The Tolkien Professor, Dr. Corey Olsen - Livestream Q&A

everyone to nerd of the rings i have a very special guest today with me um it is corey olson as you may know him as the tolkien professor he's also the founder and president of signum university and the myth guard institute so he's been doing online education since before it was cool to do online education um so welcome corey thank you so much for joining us today you are welcome uh you're welcome um yes sorry that's all right i was just getting feedback uh from other things my year there okay sorry yeah it's so good to be back to be with you guys i'm plugged into too many windows at once um uh yeah so uh uh really fun to talk to you really appreciate the the content that you create i'm a big fan of uh you know sort of youtube talking uh content creators and stuff and the stuff that you do is really good oh thank you oh likewise i'm also a big fan of your work and uh um specifically the tolkien professor podcast i i love uh turning that on for my commutes um you're doing kind of an interesting uh project with the uh the sim film yes right now so tell us tell us about that a little bit yeah film film has been a lot of fun so uh people have been following my podcast for a long time might remember that way back like 2012 early 2012. uh i started doing a podcast series called riddles in the dark when the peter jackson hobbit films were just coming out right and the whole idea there was that uh we were uh you know my my co-hosts and i were talking through adaptation challenges we're thinking we're excited about the idea of the hobbit being adapted we're thinking through like you know thinking through the book thinking through the different challenges for adaptation like how would you do the scene oh but you know and there's this issue for trying to translate from book to film and how you know how do we think they're going to address that so we it was a combination of ourselves kind of brainstorming and thinking through the adaptation challenges which we found a lot of fun and then of course also speculating about what peter jackson would actually do and then analyzing it when he actually did it and that whole so we did that for three years um through the whole hobbit film thing um and we found that that was almost entirely a really rewarding and positive experience the only downside uh to that experience was the actual movies which were a terrible disappointment right so uh like we we had these wonderful ideas about adaptation and peter jackson was unfortunately apparently not listening to our podcast yeah that was his mistake i think all along people say oh the problem was splitting into three films no no the problem was he just wasn't listening to our genius ideas about what he should have done um it did create some some some really kind of funny moments in particular it really skewed my immediate reaction and experience of watching the films because we've done so much speculation and thinking about this that there were like a whole bunch of very specific things that i was looking for at the end of every episode we ended with a particular multiple choice question like do we think you know there's this issue he's got to address this do we think that the films are going to do a b c or d yeah um and and there were often very specific things uh and so i remember in particular one of the ones which was which led uh me to a slightly embarrassing situation uh it was um we were talking about the death of were we going to see so our our question was will we see the decapitated head of thror on screen at any point you know in the hobbit film um and i voted yes that one would my prediction was that i called it yeah i called it and so in the film like when they do the battle of as an old bazaar and azog holds up the head of thror i actually like i couldn't help myself i actually went yes like they're in the theater and everyone in the like looks at me like what is wrong with this guy that's the bad guys right that is not the appropriate reaction to the decapitation of thorin's grandpa you know like that's just not what you're supposed to do anyway so that was kind of funny but anyway so so as i said the downside you know what we felt at the end of this process was okay thinking through adaptation in this way it was a really wonderful way to engage with the hobbit basically to kind of think through what's going on in the hobbit whenever you're trying to because the act of translating from book to screen it makes you think about things from a new angle like it's it's a really kind of fresh way to approach the text because you know you like so for instance um when um when you have to answer questions like well okay like during this scene what does bilbo's face look like like what facial experiment tolkien doesn't tell us what facial expressions he's making like there's a lot of dialogue we don't get like how would they actually interact with each other like what what would that scene actually look like um when you have to ask those questions which you have to do when you're doing a visual adaptation um you um uh you do it just it forces you to then kind of approach the text and be like well okay like what do we think is going on in bilbo's head here what what can we tell what would we speculate based on what it says in the text so so it was a really really fun project so i decided that i wanted to continue doing that um yeah but we just so we decided to do it in a way that was completely untrammeled by reality right like we wanted to you know get like we didn't want we didn't want any actual filmmaker messing up right no budget concerns none of that no budget concerns nothing at all uh so um so this that's what led to the film film project so the film film project is a theoretical film adaptation of the silmarillion and it's and we decided and we decided this by the way six years ago so we were like way ahead of jeff bezos on this one yeah um um but um but anyway we decided it would be an episodic cereal um uh you know it uh you know exactly like the lotron prime thing is is supposed to be um and we would start it in the einolin delay and we would go all the way through like if we complete our crazy project which if we do we'll take like 25 years uh our crazy project is to plan the adaptation from the ironwind delay until sam gets on the boat basically like so you know from beginning to end of the whole story um and um so by the time we're long gone someone will have this wealth of information they can just go out and make it that's it it's so cool because not only not only that's the thing it's been a really vibrant uh fan community project it's turned out to be so um you know initially it was mostly like we were just kind of speculating you know going through and talking it through on the podcast and speculating um but we had a bunch of people who are really excited about the project from the beginning and began we had some discussion boards and they really took off and people jumping in making suggestions and stuff and so all the time it's gotten more elaborate we've been doing this like six years now as i said we're in season five now we're planning season five um we've split it up uh into segments and i should i should have mentioned by the way of course the reason we chose the silmarillion is to ensure that we were untrammeled by reality because of course the stuff that we're doing uh we felt fairly confident that nobody would be adapting in our life anytime soon yeah so we're not competing with anything yeah yet when we get to the second age looks like we will be right yeah um but that was kind of the nice thing so um the way that we split up the seasons season one uh takes place from the i know window it's just the valar basically from the i know in delay through to uh the chaining of melkor um with the like big sort of turning point moment in the middle of the season being the destruction of the lamps okay so it's primarily the drama of the valar and they're kind of coming to grips with melkor's opposition and uh uh we kind of we we we made some interesting changes there when our real focus was on we wanted to have the focus be on the fall of melkor um so one of the major changes we made in season one uh from what the silver aliens i mean the somalian text melchor is like the evil dark lord from day one when he steps in to middle earth and we wanted to like we wanted to i mean tolkien does dramatize his fault but it it's quick like i mean it happens in the i know in delay right we wanted to draw that out in time so that we could draw more attention to the process of his fault like why why does melchor fall like what is it with melchor exactly right um and again that stuff is there in tolkien but it's not part of the drama of the silmarillion his opposition is kind of the initially exactly so we just that so that was a major change we made in season one and so by the way one of the first lessons that we learned of course in doing this is that you know these like major deviations from the texts that people do when doing adaptations like you can't help you can't avoid it yeah you can't avoid it and you know there are these there are these decisions that you have to um that you have to make um and some of them that you just want to make in order to emphasize things from the text um so um anyway so that's um so that was season one and then we you know so season two was from the awakening of the elves through to the darkening of valinor so it was mostly like the elves journey and then the fall of the noldor over the second half of the season and uh and then season three was from basically the the rebellion and the kin slaying at the beginning uh up through the uh chaining of midrose to the cliff and the rising of the sun oh okay and then season four uh was cut was basically of bularian in its realms it started with the rescue of mythros and it ended with the final episode it was kind of not a really climactic moment but it was like the moment when uh glaurung escapes and runs amok for a little while and then gets chased back by finger but it was primarily about that the primary drama of uh season four was like the whole discovery of the truth of the kinslang by single and the other uh you know and like the you know this whole so it's mostly about the establishment of things in valerian and then season five goes from the arrival of men uh in valerian with finrad and and bayor meeting in episode one up through uh the dagor braggalock uh at the end of the season we do 13 episodes per season so anyway it's like at this point now in season five we not only are just like kind of talking through the stories and thinking about adaptation we've got people uh we got people doing casting we've got people doing script outlines we actually have scripts people have written scripts for the show uh we have like costume design we have set location scouting we have like i mean the whole the whole the whole deal like we're ready like you're ready to go we're totally ready to go all we need is a the permission that we would never get and be many millions of dollars in funding but apart from those things we're so ready to go um i think it would be it would be a fun exercise to have someone uh who knows the process to to look at what you guys have created and then say it would cost this many dollars to produce the show that you're talking about it would probably cost a lot of dollars considering whom we've cast it because we do like fantasy casting like we actually have passed everybody yeah and so like most people don't like you know so who's the biggest star that you've oh my gosh there's so many all of them all of them all of them i mean like honestly like we had the conversation this year like we've got to be careful that we don't run out of actors you know like we've cast like so many uh people um but um uh but anyway it's been it's been uh it's because i mean with some some we try not to cast like really important actors for really minor roles um but just to give one little glimpse uh we um we did cast tom hiddleston uh as uh fingolfin and we cast um richard armitage we we gave him i think we do this by vote so we didn't totally control this i do we do have uh hosts do a veto power but um uh but but uh which i try to exercise that too much i think uh armitage we gave feyenoord uh okay we did armitage fan or hiddleston as uh as fingolfin um uh and there's there's there's a there's a there's a lot you know where there are some threads that go through like you can kind of tell what shows the people who predict everybody you know like we we we had this run this one year we're like okay we can only cast so many vikings actors in one season okay like let's let's save some of these people um but uh yeah anyway um so this was this was really it's it's it's a hugely fun project you know it's it's a complete but it's a really interesting combination of you know close analysis of the text and really thinking through the and with the silmarillion in particular it's a huge challenge because so much of the silmarillion is told from 10 000 feet right you know it's like plot summary of like and now in valerian these things were happening i was like well okay but like what are the people like you know each other yeah what conversations do they have so of course we do get those like brief nuggets of dialogue and almost all the dialogue in the silmarillion we've included right and it's it's one of my favorite things when i'm reading the scripts that our our team has created i love those moments when all of a sudden it float you know it's sort of the like the familiar text like yeah you know suddenly pops up you know in the middle of the conversation um it's really really neat so uh but anyway it's it's it's a it's it's it's really and so it's both a really fun you know sort of critical and analytical uh project thinking about the text um as well as a really interesting creative project you know a kind of a creative engagement with the text and it's something something this part this whole process actually has really taught me a lot is kind of the the value um of that kind of creative engagement um and it really made me reflect tolkien himself was that's what he did like he was all about the combination of like the creative and the critical engagement with things um i mean you could say you could easily make the case that the hobbit is beowulf fan fiction um you totally could make that right right as is like the rohan section of the lord of the rings totally bail fanfiction right um and you know and you know to say it that way is deliberately sort of to oversimplify it a little bit but yeah i'll just take that that clip and i'll post that online yeah let people know that you think tolkien is fan fiction it is it is he's doing fan fiction he's doing fan fiction of old norse mythology he's doing fan fiction of beowulf i mean go back to the beowulf with the hobbit thing right the beowulf manuscript the unique beowulf manuscript has a hole burned in it right there's this one page that has a hole burned in and you can't read the text well the bit that's burned out is so as you know many people know and if you haven't read beowulf maybe you don't know this but at the end of beowulf there's a dragon right you know beowulf's final you know you know everybody knows about beowulf and grendel and fewer people read all the way to the end of beowulf and get to the dragon a lot of the final boss stop with the first boss right yeah um uh but anyway um the uh the the the final boss is a dragon and how the dragon incident begins is that the dragon is like sleeping quietly in his cave on his horde and then a thief sneaks in steals a golden cup and when the thief steals the golden cup the dragon wakes up and he misses the cup and he gets really ticked off and he goes and he wrecks the local town okay now this should of course sounds yeah right incredibly familiar yeah but the thing that's missing the bit that's burned out that we don't know from the text is why did the thief do that who was the thief and why did he do this like what what the there's there's an explanation but we don't have it because it literally is gone uh and it's a unique manuscript so one way i mean it's not the whole explanation right yeah but one thing that the hobbit does is it's tolkien's fun like fairy tale answer to that question like who was that and how did he get there and how did he end up stealing a golden cup well maybe it was something like this right so and that's very like a kind of fan fiction premise right to kind of complete uh you know someone else's story you know to fill in a you know a gap or an untold story uh from there um anyway that was really um uh that that's that that kind of but talking to this all the time all the time like his uh he preferred like when he was doing his own scholarly work his preferred mode of doing scholarly work of of like laying out his scholarly ideas was through through his writing was through his creative engagement with it um he could you know give another small example in um uh in beowulf there's another line that a lot of people debate about so this is near the beginning of beowulf when beowulf first shows up uh on the the the danish shore and and is gonna come to hrothgar's hall um when he first shows that he and his men first land on the coast and there's a coast guard there like a guy who's supposed to be watching out you know just in case anyone invades on a boat just like this like this warrior and his warriors coming and landing yeah and so his job is to be like are these guys a threat like should i be sounding the alarm should i be lighting the beacons here or what do i do um so he goes and he talks to beowulf um and it's his call as to whether or not he like sounds the alarm or what does he do or puts him under arrest or or whatever and he decides that he likes beowulf and he trusts beowulf so he's going to let beowulf come he's going to lead beowulf back and he's going to let him keep his weapons and stuff which is a big deal right yeah um so he then delivers this line which anglo-saxon scholars debated for a really really long time like exactly what that line meant you know how what's the best way to translate that line yeah tolkien had an opinion about how that line should be translated and how he wanted to translate it is the line he gives that line word for word his translation of that line word for word tahamah when hama is deciding whether or not to let gandalf in with his staff right yeah the thing that hamas says when hama gives gandalf the green light right to go in with the staff and he says like you know but in doubt a man of worth will you know will decide with i'm forgetting the exact line yeah yeah um but that one that's exactly how tolkien argues so basically his contribution to the scholarly debate was not he didn't like write an article about right instead he just put it in the lord of the rings like that's you know instead you know he wanted to like envision the whole situation so he creates this situation which hama is in a very similar situation with gandalf you know and the others uh and delivers exactly the same lines so the whole scene works like a really um a really in-depth analysis essentially is that beowulf line but of course it's not like official scholarship but this is how tolkien thought this is how he worked so it's incredible so this kind of creative engagement you know i've come to not only value it more for myself but to realize yeah this is kind of like tolkien did this all the time this is exactly the kind of thing that tolkien did all the time so very anyway yeah yeah yeah i didn't realize i knew that you know the dragon came into the beowulf story i did not realize that uh i either i never knew or i forgotten that it was because of a thief stealing a cup that's very interesting yeah the golden cup is right out of there yeah absolutely awesome absolutely um so so you're cut we're kind of on the topic of adaptations here so i know you know i've kind of keeping an eye on the chat here and i know you know sooner or later it's going to come up so we'll just go ahead and dive on in to lure the rings on prime um and we've got a couple very specific questions dealing with this time period so i'll go ahead and throw some of those at you and we can talk about uh the show as well um for first question we've got from simon cooper um he asks did sauron have the one ring while he was in numenor and if so how did he retrieve it uh after its downfall when his body was destroyed no he didn't um he didn't and that is i gotta be honest i think this is one of the greatest weaknesses of i mean there are a lot of things that people will be like oh that's a plot hole in tolkien and i i you know i never am a big uh i'm never much concerned about things that people call potholes i think that a lot of times people are looking for problems and therefore making things into problems that aren't really problems um so i'm never very impressed by plot hole discussions but um in my opinion this is one of the biggest plot holes in tolkien's world and there's a there's a good reason for it and the re let me let me justify the plot hole before i even describe it uh the justification for it is that basically there were two threads of story that were growing at the same time in tolkien's mind right on the one hand he had the the whole the history of the rings um other rings of power uh all the way fro and with keller brimbur and in you know everything else all the way down to the that was like one thread of sauron's story that was growing um the numenor story and the downfall of numenor's story was a separate story that he was writing and that had begun well back before he started writing uh the lord of the rings um but he returns to it in the middle of the lord of the rings um he actually set the lord of the rings aside for a while and worked a lot on numenor stuff um this was uh this was during the gap so there are two major gaps of the writing like uh when they get to balin's tomb is one place where he stopped for like a year writing um and the second time was um like in the m wheel basically okay like when fro and sam were drawing like when he was just starting to go on the trip of the ring to mordor and he kind of petered out for a little bit he wasn't sure how to continue it um uh so that was those were kind of the two moments when he just sort of stopped for a while um and during the second time that he stopped what he did when he stopped was write a whole bunch of numenor stuff okay by the way incidentally inventing the adonai language um that whole language the whole the language of numenor was invented during that period wow um uh and he was really f in the whole atlantis thing that he was doing with numenor and stuff he was really developing that idea um he went back to his time travel story uh connected to numenor and stuff um he'd started writing a different book called the lost road back before the hobbit was published um yeah uh that's the one some people might know about the famous story when um c s lewis and j r tolkien made a bet with each other um they were gonna write science fiction and uh and so they said okay let's do space travel and time travel and they flip the coin who would get space travel and who would get travel uh and tolkien got time travel and started riding the lost road lewis got space travel and wrote out of the silent planet which is the beginning of the space trilogy yeah um uh but anyway so um so he he went back to that and started reworking that concept uh that time travel concept which is all about numenor it was it was all all about newman um and and he definitely decided that he wanted sauron to be the primary villain of that of that story yeah so even the acalabeth kind of eventually comes out of that period um stuff that he was writing um but as i say they kind of grew up separately so there's the like sauron and numenor story and there's the sound in the rings of power story right right and they never got like full fully integrated and okay and exactly the question that that person you know that the person is asking is exactly the crux of the issue right if sauron has his ring as he would he hadn't been taken from him yet right so like why wouldn't he have it it would be at the bottom of the ocean right or where you know wherever or ended up um and that's a pretty big problem yeah um so basically in order to because that that that would be simply a pothole i mean that would be just a contradiction um and so therefore seeing that um tolkien was forced basically to say that sauron set his ring aside um and didn't take it with him i mean there's no option he can't have it in numenor it's not possible right but like sauron really set it aside yeah put it on a stand over here like and like watch that until i get back right or what does he make a super secret magical vault or something that nobody else i mean like under like how on earth would he do that why would he do that i mean it's it's it's really hard to retcon sauron's mindset right i mean you could do so maybe you could be like well okay you know he'd be like well if our faraz on the king of newman or you know to whom i'm surrendering captures you know like uh you know i'm gonna be his servant he might demand if he finds out about the ring he might demand my ring of power and then and maybe he even has the strength to wield it to some extent and that could be a threat so you know maybe he's like i don't want to deal with that so i'm gonna i mean that's the only rationale i can possibly imagine for sauron not bringing his ring with him right uh yeah but even then even with that justification what does he do with it i mean where on middle earth is sound going to be like i'm i'm sure it'll be here when i get yeah it'll be fine like it's only essential to my like survival and the core of all of my power i think i'm just going to put it under my pillow till i get back like let me do it it's just hot really hard to because it's clear he doesn't even trust the nas ghoul with it right this is something that a lot of people misunderstand but i think it's pretty clear in the text when the nas go are pursuing frodo in book one of the fellowship of the ring they're not trying to take the ring from him they're never trying to take their they're trying to take him right with the re he's yeah frodo's destiny is to bear the ring to mordor whether he does in the custody of the nazgul or out of the custody of the nazgul is the right question they're gonna haul him remember that's what they say at the fort right come back to mordor we will take you yeah right i don't think the nazgul can or certainly have permission to take the ring themselves um so he can't even leave it with the nazgul so what's he gonna do there's literally no one on earth he can trust with the ring is there any place he could hide it so anyway and honestly that's it just seems it's a really weak part of the story because it's it's like um it's like a fault line right between where two stories meet right you know two different stories in his and he never fully retconned the join uh of those two stories so the only thing we get is that one sentence in the ekalabath which is like he set aside his ring of power and went to numenor it's like wait what he did what how why you know but we don't know um so so yeah it's it's it's tough i mean yes it's definitely a week and so it's it's it's the kind of weakness that you get when tolkien didn't write that story yet like he never really rushed that out and that kind of thing happens all over the place tolkien was super good at doing this kind of retcon um but um uh but he just he hadn't gotten to that one yeah um so sticking on the top you know since we're talking second age obviously we've got the amazon show coming up um so i'm curious obviously as a uh huge um and huge might be an understatement huge tolkien fan yourself um what percent excited versus nervous are you in regards to the new show i so i uh make the deliberate choice to be optimistic um i do it's not that i don't understand people who feel more dread than than than excitement i do understand that um i i i see all of the uh reasons for um uh for uncertainty but i reject them i reject them uh because um i there will be time enough to lament bad things done if they happen right um i choose not to borrow trouble right so now when we know nothing i choose to think it's gonna be awesome and uh and we will see and i'm gonna give it every chance to be awesome um there are certainly uh there are certainly causes for concern there's certainly potential issues uh but um but i am i i am excited and the here's the thing that i am most excited about and so and first the other thing i would say um what we've actually seen from the amazon people like everything the am and amazon has officially released has been great i've loved it i've loved everything that they've released i don't think there's anything that they've actually released that gives me any kind of concern at all um so far so good um and there are several things that i love about what they're doing and what they've done um and the main thing there are two main things that i love thing number one they're giving it time right the biggest objection to the peter jackson films there are lots of choices that they make that you might not like and of course the hobbit films are just not very good movies the lord of the rings movies are very good movies um but they're also in places i think less skillful adaptations uh of the text it's ironic to me that i actually think the hobbit films engage with the text a great deal more than the word of the rings films do which they kind of leave the text aside uh for large bits in in in ways that the hobbit text actually doesn't but the terrible movies and so that undermines everything else uh but anyway um the biggest problem though with the peter jackson films is they're too short i mean you can't a feature film is a terrible medium for adapting a book any feature film and any book because you're going to cut so much out i mean the audiobook readers have a natural and more intrinsic understanding of this right the hobbit the hobbit audiobook unabridged audiobook is 11 hours long right so just like to to literally do the story you know to narrate the story of the hobbit takes 11 hours to try to compress that into even three movies because you've got to add stuff for visual you know if you know the visuals and stuff um because the hobbit is very light and breezy you know there's not you you would have to you know i've always argued with people who say like oh one book into three movies but there's a lot of stories i agree i agree no and especially the way that they were approaching that i i i agree i i'm a strong opponent of people who say the problem with the hobbit films was the one book into three movies no i think that was actually exactly the right call they just did it very badly um but anyway um lord of the rings you've got to be kidding me right i mean this is this is you know 50 i forget how many 60 hours of narration i mean and and that's just the narration of the audiobook right so to compress that into even the quite long movies that peter jackson you just i mean the the literary equivalent of a feature film is not the novel it's the short story right i mean these are short stories that you're telling um so it's really really awkward um i'm not saying that no book adaptation has ever been done well you know in a feature film but i'm saying it's like i mean you could also tell a really good short story adapted from a novel too if you wanted to but it's a hard thing to do um so i was the very first thing that i am delighted by with amazon is that they're going to take their time uh a you know a a an epic narrative you know over in over multiple seasons is exactly what this story needs to do at justice so i am delighted that they are doing that they're going to get a chance to really sit down with the story um and do so many of the things that they had to just rush crazily through uh in the film so that's the number one thing that i absolutely love um about the adaptation the second thing like as a bonus i mean i would have loved it if they were just doing that you know starting from the long expected party right but doing like uh i mean originally if you'd asked me like two years ago uh before they'd released anything at all i would have been like okay what i'm hoping for is that they'll give us at least six seasons like one season per book like season one from hobbiton to rivendell and season two you know from rivendell to uh to to to parth galin right i mean that's at the very minimum that's what i would have hoped for um when they when when they said essentially okay we're gonna tell we're gonna do the lord of the rings and we're starting with kelebrimbor and the forging of the rings of power i was like oh yes that's how you do it right there yeah let's start the story from the let's really take our time and now based on the things um based on the things that they um that they have uh uh released i'm not even convinced we're going to get to the last alliance by the end of the first season you know i mean it's it seems entirely possible that the whole first season could like the the climax of season one could be nothing more than like the reveal that anatarus sauron like that and you know kelle brimbore being aware of the forging of the one ring like that could be the end of season yeah because we have numenor stuff involved there too it's very you know maybe we get the downfall of numenor to the you know at the end of the first season it's possible we go all the way through the newman or plot but it it's now beginning to feel like okay the forging of the rings of power and all that stuff with anatar and calibrim and the growth of the shadow and gilgalad is concerned and and uh you know alderion king of uh of numenor is in conversation with him and and they're you know allying with each other and stuff so we got that whole subplot and then we get the uh the you know and then the whole history of numenor right after that all the way up to our affairs on and the capturing of sauron and the downfall of numenor golly that sounds like a lot to do in one season right right then imagine that we're going to get the whole last alliance plot and the you know up to the destruction of it now seems like a crazy ambitious thing to try to do in one season which is phenomenal i mean like yeah two maybe two maybe more than two seasons whole seasons in the second age oh my goodness let's see this is interesting because i i have always and i think this is just my own assumption i've assumed that the entire show was going to be the second age you know from from what you're saying it kind of sounds like you're expecting us to go from second age all the way through lord of the rings destruction of the one ring i think so the thing that i'm that that i have no idea i mean because they they've you know everything they've released is all second age it's all pointing to the second age and the and the the the i mean i the last alliance is like the utter limit of uh uh of anything that they've talked about or released um i certainly i certainly think that they're going to um uh they're going to get to the actual lord of the rings proper um my question is what about the first three thousand years oh right the third age yeah how much that are they gonna are we gonna get the whole thing are we going to get some kind of like bits of it you know are we going to get a season about the rise and fall of gondor are we going to get a season about the rise of all of arnold you know are we going to tomorrow exactly with angmar and all that i mean goodness doesn't there's enough to talk about there yeah um and it's all in the appendices well all i mean all that there is is in the appendices yeah almost all that there is um so uh so it's possible right you know we could definitely we could you know so they could do that so we could get i mean who even knows right before we get to the long expected party yeah you know i'd be okay with that i'd be totally fine with that i mean that you know like a nice 20-year run i mean there's obviously a lot of risk involved there right to release a series called the lord of the rings and not get to the lord of the rings right for ten years you know ten seasons seems um you know a lot uh a lot to do and i'm curious to see you know what if if that ends up being the final title of the show you know if like everything we've seen so far is just lord of the rings on prime i wonder if they'll be end up will getting a uh you know a subtitle like lord of the rings the second age or something um i mean yeah and i've i've you know people have made the the point you know well sauron is the lord of the rings so you can name the series after the main antagonist you know why not what's kind of named after the main end right yeah exactly exactly yeah um so we've got another uh question here from uh this one from dorian trussell um this should be a pretty easy one i think this is this is kind of a guarantee uh uh the question is will narvey and the creation of the doors of doran be in the show i think that's probably a pretty safe bet well yeah though it falls into that period right i mean that's another classic early third age moment right you know angmar and the wars with uh with uh with arnor is you know is one rise and fall of gondor of course is another big storyline inc you know like errol the young and the establishment of rohan of course is another big thing but the dwarf story absolutely you know the uh um the the durians bane and uh uh the the fall of the dwarf kingdoms um um by the narvey um yeah so he i would be shocked i would have never i would put a character in season one right yeah i i almost guarantee you know we'll see him and keller brimbore making the door something that iconic from the films and that iconic from the books i mean but especially you know you you figure amazon's gonna cater also to fans that have primarily know it from the film something as iconic as the doors of doran i think they won't pass that up for sure oh agreed agreed um yeah no i think that that's uh that's and yeah as uh uh uh uh it if senrod just said um you can totally do spin-offs of stuff that's not in the bookstores like the blue wizards right yeah one of the great mysteries right what were the blue wizards up to out in the east uh and or the south um absolutely you could do that um and there's a lot of potent so i mean even the stories that aren't old or pointed to at least right in the third third age is a lot of material um but when you start adding in untold stories stories that are hinted at but never told like what the blue wizards are up to yeah that i think is um uh you know would be would be a big deal so yeah what's potential there i think yeah i think that's another one of those where you know if you look at it from you know uh it's easy to look at it from a perspective of a book fan and say like oh i want to see this i want to see all these details and then you know you also look at it from a movie studio perspective and you think like okay you know who's the the most popular characters from our the existing films and like gandalf is right there at the top and like we have a chance to incorporate two more wizards that are pretty popular um you know even more of like what was ratagast up to like what was his job you know like he's he's doing something right right he's not just like you know some weird hermit living in you know doing nothing so yeah what was his role you know uh and you know tolkien's own mind changed about this stuff over time you know there was a there was there was a point especially like right after the lord of the rings tolkien was in this i i don't want to like be dismissive and call it a phase but he was in this sort of like i want to make sure everybody understands how awesome gandalf is face right um and so he that was the point at which he said like gandalf was the only one of the wizards who succeeded like everybody else yeah um and the whole like ratagast failed is one of those things that like one of the few things that tolkien said um uh that i'm like it's kind of harsh yeah exactly harsh you were wrong about that and and as he went on to develop the story a little bit it seems to me fairly clear that he was kind of he lightened up a bit on that taking that by he never explicitly took that back but i think that his mind was changed based on some other things that he was writing i think that he was his mind was changing about that well in the blue wizards even he you know he because they're they're included in that and then the later version of the blue wizards has them you know without their help the forces of the east would outnumber those of the west and i mean it doesn't sound like failure yeah me oh exactly exactly and with radagast like when he decided that radagast you know when he actually went to write the like valinorian backstories of the wizards right who they were before the middle earth um you know it like he explicitly says that radagast is one of the mayar of um of uh uh of yavanna right the you know the valar of the you know the the the plants and the beasts and everything so it's like i'm sorry like ivana would not consider the i mean so the implication of his statement that even radagast failed is that basically the job of the wizards is to oppose sauron and radagast was just like going native and hanging out with beasts and that's not enough like he didn't he didn't contribute enough to the war effort essentially um that seems to be the implication of his saying that radagast failed but like seriously you're going to convince ivana that him being friends to the birds and beasts and looking after them like is she going to call that failure i think that you thought i would disagree with told you there too yeah so that that's what leads me to think that he was softening on that again he never explicitly took it back but then again he never published it either um and you know the original one in his lifetime so he didn't have to take it back um but uh this is one of the issues when we get after his death all of these things that he wrote published that he didn't ever publish right is that yeah a lot of times you see him kind of brainstorming basically and sometimes you know saying one idea and then rolling out a different idea later on and so you know it's hard to say that but um anyway so it's um it's it's you know he he kind of went went back and forth there but yeah absolutely i think there could be some really cool stories and i would definitely be in favor of some stories about like what the blue wizards were doing out east and the kind of impact that that had because one thing that's clear um it's um it's very easy to read tolkien and come just like some really simplistic conclusions right like that like basically tolkien is saying like oh all the the people out east and the people like all the people of roon and hared which keep in mind roon and horrid aren't even countries roon and harad literally mean east and south right right so there's not a political alliance it's just like the people of gondor literally waving their hands and being like the southern easterly people right so anyway roon and hared um the people of roon and heart are not evil people like who love sauron right yeah you know sauron has enslaved and corrupted them in various ways and there is definitely the implication especially in some of tolkien's later writings he makes this more explicit that behind the scenes um tolkien was imagining this whole like propaganda like uh through like by means of a religious cult like the cult of sauron like to worship him as a god so yeah he's sending out like sauron evangelists who are like convert and like bringing people to do horrible like you know probably even playing the uh rolling out the same play you know the same playbook that he ran in numenor human sacrifice and stuff right to try to try to corrupt them morally to the you know uh to get them to do horrible things in his name um in other words like he is absolutely uh not like utilizing the cultures but he is undermining the cultures he is he is um uh he is corrupting and uh eliminating the native cultures in the east and south and so to show the drama of that right where were there will have been some places that held out some places that said we will have nothing to do with this there would have been wars between you know people who had come over to sauron and those who hadn't there'd be civil wars right uh you know where particular lands and towns and families are torn um and the blue wizards in theory would have been involved yeah absolutely and so there's really cool fun stories so yeah the opportunity so of course we never meet any of the any of the good guys right among the horadrim and and and and the easterlings but they they must by they must yeah yeah totally exist within the world that tolkien created of course we never see them because the only ones we see are the ones who march with saunan's armies right right because we never go to roon or hared right um but so i mean it does it does i won't even i won't say encourage but it does enable um a really simplistic reading right and one especially a really simplistic ratio racist reading right yeah like the reading of talking as racist i mean which says like oh yeah so talking is saying like all of these you know non-white rules only yeah the only good people in lord of the rings are white people right exactly and i mean this is a result of him choosing the north of the world right you know as like the center being sort of the theater of action um um but anyway even on that basis it's not quite as simple as that but um but but anyway yes like was he envisioning that like you know uh you know black people and asian people are all evil no that is not even the story in the book that's not the story yeah but but again we never see it because it's not yeah you know yeah it's one of those things like i i wonder you know if if tolkien had more time on this earth you know if that's something he would have eventually gotten around to i mean obviously he wrote a ton of stuff and we we gradually got that from christopher um over the over the decades um but yeah like you said it it there's definitely a um i feel like oversimplified you know narrative that sometimes pops up right about this and um it's it's why one of the you know when they release the synopsis of the show one of the the sentences i was most excited about was when it said the far reaches of the map yeah because yeah that's that's always been my you know when when you know friends and stuff because uh you know i if you can imagine i'm the biggest tolkien nerd in my fan in my uh family and friend group um when they ask me you know like oh well you know why why are all the bad guy you know all all the uh minorities are bad and i'm like well let me sit down and talk to you for the next half hour um right but it and it boils down to you know like the blue wizard thing you know they clearly had you know other people that they were working with you know it's not just like these two guys just taking out all of sauron's forces you know they were you know creating forces of good within in this realm and you have to acknowledge too that you know as i i did a video earlier on uh on all of sauron's travels and the guy flees to the east a lot for hundreds of years at a time so the idea that he has a you know strong presence in that realm makes a lot of sense and you know the fact that you've got him and the blue wizards both operating in the east there i think could could you know depend on how the timeline shakes out for the show that could be a really cool uh thing to see in the show but it's definitely not not as simple as uh as some might initially assume yeah there is there are so there's so much potential for really rich and complicated stories out there i mean thinking about exactly what you're describing and the thing i would emphasize is hundreds of years right because there's lots of hundreds of years is yeah and like both when he's out there and when he's not there right right so you know yeah he flees out there to the east so milk or goes out there first in the first rage establishes worship out there that's when men fall in the first place right the untold story in the silmarillion of the fall of man um then sauron goes back out so so step one right then step two sauron goes out there and there will have been the remnants of melcor cult but it's been hundreds of years right generations of men what's happened to the cult of melkor right how has that developed over time how has the culture grown from that over the hundreds of years when melchor is not actively there there would probably still be a priesthood would it have changed in some way how would it be still placed within the society who knows then sauron comes and he's like okay i can work with this right and so he establishes himself as the new god king and will build a new worship but there will be some who will resist and some who won't and and but then he leaves and then the same thing right so then he comes back after like a thousand years and is like hey the god of old has returned and some people will be like holy cow the god of old is back among us but others will be like hey that's not my god of old like you know that maybe that you know there might be places where like the cult of sauron had become like quiet and gentle right like it didn't like become incorporated into other i mean it's been a thousand years right it could be like technically i mean we could have know like some little pockets of easter wing society in which like they still theoretically worship sauron but they decorate him with flowers and like who knows like put him on top of a christmas tree exactly right there could be all kinds of like funny and adorable little you know absolutely so because again who knows the way that like particular cultures are going to grow or the kind of legends that are going to grow around and so then when sauron comes back you know and he's like all like i want you to like sacrifice babies to me he'd be you know they'd be like that's not our god this is not this is not the true sauron that we know in worship i mean it's so interesting really complicated the kinds of ways and you know and then to have somebody like the blue wizards coming around to being like let me tell you the skinny right like what's really going on with this guy and everything else so um anyway yeah it's um uh it's a it's it's there's so much there's it's i mean it's so written you could do a whole series on just you know the east and looking at how this uh uh and how this goes by and then of course remember you've got then sauron vanishes for another you know even just thinking of the third age right he goes away and he goes away for thousands of years thousands of years i mean the amount of time between the fall of sauron at the battle of the last alliance right the bag of battle of dagolat and the slopes of mount doom all the way up until he moves back into mordor and redeclares himself in the east right that is about the same amount of time as between now and like the high period of like the ancient egyptian empire from us right i mean like that's how long it's a long long time ago we're talking like or maybe like the punic wars like the first punic wars that's how far in the distance a long time so many of the easter wings are going to be like sauron who like what are you who are you we've never heard of you um you know there might be some ancient stone tablets somewhere that still remember the worship of sauron but right many um anyway it's uh it's it's really um it's really it's again it's fascinating fascinating to think how this happens yeah i well yeah i'm i'm on board with you i like you know we got on this topic with the uh amazon show but i'm i'm kind of the same way what i always tell people is i'm not going to worry about anything until there's something to worry about right you know like we don't even have a trailer like right you know right so exactly you know until i have something to look at right and we should probably address explicitly i know one of the major things that people are worried about is the whole like nudity thing right you know and that's why that's why i was emphasizing everything amazon has released right i'm totally on board with that's not something that they released that's uh you know conclusions that have been drawn based on plausible evidence that has been found um and there again i'm just kind of uh i'm just kind of waiting and yeah we'll see because the evidence could be understood in many different ways you know i mean like it's like is it possible that they're going to do you know they're going to do the hbo approach right and like make sure that they have at least one topless scene in every episode you know like randomly added topless prostitutes in the room with i mean yeah maybe they'll do that and if they do that'll be horrible like i'm not going to say that won't be horrible yeah um but i don't think that that is what it means necessarily i don't think you know so again until we until we know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna um i'm not going to trouble myself about it too much right um i mean i will say i do think it would be a really really big mistake to do that um yeah i'm right there with you like i i get that question a lot um with stuff like that and my thought is you know you've got amazon has invested a ton of money into this thing and they spent half a billion dollars for the right yeah just for the rights before they spent a penny on the production right they spent half a billion dollars yeah on uh so uh yeah so so i don't think they're gonna go out and say like if there's one you know one of the few things that will immediately turn off your die hard tolkien fans it would be gratuitous nudity and so like i think i i like to think you know that these people are smart enough to know how big of a turn-off that would be and so that's why i don't get i don't get too like you like you said i don't don't borrow uh drama trump don't go no trouble don't borrow trouble yeah it's it's it's you know there will be time enough to get upset if it happens but right uh you know if it didn't happen then you know you've wasted all your time and energy again right upset made yourself miserable for no reason um but um but i i am hoping that too the the main thing that gives me hope about this actually and i gotta give um peter jackson props about this peter jackson did a really admirable job um it would have been so easy uh to sexualize the women at least a little bit in yeah it's not that there's no love it's not that there's no romance it's not not saying that like sexual desire is utterly absent from all of the characters at all times for sure yeah but think how the the costuming right galadriel arwen eowyn even toriel even toriel who is added just to be a female presence yeah you know like he had so much opportunity to like he could it would have been so easy to put you know evangeline lilly in some kind of slinky catwoman outfit at some point right yeah or like or a princess leia bikini or something or something right yeah every like every external justification right i mean like hollywood does this all the time i mean like you know to be like well obviously uh you know if you want to maintain the interest of a certain demographic then like you're gonna need to include this kind of thing i mean his films all of them all six of them actively resist that pressure um and i was really impressed i was expecting that that was that was actually the biggest thing i was worried about with toriel um i wasn't worried about the fact of the creation of her character that made sense to me like what else there are no wood elves like there's the elven king there's not even like there's one who gets a name accidentally because we find out what the dude's name is when the other elk talks to him but there's no characters even the elven king is just called alvin king he never really gets a right um um uh people uh people complain about legolas being included about what were they supposed to do legos was the son of the elven king he would totally have been there okay you can't avoid that um but like so that they were going to invent a named wood elf character to help us like kind of get an understanding of what else like you almost have to do that i think i would have done the same thing of doing an adaptation of the hobbit and if you're going to invent one you're going to invent a female character right because there are no female characters in that actually that's not true uh i just i i just realized uh only recently like within the last few years that there is a female character in the hobbit uh the spider the sp the spider that bilbo kills with sting when he wakes up there we go he's female okay he uses a female pronoun there so there you go see there's a female uh in uh there's a that will satisfy nobody yeah but um anyway so yeah like obviously like so if you're gonna invent a new character it's gotta be female so i've never had a problem with toriel conceptually like you know right it makes sense um but i've actually defended yeah i've defended toriel myself uh a few times because i what i've always said is um you know her as a character i thought and i think evangeline lily is great and uh you know everything they did with her character outside of the love triangle i'm a fan of you know and and you know i i have read that you know that was one of the conditions of evangeline lily coming on was that she would not be in a love triangle and then the studio wants they love triangles so they get a love triangle i i i feel such personal compassion even pity for evangeline lily yeah when watching the hobbit films especially oh my goodness especially in the end of the last film why does it hurt so much forced to say some of literally the worst i mean like the lines that evangeline lily has to deliver there are as bad almost as bad as the anakin and padme romance lines in the attack of the clones i mean it's it's close but they're almost that bad i never thought that that badness of dialogue would be rivalled would be rivaled oh my goodness they managed it um but um anyway anyway um uh so um the uh the the but but so but back to the like yeah so yeah it's it was very like you said it's very admirable i mean yes tolkien never i know a very few stories especially very few novels written in the 20th century and forward that use to use the old word prairie desire that is like design that act to incite sexual desire on the part of the reader to give to go to the opposite extreme george rr martin does this all the time right i mean uh there are constant scenes where like he is trying to make you feel you know the kind of sexual desire that that the characters in the books are feeling tolkien never uses sexual desire as a hook ever ever uses sex it's again it's not that it never happens but he never uses it as a hook there is i don't i can't think of a single place in anything that took okay let me not say that i can't think of anything in tolkien's published works that's safe um in which talking is um like inviting us even indirectly yeah to experience as readers that kind of the kind of sexual desire like the the kind of the the titillation yes the kind of titillation that like you know pornography excites right like that he never ever does that yeah and um that is which i think is why it would it would be so foreign you know if you saw that in an adaptation it would just you know it would clash with your expectations and what would feel true to tolkien i think absolutely i mean it's there's nothing i think that would be that would feel like less true to the spirit of tolkien than that than actually having that kind of uh you know that that kind of period interest on the part of the viewers to yeah uh you know make you keep watching because you're hoping she's gonna take her shirt off right i mean like that that that kind of dynamic which again hollywood does this sort of thing all the time it's a it's a pretty common card um that hollywood plays in order to keep you engaged with what's happening right um there is no appeal that you can make that is more alien to tolkien stories in tolkien's world than that so um anyway that's that's so that's certainly why i think but you know if they there are some ways in which they could kind of come up to the line that would not for me totally ruin it right um but i i do hope that they don't go there um yeah i do hope that they don't go there in general but yeah um yeah i think we're we're definitely in agreement on that well i'll i'll move on from lord ring i'm sure we could like sit here and hypothesize on lord of the rings all day long i did have some other questions i wanted to make sure i got to so um uh maria asked what was your first experience with the world of tolkien my first experience with the world of tolkien i first read the hobbit when i was eight um and uh and here's how it happened my parents loved uh the chronicles of narnia and they they they had been looking forward to reading the chronicles of narnia with their kids you know so when i was seven my parents read the chronicles of narnia aloud to my sister and and me and um i loved it i loved the chronicles of narnia and i like started rereading them again to myself as soon as my parents finished reading them to me um it's one of the things you know one of those like i always remember like you know where i was sitting and like that you know the house that we lived in when i was getting the chronicles of narnia read to me it was wonderful um and but my parents were not talking fans they did not know tolkien at all um and so they um uh they didn't you know so that was all i had was chronicles of narnia um that christmas one of my cousins uh had heard that you know i heard the story that about how much i love the chronicles of narnia and so he gave me my first copy of the hobbit uh and said like if you like narnia you'll probably like this too so he handed me a copy of the hobbit i still have the copy of the hobbit sentence over there on my shelf um copy of hobbit the hobbit that he handed me when i was eight uh it's it's it's the if you know hobbit editions it's the purple emu edition um the one with the wild crazy psychedelic uh landscape coverage that has nothing to do with the hobbit whatsoever um uh it's the whole series of the hobbit lord of the rings that was published in i think it was in the 70s uh by valentine and um he's just hilariously in fact there's a funny story about that the artist who drew those covers had never read the hobbit or the lord of the rings she was it was like one of those things where the publisher was like we need a you know covers like in two weeks do it yeah uh and so she did it you know she's like okay fantasy world all right so she has like you know a purple emu is the it's called the purple emu edition by tolkien folks because it's so funny that there's a purple emu randomly uh uh grazing you know like next to bagan um but um but anyway later on she actually read the hobbit of the lord the hobbit in the word of the rings and she wrote an apology to tolkien she actually sent him an olive branch in the mail uh and like asking for his forgiveness for her pictures that she put on the covers of his book but anyway so it's a purple emu edition of the hobbit um and i just you know reading that that was just a life-changing experience for me i read the hobbit i immediately got the lord of the rings um and uh read the word of the rings and uh and you know people sometimes ask me like you know what do you remember from your first time through the lord of the rings and i'm like i can't even tell because my first reading of the word of the rings was immediately followed by my second reading of the lord of the rings and you know so like it was just like i just began immediately immersing myself and rereading and rereading the text um so so yeah it was um uh it was it was that was very early on and i lived you know when i was a kid so when this is when i was eight when i was in elementary school i lived in rural west virginia um on a like i lived on a mountaintop in rural west virginia i literally had to hike down the mountain to get to the bus stop and back up every day um so like i was living literally in the middle of nowhere um and um therefore i didn't have i didn't have a library that was close to me i didn't you know and and my parents i said my parents were not great readers uh especially non-fiction so um you know i had a very small number of books right so when i was a kid i you know for my elementary school years i would like to read and re-read and re-read like this same number of books and so it's one of the reasons so that honestly that's been the foundation of my whole like tolkien studies career yeah um uh is that i grew up from the time when i was eight until the time i graduated high school i don't even know how many times i read the lord of the rings wow but i have to have averaged at least twice a year possibly three times a year reading the lord of the rings during that time because i had i mean by the time i was in high school i had access to other books right i did read other things we had moved and i i we lived actually i live in southern new hampshire right now which is i've pretty much moved back to where i went to high school which still is weird on some day but um but yeah yeah i'm back near my my extended family again okay um cool but um but anyway so here we had libraries and books pavement uh and stuff um so so uh so when did you get beyond you know hobbit and lord of the rings when did you start getting into the uh you know silmarillion and uh yeah the deeper lore later really um i tried to read the silmarillion for the first time when i was 14 and i completely failed i discovered uh it in a bookstore um and i was like you know because i was like wandering through the fantasy section and i'm like there's another tolkien book how did i not know this yeah and um i've always been like i've never been you know there are some people who always like their first impulse is to go out and do all their research and like find all the background information that's never been me i've always been you know from the beginning i was always like i'm content with the primary text right like i mean i didn't even read the appendices for a long time oh wow probably in middle school before i read the appendices because i like that kind of curiosity i never really had like i just i loved the story and i just wanted to immerse myself in the story um but anyway uh so so i i discovered that the silmarillion existed when i was 14. and i was like wow this is fantastic it's like a sequel to the lord of the rings i want that's just what i want i want more lord of the rings so i started reading the silverian and i'm like wait what's this song stuff so i don't know how far i got i think i couldn't have gotten past the vala valicuenta um i'm quite sure that i dropped it by the time i got to the valley because i mean now i dropped it reverently right because it was talking right so i'm like like this must be good but it's definitely not what i want you know so i it wasn't until high school um maybe even late high school that i came back uh and read the silmarillion for the first time and only you know thereafter uh probably during college was when i was first really reading things like unfinished tales and uh and stuff like that for the first time um so um uh so yeah i mean it was it was it was relatively kind of late in the game i saw people joking and i get this question a lot you know people saying like so how do you become a tolkien professor i want that first of all it doesn't pay much let me just tell you that right up front okay you should be warned if you're considering this as a career um but um uh but basically i mean step one become a professor that's kind of that's kind of you know how it works uh because that's i mean that's what i that's what i it's what i didn't i'm not just a tolkien reader who declared myself you know they told me professor how that came about so first i became a professor basically i you know through my love of tolkien really um i you know was passionate about literature and i was passionate about medieval literature and particularly tolkien had really awakened this love for medieval stuff so when i first read medieval stuff i'm like this is awesome i love this stuff um so i uh when i went to college i was an english major and i decided i wanted to go to grad school i wanted to teach teaching is what i really love um and i decided i really wanted to teach college and i wanted to be a medievalist medieval that i loved medieval lit and that's what i wanted to study so i went to graduate school and i studied i got my phd in medieval literature from columbia university and then i got a tenure-track job as a an english professor teaching medieval literature um and it wasn't until then that and it was funny like looking back on there's so many things in my life that i look back on and i'm like how dumb was i for so long but like seriously we all have that yeah never people like would scarcely even believe i was so obtuse uh but it's totally true throughout my whole college under a graduate school and like the first couple years of my professional professoring career it never even occurred to me to include tolkien in my academic studies you to write an article about tolkien to do anything i was a medievalist who loved talking and it was like i had this like firewall up between like private life and my official academic life you know um and part of that of course was at least indirectly encouraged by the fact that the academic world the act the literary academic world is very interested in keeping the firewall up between tolkien and the official world of literary studies um uh which is dumb uh and which they're i'm delighted to say that uh stick in the mud academics who have been trying to maintain that for years are uh losing that fight very resoundingly these days which is delightful and they should they deserve it so anyway so uh so that was part of it i think that like you know i had never been encouraged by anyone to consider my love of talking as relevant at all to my literary studies um but anyway whatever i never made that connection i kept that firewall up but then the moment came the mo and the moment came in my first year of teaching uh as a as a tenure track professor um i was i took over a job from as a medievalist in a department where the guy who was retiring who whom i was replacing had been like a part-time medievalist he'd done so many evil lit courses on the side but they had decided when they hired me that they wanted to like do more medieval stuff for their students so the department chair said we we want you to create several new courses that you could offer and i was like awesome that sounds great so i'm like oh yeah i can do i can do an arthurian lit class that's going to be a lot of fun i'm going to reconceive this class in that way and then i had the moment when i was like wait i could teach a tolkien class that would be awesome and i pitched it and the department chair said okay and i got pushback from other colleagues in the department especially from the modernist as a rule 20th century lit scholars loathe tolkien like you want to start a fist fight with an academic go to a joyce scholar and tell him that tolkien is the best is the greatest author of the 20th century uh and uh the bouncers are likely to kick the street in five minutes now why is that why why i'm curious this is that's considered behind the curtain that i've never seen oh oh my goodness yeah um yeah all like mainstream like traditional 20th century academics all will say james joyce is the greatest author of the 20th century um like that's the like i think it's not universal nothing is universal in academics there are some random people who will say you know something else um especially american lit people will put forward you know some other american uh names and stuff but anyway the like the canonical uh thing is that joyce is the greatest author of the 20th century um but of course everyone is aware of the fact that tolkien is the most popular author of the 20th century um and there has been and it's it's part of like the whole the whole atmosphere the whole approach the whole bias the like steeped deeply into the culture of the literature of modernism it's like of the first half of the 20th century especially brittle it but even in america was this deep-seated conviction that that which is popular is bad you know you can tell a great work by how little people understand if people can read it and get it and like it it's obvious it obviously sucks right and that's an oversimplification but it's not that much of an oversimplification ezra pound who is one of the great movers of the modernist movement you know uh he edited a whole bunch of you know literary journals and stuff which had subtitles that said things like making no compromise with the public taste uh because tag lines you know like it's just that's how it worked like it's it's how they thought it's what that culture was you know that literary culture um and so a lot of that has i think kind of infected scholars who study that period like kind of in some ways unconsciously and some ways uh consciously i think basically sort of adopt that model and say like it you know something that is a bestseller something that is you know popular with the crowds is obviously that's like a strike against it clearly yeah it's not yeah it can't be great it's almost uh you know i i feel like that happens a lot in uh in films today i mean you look at all the the award nominees that's one of the reasons why you know the uh the lord of the rings series was kind of a uh an outlier because it was so awarded and it was so popular you know typically um even after they expanded the number of best picture nominees it's still you know there's there's been many years where i've not seen a single one of them yeah because they don't look interesting to me but absolutely that's yeah it's an interesting phenomenon it is it is and this is something um a really interesting uh um one of the interesting most interesting things i've read about this is actually an essay by c.s lewis a literary essay by c.s lewis and in which he's he's asking the ques he's kind of approaching this question because it was still like a con like basically why people feel like they have to apologize for reading you know popular like best sellers right yeah um you know like you don't why you don't put like the late you know like why why nobody puts like twilight on their coffee right like instead you would put like you know like uh you know ulysses by james joyce on your comment would be like see how he is well and sophisticated nobody brags about reading people sometimes even are like feel ashamed about reading popular books anyway lewis was talking about this phenomenon and and trying to decide like what you know when people say like these are good books that are like you know legit to read this is real literature and these are like they might be fun you know but they're not real literature um and he was looking at how that changed over time yeah you know and he said the problem is is that some books which were definitely in one category at one point like charles dickens charles dickens is a great example he was absolutely street level pop culture right in the 1860s and 70s right um but nowadays he's a good book right you brag about reading dickens nowadays right um whereas you would not have bragged about it in the same way back in 1870 right so what is it like what is it that determines like whether it's a high brow book or a lowbrow book what is it that that and why does it change over time and the conclusion that he came to i think he's right the conclusion that came to me says the only common factor that you can see among all these things is difficulty if it's hard to read yeah good book if it's easy to read and you just enjoy the pride you know you just it's just fun it's fun yeah then then obviously it's it can't be real it can't be good when you actually back up and look at that that's a really stupid way to categorize it it's dumb it's not it's not right it's it's um a book that is that is in fact easy to read and enjoyable to read maybe for that reason very skillfully written right you know i mean there's some to admire there yeah uh anyway i just saw someone in the comments say popularity plus time equals literature sometimes often yes yeah i know that the bad literature of three centuries ago is like only read by the most essence these days yeah absolutely in some cases that's certainly the case um it's good because it's harder to read now because it's more removed from us in culture it's more removed from us in vocabulary addiction it's just it's just harder um you know dickens is a hard read for some people i mean it's his vocabulary is strange and different his style is different and you know but in those days again it's what like your average person on the street was reading and how they were talking so anyway yeah it's it's it's a weird thing but anyway so this is why one of the reasons why so because tolkien is so popular because tolkien wins every single poll that was ever made about like what is the most important book of the 20th century um but that's exactly why so like it's like they the scholars the 20th century scholars feel like they need to circle the wagons right because they oh man like and this was extremely pointed it was 2004 when i started my when i got my first tenure track job and um so right after like the turn of the millennium so we were still like doing lots of like retroact retrospective polls and and discussions about what is the greatest of the 20th century now that it's over and stuff uh so they were particularly uh on edge about this because tolkien kept coming out again and again and again winning every single poll right made it no matter how they kept trying to do the polls in different ways to make it after they tweaked the verbiage yeah right exactly it always failed um uh but um uh anyway so uh and this is why so by the way when tom shippy the the great tolkien scholar published the book j.r tolkien author of the century he was deliberately like shoving it in the face of fantastic of all the other academics who who just hate that action so much anyway so yeah so yeah my modernist colleague attempted to discourage me from teaching my my tolkien class but i did it anyway um and um it may have something to do with the fact that uh uh well i won't say uncharitable things about his enrollments but uh it was let's just say the tolkien class was a little bit more popular that pop money yeah uh and um anyway so there were there were issues there um but um anyway so that's how it ended up happening so i how did i come to be called the tolkien professor that was an accident so i decided that i wanted to start a podcast um just because i had started publishing on tolkien doing scholarly stuff officially on tolkien um you know publishing so that i didn't perish and stuff as a junior faculty member and um but i decided it was kind of lame okay that's but actually yeah that was kind of what it was because i was like look you publish something in a scholarly journal scholarly publication means nobody can read it basically like that's what it means um because to publish something in a scholarly journal means that it's it's set aside like nobody has access to that like they're enormously expensive so like only research libraries have copies of the things that so i'm like this it just felt to me dumb i'm like why why would i spend all my time working on talking and publishing things on tolkien which like nobody can get access to or only a very small number of people can get access to when i feel like there's a whole lot of people out there who would be really interested in talking as you know as you've seen there's a large audience of folks really passionate about tolkien um and i had a vague sense of that though i didn't um i didn't even uh um i underestimated it at the time i mean at the time i remember talking to my department chair and i'm like i bet you there are hundreds maybe thousands of people would be interested in this and then i so i i experimented and i released you know a lecture series in a podcast instead of you know publishing stuff uh in a scholarly journal and i had like you know ten thousand followers within the first like you know month or so right and i'm like hey okay so um but um but yeah so so when i was first coming so i was making a website and i was naming the podcast and i was like all right i want something that's gonna be like truth in advertising right so like because i'm professor so i'm gonna be lecturing now like i want people to understand that that's what you know that that's what they're getting you know when they click on this or something and i want it to be clear so i'm like okay talking professor.com like that's pretty simple right i'm a professor talking about tolkien that's going to be good so my podcast i'll call it the tolkien professor um what i didn't anticipate was that people would start using that as a title right like and they and right away it started happening people like hey i'm listening to the tolkien professor and i'm like oh wait that's really bad and my colleague have been giving me a hard time about this for a decade now mike drought i don't know if you know mike drought's work uh talking scholar he's a wonderful uh talking scholar and he looks familiar yeah he he's awesome um he teases me every single time like every uh we had him at myth move the annual conference that sigma hosts um and so i was on a panel with him and he starts off and he's like can i just say what an honor it is just talking uh he always brags me about the definite article uh there are lots of other people professors who do tulkey not saying i'm the only one or the definitive one uh so yeah i might have planned that differently if i'd anticipated that but anyway that's funny um so when uh one of my friends when when i was toying with the idea of starting this youtube channel um i was firing off some names and i was like yeah i'm uh you know i'm kind of digging nerd in the rings like i get called a nerd a lot and this friend this friend goes well what a you know do you want to sound more academic like what if you called called it the tolkien professor i'm like dude that's been taken for so long yeah yeah and b i'm not a professor so yeah yeah so yeah so we've we've covered you know we've talked about the amazon show we've talked about the movies a little bit talked about the books obviously um so another thing that you're really big into is uh on the gaming side is lord of the rings online you actually do a regular um live stream yeah um so tell me so i i am in the unique situation where i've i've dabbled in lord of the rings online in previous years but i made the mistake of updating my imac like two years ago and then i couldn't play it so i never actually got into it so as a newbie what advice would you give because right now i feel like you know if you haven't gotten into it it can be kind of daunting to think like this thing's been out yeah this thing's enormous like what what advice do you have for me as a newbie getting into lord of the rings online um so general comment on the lord of the rings online it is a gorgeous adaptation of tolkien's world and i mean that in every sense it's it's artistically gorgeous i love the what they've done with the world of middle earth uh there um i have been every time i've met the folks at standing stone the makers of the game a bunch of times as it happens they actually are their home base is about an hour away from me they're up here so i've been down to their studio several times um and i'll sometimes do like we'll do like a little um you know podcast episodes and stuff basically with the you know we'll sit around and chat um but anyway whenever i meet them whenever i talk to them i always say the same thing i'm like tourist mode please enable tourist mode like i've you know i would love to be able to get people to just um and you know to enable folks to just get in the game and walk around without worrying about getting slaughtered you know by the mobs on the land in the landscape you know um uh because of course not only not only are there lots of you know enemies that you've got to fight uh but if you're really low level like you know the the different areas of course are are ranked but you know it's sort of linear exactly but it is progressed uh so you know you get to gondor gondor is a level like uh 105 uh landscape uh so like uh the the the the deer in the landscape are level 105 right so the more under level you are the more aggressive the the creatures are so i actually had the first time i went to um because i i even i don't i i've been playing for years i don't play that much i don't i don't get much time i mean honestly right now i pretty much play when i'm on my live stream and i don't really get much of a chance to play else yeah otherwise um so i'm going through the game really really slowly um and so therefore they actually have been producing new extensions and new content faster than i've been able to plant they're like they're pulling away from me basically um uh but so anyway so i'm always under level like my highest character is always still under level but i always want to see the new things when they come out so sometimes i'll get um you know higher level characters will help me you know they'll like transform into uh to the spot and i'll get a tour of places and stuff but i remember they bodyguard you they totally do and it's hard work like they're like there'll be like a net of uh like max level characters like trying to like kill all the things that are charging in to attempt to kill me um uh and i don't make it easier because i'm one i'm like oh look at this over there and i'm running over there to look at this thing and they're like wait you know anyway it's always fun um but um uh i remember the first time i went to hennathanoon when they had just released a philly i'm like i want to see henna the noon i want to see the the the the waterfall and everything um i i got to head at the noon and i went down the tunnel uh into kenneth and noon and i was almost all the way down the tunnel and i was about to get to the waterfall when a doe from the landscape pursued me down the tunnel and killed me [Laughter] holy cow anyway like that's the kind of thing again it's just it's the way the game mechanics yeah but um um but it's um uh but yeah tourist mode i wish they had tourist mode like just like you know make you unkillable unnoticeable by the mobs you can't do anything honor just just sightseeing just just look at surroundings and see middle earth um so i've been arguing for that for years and they haven't done it yet i'm sure there are reasons that i don't i mean i'm not a you know game creator harder than i think it is but um uh but anyway um so uh uh but it's a it's a really cool word but not only is it gorgeous artistically and they've done a really really good job they are really careful readers of the text i have great admiration for their lore people um uh the the the lore masters down there at uh uh at standing stone chris pearson has been their chief loremaster from the very beginning of the project um he's come and he's spoken at myth mood also too before um uh uh he and uh uh uh jeff uh made of lions as he's uh called uh his username and game um they are they're wonderful both of them are wonderful he's uh made of lions uh jeff is the um the like the main storyline guy the main going you know storyline guy uh and um um uh chris is the is the main you know overall lore guy yeah they such a wonderful job um and uh they read the text really carefully whenever i go to a new area that i've never seen before in lotro the first thing i do there's always something like it'll spark like a memory of a particular detail of the text i'll always go looking for it um so like for it uh the the first thing that i noticed when i got to frodo's house at crick hollow right that you know when you get to frodo's house and quick the first thing that you'll see is there is a torn cloak lying on the doorstep and i'm like oh perfect there's a torn book on the just exactly as gandalf described it was there like the attention to detail it's really really good the first time i went to tom bombadil's house the very first thing i did i didn't go inside i ran around the back of the house to see if there are rows of beans on poles outside the back window sees when he wakes up and looks like windows and there are they put beans on like really really careful attention to detail i'm not saying it's perfect there there are some places where you know because obviously just like we were talking about with movies when you're doing game adaptations there's a lot of things that you've got to that you've got to change that you've got to make uh you know uh to alter in some ways um in order to make the whole game world function right it can't just be a one-to-one yeah exactly exactly but they are very very careful and the storylines that they develop are very very good i love the narrative of the story the live stream that i'm doing i do the my live stream so um my twitch channel is twitch.tv slash sigmu that's the sigmu twitch channel and i sometimes do do stuff there my weekly stream is on the lotro official twitch channel um loto stream um but um it's on friday afternoons at what is it two i should i should know what time one o'clock i just want to class 1 p.m eastern is when i begin uh phil who is one of the people who's here in the chat i see him is my uh uh my my my loremaster who takes questions and makes sure that i see the questions that people ask instead of laughing at me that i can't remember what time it starts what's time he's about to say that that explains why i'm uh so often late but anyway at my stream um uh my weekly live stream i'm going through and i'm basically doing a completionist trip through the storyline like doing every quest and following every story um because i am so interested in how they adapt uh how they adapt the stories um obviously when you're doing a game you have more even much more even than in a film when you're doing a film there's so many things that you show that aren't explicitly said in the book right so the decisions you have to make that the book doesn't have to make uh all over the place in the game it's even more detailed because of the dilation of time right so like for instance my character uh whose name is griflit uh he's a hobbit burglar named griflit and he uh he's traveling around rohan right now he's been doing rohan for a while and um you're traveling around rohan at the time like right right before and right after worm tongue has been exposed okay so basically what they have to do is not only flesh out like what are the different cities and towns and areas in rohan like what are the towns look like what are the cultures like what you know uh what's the difference you know in the the landscape and feel and culture of like the wold versus the westfold and you know all these other things so it's it's not only that they do that bit of world building for one thing um but then in addition what's the story in each of those places like you know what is what has worm tongue been up to what kinds of decrees you know worm tonguey and decrees have come from the various places and how are the different things and reeves of the of the land responding and what kind of conflicts is this creating who's on wormtongue's side and who's not on wormtong's side and and and how are they not in what are they doing and and so in each place you're sort of discovering these things and you're you know helping the different people um so you know again even in a film you just get a like a glimpse of this right but of course in the game you're going around and you're you're like doing all these you've got quest in one town and then you go to the next down you get 15 more quests in the next town and they're all like kind of theoretically parallel right so that that that like in the two you know month before worm tongue is exposed but when his power is at its peak that moment gets dilated over you know hours and hours and hours of gameplay in multiple different places all across rohan um it's really fascinating so i'm just imagining chris's office being like the meme with like the conspiracy theory stuff you know that's what i'm imagining with all the strings and stuff it's really complicated it's very complicated with um um uh it's very complicated with uh the timelines especially because it got really difficult for them because they parallel the pc play to the story of the ring i mean that the fundamental premise of lotro is that you're playing a character but you're not playing one you know it's not like you know one of those or something exactly it's not like one of those old console games or something where you're like play frodo and like go through the quest like it's not like that so you create your own character and your character is a side um a side like a peripheral character like of the whole thing so your job is not to go with the company your job is to like go around the company and they they are brilliant at um they are brilliant at finding ways to tie it into explicit references in the text one of my favorite examples from earlier early in the book you may remember that um uh when they get to rivendell right so in the first chapter of book two uh many meetings right when they get to rivendell um uh and then after the council we're told that they're there for a long time right and while they're there yeah while they're there they're sending scouts out and everything that's a whole quest line right you're one of the scouts and remember that reference to how they they found the bodies of eight horses right mm-hmm uh-huh ninth horse that's a quest right quest uh that you gotta go on to find like well we gotta you know did one of them escape is one of them still around like you know what's going on you know we we got to make sure to get to the bottom of this right they do a lot of things like that where they're really brilliant connecting it to the store so like you actually appear in the story not by name right but you actually appear in the books uh another one of my favorite examples of this is um uh theoden calls for his sword right and he's like where is my sword you know grima held it in his keeping and somebody somebody runs it back you do that like the pc gets to sign the quest to go to grima's uh house and like go through his chest bring it back to him um so i mean it's um it's it's it's really it's it's a fun adaptation they're they're really really good at um uh at the the attention that they pay to the text the adaptation of the story um and i just have a huge respect for uh for what they've done um their adaptation even of the landscape is interesting um you know even just looking at the um the the kinds of history that they build i've spent a lot of time in lotro just going around and looking like at the ruins and from the ruins which you can see these are our norian ruins because they've got the numenorean symbols on the star of the north right yeah okay um and then so we can we you can kind of piece together the whole back history of not only the kingdom of arnor but like the arnorian civil wars being like oh there's the rudow symbol so okay so this was a root tauren castle at one point um you know based just based on on where they've placed all the ruins and stuff that again a lot of real attention to detail so as far as for a newbie person yeah there are like hundreds and hundreds of potential hours of gameplay i'm sure that you can do but if you go through there's the epic quest line and then there's like side quests stick to the epic quest line you can do this um uh and you can do it you don't have to be like you know you can you can pay a subscription to be a vip member you can play for free um you can play for free and play the whole epic quest line so you know it's not required to be a vip obviously there are some things that make it easier if you're a vip but um but you can play the whole epic s the whole epic line as as as a free to play um and uh and that gives you sort of the core story that goes along in parallel with uh um with the main plot uh of the word of the rings uh with some extra stuff uh worked in like the exploration of moria for instance um they did all of moria it's huge it's amazing you can even go down and find gandalf's hat at the bottom of where he fell awesome uh yeah it's pretty cool well i i am definitely looking forward to i that's one of the um when i upgraded my computer recently i switched to pc and one of the things i was most excited about was uh breaking out my my character on lotro again um and really diving into it my for for the record my character is a dwarf and his name is kildum nice so i'm excited to get get killed him out and go kill them orcs well i i know we're running short on time here i know uh we gotta we gotta get wrapping up so i've got some rapid fire questions for you and hopefully you know maybe someday we can unpack these further in a future live stream but i'll i'll throw some rapid fire questions at you um what age do you think is the most interesting of middle earth i have to say the second primarily because there's so little written about it yeah um it's the second age is like the great untold story in tolkien's world and so for that there for me it's extremely tantalizing and very interesting for that reason um i mean it's hard to choose first age and third age there's so much and they're so awesome but yeah if i had to go with like what i find most fascinating i think the second age because it's so unknown um yeah great um what is your favorite tolkien book favorite book okay see if we say favorite thing that tolkien wrote i think my favorite thing that tolkien wrote i mean you know the lord of the rings is his great work like you know but that's you know cheating um my favorite thing is leaf by niggle um leaf by niggle is my favorite i've told my non you know uh non lord of the rings category uh my favorite thing written by tolkien is leaf by nickel i love it's one of his short stories i love leaf by nickel great um yeah yeah it's a fun one um do balrogs have wings no definitely not absolutely not under no circumstances do bellrocks have wings um that's explicit in the text um uh the the wings of the it's a metaphor it's a metaphor first he uses a simile the shadow spread out behind him like wings then after that he metaphorically says and his wings that is the shadow that was like wings spread out around him but he obviously doesn't have wings because if he did he probably wouldn't have plummeted down balrogs of course are always plummeting off of high places in tolkien's story very peculiar thing for winged creatures to end up doing uh what's more it's even more explicit in the non-lord of the rings stuff i mean we won't get that one glimpse of the balrog which has that one very famous simile and metaphor in it um but it is extremely explicit one of melkor's biggest restrictions in the first stage was that he had no air force um and uh the balrogs are very plainly and explicitly his they are his heavy infantry they are his his heavy ground troops um which is why it's such a big deal when the war of wrath when the winged dragons show up a big deal exactly because it's the first time uh melchor ever had anything winged um so yeah it's a it's a it's a it's so it's very it's not a debate like there's no there really can't be two opinions on this subject like it's very clear that bellrocks don't have wings but i will give one caveat i totally understand artists who depict you know the bridge of kaza doom always want the balrog wings and i get it the balrog looks so much it looks cool yeah like wings are cool winged rocks look way cooler than unringed unwinged balrogs like i totally respect that so i'm not gonna you know harsh on any artist like john howe always depicts a very explicitly winged balrog that's fine i get it i get it but it's not um it's it's that's they know they don't have it okay i'm glad we i i'm on the same page i've always had that uh i i think i listened to uh a podcast one time where that was brought up and so ever since then i've been a convert i'm like okay my eyes have been opened they don't have wings so next question who is tom bombadil and what is your favorite theory i know we don't have like a finite answer we don't we don't um but i also don't think he meant tom bombadil to be like an utter mystery either you know so tom bombadil clearly based upon his own account he clearly he's not one of the children of a louboutin right so he's not and man he's not an elf he's not he predates elves obviously right which means there's he's got to be one of the ainur who came into middle earth like he has to be um he remembers um uh i mean he he remembers like he he was in middle earth before melchor came into it right there's just there's not a large cast of characters there's like the inaudible at that point so he must be one of the inor um he's not one of the valar or one of their maya you know one of the mayar who are kind of like you know the you know the sort of lesser servants yeah persistence of the of the of the vowel he's not one of them um but he's one of them also in a different i mean he's he's he's a free agent basically but that same kind i don't think there can be an i mean within the world as tolkien you find it only so many things he can be um so in that sense i don't think it's that mysterious but he is mysterious in the sense that he is the the one that we meet there are i believe in tolkien's world many spirits like this many kind of free agent spirits who are attached to middle earth who are kind of manifest who are geographically restricted uh like spirits of the land karatharas is another one right karatbars exists too um i don't think that's just a you know a way of talking about the weather right i mean there is of courathros um so anyway and it's it seems from other writings that tolkien was thinking in that way actually quite um like goldberry she's the daughter of the river right and yeah it's and one of uh one of the ones that i recently discovered that i've liked like just dropping on people and say hey google this um is uh ball dog the uh the orc that's not a my arm but it disguised as an orc which is really interesting so yeah i i i'm with you there yeah um okay i don't think we have time to get go ahead that's a fun theory i know there are a lot of people who like to think that tom bombadil is a louvitar in disguise totally not louis yeah and that can explicitly address that i mean yes like he talked about that um and his argument was of course very a very good one you know he was like he she said he is which is very different he is is very different from i am that i am which is what primarily you know the identity of the name of god as i am right uh is primarily what people kind of latch on to when they're making that connection and tolkien was like yeah no that's not even what that says it gets um he he's not only opposing and saying that's not what i meant he's saying that's a bad reading of that passage yeah and here are the reasons why it's a bad reading of that passage so yeah and and he's also not talking himself i've had a lot of people comment asking me if he's talking himself and that he he also directly refuted that one i believe as well yeah i mean it's it's i mean you know you could say it almost indirectly in the sense that like he really liked tom bombadil and tom bomigo represents a lot of things that he really enjoyed um but you know it's um but yeah no it's it's he's he is uh a separate strange independent entity um and that's how tolkien kind of wanted him to be but i mean i can't blame the people who want to know the answer to this question oh yeah because kind of the kind of world that tolkien has built and and went on to build and to intensify is exactly the kind of world where there should be answers to these questions so you can't blame people for asking it yeah for sure okay so my last question here um i i had a couple others regarding whether or not taking the eagles to mordor but we'll save that for another time because i think we could go on for a while on that one so talking professor versus stephen colbert who would win in a trivia contest oh man uh you know i he might win because first of all stephen colbert is a legit fan like he knows for sure and you know i think he is way quicker-witted than i am so he would probably win in a debate um people have been wanting to set up a debate between me and stephen colbert for like a decade really i uh he listens to my podcast by the way i've had several like very indirect interactions with him um uh but um i know he listens to my podcast uh and what i would love i don't want to debate with him i just want to geek out with him i just want to have like a session where we just kind of like talk about tolkien and like you know give him a chance on his show because he's never had that like you know he's he's never he's almost never had a guest whom he could really like discuss talking with in the way that he always wants to talk about talking so that's what i would want to do i don't know let's just discuss let's not yeah but uh but yeah i think he would he might possibly win but it would be fun if uh if debating him is what would have to happen in order to like to you know for to to have him have me be on his show i do the trivia yeah the trivia contest yeah i've i've heard i i had uh stephen hunter who played bomber in the hobbit movies he was um you know we i i had heard before that uh um stephen had gone down to new zealand and had a trivia contest uh down there with uh was it uh philippa boyance yeah yeah and uh i had always heard like it was a mystery who won but stephen hunter totally ratted him out and said that stephen colbert totally won it surprised me for two years that doesn't surprise me yeah yeah but no i mean i i and i know you know stephen colbert of course has become more and more heavily entrenched in the political realm and in late years um you know i don't want anything to do with the political realm but uh but on a pure discussion you know yeah i i really whatever anyone thinks about him for political reasons and i i you know i have no opinion on those things right um but i i he's he is uh he is a true fan you know he is he knows his stuff really well yeah i that would that would be a great yeah i would i would definitely sign up to uh excuse me to listen to the two of you geek out and uh just be a fly on the wall in that conversation that would be amazing um yeah well corey thank you so much for uh for joining us here today doing some uh q a and just uh talking tolkien um hopefully we can do this again sometime and uh we'll definitely have a a lot of uh stuff to look forward to with the amazon show and um i mean we even we didn't even talk about we've got a new tolkien book coming out later this year um so we've we've got some exciting stuff on the horizon so um yeah so uh tell us real quick um for everybody watching here how they can uh find you um your podcast and uh yeah go plug everything a bunch of different i kind of sloppily uh i publish my stuff in lots of different places so people can get it in lots of places my 13 year old son tells me i'm doing youtube wrong but you know [Music] it is what it is so uh you can the best place you can go to get um to get my content is the signum university youtube page um a lot of my stuff is there um i do a bunch of weekly live broadcasts um well i've got four different programs um one of which is every other week and the other three of which are every week um so uh i do those all of those get posted to my to our youtube channel um either they're broadcast live on our youtube channel or they get posted there right afterwards they're also audio podcast feeds for people who want to do the audio podcast look us up uh talking professor um exploring the lord of the rings my exploring the word of the rings class is a separate um a separate thing um and then they're a separate feed and then there's the myth guard academy which is another separate feed um one of the other broadcasts i do um so there's lots of um there's lots of lots of content out there you know i i just recently did that youtube uh video with wired right yeah well watched and so there were a whole bunch of people who were kind of you know learned about my stuff for the first time so i was getting a lot of stuff on twitter because my my twitter account was uh was posted and you can reach out to me on twitter at tolkienprof twitter is kind of my primary uh social media because i'm old um so uh twitter is what i primarily do um and uh anyway so um on twitter i getting a bunch of people reaching out to me and being like hey is there any more of your content i can find and i'm like make sure you're sitting down because there's a lot a thousand hours of material so there's plenty um but the thing about the youtube channel that is i always refer people to the youtube channel first um because it's set out in different playlists so you can see it in different chunks there are some really long running uh programs like the film film thing we were talking about before like exploring word of the rings um there's also um single book discussions that i've done like through the myth guard academy where i you know you can look at my you know um i don't remember how many was 14 or 15 uh class sessions chapter by chapter through the book of lost tales you know or whatever um so it's a little bit easy and also we did other non-tolkien stuff there you can look at my class on dune or watership down or dracula so all this stuff is there so youtube channel is definitely the best place to start and if you want to contact me or ask me a question twitter's the best place to reach out at tolkienprof very cool well thank you again corey this has been a lot of fun and uh yeah we will see you guys next time um be sure to go uh check out tolkien professor check out signum university uh here on youtube and we'll see you next time on nerd of the rings

Channel: Nerd of the Rings

Views: 67,332

Rating: 4.9272728 out of 5

Keywords: tolkien, lord of the rings, lotr, hobbit, the hobbit, nerd of the rings, silmarillion

Id: KnYrP5MhKt0

Length: 116min 55sec (7015 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021