Hello and welcome to the Natacast, podcast, the podcast that usually goes through a Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week, but not here.

I'm one of your hosts Emmett, also known as Poor Quentin.

My co-host, Jeff, also known as Brendan Beefish, is taking a couple of months off the podcast for work.

As soon as he's back, we'll jump right back into the weekly Song of Ice and

Fire podcast with Sansa's third chapter in a Storm of Swords. In the meantime, I'm picking up where I left

off last time, going through J.R.R.R. Tolkien's, the Lord of the Rings. Last week, I covered book

four chapter six of the Lord of the Rings, the Forbidden Pool, in which Frodo and Fairmir were just getting

to be friends before Gollum showed up to ruin everything. This week we're going to be covering

Book 4 Chapter 7, Journey at the Crossroads, as well as part of Book 4 Chapter 8, the stairs of

Kirith Ungol. And then next week, we're going to be finishing up Book 4 chapter 8. So here we go, let's jump back in to the Lord of the Rings.

As we've gone through the chapters in which the Hobbits are spending time with

Faramir, I've been comparing it to the fellowship's journey through Lothlorean back in

book 2. And that holds up here as well. When the Hobbit's part from Faramere, it's the

equivalent of their farewell to Lothlorian. It's less elaborate, less visually dazzling, but the parallels are still there.

Men and elves walk the same path.

They just do it at a different pace.

The men give the hobbits walking sticks instead of vials of light, but like Sam's rope from

Lothorian, there's subtle magic at work here.

These sticks come from beloved trees,

an important symbol in the Lord of the Rings, especially for the men of Numenor. And they have a

virtue laid on them, Faramir says, of finding and returning. Full circle, the story of life,

there and back again. It's something Faramir hopes the shadow cannot take away. Frodo links it to Elron's words when the fellowship set out, that evil would be turned to great good,

...