Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's works has always interested me because I believe that there's always been a fundamental misunderstanding about how magic actually works and what it even entails.

And my sense of this is it's because, well, it comes from a lot from us, from we the readers, imposing on the works our own expectations of what magic is or what

magic even means rather than paying attention to what the works actually tell us in biblical studies

for example when you study historical works and biblical

works and religious works, especially, there's the use of the terms isogesis and exegesis.

So, isegesis is E-I-S-E-G-E-E-S-I-S, and ex-A-G-E-E-S-I-S.

And the difference is, when you are reading a work and you are imposing into the work itself

your own expectations of what you are looking to find and then justifying what you are looking to find.

That is is eSegesis.

When instead, and this is the way we should be reading works, whether they're fiction or

nonfiction or whatever, you read the work in a way where you are interpreting out of the

text and you're letting the text tell you what it's saying and understanding its context only from what is within the text and what comes out of it.

Without inserting any of your own expectations, this is exegesis.

And in my understanding of the way magic works in the world of Tolkien, and this happens not only with magic, just side note here, this also happens a lot with people's expectations, with people's beliefs about what it's saying about culture and Tolkien himself and all of these things, which I try very hard to stay away from iso-geasing these works, right?

So when it comes to magic, I believe that this is something that many of us do,

simply because we have expectations of what will be in the works, or what magic has meant to

us before we got to reading these works.

So before we get any further with the stories and with the events that happen after the

death of Feanor and all the things that his sons do and the way things happen in ballerian and what goes on

with melchor all of that stuff before we get into any more of that stuff i wanted to take an

episode to address what magic might actually be in Tolkien's works according to him and then

according to other scholars that have used

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