Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast,

the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. Today we begin the unfinished tales, for real.

Last week, we did a little intro.

But today, we are diving into the story of Tour and is coming to Gondolin.

Now, I have been debating for weeks the best way to handle diving into some of these stories

that we have already heard about in the Silmarillion,

and yet we have a slightly different version here in the unfinished tales.

I've come up with a few different ways to handle this, and I think I've finally settled on

exactly what we're going to do.

At first, I thought, you know, we could take each of these texts

side by side, look at the similarities and differences as we go down each of the texts.

But the more I prepared to do that, the more meticulous and, although technically interesting,

it didn't really create a story, the way that I like to tell these stories.

There's too many subtle, minor differences that would pull you out of experiencing the story in the way that I think Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien would like us to experience the story. And I say this for one major reason. When the story of Tour was taken

and placed into the Silmarillion. It was truncated.

It was shortened, and the tone of it was even adjusted in order to fit into the greater narrative.

What we have here in the unfinished tales reads more like a novel.

That's the experience. That is the reason why J.R.R. Tolkien rewrote this

in the 1950s. It's the reason why Christopher Tolkien wanted to include this version, even though

some of the threads don't wrap up. We don't get to the fall of gondolin, all of that toward the end of the story.

But the story itself can stand on its own in a way where it is written to be read more like a novel.

And I think that is the best way to actually experience this.

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