Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast, the show that explores the background of

Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning.

I've talked about this number of times on this show, about how Tolkien is such a master

of building a scene and building a scene and leading to a climactic event.

And then the way things follow after, the quiet moments,

and then beginning to build things again, and foreshadowing things that are about to happen.

And we're going to see a lot of that at the end of this chapter.

Smalg is dead. He's done.

And the people of Lake Town, of Escaroth, need to put things back together.

And we get a lot of these little details in this section about the way things would feel

and the way that, well, even politics might play out in a situation like this.

Again, it feels like the kind of thing that Tolkien himself may have been witness to during his life.

And even more than this, we get kind of a really unique situation here with Bard.

Remember, there are many heroes in Tolkien's stories, and many of those

heroes go through a hero's journey type scenario, which I've detailed before, and in even

greater detail in some of the bonus episodes. And it would make sense that a character like

Bilbo would go through a hero's journey, a character like Frodo or Aragorn, or maybe even Gandalf,

which absolutely does happen. But what about Bard? He was just introduced very recently,

and yet he is definitively a hero. He is the hero of Escaroth. He is the descendant of Gerean of Dale.

He is the archer who stood and took down Smog.

And before that was on guard and warning people to be careful and to be aware because

the dragon could come at any moment.

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