Music

Welcome to the Second Age Podcast.

Your guide to Tolkien's world of Middle Earth.

I'm David.

And I'm John.

And this is Chapter 1, Origins of Numenor.

In this episode, we've got three segments, the history of Tolkien's writing,

a brief discussion of some literary themes, and then a deep dive into the background of the island of Numenor.

Before we get started, here's a quick reminder that you can send your feedback to secondage at BaldMove.com.

And we'll get to those questions on the final episode, which will be a Q&A.

And if you want to talk Tolkien with us sooner, join us on the BaldMove Discord server,

link in the description of the podcast, or you can find it over at the BaldMove website at BaldMove.com.

And be sure to get all the BaldMove and Lorehounds coverage of Rings of Power by subscribing to the Doug 2 Deep Podcast Feed.

We're going to be releasing exclusive content on this feed so you don't want to miss out.

Click on the link in the show notes or search for Doug 2 Deep in your podcast application of choice.

So let's get started with a discussion of the literary history of the collected works of Tolkien and Middle Earth.

All right, John. One of the things that we thought would be helpful for folks is if we talked a little bit about the publication history of a lot of these works,

because it's not just the Lord of the Rings, the three books, as we know them. There's a whole bunch more out there.

So I thought we would just talk about the core material that Tolkien written and was also compiled by his son, Christopher.

Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, the breadth of this work is really a large part of why it's hard to approach at first.

Right. And it's not like it was all written, you know, it wasn't necessarily a like, oh, I've got an idea for a story. Boom, here's the story.

I was doing some reading on Tolkien's history and basically in the period of around 1911 to 1930 when he's starting his family and he's in the army and in World War I and then working,

...