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 thought about all the different things that you have to take into consideration as an author as you're writing through a story?

I'm sure a lot of us consider some of these things.

The general plot, the different kinds of characters, the locations, the character arcs,

the way things are going to play out, maybe even the tone and the minute details

behind the scenes stuff, you know, the things that you don't necessarily point out,

but then flavor the rest of the story.

But there's another element among all of the different things that you have to consider

that I don't think gets discussed very often.

It's about information.

How do characters know what they know?

And how does important information get from one place to another, especially

when it's secret? Especially when the plot hinges on that information getting exactly to the place

it needs to go. And some authors are better about this than other. Sometimes people just magically

know things and it's not really explained, or sometimes it's kind of a clumsy thing, or sometimes

it's a Deus X Machina. It's like a god behind the machines, and things we're just going to work

out that way no matter what. But the most elegant solution to the problem of the dissemination of

information are solutions that make sense in the context of the world and the situations that

the characters are in. In today's episode, we're going to be discussing how information travels

from one place to another, a few different ways.

The most prominent one that you're probably aware of is the information about Smog's

weak spot and how that information gets passed to the dwarves.

And in the conversation between Bilbo and the dwarves, it is overheard by the thrush, who then takes

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