky. So that's really cool. Yeah. We sat a lot around a fire pit one night and just got hammered and played cards against Arda on our phones. And so that was fun.
Speaker: A lot of random Norwegian metal got played around a campfire. As you do. I don't know why there's so much overlap between Norwegian metal fans and Middle Earth fans, but there is this huge.
Speaker: northern Finnish and Norwegian and Swedish. There's so much metal crossover between that sphere and the Tolkien sphere. And I'm like, I don't understand it, to be honest.
Speaker: I guess it's just the North mythology influences or whatever. Right. And so and Viking rampage and, you know, songs to slay to. I don't know. Yeah. So I don't even know if I had other questions in here. My cat helpfully rewrote our episode. Oh, good. What questions did the kitty have to ask?
Speaker: It was a bunch of brackets. I certainly can't read what questions Shoudy wanted to ask of you, so I apologize to her for failing in this task. No, one of the questions that I wanted to ask was, this is the first time you attended, correct? Yes. So as first time attendees, what was something that intrigued or surprised you a lot about the event?
Speaker: I guess for me, it was that it was actually a way queer event than I expected it to be. There was definitely sort of a generational divide. I would say the vast majority of the people that were there were, there was maybe a couple of people that were like under 30, but I would say maybe 95 % of the people were 30 and above. Maybe 50 % of the people were like 50 or above. Does that seem accurate, Alicia?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a pretty similar demographic split to MythCon, which is not helpful to anyone who's not on this call right now. I would say that is pretty likely, although like my view of people under 30 is a little skewed because I talked to one of those people at length. Yes. But yeah, especially in that younger contingent, and I say, I say younger in this context, I mean, like, you know, the.
Speaker: 25 to 50 kind of crowd. It seemed like very heavily skewed towards queer people, like a lot of non -binary people, trans people, gay and general people. I know at least there were a couple that were like aroas.
Speaker: that kind of thing too and it was it was really cool experience and not something that I was expecting because especially it's sort of the tables that we were hanging out like sort of late into the evening at the pony like around the campfires and stuff I was in the minority as a fucking like cis straight dude and that was
Speaker: really interesting to me you know and I found it I mean I was definitely having to be very conscious of pronoun usage and stuff like that which I'm just in my daily life I don't interact with that many queer people especially like not that not people that are like openly non -binary or trans and so it was really an interesting experience for me in that respect just having to be that conscious of it and having those experiences and I don't know what it is about the event necessarily that
Speaker: You know, it does seem like a very welcoming group of people in general. Like they talk about, you know, it feels a little cultish, to be honest. Like they talk about, like, you know, once you've come once, you're, you're part of, quote unquote, the family sort of thing. The family. Well, I mean, that's, that's actually a very clear thing. So. Yeah, exactly. I was kind of waiting for the Kool -Aid to get passed around.
Speaker: So, wait, is being queer a cult now? Okay, might have to rethink some of this. It was really a great experience speaking as a non -binary person to be around that.
Speaker: number of people who also are non -binary or genderqueer in some way. Yeah. Tim and I had a ton of conversations about what pronouns does this person use? And I'm like, shit, I don't know. Just use they. It's the safest. Just use they.
Speaker: I had a lengthy conversation with some, with a couple of people about hormone replacement therapy, which is not at all what I thought I was going to be discussing at a Tolkien event. Totally. It was fantastic. Like to just really feel like fellowship with a bunch of people who are similar to me, even though, I mean, I know a lot of those people from other events, but to have everyone all together and just being our weird little queer selves, it was great.
Speaker: Ah, I love that. Yeah. It's kind of kind of a rare thing in Tolkien to encounter, especially like in like an in -person event. So they sort of hope that this means that this is going to become a lot less rare, especially as those quote unquote younger folks, the 20 to 50 year olds start aging up and kind of, you know, becoming the, I don't know, the old guard of Tolkien, you know,
Speaker: I kind of hope that the demographics are changing in all sorts of areas of society and I'm eager for it for what's going on in Tolkien for sure. Yeah, it was interesting to me. I had a thought about potentially doing like a demographic survey of different Tolkien groups because I've noticed as I've gone to more and more events, there are older queer people at Tolkien events and they're generally lesbians.
Speaker: Mm hmm. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm like, I'm here for it. I mean, what are hobbits, if not cottagecore lesbians, honestly? That's that's that's it. That's exactly. Speaking of demographics as well, another thing that struck me is it is a very white event. Oh, yeah. Which is probably not surprising to anybody there. You know, I could there's probably less than five percent people of color kind of thing.
Speaker: Yeah, one of the gentlemen that was part of like the ranger group was black, lovely guy. There was a woman, I think that maybe a Filipino descent, but it was very, very white. But again, you know, I think that's honestly, you know, the demographic of Tolkien fans definitely does skew pretty white, but still, you know, it would have been nice to see a little bit more representation in that respect. But, you know, I think we can get queer as hell is still pretty good.
Speaker: I saw like three Asian people there. True. Yeah. Which is the highest number of Asian people I've ever seen at a Tolkien event ever. Yeah, which is pretty sad. Also a little heartening, right? Yeah.
Speaker: It's a reminder to all of us that we have a lot of work to do to make our spaces actively welcoming instead of just passively welcoming if we're trying to hold space for everyone in Tolkien fandom and in Middle Earth. And I will say that the experience of the event itself was very good in general and there's not much that I can say that's negative about it. It does kind of feel a little bit like it's organized on a wing and a prayer.
Speaker: You know, they give you a schedule like very last minute and you just kind of have to know or ask somebody else like where things are is like, Oh, where's dinner tonight? Cause there's one night that they have it under, basically they set up this area on sort of a satellite area of the Shaker village to be a party tree. And it's beautiful. But like, if I didn't know that it was out there, I would have just gone to the barn where we'd eaten dinner the past two nights, which is also lovely, but not where dinner would have been that night.
Speaker: And it was two miles away from the bar. Basically you somewhere that you have to drive to. Yeah. He did the work for your dinner, man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In terms of the programming too, because I feel like partially because Mike dropped out and partially because I just get the feeling like Tim, that it is just kind of on a wing and a prayer. Most of the programming was incredibly heavily Christian.
Speaker: The academic program especially, yeah, they had a couple of guys there. I'll just say names. I think it was Charlie Starr, who is a professor. I can't remember at what school. I'm vaguely familiar with his work. And I think he's more of a Lewis Scholar, honestly, than he is a Tolkien Scholar. You know, it's super surprising. And then another guy named Devon Brown, who I had not ever heard of before personally. And they were the ones that were giving the, I think all of basically the academic program.
Speaker: I'm famously sick to fucking death of all Jesus all the time in terms of Tolkien. I mean, I'm right there with you. And then you want to volunteer the next time I go to have some like not overtly Christian scholarship happening. Yeah. Like some of the other stuff was cool. They had a bunch of costuming stuff, like historical costuming in particular. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, as someone who spent a year and a half hand sewing historically accurate Hobbit costumes, I appreciated that they were leaning into kind of more historical costuming. And it's one of the things that I honestly miss about DragonCon. DragonCon used to have in the Tolkien track a bunch of costuming content, which got me into wanting to do cosplay.
Speaker: And I wish that they would bring that back, but this isn't a episode about Dragon Con and its failings. I'm sure we'll have that episode at some point as well. Perhaps. And then the other thing, you know, that was a little bit negative surrounding Aylep was
Speaker: Again, because it is an event that's happening during the pandemic, you know, they had to make choices in terms of like what COVID mitigation measures they were going to take and stuff. I guess last year they had sort of a very small scale back event where they did require vaccination or proof of a negative test. They didn't have that this year, but they did end up requiring masks and
Speaker: the Facebook group got spicy when they said that they were going to require masks. There was a lot of people that were great and said like, yeah, that's fine. You know, I'm not crazy about it, but I'll do it. But then there were some people that straight up said like, I'm not coming if I have to wear a mask and whiny fucking yeah, conservative.
Speaker: anti -science bullshit. And that wasn't great. Yeah. Keep in mind this is happening in Kentucky and therefore it draws a lot of locals. And I feel like I am safe to make generalizations about people who live in Kentucky because I am from Georgia.
Speaker: I'm not sure if it was even all conservatives. It felt like there was a little bit of that horseshoe effect, like our lefty, like hippie, crunchy hippie. Like I don't trust anything that's not quote unquote all natural kind of thing. And there was actually one dude that I know is a practicing whip. So I don't know.
Speaker: political leanings, but I think because of that was very much into the organic like, you know, I don't want to take anything into my body that's not all natural kind of thing. None of that really surfaced at the actual event. I will say, you know, there were a lot of people that were not wearing masks, even though they were required, but nobody really like made us think about it. It was just, you do you, I do me kind of thing.
Speaker: I spent a lot of time at fire pits because of that. Yeah, outside. Yeah. But the group that we were kind of conversing with was pretty good about it.
Speaker: Yeah, one of the people in the group lives with somebody who's really high risk. So we were all being as serious about that as we could be. Even when we were just hanging out inside by ourselves, one of the nights we ended up in a house because the housing works in like individual houses and they're split into little hotel rooms. So our house was rented out completely with people that we knew, mostly people that we lived near in Atlanta. And one night we spent
Speaker: a couple of hours in like the downstairs of our house. And we were all a little common area. Yeah, we were all still wearing masks because one of those people is someone who lives with somebody who is really highly at risk, even though we were all a group of relatively careful vaccinated people. It got brought up. You don't know what I've been careful really means. Right. Everyone's everyone's level of care is is different for sure. Yeah.
Speaker: And that was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to go back at some point, whether we do the halfway one or the next full one. It was so just like chill and liberating. And like, I got up every morning and ate breakfast and then came back and had a nap and then woke up and put on some cosplay and just like walked around and read a book and then took her dog out because we had to take her dog with us in my cosplay. Yeah. And then it was time for dinner. It was great. That sounds idyllic.
Speaker: Gordon was Juan the Hound of Valinor for the weekend. Yes, there you go. And his little goggles. Yeah, I will say the food as well was very Hobbit -ish. Like it was, you know, full sort of Southern breakfast and grits and everything.
Speaker: Fucking biscuits and gravy. Man, I've missed that. Baked apples with breakfast every morning and it was really good. Well, I'm glad to know that events like this exist and to have it on my radar and to have it on our listeners radar, too, because I think some of the the way that we manifest the the hope for continued inclusion and increased inclusion in Tolkien spaces is
Speaker: by being able to share the successes and challenges and all that of the events that we're attending. So this has been fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. So for the next section of our episode, we're going to jump into our first Quick Post segment.
Speaker: So Quick Post, as you may remember, is the name of the postal service operating in the Shire. Every few episodes on kind of an irregular basis, but just as needed, we'll do a Quick Post segment to give you updates about the world of Tolkien and Tolkien in the world.
Speaker: And so we're going to start off with kind of a hard right turn here. Oh no. We're going to go to hell for that one. Yeah.
Speaker: just because there is some really, you know, fucking terrible news in the realm of world politics and association with Tolkien right now, and that can be most succinctly summed up in two words, which is one person's name, and that's Georgia Maloney. Yeah.
Speaker: exasperated size. Everyone's size. It's been nearly 100 years and Italy's still showing its entire ass. For anyone who isn't familiar with Maloney, Maloney is the newly elected Prime Minister of
Speaker: Italy. She is the head of a neo -fascist party that came out of the roots of the fascist party there in Italy. She is the most right wing person to hold this role since Benito Mussolini. And I think she would see that as a badge of honor, sadly. She does as does most of her family to my understanding, because they are also involved in the party.
Speaker: talking. The reason that this relates to Tolkien is that she is a huge Tolkien fan. As are most fascists in Italy. This is true. Yeah. And this is actually something that I think a lot of folks in the wider just general Tolkien fandom don't realize that this is there's an organized fascist neo -fascist movement that is taking place in
Speaker: you know, various countries. But in particular, Italy has since 1977 been running neo -fascist hobbit camps called Campo Hobbit. And this is going to sound great in this context.
Speaker: children's youth fascist training camps, because those were always worked out well in history. Yikes. On several trikes. Yes. Basically indoctrination into far right and fascist ideals. Stream right wing, anti -immigrant, anti -socialism. Deeply anti -LGBTQ. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I want to point out this is not something that is new or just in the news. There have been entire academic papers written about this particular subject because it is so important and terrifying. Yeah.
Speaker: It's just so hard to see what they could possibly see and identify with in Tolkien's works. But when you read into it, it's things like having different peoples that have their own spaces and countries that are their own and that they don't interact with each other kind of thing. They don't intermarry with each other. Exactly. Except when they do, in order to save the entire fucking world, they have to work together to do so.
Speaker: And then it's a lot of anti -globalization and anti -technology sentiments and stuff like that.
Speaker: Oh, well Mordor and the Ring is, you know, represents all of modern technology and we should have skewed that for simpler times. As much as I hate this, people say Tolkien's rolling over in his fucking grave. As you say, he definitely is not, I think, with all the other shit that people tell us that he's definitely rolling over his grave about. He definitely is for this. He absolutely is for this.
Speaker: Because he, one, hated fascists as evidenced by our 20 -minute rant about him and Nazis in our unofficial first episode, and two, the suggestion that perhaps the ring might be allegorical.
Speaker: Yeah, that would really piss him off. It's just organized a letter writing campaign to Georgia Maloney and her government of that letter where Tolkien talks about how much you fucking paid to not write. I'm like, hey, this, he would not like you. Just walk, walk, walk, walk, walk forever and ever. Oh, man.
Speaker: But no, for more than half a century in Italy, the fascist parties there have constructed their identity around this traditionalist, like mythic age and symbols and heroes and creation myths and all of that.
Speaker: And I want to point out that what they're doing in that is that they're appropriating fiction and twisting it to create a fictitious past, this modern construction.
Speaker: of a regressive past that was more regressive than history even ever was. And it's an entirely modern construction. Yeah. The past that never existed at all. Yeah, it's the South will rise again, fucking Americans. It's the misogynists that want to go back to Pleasantville fucking 1950s America that never really existed or only really existed for upper white class men, basically, and nobody else in America, right?
Speaker: Yeah, it's Make America Great Again. It is the Italian fantasy -based fascist movement. And in fact, link up there because Steve Bannon, in fact, has spoken and been a guest of honor at one of the training camps that Maloney herself hosts and organizes. I really thought he was dead.
Speaker: I don't know. We're still yikes and tricks here. From your lips to Satan's ears. Because I hadn't heard about him in a while and the last time I saw a picture of him, he looked really like, he looked Mitch McConnell bad, right? He's always looked that terrible. I think from the day he was born, he looked like that. The man looks like he's actively rotting.
Speaker: Well, evil will age a white person like milk. Yeah, he's like Emperor Palpatine, like where, you know, the more evil he gets, the more horrifically he distorts. One of the things that I did want to point out, the New York Times did sort of a profile on this phenomenon. And they point out that after the Second World War,
Speaker: younger members of the fascist movement were starting to feel excluded from civil society. And so they seized on a particular edition of Lord of the Rings in Italian prefaced by Ella Meyer Zola, a philosopher who was, quote, a point of reference on the hard right and who argued that Tolkien was talking about everything we confront every day. So these are some of the talking points that are being used in this context. And Maloney actually in an interview
Speaker: said that Tolkien explains better than we can what conservatives believe in, which is one thing that just pisses me off. Yeah, it's kind of chilling. Conservatives famously are all about interracial friendships banding together to
Speaker: to save the world. Sailing off into the West with your bro. Being aristocratic and befriending people of a lower socioeconomic status than you.
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of chilling, I think. Another line from the very end of that article from the New York Times really, really kind of disturbs me on a deep level. It's a quote from her in the article. She says, I consider power very dangerous. I consider it an enemy and not a friend. And based on what she has been doing for most of her life and now being poised to take
Speaker: on this position of power in Italy, I kind of have to wonder if she actually believes that. If she actually believes in what she's saying there because her actions suggest suggest otherwise. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Speaker: And I will say that I think that this is maybe one of the sort of side effects, whether good or bad, of Rings of Power and all of the backlash that we've seen. I don't know that all these thing pieces would be getting written if Tolkien wasn't sort of at the forefront of the public conscious right now. And so regardless of how you feel about Rings of Power, I think that it's, you know, just the fact that we're having these conversations about Tolkien, that it's dragging a lot of this terrible shit into the light and shining a light, you know,
Speaker: When did you think you were gonna see an article about, you know, fascist groups co -opting Tolkien in the fucking New York Times? Like, so... Or Stephen Colbert. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Stephen Colbert has an amazing segment on this, which we will try to provide a link to in the show notes there for Abel. And I don't want to spoil all of the punchlines because he does such great delivery on all this and really, really takes it to task in a very humorous sort of way that juxtaposes the horror and the humor. Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm glad at least that some light is being shone on all of this in a more mainstream fashion. Like a lot of people already knew that it was happening, but you know, that it is kind of being brought more into the mainstream discourse. I do hope that that continues. This coverage of Maloney is some of the first coverage that hasn't just been like, oh, angry fans and has been like, oh, wait, no, we're actually tying it to a fascist movement. I hope more of that starts happening.
Speaker: because like yeah there are angry fans but there has been this organized group of fascists using Lord of the Rings and other cultural touchstones to further push their agenda and they have been for a literal decade now and people have just not been paying attention to it or writing it off as like some
Speaker: low -stakes culture war when it's more than that. There's a reason that a significant percentage of articles about Tolkien have been written in right -wing publications in the United States like the National Review.
Speaker: There's a distinct reason for that. It's a long -standing, evolving phenomenon, and the fact that a lot of us have been lucky enough to escape recognizing it doesn't mean that it hasn't been happening.
Speaker: to just really horrifying other details from this about Maloney. And then we'll move on to our next point. Just there is a a group, a musical group that is a like fascist folk band. Fucking hell.
Speaker: I think as an extremist folk band, I'm like, it's just this. I'm going to play the fiddle real aggressively. I'm familiar with like Joni Mitchell being a Tolkien fan, and so this is just hard to wrap my brain around.
Speaker: But the band Fellowship of the Ring plays songs about European identity, including what became the anthem of Maloney's party's youth front, Tomorrow Belongs to Us, which is the echo of the ballad, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, sung by a member of the Hitler Youth and Chilling Scene in the movie Cabaret.
Speaker: Wow, that's so on the nose. It's so on the nose. Also, they did acknowledge that in the context of Campo Hobbit, the camps have their fair share of fascist sluts, but they're characterized as ironic.
Speaker: Oh, right. Because that also definitely is not a part of the wider far right movement spreading its tentacles across the internet. They definitely never use irony or it's just a joke or humor or any other kind of way of shitposting to, you know, frog, the OK symbol, all of that. As soon as they get called out, it's like, well, it's just sarcasm. It's just irony. I'm just doing it ironically. It's just a joke. Calm down.
Speaker: Yeah, the sound that listeners may be able to hear in the background is the collective sound of all of our eyes just rolling back in our skull as we react. I do just want to point out, if there are any people who are currently listening to this podcast who identify with that fascist shitposting nonsense, fuck you in particular. Yes. Stop listening. I don't know why you're listening, but stop it. I'm not sure how you're not here, but I think you're lost.
Speaker: This is not the podcast you're looking for. Move along. Move along. The other thing is that Maloney points out that she essentially elevates Tolkien's text or at least her interpretation of it to the level of no longer being a secular text, but being a religious text. Oh, please tell me she's one of those fucking canonized Tolkien chuckle fucks.
Speaker: That would require even more research into Maloney than I have done, and I gross. There's only so many showers you can take. I was going to say, that might be a rabbit hole that I might not want to dive down into. Yeah. These are the same people who are 100 % old. Tolkien would hate that. I just want any of those people, if you didn't fuck off and I just told you to, be well aware.
Speaker: Tolkien would roll over in his grave at least five times to hear anyone trying to elevate his work to the status of a religious text. Primarily, I'm basing that on his dislike of Lewis's proselytization because he didn't think that lay people should have any say in religion at all because he was incredibly Catholic.
Speaker: Yeah, get the fuck off with that. Yeah, he was very careful to remove overt religious reference from his text as often as he caught it. Certainly he might have believed in themes and what have you, but he was very, very careful about this and very upfront about this in his letters. So, phew folks. Yeah.
Speaker: God, I got way more heated about this than I was expecting. Hey man, if you're not flames on the side of your face about fascists, then I don't know why you're here. You're not paying attention. You're not paying attention, that's right.
Speaker: Shifting gears just over across the Atlantic, coming back over here to America again, link up with Mr. Bannon having an overlap with this. But this is a more, I think, hopeful news item. And that is that there is a podcast that at least some of us among the hosts have been listening to and really enjoying.
Speaker: once the American Id podcast, hosted by Danny Holtz and Craig Franzen. They've started their debut series by looking at Tolkien and the Rings of Power, the backlash around it, and contextualizing that over a series of researched, nuanced, in -depth episodes, where they explore the efforts of the American extremist right wing to purify, quote unquote, Middle Earth,
Speaker: and to purify Tolkien for their ideological purposes, how that's unfolded over the last six decades. They have a lot of really interesting information in their shows and a lot of things that are just really interestingly contextualized that I think one of the reasons that I in particular am enjoying it is that
Speaker: It helps me feel like I understand the full context and I'm not being gaslit by people who claim that this is a new phenomenon or it's an isolated phenomenon. Yeah. Ten thousand percent. I've been morbidly reading and researching a lot about conservatism and about the far right.
Speaker: particularly the niche of Christian nationalism and Christian dominionism and Christian fascism. And in the Venn diagram of a lot of these things, Tolkien comes up a disturbing amount. And again, for the reasons that we've kind of been talking about. And Craig and Danny do a really great job of outlining how this movement
Speaker: Is an actual movement and not an isolated phenomenon that isn't it's not a fan like spheres sort of isolated bits of upset fans about things it's strategic it's organized to a far greater degree than you might think.
Speaker: And there are a lot of different actors and players in this, some of whom don't even realize that they're actually a part of this network of chaos and bigotry. They go into how each of these things has built upon the previous piece historically. Yeah. And I think that's really key to the contextual understanding because I am in my 30s and this has been going on twice as long as I have been alive.
Speaker: And that matters to me to know the context. And it's been going on since the internet debuted during our childhood. I'm also not, I don't know if I'm an older millennial, but I'm in my 30s as well. And so I'm kind of like, I can remember there not being an internet and then there being an internet. And so it's been a tool for this movement that has only contributed to maybe more of its members have deteriorated, but
Speaker: Their impact, I think, is magnified exponentially thanks to the internet. So yeah, it's been a podcast that I've just been really, really, really enjoying. It just started. And I feel like if you're interested in this sort of information, then it's a really worthwhile resource for you. Yeah.
Speaker: One of the things that was just very salient to me was looking at the context of how so much of the conservative attempt to claim Tolkien has started in places like the National Review and decades ago.
Speaker: But now with the backlash about Rings of Power and everything like that, I've noticed that a lot of the articles that continue getting shared in Tolkien spaces, in spaces about that show, are articles published through Forbes.
Speaker: And this lends a veneer of respectability, but the people publishing and writing these articles are contributors to the national review. There is a distinct lens that is going on, and it's not particularly hidden. It takes very little effort to scratch the surface and see it, and to understand the political connections of why a business magazine like Forbes
Speaker: whose readership skews toward business executives who are 70 % of them.
Speaker: align with the conservative right, why they're publishing this sort of content and what tradition it comes out of. So yeah. I haven't actually been listening to this podcast, but I'm just going to jump in to vouch for Craig and Danny as people and as scholars. I have been to numerous conferences at this point where Craig has been presenting his research and it's all incredibly well founded and it's good shit. And I'm assuming if he takes
Speaker: half of what he's putting into his scholarship into this podcast. It has also got to be incredible.
Speaker: Yeah, I've been a fan of Craig since I think I saw him on probably one of those panels that you have mentioned before. And so yeah, I was super excited to learn that he and Danny were coming out with this podcast because I think it really is a chance for that research to reach an even wider audience than he's been able to before.
Speaker: Yeah. And it needs to. And I am so thankful that he is willing to take on the actual physical risk of releasing this research into the greater public. Yeah. It's really important stuff. It's dark and it's kind of terrifying. I'm one of those who's like, I like to have knowledge as kind of an inoculation, I guess, against some of this really dark stuff.
Speaker: And so the more I know, the more I feel like I'm able to point out when it appears in my sphere. And unfortunately, with the show, it's been appearing a lot more. So we've been encountering numerous books with numerous takes on Tolkien, many of which would probably be recognized and favored by Georgia Maloney.
Speaker: On that related note, news item, there's apparently a television show airing in the Tolkien space. You may have heard of it. What? What are you talking about? I've missed this entirely. In actual connection to our previous topic, the space of Tolkien.
Speaker: scholarship and research, we wanted to highlight a particular review of a book that has come out in recent months on the topic. The title of the book is Token Race and Racism in Middle Earth by Robert Stewart. And here I will just distinctly note that what we're centering is Demetra Fimi's review of that book, which she did just release. It's a beautiful eight page review.
Speaker: Demetra fame is a fucking boss. Yes. In Journal of Tolkien Research. Yes. And this review is like, like chef's kiss, masterful annihilation. The knife work on this academic evisceration is particularly beautiful.
Speaker: Ah, she dissembles this book with surgical precision. Yeah, I just want to give some context for people who don't have it. Demetra Fimi in 2008 wrote a book called Tolkien Race and Cultural History. We've mentioned it before because it is like a foundational book in Tolkien studies. It was the first monograph written about Tolkien and racism and it started a swell of scholarship that has followed it.
Speaker: So, this book, Tolkien Race and Racism in Middle Earth, claimed in its blurb as promotional materials that it was the first monograph about racism in Middle Earth, which is just false. 100 % false. Because Phoebe's book was put out by the same fucking publisher. I still haven't gotten over that. Paul Green, what are you doing? Yeah, what the fuck are you doing over there?
Speaker: For anyone who does want to do a deep dive on their own into this particular book, you can buy it new or used for $121 .39. Jesus. Or you can get Demetra Femi's book, which is so much better and only like 20 bucks.
Speaker: and actually support, instead of supporting a white man who has never published in Tolkien studies before. We'll get back to that one. Yeah, who thought that he needed to wade into the fray and put up a defense of Tolkien and his racism. You can actually support a very well -known and wonderful scholar, Dimitra Fimi.
Speaker: Yeah, the book apparently should not have been called Tolkien Race and Racism in Middle -earth, but Tolkien Man of his time was definitely not racist in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, that's the accurate title. Yeah, that's the real title. So I have a personal beef with scholars outside of Tolkien studies who dip into Tolkien studies to
Speaker: published something, having not engaged with the field at all. And it's something that happens all the fucking time with Tolkien studies. We're a very small, very insular field. I have been chastised for saying that because there are a few hundred people who work in Tolkien studies, but that's tiny.
Speaker: When you take into consideration the thousands of people who studied Shakespeare, et cetera. Right. A lot of us know each other. No one knows who the fuck this guy is because he's never published Tolkien at all. And as one of my friends said, the brass fucking balls this man has to dip his toe into Tolkien with a monograph having never published in any of the Tolkien journals and it to be this monograph.
Speaker: Wow. The fucking Caw Cassidy, the confidence of a white man. A mediocre white man, yeah. So brave. Full disclosure, I have not read the entirety of this book. I have skimmed a couple of chapters. I don't really feel a need to read this book, having read Demetra Femi's, which, yeah.
Speaker: based on the chapters I've skimmed seems vastly superior and also after reading this fucking review, Dimitra Feeney left it this month.
Speaker: Yeah. If anybody had an inkling of an idea to pick up this book and add it to their library, I strongly recommend that you check out Professor Fimi's. Take that $120 by Demetra Fimi's book, buy her Audible course that she has on, uh, on Audible right now about Derek Tolkien. And then, you know, pick up a couple of copies for some of your friends who could use a good read also, like money, much better spent. Yeah. Yep.
Speaker: However, download this review that she did. The Journal of Token Research is an open access journal. It is worth reading. The first couple of paragraphs of that review made me need a cigarette, not even smoke. It was some of the best academic evisceration I have ever read. In the first paragraph,
Speaker: She I mean, she completely so elegantly refutes the idea that this is that his work is the first in this field and just like she cites. Can I read this quote?
Speaker: Yeah, please do, please. Quote, it reads more like an unrealized book proposal. And at the same time, an attempt to flaunt all the serious critical reading which has happened in the background of the study in order to establish the writer's authority. Parentheses. This is the first time Stewart has published on Tolkien. Beautiful.
Speaker: Yeah, and then she does the boss move of citing herself numerous times in the review. She cites herself in the first paragraph, or references her work in the first paragraph, and also that of Robin Ann Reed, who is another tremendous scholar in this particular field.
Speaker: If you need bibliographic research done, Robin reads the person to do it. She's done a ton of bibliographic research. She knows the field of Tolkien studies better than basically anyone other than David Bratman, who does the Tolkien year review and scholarship. Yeah. And she does it with him now. Yeah. Like just don't fuck with these people. They know the field much better than Bobby Stu. They're better than you.
Speaker: One of the things that I really love in her review here is that she takes to task the entire premise of this writing as well. He's asking questions like, was Tolkien a racist and everything like that?
Speaker: And this is a beautiful quote that I want to share, where she says, demonstrating that Tolkien wasn't self -consciously racist, that he did not set up to deliberately write a racist mythology, that he wasn't a Nazi sympathizer, nor did he directly and specifically endorse the ideology of other contemporary fascist groups in Britain and beyond, is pretty easy. Anyone who can read his fiction and nonfiction can see that.
Speaker: Anybody literate and figure out what you're trying to prove. Oh my god. What is at stake and is taken up as a challenge in much contemporary token scholarship is more complex than this. This entire book is written by a white dude who doesn't know shit about systemic racism is what I'm getting from this.
Speaker: like yeah it is very possible I know I'm speaking to the choir here to be racist and not intend to be racist because we all as white people benefit from a system built upon degradation of people of color yeah fucking christ guys and I understand this dude's from Australia and is not going to have the same like background with racism as like an American would
Speaker: Or a European for that matter. A very different sort of background though, that perhaps he should educate himself upon before endeavoring to talk about it in a book length screed, I guess.
Speaker: And to have more connections into the area of scholarship where you are seeking to publish can only enrich your work and make it better. And it's simply not the step he didn't do. I would take him writing one single paper for any of our peer -reviewed journals. We have a number of them. You have to cut your teeth.
Speaker: And cutting your teeth is not writing a borderline researched monograph. That's not where you fucking start. And it just kind of speaks to, again, fucking Paul Grave. Come on, you guys. You give this to a white dude who has very little to show for it. It's sort of like, what on earth kind of message are you trying to send?
Speaker: And what have you been doing lately for some perhaps some other scholars of color, some queer scholars or anybody else, basically? And instead you kind of opted for this really easy way to get money because Rings of Power is out and Tolkien is in the public sphere again.
Speaker: But this is also just a complete failure of capitalism, too, because to claim that this is the first in this field, when you also publish the actual first in this field, sell them both. Like, the marketing department should all be fired? Yeah. Like, hire me, Paul Graves.
Speaker: I just how do you forget that you published like as much as I don't like to use this word the seminal book on this subject? How do you just forget that? It wasn't all that long ago either. So maybe that full department has like turned over since then, but nobody knows what the hell is going on.
Speaker: Just searching, Tolkien, and racism brings up Demetra Femi's book. A fucking cursory Google search would have solved this problem. Yeah, absolutely. Like, unforgivable. You don't even have to go to Google Scholar. You can just go to regular Google. Just go to Google? Yeah, man.
Speaker: Yeah. And by setting it up and framing it all this way, too, it doesn't set up any further research for success. It doesn't set up this particular scholar who wrote this book for good reception because it's just every aspect of it is slapdash.
Speaker: I can't even imagine this guy coming to an actual Tolkien conference at this point. Showing his face. I would go to his talk and fucking heckle him. I would be that dickbag in the audience heckling the speaker because the caucacity, the caucacity of this book. It's like, yeah, you don't you don't deserve it. You have not earned our respect here, man. You don't deserve it. In conclusion, fuck you, Bobby Stu.
Speaker: Go read Demetra Fimi. Which you should have done before you began this book. To be 100 % fair to this guy, he actually does cite Demetra Fimi in his work. It just seems like he didn't actually, I don't know, absorb what it was she was talking about. I don't think he took quite the right lessons away from it.
Speaker: He needs to reread it I think. Also, why did he allow them to bill his book as the first of this kind, if he had cited to meet your famous book when he cites a previous monograph. I have so many fucking questions about this and so much rage about all of it.
Speaker: However, Demetra Fimi is delightful and please read her review of this horrible book. Yes, please download it. Please read the review. It is a delight to read and also read her book.
Speaker: and do her Audible course while doing that one again. Speaking of books, the last topic that we wanted to just touch on in our quick post review here is the current art of the manuscript exhibition that Alicia mentioned that is currently going on at Marquette University. This should send us off on a little bit more of a cheerful note.
Speaker: But we've been quite cheerful this entire time. What are you talking about? I'm not sure Bobby Stu is if he hears it. We've been, well, I guess that's it. We've been perhaps cheerful about different things, but yeah.
Speaker: It often surprises people to learn that there is a sizable trove of Tolkien manuscripts in the collections of Marquette University's Rayner Memorial Library. That collection contains the original manuscripts and multiple working drafts for The Hobbit, Firmergiles of Ham, The Lord of the Rings, and the original copy of Mr. Bliss, among other papers, etc.
Speaker: The reason for that is that in 1956, Marquette University had hired a new director of libraries. They were constructing Memorial Library, which is the older of the two connected buildings. Marquette is a Catholic Jesuit university, and Reddy was tasked with expanding the collections. He had a particular interest in preserving the works and manuscripts of Catholic authors around the world.
Speaker: Tolkien qualified in his view. So in 1956, the same year that he came on board, Marquette purchased the manuscripts for 1500 pounds. That is accounting for all of the inflation and all of the translation between currencies still less than $40 ,000 today. What? Yup. $39 ,000 today.
Speaker: And 1956 was before everything had taken off. It was before the paperback copies became so popular in the United States. It was before there were adaptations. So it was very early on in the process.
Speaker: By that year, 1956, papers started arriving, and a lot of it was there by 1957, although Christopher Tolkien, throughout his life, as he was researching things and would find individual sheaths that were supposed to be part of that collection, would continue sending them to Marquette.
Speaker: Most of the rest of Tolkien's papers and a lot of ephemera are held by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Some of those items are currently on loan to Marquette for the Art of the Manuscript exhibit, which is going on there at the Hagerty Museum of Art on the Marquette University campus.
Speaker: And full disclosure, I have been. It is amazing. Oh, my gosh. So jealous, especially if you're a nerd. I'm not sure that my like 12 year old nephew would be excited on the same level, but I was very excited. They offer three time slots every day for admission. It's a ten dollar ticket for adults with some discounts available for different things. The exhibit runs until the 23rd of December. So it's it's still going for a couple of months here.
Speaker: And I would honestly go back again and again and again just to be able to look at all of the artwork. They have some of the pages of the Book of Mars of Wool and different things that are annotated with his handwriting drafts where Strider is still named Trotter.
Speaker: Oh my gosh. Oh yes, the hobbit that wore shoes. Yeah, very, very cool things there. Also, I have to give mad respect to Christopher Tolkien in reading his father's written annotations on manuscript graphs and everything because having seen them in person now, oh boy, that's hard to read.
Speaker: Yeah, he's a mess. Alicia and I got to go to the Bodleian Maker of Middle Earth exhibit at Oxford a few years ago and see a bunch of Tolkien stuff in person, including some of his handwriting. And yes, it is practically illegible. Anybody that did, you know, because he hand -wrote everything, he didn't type anything out. So he hand -wrote everything and had somebody, you know, type it up for him.
Speaker: God's bless the people that could actually read his handwriting and type that up. Oh yeah. Yeah, I have yet to actually talk to somebody who did Maker of Middle Earth and also Art of the Manuscript to kind of compare the two. Because I really want to know, I want to go to Art of the Manuscript partially because the exhibition catalog is beautiful and I don't want to get it unless I actually go to the exhibition.
Speaker: And partially because I've seen some of the stuff that's come out of Marquette for reasons I can't talk about. I've never actually been to Marquette but I've seen some interesting things and I would like to see how much of that kind of stuff is actually on exhibit. There's a couple of really cool pieces there. There are some things that have never been exhibited before so there are things that are unique to this exhibit. I think they're going to be fairly small nuance differences but there are some really neat
Speaker: things that are or that are laid out together for the first time and all that. One of the things that's really cool about it is that they have essentially like microfiche set up and they have copies of the single volume Lord of the Rings that was the published version sitting next to it and you can sit and scroll through some of the manuscript drafts and the actual published manuscript is very cool. I don't know if they would let everybody do this. I went on a Sunday when it first opened.
Speaker: And they definitely let me hang out an extra half an hour just like sitting there and nerding out. I highly recommend for comparing the drafts at the Council of Elrond in fellowship. It is a great chapter to look at because in some of the early manuscripts, you get all of Elrond's narration instead of the summarization that is in the actual published draft. That chapter is already so fucking long. I can't even imagine. Yeah.
Speaker: It would be really cool, as you say, I mean, just just going off of like, you know, how much of that is Gandalf narrating? I would be so cool to have Elrond narrating as well instead of just a summary. But yeah, yeah, I wasn't the editor. So there is also a really cool digital system that they've been working on. They've licensed from the token estate, the word Anduin.
Speaker: And they have this digital resource that they're setting up where they can take six different manuscript drafts. And you can look into the different drafts, the handwritten, the typewritten manuscripts, the amended ones, the final published edition, and see how things shifted and changed from draft to draft. And having it digitized in that way makes it really cool and a really cool way to get a sort of a bird's eye view. Yeah.
Speaker: They've been working on that a while, too. Yeah, and I don't get the impression that it's done, that they're still deep in it. Yeah, Eric Mueller -Harter has been working on that, and he's been gone to Wisconsin for just months at a time. He's from Vermont, I do believe.
Speaker: I mean, it's a very cool project. That's extremely cool. Yeah. So that's happy news in the Tolkien space. Yay. Go see Art of the Manuscript, if you can. I so wish that I could, but I'm stuck here in Seattle. So I will have to lust over the catalog and save up. It's a very nice catalog too. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: I do want to bring up like quickly while we're talking about Marquette Bill Fliss, the current guy who's over the Tolkien archive is doing the fandom oral history project. He's taking like five minute interviews from people where you basically just talk about like how you got exposed to Tolkien, what Tolkien means for you. He debuted it at MythCon like three or four years ago. I was one of the first people to do it. Nice.
Speaker: He's really cool. He really sets you at ease. And if you want to hear part of my story, I'm in the first advertising video they did for getting more people to fill out the oral history. It's really interesting. It's going to actually go in the archive along with all of Tolkien's work.
Speaker: Oh, I recommend that if you have, you know, five minutes to spare. Yeah, it's, it is a very cool, very cool archive that's doing a lot of good work and then also has had a really important role in a lot of like Tolkien scholarship and like access for scholars and everything like that. Like, you know, in particular, the Atlas of Middle Earth, Karen Winfunstad.
Speaker: spent a lot of time working in Wisconsin in particular with Marquette University for the Archives and then also UW Oshkosh's cartography department. So there's a lot of sort of like middle America university resources there in the Middle Earth Atlas and I think that's
Speaker: That's really cool. That's very cool. I've done the, I sat down for, you know, three minutes with Bill Fliss and I think I'm in the third aortic. I will post a link to that because my name and stuff is public in there and it's, yeah, it's a lovely experience. Like Alicia said, Bill is just a lovely guy and
Speaker: makes you feel very much at ease. And it's a really cool way to kind of be a part of history, you know, and just and literally just talking about your love of Tolkien and what what your history with Tolkien is. So, so, yeah, we'll post some links to that, I think, to to email and get that set up, because I think he's still he's definitely still looking for for folks to fill out the rest of the rest of the mark, I think so.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm wanting to say, it was part of the, part of the manuscript talk I went to, Bill Felice sent somebody with a bunch of talking points. They're about to finish out one of the airheads, but they still have like 15 more to go or something like that. There's definitely room. There's definitely room. So yeah. So come, come and, come and join and tell your story.
Speaker: And if you want to be able to catch those links and everything, come find us on social media and connect to us, like the podcast, share the podcast. Alicia, where can the folks find us? Yeah. So you can find us on Apple podcast, Google podcasts, or Spotify.
Speaker: You can also stream our episodes directly on Zencaster, which is zencaster .com slash queer lodgings, a Tolkien podcast with the hyphens between all those. Like Grace said, leave us a rating, please like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on Facebook at queer lodgings, Twitter at queer underscore lodgings. And you can also send us an email at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com.
Speaker: I can take a breath now. Excellent. Cool. Good job folks. Our light just like news and reports episode that was going to be a bit of a short episode. I think we've come in under two hours. Jesus Christ, we can't record for less than an hour apparently. We're very bad at this. Yeah. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Bye guys. Bye.
Speaker: Yeah.
