Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that explores the background of he's spent a lot of time alone.

He has run into some other characters and he's spoken with them, but we haven't really had a secondary

character stick around in the story for any real length of time yet. But now, Ulmo has brought

him together with Varanwi, and we get this section in the story for the first time, it seems, a protracted

conversation, let's say. This goes on for a while, and they talk about a few different things,

but what's so interesting to me about this section of the story and all of the dialogue here

is not just how they decide what they're

going to do, where they're going to go, but the little details that are dropped in here

for the reader. You have to imagine that as Tolkien is writing these stories, that they need

to serve two purposes at once.

First of all, like The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, if you are somebody who is new to his

mythological universe, then you don't understand all of the background. You don't have the context of why this story is set at this period of time and what has gone on around it.

So you have to clue in the reader a little bit to the past events and to why the world is the way it is during exactly this time period.

But that also plays into the people who do have experience with the world, the mythology,

because you can drop names and locations and events.

And they'll go, oh, I remember that.

I get that. And then you can build out those details in a way that expands their

knowledge of those events. So it does two different things. And like I've mentioned before,

with old myths and fairy tales and things like that, sometimes you just drop a name and you don't

explain any of it. And that's also

normal in this style of writing. And in this section we're about to go through, we have this

really cool conversation between the two characters and some archaic language, some old uses

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