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 B-fish, is taking a couple of months off the podcast for work.

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've been picking up where I left off last time with J.R.R. Tolkien's,

The Lord of the Rings.

Last week, I wrapped up Book 5, Chapter 1, Minas Tarith, and this week we're jumping into

Book 5, Chapter 2, The Passing of the Gray Company.

So like I said in the Minas to Rith chapter, book 5 is a bigger, better sequel to book 3.

And so just like in book 3, Tolkien keeps jumping around in space and time in book 5 to capture

all the different stories running parallel

to each other, before they come crashing back into each other at the Pelinor Fields.

So this chapter rewinds past the previous one right back to where book three ended, with

Gandalf and Pippen riding off, the sonic boom of Shadowfax's magical hooves echoing into the distance.

We know now that they're going to find Minas Tarith in big trouble, desperately in need of help

from the characters they just left behind. So here we see how that coming to the rescue thing is going

to work, and at first it seems like it might not. This is a chapter all about

dread and melancholy on first read, with the seeds of hope only clear in retrospect. The chapter

builds to a confrontation with the dead, and the very title of the chapter alludes to death,

the passing of the gray company. Like these characters

are passing away. All the colors of life leached out, leaving only gray. The remaining members

of the fellowship are all far from home, emphasized when Tolkien writes that Mary barely

has any possessions left to carry. They're standing at a crossroads.

...