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 months off the podcast for work while he's

been overseas and he's getting home, which I'm very glad about getting back to his family. He's just taken a couple months to complete that transition and spend some time with then.

And then we will be resuming the weekly Song of Ice and Fire podcast with Sans's third chapter in a storm of swords.

In the meantime, I'm going to be picking up where I left off last time Jeff was off and going back through J.R.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I'm going to be doing one episode a week covering one or two

chapters. When last we left off, I just finished up book three out of six in the Lord

of the Rings. That's about halfway through the two towers. If you want to check those

previous episodes out, get caught up before this one. Go ahead on over to patreon.com slash not a cast ASO-I-A-F and sign up.

My Lord of the Rings episodes covering books one, two, and three are available for all $5

and above patrons under the LOTR tag.

So this week we're going to be covering the first chapter of book four, The Taming of Smeagle.

So when we left off with Frodo and Sam,

they had broken off from the rest of the fellowship, planning to complete the mission on their own.

In the meantime, we've read book three, all about the rest of the fellowship dealing with Gandalf coming back from the dead, fighting in the war against Saramon, bearing witness to the

fury of the ants. A lot has happened. But now as we rewind

the clock, we're back with Frodo and Sam, who are in a fix, as Sam says in the opening words

of the chapter. They're pretty much right where we left them. The deflation is palpable,

and I think it's deliberate. The sudden, exciting transformations like Gandalf showing up at Helms

Deep or the Entz marching

on Eisengard are replaced by an exhausting, dispiriting grind where you're just fighting

...