Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. Every story must come to an end, right?

I mean, that's how stories work.

They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And for The Hobbit, this means that the story ends in chapter 19.

You don't get to 20 chapters, just 19, the last stage.

And this chapter isn't just the end of the story.

It's actually a bookend for the story.

It's a returning to the place where the story began, much like, I don't know, something like The Odyssey.

You have a character who leaves home and then returns home, the hero's journey.

That's part of why this fits in that template so easily.

And for today's episode, I'm not going to break this final chapter into multiple bits.

I mean, really, it just works as a single chapter

for a single episode to look at it all together at once. So that means that this episode's

going to go a little bit long, but here's what we'll do. Instead of having a bonus episode just

for patrons, we'll make an extra long episode. I've only done this a few times,

and we'll just put it up for everybody this week. And the way this story ends is important.

It brings things back around, but remember, I've discussed how the story of the Hobbit starts out

feeling like a fairy tale, and then by the time you are at the Lonely Mountain, it has become a high fantasy with language almost on par with the Lord of the Rings.

But then we return back to the Shire, or at least Bilbo and Gandalf do.

And as I discussed a little bit last week, that journey home isn't, well, fraught without perils and other things,

but it also is backtracking many of the locations that they journeyed on the way into the journey.

And if you think about it, that means that their journey into the wilds, into the land of the fay, the fairy, is now in reverse.

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