A Long Expected Podcast

06/15/21 • 94 min

An Introduction! West of Valinor's Inaugural Episode introduces fans of Middle Earth to just exactly how The Hobbit was written (and when. and why.) It goes through where Tolkien got some of his earliest inspirations, and the mythic histories of Dwarves and of Wizards.

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Next Episode

Tooks and Bagginses

In this episode we look at Chapter 1 of The Hobbit. Even though Hobbits are a race entirely of Tolkien's own creation, we look at some of the mythic and historical forbearers of hobbits, and of how Tolkien used and altered them. We look at the voice of the narrator, and just how much he knows. We look at the songs of the dwarves, and discuss the roles of poetry and of prose in Tolkien and in general.

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West of Valinor - A Long Expected Podcast

Transcript

Episode 1
1. Introduction:

Some time around 1930 - he and his sons disagreed later about the exact date - Professor Tolkien was sitting in his study grading papers. And apparently he found the task as distasteful as I do, because he turned around and, on the back of a term paper, wrote down the line “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” According to the story, that’s all he wrote at that point, but that l