Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. Let's paint another scene for you.

You are one of the Edain, one of these houses of men who have stood nobly against Morgoth and with

the elves, your allies. And like so many other passages, chapters in the Silmarillion as a whole.

The details here are sparse.

We're not given the situation where this information I'm about to share with you was

revealed to them or their specific reactions or who got on the boats first. But we do know that it did happen. And I want you to

picture this. You are not an elf. You have not come across the sea. You have not been to Valenor. But you know what the sea is

like because you've spoken with the elves. You know what might lay across the western sea,

where they came from. And so you and your family and your friends get on a boat for the first time in your, well, in the history of everybody, all of the other humans that you know.

And I don't just mean any sort of boat.

I'm sure.

People have probably been on fishing boats and doing things like that on lakes and

maybe even along the coasts.

This is the first time that you and your people have gotten on boats meant for

traveling, for transporting large groups of people across the ocean.

And in today's world, when we think about this, we think about gigantic ships traveling across, say, the Atlantic from Europe to the U.S., or going on a cruise and, of course, the absolutely colossal-sized ships there.

But in this situation, they're not traveling by coal-powered ships, steamboat engines,

or current modern-day technology like the two other examples I gave you.

These would be sailboats.

Well, sail ships, I guess you could say.

I had the opportunity a few years back when I visited London to see a life-sized replica of Sir Francis Drake's ship.

I believe that's called The Endeavor.

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