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.

As soon as he's back in late July, we're going to resume the weekly

A Song of Ice and Fire podcast with a Storm of Swords. In the meantime, I'm putting out weekly

episodes with a rotating series of guest hosts on a variety of topics, as well as putting out

text and audio posts of my own like this one. Every week, I've been going back through

J.R. Tolkien's classic The Lord of the Rings

for patrons. Since this week we're not going to have a regular episode, I thought I put out the

first couple chapters for everyone. So all non-patrons can take a listen, see what you think. If you

like what you hear in this episode, we got seven more episodes on the Lord of the Rings over on our Patreon. So far,

we've gotten all the way through book one out of six and a big chunk of the way into book two.

Just finish up the chapters on Moria and Lothlorian, some of my favorite stuff in the story.

So if you like this episode, go ahead over to patreon.com slash not a cast, ASO, IA-F, and our Lord of the Rings episodes are available for all patrons.

So no matter what you sign up for, you can take a listen to all of those Lord of the Rings episodes.

So this episode is going to cover the prologue to the Lord of the Rings as well as the first two chapters,

a long-expected party and the shadow of the past.

Hope you like this, and thanks for listening.

I remember very distinctly, I'll never forget my mother reading aloud Lord of the Rings to me when I was a kid.

And with certain fantasy series, there's just so many proper nouns and place names right up front that becomes

ludicrous. I remember there's the, the Pridane Chronicles, a fantasy series for kids by

Lloyd Alexander. And the later books were very enjoyable. But there is, in the first couple of pages,

...