Pints for Jack, Season 4, Episode 97.

After Hours with the Tolkien Road.

Welcome, everyone. Pines for Jack is your weekly CS Lewis podcast, where Matt and I break down and discuss the works of C.S. Louis.

We're in our final month now of season four.

Earlier in the season, we read the screw tape

letters, and we then looked at screw tape posed as a toast. We then had our month in Narnia

when we read the Silver Chair, and we spoke to a number of guests about Narnia, and since then,

we've been interviewing scholars and writers, and today we're speaking to a returning guest of the show, John from the podcast,

The Tolkien Road. If you didn't catch his earlier appearance on the show with his wife last season,

we invited them on as part of Tolkien Month. The podcast, The Tolkien Road, was launched in early

2015, and on the show co-hosts John and Greta Carswell journey chapter

by chapter through The Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, The Hobbit, as well as Tolkien's other works.

John himself has written several books about Tolkien, Tolkien's overture, an exploration of Middle

Earth's creation story and the role of music in Tolkien's tales, and he's also written Tolkien's Requiem, which is a

contemplative journey through Tolkien's most personal and pivotal Middle Earth tale, the story of

Baron and Luthian. John, welcome back to Pites for Jack.

Hey David, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. It's always nice to have returning guests. It just feels calm and nice.

And particularly during this COVID era, this is how I interact with most people normally anyway over a video screen.

That's right. That's right. Why not have good conversations about interesting, fascinating things, right? So absolutely.

So what have you been up to since you are last on

the show? What's been happening on your podcast? Wow. So since we were last on here, we've covered a lot

of ground. We've covered this issue of Lord of the Rings and religion, which I know we're going to

...