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

Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning.

Welcome back to the Lord of the Rings lore cast.

This is a very different episode this week because this is our first patron chat.

We have some of our VIP patrons here with me today.

And I am excited to get to know more about them, their stories, how they

discover J.R.R. Tolkien and his legendarium and his novels or his movies or the movies about

his novels. You know how all that stuff works. And we've got two guests with me this week.

And by the way, this is a brand new feature. So if you are on the Patreon and you are a VIP patron, then this is something you have access to.

And we'll be meeting on Sunday nights, the last Sunday of every month, at 8 p.m. Eastern time as of right now.

So if you're listening to this in the future, maybe that changes for schedule needs.

But for right now, that's when we'll be meeting. And you're welcome to join us next month if you're already a VIP patron or you can go to patreon.com slash LOTR LORCast and you can sign up and join us next month. But with me this week, we have Azl Razzle and Matt. Welcome to the show,'s so nice to have you here and to actually get to talk to you and meet you. I'm going to call you out individually so we all don't talk on top of each other, but Azl Razzle was the first to jump in the chat. Azal, can I just call you Azel? Does that work? Yeah, that's good enough. No problem here. Nice, nice. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you. Can you just share a little bit about yourself for everybody?

Hello, my name's Azul or Azal. I've been a long time Lord of the Ringspan, I think, starting originally with the movies, I guess, as I guess most of us did.

I've since from there, I always had the odd curiosity, the questions you see around the place that I guess as I guess most of us did. I've since from there always had the odd curiosity,

what the questions you see around the place that I guess get answered here a lot,

why you want to, why did so-and-so do this, what it's the file of Galadriel,

what's this random city that they call out to in the heydays and wanted to know a little bit more about the lore and through that,

I guess I played some of the games and that began with the Battle of the Middle Earth series

is the one that I guess mainly sort of expanded my knowledge of the lore, especially the

rise of the Witch King series. Yeah, very cool stuff. Those games are great. Yeah, it was good. The amount of sort of extra things that aren't necessarily in the books that they cover there. And then from there, I for some reason, just jumped straight in the deep end and attempted to read the Silmarillion. On the third time, it stuck and couldn't put the book down. From then, I went on to the, eventually the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time and then the Hobbit.

So I sort of did it in a weird backwards reading way, but I guess doing it that way, when I read the Lord of the Rings for the first time,

I was surprised at how many callbacks and references there were to the Silmarillion within the book

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