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

Soon as he's back, which is going to be the next week or two, we will resume our weekly Song of Ice and Fire podcast with a Storm of Swords. In the meantime, I've been doing episodes with a rotating series

of guest hosts on a variety of topics, as well as text and audio posts of my own, like this one.

Every week, while Jeff is away, I've been going back through J.R.R.R. Tolkien's, the Lord of the Rings for patrons. Recently I released one of those episodes covering the prologue

to the Lord of the Rings and the first two chapters for everyone. And this week I'm going to be

doing the same thing. This episode is covering chapters three through eight of the first book

of the Lord of the Rings. So those chapters are three is company, a shortcut to mushrooms, a conspiracy

on masked, the old forest, in the house of Tom Bombadale,

and fog on the barrowdowns. So if you enjoy this episode, there are many more Lord of the Rings

episodes over on our Patreon covering the rest of book one, all the way through books two and three.

So over at patreon.com slash not a cast, A-S-O-I-A-F, all our patrons get access to those lord of the rings episodes so check

that out if you enjoy this one everyone likes the first two chapters of the lord of the rings

everyone likes bilbo's birthday party and everyone likes gandolph's dramatic backstory monologue about the ring

but now the journey itself begins and this this is where Tolkien loses some people.

These travelogue chapters are self-indulgent, the argument goes.

They slow the book down, at the precise moment it should be speeding up.

It's not exciting.

It's boring.

I sympathize with these arguments, and I'm not going to pretend I love these chapters

as much as I do the Shadow of the Past, which is a flat-out masterpiece.

But I do still love them, and on reread, I think it's clear why these chapters are structured

...