Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that a teenager, there was one type of thing that Tolkien would do in the books.

That was my least favorite. And I know I gush all the time about all the things I love about the way Tolkien writes things. And I'm going to gush

about this now because it was something that I didn't fully understand and something that I

often avoided. In fact, I would even skip these passages

sometimes because I just didn't get it. I didn't understand the value. I felt like it slowed down

the progress of the story and it was the least interesting thing you could add into a book like this.

And what I'm talking about here are the sections of the stories kind of in between the major

moments where the party is traveling, whether it's, you know, Bilbo and the dwarves, or

whether it's the fellowship or whoever happens to be traveling, because there's a lot

of traveling in both of these books. These are both odyssees, if you were to put them in a classical

category. There are these moments where Tolkien stops to smell the flowers, so to speak. And maybe

sometimes it actually is flowers, but oftentimes it's a description of the landscape

or a description very, very regularly of trees and plants and the things that they're

passing as they travel.

And I always thought that these were just sections that could have been cut out.

Why spend so much time in a book with adventures and interesting characters and really cool hints at the breadth of history?

All of these engaging moments to talk about something as boring as trees.

I didn't understand. But now I understand.

This does a few things. It gives us a time to take a breath between the more exciting moments of the

story. It gives us time to ourselves to stop and smell the flowers, but it also presents an opportunity for us to get a sense of how the journey would actually feel if we were there.

How many times have you been on a trip where you've been traveling by car?

And you've noticed, oh, we've just spent the last five hours

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