Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. So here's a fun thing to notice in The Hobbit right now as we've been going through it.

And as we will continue today, we are talking about the dwarves being captured by the elves.

We have this moment of imprisonment.

But it occurred to me, thinking about today's episode and how I was going to kind of

organize everything, that they just went from being captured by the spiders, which was a

much more dire and time-sensitive kind of situation, the spiders were going to eat them

at any moment, to being captured by

the elves, in which case they aren't about to be eaten, but they're not really going to go

anywhere anytime soon. So they're still captured in both situations. And it also occurred to me,

I was like, wait a minute. So we're going from one type of prison to another, but they've already

been in a prison this whole entire time. As soon as they set foot in the forest, they were

captured. The forest itself is a magical prison. It's a place where you go in and you don't expect, well, you hope to get

out, but the forest doesn't expect you to leave. It's a dark, foreboding, terrible place. If you move

anywhere off the path, you get lost. If you fall in the river or drink the water, you fall asleep.

That's a prison of consciousness

or unconsciousness. And then as you continue through, or at least as this party continue through,

you come across spiders, which are looking to capture and keep you and eat you, and then you'll

never leave. Or the elves who are definitely not down with strangers, you know, crashing their

parties. And so they're going to capture you and interrogate you and keep you from leaving.

This entire time, time doesn't seem to work the way it should anywhere else. This entire

situation is a prison with other ways of keeping you in inside of it.

So when you think about them being captured by the elves, this is just another way that the

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