While Gandalf and Aragorn ponder the evening’s events and finally identify the object of Pippin’s affections as the palantír of Orthanc, a Nazgûl flies overhead — which means it’s time for Gandalf and the sticky-fingered Took to exit, stage east. And as Shadowfax carries them over the plains at breakneck speed (not that any necks will be broken, we hope) we bring Book III of The Lord of the Rings to a close. But before we wrap the fifth season, a mailbag question about the podcast and listener expectations gets Alan and Shawn into introspective mode.
Recommended Reading:
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of The Lord of the Rings (Mariner Books, paperback) “The Palantír”, pp. 580-86
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) The Silmarillion (Mariner Books, paperback)
Do you already have a plan for what you will do after the next two seasons? 🙂
Well, it’ll be 3 more seasons before we get to “Well, I’m back,” and then we may do another season on the Appendices! Then there’s a host of stuff we want to do from Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, and the non-legendarium works before we go back and revisit The Silmarillion for our last season. But nothing is set in stone. 🙂
In a similar vein – if you were offering guidance on re-read order (finally into this) what would it be. I have re-read The Silmarillion and started on The Hobbit but I wondered if I should have tackled the recently published ‘Great Tales’ as they are first age stories. For now I will follow the podcast sequence – I should have caught up by Christmas!
Despite the fact that we covered The Silmarillion first on the PPP, I always recommend (for first-time readers) The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion in that order. If you’ve already read them all before, then you can start at The Silmarillion and go more chronologically.
The three “Great Tales” should be read after The Silmarillion, because you need the context of The Silmarillion to make sense of the First Age, and the stories are outlined in The Silmarillion… the standalone publications fill in the details. It’d probably make the most sense to read them in this order: Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin; because that is chronological to the timeline and their appearance in The Silmarillion. But I suppose you could also read TCoH first, since it was published first.
After that, Unfinished Tales is your best bet, with the caveat that you’ll have read all the First Age material in that book if you read the standalone editions of the Great Tales. And then if you like the “manuscript + commentary” format of Unfinished Tales, tackle The History of Middle-earth! We covered the best reading order for HoMe in a recent mailbag segment.
I hope that helps! Enjoy catching up. 🙂
How about a couple seasons reading through the “academic” Tolkien-related writings, reading relevant passages for the Legendarium where apropos? Flieger! Fimi! Shippey!….