Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. Welcome back, friends.

This is a different episode this week because I decided that we're going to answer some

questions that I posted on the Patreon.

And by the way, you can sign up for free on Patreon in order to answer queries

like this for questions. These go out to everybody. You don't have to be a paying member,

although I would appreciate the support if you can do that. But if not, that's totally fine.

You could still participate. So I got a number of really good questions from the community.

And you might be wondering, why are we taking a

break? We're right at the point where Bilbo confronts Smauk. What are you doing? Well, it's been

kind of a crazy week. There's a lot going on this last week. My son is back in school. My father

has had a major surgery, including operations

on his brain. So hopefully you can grant me this, the ability to just do this. And it's

going to be like an extended episode, an extended episode where I take on some of your questions

and some of your thoughts. And we, although I've totally prepped the episode, I have my notes on it and everything's ready to go with Bilbo and Smauk, I'm going to push that back to next week.

So instead we're doing this, but we're also doing a thing where this is going to be a longer episode.

So instead of breaking this up into the main episode and a bonus episode just for patrons,

this is going to be an extended episode, basically, for everybody.

So if you were looking to get some insight in the kinds of things that go on in the patron episodes,

this may give you some insight into that.

So here we go.

Let's get into the questions.

Yeah. So here we go. Let's get into the questions. So let's dive right into the deep end. This question is from Erruiluvatar equals Jesus with an exclamation mark, who writes, several evil myr turned into ballrogs. Is there a creature

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