A new day begins, but doesn’t quite “dawn”, and Gollum leads the hobbits down to the cross-roads. They clearly aren’t in decent places anymore, with loud noises and orc graffiti keeping them all on edge (not to mention no decent tea house for miles). But a ray of sunshine at the right time and place reminds them that not all hope is lost. We discuss Sam’s actual pipe dream and the Gaffer’s old belief that where there’s hunger, there’s hope… but first, a new installment of our collecting segment Kingly Gifts, with guest Chad High.
Find Chad High online as Mr. Underhill on Tolkien Collector’s Guide, and listen to Texas Tolkien Talk wherever you get your podcasts.
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Recommended Reading:
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of The Lord of the Rings (Mariner Books, paperback) “Journey to the Cross-Roads”, pp. 682-87
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) The Silmarillion (Mariner Books, paperback)
Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, paperback)
Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Mariner Books, hardcover)
Great, fun episode as always but
45:14, 1:10:30 Covert, as a noun, is pronounced CUH-vert, including in the US. COH-vert is OK for the adjective, though historically it was pronounced the same as the noun and still is in the UK.
01:08:00 “Where there’s life there’s hope” sounded like a common saying to me. Apparently it is from the playwright Terence:
Modo liceat vivere, est spes
While there’s life, there’s hope
It’s first recorded in English in 1539, though at least one on-line source thinks it is original to Tolkien.
Loved the Gauntlet reference. The soundtrack to that game was genius. I never quite decided if “I have never seen such heroism” was complimentary or sarcastic !
Also… you didn’t make the link between the line you read in the Ozymandias poem and what Galadriel says at the mirror – all shall love me and despair…
Thankfully, I couldn’t find any examples of Orc graffiti, but I found this entry in the Hitchhiker’s Guide:
“Orc poetry is considered the fourth worst in the universe, falling behind Vogon poetry by only a slim margin. Ratfink the Eloquent is perhaps the finest poet known to Orc-kind, though by “finest” we mean that he advanced as far as having rhythm and meter. Sadly, he never discovered rhyming since, during a reading of “Pox Upon Thy Pungent Pit” a fight broke out, killing 10 Orcs including Ratfink himself”