Hey,

Hey, everybody, it's your Hobbit Hole Wizard, Holden McNeely.

Why wouldn't Gandandolph be why would

the actual wizard the wizard i'm your glowing bruiser holding mcneely and i'm your just

fussy englishman who smokes tobacco all day and just sits in the bathtub thinking about goblins. Is that your description of Gandalf? No, that's fucking the OG, J-R-R. Oh, okay. You're not going to be Gandalf if I'm giving you the wizard and you don't want to be Gandalf? I always liked... All right, I get to be canned off. Okay, start again. I'm Bilbo to a tea, man. I just want to fucking stay in my goddamn little tree stump.

All right, let's switch it then.

Hello, it is I, your pipe smoking wizard, Holden McNeely, aka Gandalf.

And it's me, your second breakfast cramming three foot tall bruiser, gee.

Adventure is, you know, I yearn for it, but also I like naps.

The greatest adventure is hard as flies ahead.

I'd have to look up the lyrics.

And we're not going to be talking about that movie, by the way.

We're not going to be talking about any of the movies, any media surrounding it. This is J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And I'm going to tell you this right now. We're barely going to talk about the actual book series, the Lord of the Rings today. Today we are in a lot of ways. We might get to two rings, tops, like some of those elf rings, the bullshit ones.

Yeah, we'll get to the bullshit rings, but not like the good, you know, the good rings.

We're saving those good rings for Part 2.

So anyways, also, this is actually a Patreon-sponsored episode.

This one goes out to Alan Harms, who has an anniversary coming up with

his lady, and it is for his lady. He says, I just want the episode shout out to be to my lovely

wife, Bailey. I'm tempted to pimp her books because she's a self-published author on Amazon,

but I think she may kill me for that. Okay, well, then I won't pimp her books, but I'll tell you what, it's probably going to be a two-parter, so if the books need to be pimped, books need to be pimped. But listen, thank you again. There are literally dozens of people waiting to hear those book titles, yearning to spend a normal amount of money to read them on their Kindles. I will say this. Thank you for forcing this to happen because I've been trying to get Jake to do one of these, an episode on Lord of the Rings. I think since we started, it seems kind of like an obvious choice for a version of the Bruiser episode. And Jake always balked. He went tush, tosh, when I would say something. No, I would go, fuck, please. No, I have a life. I have a family. Please, I can't get into the Silmarillion. I can't. Oh, we're talking about it. I can't do this. We're talking about it. We're not even going to touch on the filking subculture. What? I don't... It's filking.

It's a key part of fantasy and fandom.

Ladies and gentlemen, bear with us.

...