Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast,

the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning.

In today's episode, we are taking a further look at the corruption that Sauron brings to Numenor.

This is the full extent of everything that Sauron was doing, taking the mind of the king and twisting it and actually getting him to act in ways that are against his own self-interest through lies.

And I try not to take these episodes and get to political.

I try to draw some comparisons to the real world and those kinds of things.

So if you hear in this description of the way this corruption works through the government system and through the leadership and society. And you draw parallels

on your own between what's written here and things that happen in our own world, even today.

Well, I'm not going to deny that you're probably right. I will say that corrupt leaders have known for a very long time how to manage a population,

how to keep people divided so that they never unite against them, how to sell them things through lies that are against

their own self-interest, how to convince them that they're actually getting wealthier and

stronger and happier while everyone consumes themselves and hatred and squalor become the norm.

This is what happens in Numenor.

This is a scenario detailed for us by a man who was born at the end of the 1800s who lived through two world wars and watched

as post-colonial forces did these very same kinds of things to humanity. And then the outcome of that.

There is no doubt in my mind that Tolkien understood the way that corrupt governments

manipulate populations.

And he shows us here.

He shows us the fruit of that.

And maybe fruit isn't the right example,

because fruit comes from a tree and the tree has to be alive.

He shows us the ashes of what remains.

...