Episode 23: Lord of the Rings

July 2, 2011

Featuring Matt Anderson and Ben De Bono

Immediately after watching all three Lord of the Rings back to back to back, Ben and Matt sit down and podcast about the trilogy. Ben shares some of his Middle Earth knowledge from reading both the books and The Silmarillion and both Ben and Matt discuss some of the major spiritual themes that emerge throughout the story.

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2 comments on “Episode 23: Lord of the Rings

  1. Michael Oct 7, 2011

    You guys joked (at about 52 minutes in) that JRRT discovered rather than wrote “The Lord of the Rings,” but that’s kind of the way Tolkien thought about it. Not that he really believed he wasn’t inventing the story, of course; but it was also more than just “making up a story” for him. First, he was “subcreating”: trying to almost uncover a self-consistent, separate world. Hence his obsession (no other word for it, not meant unkindly) with the languages. Second, he was more than just a linguist in general, he was a philologist, meaning he studied word origins, including hypothetical forms. So his languages are all “hypothetical” forms of human languages we have today, because Middle-earth is, “in fact,” our world in earlier ages now lost to us. Again, it’s not that JRRT couldn’t tell reality from fantasy; but he strove to make his fantasy as “realistic” as possible. So you really weren’t that far off the point!

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