Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast.

It has been a while since we've talked about The Hobbit.

It's over a month and a half now.

And I'm glad that we were able to talk about the rings of power because the second

season definitely improved on the first. And if you listen through those episodes, you heard my

critiques and my enthusiasm for different parts. And I love the conversation that we've got going on

around it in the Discord and on the Patreon episodes. And thank you for going through that

with me because it's a once in a two-year thing. So I figured it was worth taking time out

this time to go through that. But we are back to discussing The Hobbit. This will be the 12th

episode on The Hobbit. And in order to get you back up to speed, the dwarfs and Gandalf and Bilbo are in Rivendale.

And they are talking with Elrond.

And this is the first time in this story that we get a close up view of an elf, somebody actually having conversations with one,

and we start to get to know a little bit about Elrond and his knowledge, his history,

his understanding of things.

And you have to remember, as we go through this, that this book, The Hobbit, there and back again,

wasn't always going to be part of the legendarium.

At first, it was a one-off story, and we've talked about this.

And there are little, I guess you could call them, vestigial pieces of text that either make that kind of obvious or point to a different reason why this story was to begin with. And we're going to get to that as we get through here.

And this is not going to be the most adventurous episode, but it is an episode that is going

to be linking together the end of the chapter we're currently on with the beginning of the next chapter.

So we will be wrapping up chapter three and entering chapter four.

So without further ado, let's get into it. So we left off last time, and Elrond was asking the dwarves to show him the map.

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