118 - The Hobbit

Good morning to your destined. Good morning, Matt. Are you ready to go on an adventure? Am I ever ready for an adventure?

Are you packed? I don't know, really, but I'm just now finishing my second breakfast and I'm loading the ponies. Well, one can't go on an adventure before second breakfast. Well, today we're going to review the Hobbit, which is something I've been looking forward to forever so long.

Counting down days, my friend. What are you, by the way? I'm a Hobbit. I'm...

...Dochrotty older Hobbit. No, no, we didn't agree on characters. We did agree on characters. I just felt like there should be voices.

I know. Today's the day where we get to review the hobbits, and we thought it would be fun to start here in the Shire as we go on our quest. So what do you say? Let's do it.

It feels so warm and safe and cozy here. Who knows what adventures await us beyond the borders of this friendly place? I listen to the audiobook of the Hobbit because we do this audiobook thing where we recommend books to each other, and then we listen to them, and then we talk about them later. Did you have a chance to do that?

Yeah, absolutely. So I've listened to the Hobbit one and a half times. So I listened to the Rob Inglis version. Which version did you listen to?

I listened to the Andy Serkis version. He's the guy who voiced and acted in the movies. And he was Ulysses Claw, the arms dealer from Wakanda or outside of Wakanda in the Marvel universe. Wasn't he also in the drugstopper?

I wish he was in the drugstopper. You're thinking of Nikolai Volkoff. Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

Sorry. Got it. Okay. He's running drugs again.

Bad drugs. The kind of drugs that need to be stopped, but that can only be stopped by the drugstopper. Got it. Did you really?

So you're basically Tolkien in your story. It's the same exact idea. Rich dynamic characters in an immersive world with serious thematic emphasis. Yeah.

Same guy. A clear sense of purpose. Yeah. 100%.

All right. Let me ask you this. Have you watched the Hobbit movies that Peter Jackson did? All right.

I'm going to level with you. So I read the Hobbit for the first time in sixth grade. And wonderful. I remember thinking about when they were shooting the arrow.

Smaug. Smaug. How ever you want to say that? Smaug.

The concept of having armor on the outside of a magical beast, almost in my mind. But they're being a weak spot and you had to exploit that weak spot. Something about that specifically stuck in my mind. And so that was magical.

Fast forward 10, 15 years, probably 20 years. We were at a lake house retreat thing with a buddy of mine and we decided to watch the Hobbit one evening. And we started watching it and I was just like, this sucks. I fell asleep.

I was like, I'm just not interested in this at all. So I went back last year and I listened to the Hobbit. No, it's earlier this year on our trip out CU. I listened to the Hobbit just for fun and I loved it.

It was great. I could care less about the movies. Or I could not care less about the movies. I don't have that saying as supposed to go.

But I get what you mean. Yeah. So whatever. I think the book is what I'm here to talk about.

Like, if you want to talk about the movie, we can do that. But man, the book is worth it. It's not a movie club. It's a book club.

Yeah, exactly. But the reason I bring it up is because I'm guessing that a bunch of people in the third chair have not read the book, but have seen the very drawn out series of movies that do not live up to the quality of the Lord of the Rings trilogy at all. I mean, one of those Lord of the Rings trilogy movies, Return of the King, one best picture. They were good.

The Hobbit films just didn't work on a lot of levels. We don't need to do a post mortem on that. But the reason I brought up the movies is to say we're talking about the book, not the movies. The movies are weird.

They're caught between two eras of time and thought. They don't know what they are. They don't know what they're trying to be. They queued through at least two directors.

But Tolkien had an entirely different process when he wrote the Hobbit. Have you read anything about that? Do you know anything about where the Hobbit came from? No.

But I know that Tolkien, J.R.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the Hobbit, I knew that he hung out with C.S. Lewis. They used to drink together at this pub called the Eagle and Child.

Or as they call it, The Bird and the Baby. I've been there. Dad and I had fish and chips there. You've been there?

I have. Yeah, I took care of Nutect. We went and hung out. That's awesome.

Yeah. So I went there. I had to make the pilgrimage. They're an Oxfordshire.

Dad and I went over to the kiln's, which was the home of C.S. Lewis. I got C.S. Grave.

I did a grave rubbing. You know what that is? I do. It's where you just lean down and you put your face on the grave and then you just move your hips back and forth so your face rubs on it.

No, that's not a grave rubbing. A grave rubbing is where you take a piece of paper from a local art shop and you try in your broken Alabama English to explain to the dignified man at the art shop, I need to scrape a crayon on the paper so that the letters from the tombstone come off. Oh, you want to take a rubbing, do you? Okay.

So this is what you want to say. They say it. Yeah, no. Anyway, they hooked me up with paper and all this stuff and I took a couple of grave rubbings.

It's really cool. I gave those to some people and I have one here at the house. But anyway, I love it. I love the whole concept of these two people being friends.

My understanding is that J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist. Is that correct? What's a philologist?

I thought a philologist was a person that studied the origin of words. Am I wrong about this? No, I think you're on to something. Yeah, I think that's the right term.

I was just pestering you. Okay, so I'm right. Okay. So such a ginormous word.

Yeah, he was philologist and so he studied words and he was really into literature. But that's about all I know. Like, how did the stories come to be? Well, my understanding is that these are the stories that he made up for his kids.

Really? Yeah, that he just told this, I guess it would have been between maybe the late 1920s and mid 1930s to his kids. Like, my story about the friendly dragon. That's what we did.

We just wrote stories. They weren't this good. But, oh, no. I made up stories for my kids and I put pen to paper on a bunch of this stuff.

And I made it up because the kids were going through those childhood wonder years where all stories are new and fresh. I don't think I imagined myself to be a C.S. Lewis or a J.R. Tolkien because I sure ain't.

But it was really fun. And unlike any other writing I've ever done, making up those stories during the day, knowing that I had a deadline of bedtime each night during those years, it really pushed me to be creative and to think and to show up with something. And then each night I did. It just wasn't good enough to turn it into a book like The Hobbit.

But The Hobbit was good enough. And so you and I get to read The Token Family Bedtime Story. Oh, that's really cool. I made up stories about a little girl named Pink Sausage Mildred.

And her job was, well, the thing she created as her job was she would take her kayak because she lived down by the river, not in a van. But she lived down by the river. I wonder if you'd go there. No.

Down by the river. And people would drive across the river and they threw trash out of the car. And she always took her kayak down there and she would clean up the river. That was her thing.

And so she had a little basket and she had a little pig named Pork Chop. Pork Chop could swim. He was really funny. And her brother named Blue was always getting involved.

Yeah. Sounds like your stories were way better because you had upside down jellyfish stars. That's pretty good. We did have upside down jellyfish stars.

We did have that. My kids got to hear one chapter of Pork Sausage, Pink Sausage Mildred and Pork Chop at that thing that we all went to together in Park City. You didn't have your family. I had mine.

We hung out for a couple of days and nights. And it was story time and you were like, I have one. I was like, yeah, let's take a break from my thing. And so you sat my kids down when they were really little and you told them Mildred and Pork Chop story.

Yeah, I forgot about that. That's the first time you'd ever met them. First time you'd ever met my kids. Oh, I told them about Pink Sausage Mildred.

That's fun. You did. Yeah. It was lovely.

That was cool. Well, sweet. So the Hobbit. Well, let me ask you this.

Does that make the story better for you knowing that this was for his kids and that's who he constructed it for? Or would it be better if you felt like this story was constructed for you? Is that a fact? Like, is it an accepted fact that this was written for his children?

That is an accepted fact. Really? Okay. Yeah.

I've never read that anywhere. I don't know. That is true. If you'd like me to substantiate it for you so that we can move forward, I can do that.

I mean, I take your word for it. That's your fact, not mine. But I don't know if it changes it for me at all. It's just so well done.

It has a story arc. You know, there's an objective that we're trying to do the entire time that's pushing us forward through the story. But there's all these side things that are getting in the way the whole time. The characters are amazing.

Like the mental image I have of goblins, of trolls, you know, the way he draws these characters. And what I thought was really interesting. Or are we just jumping into it? What are we doing here?

Absolutely. Yeah. Rock and roll. The thing I like about the way he starts the book.

You got Bill Boats, The House, Gandalf shows up. He tells you this is a Hobbit and he describes the attributes of Hobbits and all these things. But he puts you in Bilbo's head. And the way he does that is he tells you how awkward things are.

Like, oh, he shows up and he's got to provide food for all these people that are coming in. And he makes you empathize with Bilbo. But you also understand a little bit about Bilbo. He wants everything in order.

And so this is really frazzling him that he has to get all these plates out and feed all these people. And he didn't invite them. They're just barging in. The way Tolkien puts you into the mind of Bilbo early on.

And with what I thought originally was the boring part, you know, like a little party that you're not expecting. It serves a lot of purposes that you don't really see at first. And it helps you empathize with who Bilbo is and helps you understand what exactly he's all about. And that shows you that all of these other adventures are going to be so out of character because he's worried about what time we're going to do breakfast.

I didn't like the scene at first until I went through the second time and I understood what the purpose of it was. That's the way I took it. What did you take about the first scene? What did that do for you?

Yeah, same reaction for me. I found a little drab the first time that I read the Hobbit. I did not read the Lord of the Rings before watching the Lord of the Rings. I just flirted with those books, but never got through the Hobbit.

We went through when I was a kid. Didn't remember it very well. Remember thinking it moved a little slow for my taste. And then re-encountering it in print.

And now an audio book as an adult. I agree. I think that opening sequence is really important. As a kid, I was like, well, I don't even want to know about somebody who likes order and likes his house to be together.

I can't relate to that. Get to the adventure. Now I encounter it again. I'm like, I get that.

I have a way some things work. I find meaning in that. It gives me the same. And fishing company after three days is the rule.

But how much more does that company stink when it's 13 people who show up unannounced and need to be catered to? And there's bulls in a china shop. They're wrecking all your stuff. They just feel screwed up.

And I have a lot of things to do. I have stuff on the calendar. I can't go on a gigantic adventure right now. I just felt such a different batch of emotions and so much more empathy for Bilbo this time around.

But the other thing that I caught that I don't know why it just never stood out to me was all of the business about the baggens' and the tooks. And how token and tones that there is a genetic predisposition within him that is very real and that he is a split personality that half of him secretly wants all of this adventure. And half of him really likes the ease and dignity of not adventure. I love the way he called it tokishness.

I thought that was just the cleverest way to say it. The cleverest. That's a word, right? I liked it.

And then in Lord of the Rings when you've got Pippin and Mary and at the one point Gandalf drops. I thought I took because he's like the took thing means something. It wasn't just like that's your name in that community. That has certain connotations.

Great job. How tookish of you. So I like that the Bilbo was like us. Torn on the question of adventure.

Torn on the question of risk. Torn on the adventure of whether or the issue of whether it should be you or I who goes to resolve a problem or combat an evil or whether it should be someone else but we'd really like someone to please do it. I like that. And I also like the way that introduced this theme throughout of race.

And it's a completely different era of the conversation of what about race? Race. Race. I see.

Yeah. That some things in Middle Earth, please don't read between the lines of this at all in terms of some social commentary on real Earth. But there, Tolkien, the all seeing narrator, is more than comfortable with saying, yes, this tendency exists for this family. And that is somewhat genetic.

And then he just goes to make sweeping racial generalizations about the woodland elves and about the Rivendell elves and about dwarves. They're like this. They're like this and even the best of them still have this tendency. Did that chafe you at all?

Did that feel like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't say that about dwarves? Easy. Not all dwarves. But did that just roll as being just part of the story?

I mean, like the goblins are the way the goblins are, man. Everybody knows the way the goblins are. How are the goblins? Yeah.

I mean, they're just evil things. They make a lot of things, clever things, but nothing of beauty. Ah, yes. Well said.

Yeah. I mean, yes. That line. I remember reading that line.

I was like, man, that's beautiful. And you'd bring it up. I knew you'd bring up that line. Yeah.

Yeah. I thought of you when I heard that, not because I think you're a goblin, but because I knew that line would stand out to you. Oh, it's beautiful. I mean, and there's just so many one-liners that I just connected with.

I like the fact that he says Gandalf is, he couldn't do everything, but he could do most things and he could really be valuable to his friends in a pinch or in a tight corner or whatever it is he said. In a tight spot. I'd love that. What's interesting, because who would you say is the ideal in the narrator's mind as a people group in Middle Earth?

The elves. Yeah. In my mind. Okay.

Let's just go through the races. Can we do that? Okay. Yeah, please.

Yeah. All right. So we've got the way easier if I could pull up a, there's got to be a list of this races and the hobbits. Okay.

So we've got elves, hobbits, dwarves, orcs. But there's also the goblins and the trolls. Right? And two brands of elves.

The Woodland elves. Yeah. We get the, what do they say about those types of elves? They are less wise than Elrond and Galadriel's version of elves.

They're so many. They're not all the same. Okay. So you've got other stuff here.

So all right. Middle Earth peoples. That's what I'm reading here. So we can do the page.

We've got the, the Anir. That's the wizard and the ballroggs. Yeah. These are ancient creatures that come from a distant land and still wield some kind of magic or enchantment.

They're like almost angels and demons. Yeah. I don't know. They're awesome.

And then you've got the free peoples. That's the dwarves, the elves, the men, the ants and the hobbits. And then you've got the enslaved people, which are two different types of men. The orcs, the trolls and the barowites, which I don't know about that.

And then the other beings and it's talking about these, the ones that I think we see in the boat. We see the river spirits, the giants, the dragons. And yeah. It's interesting.

So my favorite character by far, who do you think my favorite character is? Mm hmm. Ah, let's go with Gandalf. Yeah.

Absolutely. Gandalf. Hello. Gandalf is Obi-Wan.

Gandalf is the guy. Who's your favorite? Okay. I would have said Gandalf in the past.

Now I would say Bilbo. Really? Yeah. You're gonna go with Bilbo?

Huh? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Why'd you come up with your answer? Gandalf? Cuz he shoots fire stuff. No, he's the wise character.

And he's kind of above the things. You know? Everyone's talking about stuff. Like, yeah, I probably deserve some of the dragons gold when you get it already.

I've done enough for that. He says things like that. And so he's very much in the market and he's doing things for motives that aren't altruistic. But at the same time, he's helping his friends.

He's got friends from past lives. He's lived in past adventures. He's gonna go talk to Bjorn. Even though Bjorn doesn't recognize him, he knows all about him.

He just knows things. And it's a deep wisdom kind of knowing of things. I love it. I think it's awesome.

And yeah, that's why I'm attracted to Gandalf. Gandalf. Yeah. I guess you have to say the L, don't you?

So... Gandalf? Yeah. No.

You're gonna get in trouble either way with the internet. Yeah, you are. Yeah. Somebody's gonna post a GIF about that on your Twitter feed.

Yeah. That's fun. I'm cool people. Or GIFs.

This episode of Notam Questions is sponsored by Audible. We love Audible, which is why we do this audio book experience thing. We like to engage with literature of all types. And this episode itself is our way of doing that.

If it is ever occurred to you that like, oh, maybe I'll just tap through the ad. You gotta know that you're missing stuff because especially on this one right here, we listened to two different versions of this audio book. We heard two different performances. And I kind of wanted to wait until we were talking about Audible, the sponsor before we got into comparing and contrasting those things.

Are you cool with going there? Absolutely. Which narrator you listened to? What was the name again?

Andy Serkis did mine. And yours was Robin. Yeah. In bliss.

I've heard great things about his performance. Oh, yeah. It's fantastic. What's he doing with the songs?

He sang them all with his gruff and a circus voice. And it's, dude, it's not perfect. I like that there's some tonal problems. A little bit pitchy.

A little bit pitchy. But it feels like the kind of thing where a bunch of people would get their beer steins out and sing and reminisce and who cares. I for perfect vocalists. He does the voice of rock, the raven.

And it's so rusty. And you can tell who all the different characters are because he's got this incredible repertoire of voices and voice talent. And it's all one dude. If you didn't listen to the Andy Serkis version, it's worth using a credit just to hear the artistry and perfection of his performance.

Rob Inglis did a really, really good job, I thought. And the music is what I don't understand. I still understand how he did this. Like, did they- Did he sing it?

Yeah. Did they write actual music? Or did he make it up? I don't know how it went down.

But it's incredible. It's really, really well done. Have you ever done this? Like, you listened to a book and you're like, man, that narrator is so good.

I'm going to go listen to another thing narrated by this person. Have you ever done that? No, I haven't tracked it that way. But I have definitely made my decision on the Hobbit based on my awareness of how talented Andy Serkis is.

That's awesome. Yeah, I've done that. So I've tracked a book and that narration was fantastic. And then I'll just go find another one.

I met up with a narrator of one of the books, Seven Eaves. Oh, yeah. You've talked about that book for a long time. It made an impression.

Yeah. I went and met with Mary Robinette Coppol up in Nashville. And she told me a little bit about the whole process of narrating an audiobook. I would love to explore that sometime with Audible on Smarter Every Day.

I've asked him if I could do that. And so I hope to be able to do that one day. I'd love to do an audiobook someday, man. And I've long thought, I got the chops for that.

But then I listened to the Hobbit the way it was performed. I don't know if I'm brave enough to just go full on into these voices and just do it. You have to own it. You have to own it.

You've got to own it. And he owns it. And it's just breathtaking how excellent the delivery is. I have a new found massive respect for the people who do this.

Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. And what people are going to find is this audible thing. I don't know when everybody lasts to look at it.

But if it's been a while, it's not what you remember. It used to be awesome because it had the gigantic collection of audiobooks. Now it's awesome. It's just massive amounts of spoken content from all kinds of different genres.

They've got this plus catalog with stuff that you don't have to use a credit on. It's just there for you whenever you want to. There's a lot more here to go and look at. And it's always growing and always improving.

So it's not just like a monthly credit club. It's access to this whole gigantic thing. Our small group at church, we're actually going through an audiobook together. And we're playing the scru-tape letters.

It's actually part of the plus catalog. Tolkien's buddy wrote that one. Yeah, Lewis. So here's the offer.

If you're interested in supporting the podcast by supporting sponsor, you can do that by going to audible.com slash in DQ or texting in DQ as a note of questions to 500 500 on your phone. Just like literally put 500 500 in the phone number spot and then type in DQ of the link will pop up on your phone. You get a 30 day trial of free book and access to the library. The scru-tape letters that's in the plus catalog, you just like get that for free.

So the plus catalog is huge. You get all kinds of, I mean, I just like to scroll through there and see what's up. But when I go run, walk, whatever, when I'm driving, I'm consuming audiobooks. I also talk on the phone to you.

Well, there's that too. Or we're talking on the phone about audiobooks that we're consuming. It's worth the membership just for the plus catalog, let alone the monthly credit that lets you get pretty much anything. It's a massive library.

Dude, 1984 is in the plus catalog. I didn't realize that. What? You burn a credit on that?

No, I did not. I forgot that. I just got it. Yeah, 1984.

George Orwell. So I listened to that. That was awesome. So I went to the top of this, like in all categories, the top listens in the plus catalog.

The first one's Oracle. Don't know what that one's about. Second one's 1984. Man, there's a lot here.

It's great. You're going to enjoy it. Go to audible.com slash in the queue text, in the queue to 500, 500, enjoy the Hobbit, enjoy all the rest of the books. It's a huge deal and it supports the podcast.

Yeah, and I would throw this out, man. If you enjoy the Hobbit and you want to stay in that world a little bit longer, maybe you feel like you've done the Lord of the Rings middle Earth thing because you've seen the movies because the Lord of the Rings movies are really fantastic. But you haven't. It's so much more immersive, so much more in depth.

Audible audio book versions of the Lord of the Rings are fantastic. Do yourself a favor. Work your way through those or go and grab the Silmarillion, which is the pre history of middle Earth. You'll enjoy every last bit of it.

Anyway, if you want to support the podcast here, support, no questions. We would greatly appreciate that. Audible.com slash in the queue or text in the queue to 500, 500, that gets your 30 day trial, a free book and access to the library. Awesome.

You want to talk about that? It's more? Yeah, let's do it. All right.

So where do we go from here? Do we talk about the where we go from here? Is I tell you why I resonate with Bilbo do it. Why?

Why? The reason I resonate with him this time around more than I did last time around. He's modest in his abilities, but he has a usefulness that he doesn't know is there and that he discovers as he goes along and he is corruptible. He is no Mary Sue.

He has problems and chief among them are the limits he has put on himself and his own mind and his own character. He's more resistant to the corrupting power of the ring than other people who encounter it in middle Earth, but it still messes with him. He doesn't entirely dislike power. He somewhat is attracted to that and watching that ring get through the armor for him just a little bit was very intriguing for me.

Yeah. Yeah. And watching him try to be judicious in that. And then all of that adds up the violence, the running scared, the adventures, the problem solving, the friendship with the dwarves or sort of friendship, the affair with the trolls, the relationship with Gandalf, which is very granddad, grandsonish, all of that adds up to a moment where he uses his burgling skills to try to avoid a whole lot of things.

Horrible catastrophic violent evil that everyone was everybody had brewing. Like he was the guy who tried to step outside of the obvious decision making, not just to say, come on guys, let's not have a battle of the five armies. But he tried to do something with the equity and negotiation with that Arkansas that would cost him dearly. It would cost him friendships, but it was right.

And to me, that's the moment that defines the whole book. That's the completion of the arc that I was tracking with Bilbo on. And I related to him because I read the book before and I knew what was coming. And I would hope that I would have the character to do that, even with a ring of evil in my pocket that I find attractive, even with character flaws that I have.

And character flaws I don't even know I have yet and weaknesses and frailties that I know I have. I hope that even with all of that brokenness and weakness in my life, that I would have the courage and the creativity to do the right thing in such a circumstance. Hmm. That's interesting.

Again, I'll shoot fire. I didn't think of that as being as big of a deal, but now that you know, you say it, it does make a lot of sense. It does kind of complete his character or doesn't it? Huh.

The moment that I first saw the chink in Bilbo's armor is when he stuck his hand in the pocket of the, what was it? The troll where he was stealing things. He stuck his hand into the pocket and he started, and he says he was warming up to his new occupation or something like that. I forget how he said it was like, okay, there is a glimmer of evil in there.

There's a glimmer of selfishness. I mean, he's quite selfish the entire book. However, there's a small moment where he's like, oh, I'm good at this. I could take advantage of this.

I thought that was interesting. Yeah, me too. Dude, we're all over the place. We've got a, we've got a good structure to this.

Whatever. This is structure. We're at a book. It's wide and sweeping and we went through it.

I mean, if you want to go in order, just kind of a chapter breakdown, we can do some of that. Hmm. Well, how do we do this? So they went on the adventure.

They started off Bilbo's late, late to the original meeting. He shows up, they start heading out. I really like the fact that they're having to walk in their interviews and ponies. When I was on the Appalachian Trail last weekend, it was all about your water.

You're like, man, okay, how far until the next water so I can filter some more water so I can go eat as about your food and your water. And if you didn't have those things, you're done. It was fun for me reading the book because I had to think about those things. And so when we would pass a little creek or stream, I would be like, oh, well, I wonder if back in the medieval times, if an army was on the move or, you know, a party was going along, if they'd come to a little stream like this, would they all stop and water the horses?

What would they do? Would they fill their skins with water? And so there's an element of that that I really enjoy thinking about the logistics of what they're doing. So when they leave, the Shire initially and they head out into the world, not really knowing where they're going to go, just that and itself, that adventure part of it.

I got excited. It's like, well, here we go. Did you feel anything? Or just like, what's next?

Yeah, absolutely. And you got a build for the long haul. That's what's interesting about it. We've been watching this history channel show called Alone, where they take some people out and they just put them in the wilderness and they're like, all right, figure it out.

And you can tell right off the bat that people who are going to tap out really early because they don't make any decisions that indicate any kind of long-term plan. They're there to be on the show to be tourists, easy for me to say. I mean, I couldn't do it. I'm sure I'd fail at that horribly.

But they're not even making moves that indicate they have any intention of staying. Then you watch people who end up performing really well and they have a plan and they are moving things around and making moves day one that are going to pay off in day 80 or day 100. What I thought was interesting about the opening here was it looked like Bilbo just had no sense of where this thing would go. Whereas Gandalf and the dwarves, they were behaving in subtle ways that more looked like they understood the size and the scale and the scope of this undertaking.

And as much as it's fashionable to complain about the Eagles in tokens writing and to complain about all that walking in tokens writing, all that walking really does give you a sense of how long this took. They don't skip much. You feel the distance in the book. And if Bilbo is your point of view character feeling that distance more than the other characters feel it, it's really important to experiencing what you're supposed to experience.

It is a hard journey. It is a long journey. And neither you nor Bilbo really has a sense of how vast the undertaking is. So yeah, I guess I'll say I did feel that.

Please forgive me. You said it was fashionable to complain about the Eagles. I'm not in the know. I'm not in the Tolkien whatever community.

So why is it fashionable to complain about the Eagles? The books do it better. Even in the books. I think if Tolkien were writing today with all that we've learned from the mistakes and plot holes of other people's work, I think you might handle the Eagles a little bit differently.

But it's just an easy bailout, an easy solution, and especially in the movies where you don't get really much of anything established with the Eagles. At some point you look at it and you're like, why didn't you lead with that? You can just call the Eagles like you can whisper in a butterfly and they just come? Well, then why wouldn't you get another butterfly or a whole bunch of them and whisper into it and be like, hey, we need you to carry these people to the volcano, and then we're going to drop this thing in there.

They better explain. Like the ring would corrupt them or the Eagles are actually enemies. And they're not, they're suspicious of you. Just that wasn't clear enough in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

And it really wasn't clear enough in the Battle of the Five Armies, the Hobbit movie. I like the Eagles are here, whatever. And boy Bilbo yells the Eagles the Eagles so many times in the book. Even that felt a little over-killish.

So, token takes some abuse for how conveniently the Eagles seem to solve all problems. And token takes a lot of abuse in ways that I think are kind of funny, if not entirely fair, about how much walking there is in his books. They walk and then they walk some more and then we're going to show some more walking. I like that element, but not everybody does.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's closer to reality. Like the Civil War, for example, we think about the battles, but just imagine how much troop movement there was. I mean, you know, the same with World War II, the same with all these big things, Lewis and Clark, any quest, just imagine how much transportation is there. It's like in the Never-Ending story, the turtle shows up and it's like, Bastion, what's the deal?

He's like, oh, it's 5,000 miles away or whatever. And then all of a sudden a luck dragon comes up and then boom, you're there. No, that was convenient. That's cool.

I took a nap. I woke up. I was where I needed to be. So, yeah, I can see that now.

I mean, now that you mention it, but I didn't think about it at the time. I was like, man, it's pretty convenient because the trees they were in were on fire. So, you know, it's really good that the Eagles got them away from the goblins and the goblins were trying to burn them down. That's nice.

When Tolkien was writing on the back end of the Romantic Era in literature, the Count of Monochrysto, Les Misérables, Man in the Iron Mask, these gigantic sweeping 19th century stories that were written oftentimes in serial form, each little bit being put into a magazine, a periodical of some sort. I think that's how the Count of Monochrysto happened. It's a huge book that takes so much metaphorical walking in the Count of Monochrysto, but it works because it's kind of a bedtime story for adults that gets published in a weekly newspaper or something. Well, that's the stuff that Tolkien read growing up.

That was the pacing that he was used to. And there were some logistical reasons, the medium is the message, that kind of pacing would have happened in the literature at the time that influenced him at the time that he was a kid. And so some of that comes through. And I think the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings would be worse if they were written now, because one, I think they'd just go way too hard to the whole in trying to signal to people like, I understand how things ought to be politically and socially.

Here, if you just remarks to make sure, you know, I think all of the fashionable thoughts now that'll definitely be fashionable forever. It just doesn't come up in these books. And that's part of the medium that really does feel like you get a break from that. But I also think there would have been a tyranny of the urgency bearing down on Tolkien editors coming at him being like, we gotta get through this forest way faster.

It's just too much time with the spiders and the elves having parties and the people don't like it. They get bogged down. They get bored. Let's make that go faster.

And I think you would have lost the pacing and the feel of the book that makes you feel like you're on a journey. And instead, it would have made you feel like you're going through a video game level. Huh. Dude, you just said so much and you were so well over the place.

You said there's some... Well, over the place. Like two things. There's some political stuff in there.

It doesn't virtue signal heavily. And two, the pacing would have been rushed if it were written for a modern audience. And I like that it wasn't. It's only two things.

Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I can get down with that.

I like the swords and the weapons. Did you like the swords and the weapons? I like that they were named. We've talked about those swords and weapons before on this podcast when we tried to brainstorm a list of things that had names.

Which name did you like best? I liked Bider and Beater. I like those names. That's what the goblins called them, right?

Yeah. So that's the lime drink, which is Gandalf sword. And what was the elven name of Thorns sword? I don't remember it.

I don't know. Looking it up. Not. Orkrist and glam drink.

Orkrist, that makes sense. Yeah. That's pretty rad. I like that too.

Did you ever get a sense of why those swords were so awesome? I can seem like they didn't do anything magic. They were sharp and pokey, like normal swords? No, I don't know why they were important.

Other than the fact they were cool. I liked that they had the old runes on them. And they didn't know what they were. And so there's this gradual revelation of what the sword was when they're hanging out in Rivendale.

That's where they learned about that, right? Yeah, because it helped connect them to the mystery of when they could get into the lonely mountain. Something like that. Yeah.

The runes helped set them on that plot trajectory. The thing that I found most interesting was Thorne. The way Thorne, he started for a very altruistic reason. What's a better word than altruistic?

I said that twice. It's an honorable, honorable. I like that. Good.

Yeah. He's like, I'm going to go reclaim what is rightfully my family's. That's where he starts. And at some point he gets the dragon disease and greed takes over and the lust for power.

Once he's finally established, things change. And I like that Tolkien doesn't dwell on that very much. He's like, yeah, of course he becomes corrupt as soon as he gets power. Duh.

He just kind of says it. I really like that. And of course at the end when Bilbo and Thorne come back and they reconcile. Obviously that's cool.