5 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
As the party reaches the end of their river escape, the Dwarves climb out of their barrels seemingly barely alive. How realistic is this?
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0:00.0 | Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. Have you ever noticed how sometimes when reading fiction, |
0:30.3 | the things that stand out the most to us, or at least to me, as being improbable |
0:36.6 | or, well, not exactly realistic, are not the things that are big and bold, |
0:43.4 | the things that are distinctly different and beyond the experiences of our regular world, |
0:49.4 | but instead are the things that are very close to, but not exactly the same as what we experience. |
0:57.0 | Here, let me give you an example. |
0:58.8 | Now, maybe this is a spoiler, but I think it's fair to assume that everybody listening to this episode of this show at this point has at least seen the movies of The Hobbit, if not read the book. |
1:08.1 | But coming up very soon in the story, as we get towards the end of this book, they will |
1:13.8 | have to confront a dragon. |
1:15.7 | And that dragon will get very angry and will attack Lake Town. |
1:19.8 | And Lake Town will defend itself. |
1:21.8 | And somebody from Lake Town will shoot the dragon in the one spot that it's vulnerable in order to kill said |
1:29.6 | dragon. Now, this is well beyond the experience of us in our own reality. Sure, some people |
1:36.7 | go hunting for big game and things like that, but I can pretty much guarantee that nobody |
1:41.4 | you know has actually fought a dragon, right? And yet we accept that. |
1:46.7 | This is fantasy. This is fiction. And in fiction, strange, mysterious things will happen. |
1:54.4 | Gigantic, amazing events will happen. The unexpected will become real. You'll find a ring that turns you invisible. A man will turn |
2:04.4 | into a bear and then back again. This is how fantasy works. And I think we all have come to expect |
2:11.3 | that. But what about when the events of the story are similar enough to real life, but yet still improbable, unlikely, maybe even unrealistic. |
2:24.2 | What I'm talking about here is the fact that at the point of the story that we are at right now, |
2:29.0 | you have a bunch of dwarves stuck in barrels in very cold water for hours at a time. |
2:38.0 | Now you might be thinking, yeah, that sounds uncomfortable. I don't want to be in that situation. |
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