Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast,

the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. In today's episode, we have what I would call a little mystery.

And this is something that Tolkien does in his writings every so often.

And I find that this is an interesting balance. And what I'm

talking about is the difference between the times where Tolkien reveals a little bit of something,

kind of like Gandalf has been doing lately, where he'll reveal a little bit, and then he'll

reveal a little bit more. And then sometimes he doesn't even give you the whole story.

He keeps something a mystery.

For example, the origins of Angoliant, you know, like this creature from the void sort of thing.

What's actually going on there?

Well, we only have so much to go on and we can speculate about it.

Tom Bombadil.

That's another example.

What happened to the Ent Wives? We get these glimpses into a mystery with a limited amount of

actual data to go on and then we're just kind of left hanging and we have to figure out what's going

on by the little bits of pieces that he gives us. Or he does the

complete opposite thing and will do things like completely spoil the end of a story within the

story. He'll tell you how things are going to end before they end. He will go into extreme

amounts of depths about the minutia of little details and leave no mystery at all. And it's

interesting, right? Like sometimes he does one and sometimes he does the other. And you would think

that this would create some form of inconsistency, some level of not being able to trust the author

or the person telling the story or the character that you are reading about

...