Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast, the show that explores the background of

Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning.

Why do we love Ghalm so much?

This is the question that has been bouncing around in my brain for the last week as I've been

prepping to jump into this episode to actually talk about riddles in the dark and our first interactions

with Ghalm. And it's an interesting question, and I'm not going to spend too much time on this

in the intro, but it's just something that I ponder. Why do we like him? It's not like he's a good

guy. It's not like he's nice or brave, or he just doesn't have any of those

qualities. I think the answer might lie in the fact that he's so interesting, that he's so

unique, even in the Lord of the Rings, let alone in anything else.

There aren't very many characters like Gollum.

We end up with all these archetypes, certain types of heroic characters or tragic characters,

or villains, or dark heroes, these anti-heroheroes and, you know, like Wolverine or things like that.

There are typical archetypes, right?

Like most characters fall into some classification that makes them very similar to another character that you could find either in the similar works

by that same artist, same author, or somebody else.

But Gallum is a little different.

He's very unique.

He's a monster, but he's not a monster.

He's a person.

He used to be more of a person, but now he's less of a person. He's riddled with

all of these dark, terrible thoughts because he's been corrupted, but yet there's still a certain

...