Chapter 1: What topics are introduced in the beginning of the episode?
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Hi, folks. Let me see if I can sum up Midnight Burger in about 25 seconds.
Really, big monster? Zero irony. Pardon me, Gloria. Might my husband and I have a word?
The radio is talking to me.
So this is how it ends.
Eaten by wolves in space.
There's a pocket dimension in the deep freeze.
This is the stupidest dystopia we've ever been to. What the hell is that?
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Isildur's actions with the Ring?
And then do you have a favorite non-legendarium work? And if so, what is it?
Okay. I'm going to answer the non-legendarium first. Cause that's easier for me. That is Leaf by Niggle. Hands down my favorite book.
Excellent, excellent choice.
As for in the Legendarium, I'm going to have to give it up to two. I got to give you a two one. Children of Harren, absolutely love. And then also specifically book three of Lord of the Rings.
Ah, yes. That is the best individual of the six books. The one where the fellowship is split and you're following Marian Pippin and then the three hunters. Yeah.
Yes, absolutely love it.
that really showcases i think tolkien's incredible story weaving abilities like the the whole interlacing it's just mind-blowing how how beautifully complex that is the fact that he's able to keep all that in track like it's amazing yeah yeah and he didn't even have an excel spreadsheet to do it in i mean you guys just do it on a piece of paper
Of course, I think you earned Matt's appreciation when you mentioned Children of Huron, so there's that.
Yes, absolutely. I also always appreciate when folks pick a specific book out of Lord of the Rings because you can go one of two extremes. You can say, my favorite book is The Lord of the Rings, or you go the complete opposite end where it's like, yes, actually this half of Return of the King is my favorite book.
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Chapter 3: How do the characters reflect on Isildur's legacy?
I'm just waiting to... It's smoke and mirrors. That's right. I keep waiting for somebody to give us the wrong answer. We can say, thank you for joining us. Bye-bye.
All right.
No, I'm kidding. All right. All right. Do you consider yourself a Mary or a Pippin?
I view myself as a Mary. I'm sure some people will say I'm a Pippin. I am a Mary.
All right, Sam, your favorite poem or song in the legendarium?
Well, this is not going to be too much of a surprise with previous answers, but it's going to be what I refer to as Durin's Day, the poem or the song that Gimli sings in the Minds of Moria. I just love how it shows the progression of time and the fall from greatness that the world is going into.
Yes, I agree. I have to say, though, given your your mention of Rohan, I thought you were going to say when this didn't surprise us very much, we're going to get one of the alliterative verses, you know, perhaps the, the, the mounds of Munberg.
Not going to lie. If they had ever given the oath of a oral in alliterative, it would have been the number one.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm still waiting for that one. All right, Matt, one more.
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Chapter 4: What insights are shared about the aftermath of Isildur's fate?
Let's talk a little bit through that. Yeah, absolutely. So in The Hobbit, in the chapter Flies and Spiders, Bilbo, who is wearing the ring and invisible, sings a couple of tunes. And when he goes to get away, we read, quote, "'Out came his little sword. He slashed the threads to pieces and went off singing. The spiders saw the sword, though I don't suppose they knew what it was.'"
So for them, they're just seeing a sword dancing through the air because they don't see Bilbo. Just a flying sword. But it is not invisible. But would it have been invisible had it been a normal sword? Yes. I mean, that's the thing. It seems like... What is invisible when you're wearing the ring? We get another moment on Weathertop. I'm not sure this is an example or not because...
this is from Frodo's perspective. So I'm not sure if it was visible to everybody else, but this is another interesting moment. He puts on the ring to hide from the Nazgul. So he's invisible. He draws the barrow sword, which is not like sting. And we read desperate. He drew his own sword and it seemed to him that it flickered red as if it was a firebrand. Yeah.
I'm not convinced because I don't think anybody else talks about, we saw your sword while you were invisible. And I think we would have seen that in the text. So maybe that was a little different, but I don't know. There's a few other moments, aren't there? Yeah.
Back before Bilbo even knew that the ring made him invisible, back when he's running from Gollum, we read, he struck his toe on a snag in the floor and fell flat with his little sword under him. So I think Tolkien put that there because we know that the sword glowed with the blue light and it needed to be hidden under something in order to be invisible, even though Bilbo was wearing the ring.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then there's the footnotes of this passage. Tries to explain it. I'm not entirely sure it explains everything, but let's look at the passage.
It says, the meaning, sufficiently remarkable of this passage, and this is Christopher talking, not Professor Tolkien, appears to be that the light of the Elendil mirror was proof against the invisibility conferred by the one ring when worn. If its light would be visible, were the ring not worn? But when Isildur covered his head with a hood, its light was extinguished.
So what Christopher Tolkien is saying here is like the Elendil mirror is not susceptible to the invisibility. And the reason why is because if he were not invisible, it would have its own light. If the object... creates its own light. So Sting, the Elendil mirror, one imagines the file of Galadriel. Yeah, I can see that. Any other object, Silmaril, but that's not really a question here.
Anything that gives off its own light, even a flashlight. I'm imagining, I mean, you know, a torch. Let's say Bilbo's holding a torch or Frodo's holding a torch while wearing the one ring. The torch is going to be glowing. Anybody seeing him isn't going to see that the torch is invisible. They'll see a torch dancing through the air. Yeah, just like Bilbo's sword. So the clothes are invisible.
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Chapter 5: What evidence suggests Isildur's fate in the Anduin?
Then there's also physical evidence in the form of orc camps, which showed that some orcs armed with bows were left on the west side of the river to shoot any escapees.
Now, they don't go into detail about what those camps looked like, but you have to assume if they're going to make the claim that these, you know, were orcs stationed on the west side to shoot down escapees, the camps themselves would have had evidence like, bows, bowstrings, arrows, arrow making supplies, fletching supplies, that kind of thing. Right. Yeah.
Finally, and this is sort of the logical conclusion that both the king and the ring had been lost in the Anduin. After all, if he had made it out with the ring, he'd have gotten away from the orcs on the west side and being who he was would have been able to make it to Lorien or even to Moria. That's right.
The text explains that each of these guys, the 204 of them, all these Numenorean soldiers, Gondorian soldiers, but of course Numenorean, would have carried a very small pack of supplies on their person. And that pack, that wallet they mentioned, Wallet doesn't mean what you think, by the way.
It doesn't mean the small leather thing you fold and put in your back pocket any more than the word coffin means the thing you bury a human in. We're going to get the word coffin later, and it's really just a small box. That's all it means. So wallet in this case is just a thing that holds. It's like a pouch in this case.
It includes a bit of drink, a little bit of a cordial, along with some whey bread. And it's not the quality of Lembas and Mirovor, but it's definitely enough to get somebody like Isildur through the journey. We also get a reminder of just how knowledgeable the Numenoreans were. Their knowledge of medicine was powerful and not yet forgotten. Those supplies weren't found with Isildur's gear.
We can sort of surmise that he had them with him, but since he didn't make it, he must have been lost to the river.
yeah that's correct so we've got all that yeah a lot of evidence and certainly you know it's a it's a piece by piece thing you know first you have eyewitness testimony then you have physical testimony or physical evidence then you have more physical evidence because of the orcs then you do have an inference but it's a logical inference based on what you know of isildur so it makes sense.
I did want to linger a little bit on the idea that their knowledge of medicine was powerful, but quote, not yet forgotten. I think that's speaking a little bit to the sense that we get in the return of the King when we're dealing with the houses of healing and the herb master and the sort of idea that things used to be different. Things used to be better. We don't have that technology anymore.
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Chapter 6: How does the knowledge of the Numenoreans compare to later cultures?
Yeah, things are deteriorating, not getting better. And that's very much a medievalist approach. So it is interesting. Is this... Is this enough to build a story on the evidence that we have, those pieces? It's Delmo's testimony. I think so, yeah. Do you? It feels like there's a little bit, almost too much of a presumption that the king and or the ring must have been lost.
we've read earlier that they don't need to be able to see him to track him. He would have been exhausted. I think if nothing else, let's say he did get out of the river with the ring stays invisible, hides rests to recover his strength. Do you not think that they're able to, to track him by scent or maybe the fact that he's gone through the river, uh, He's basically washed himself.
Now they don't have a scent as much. I think because it's not mentioned, it's kind of a moot point. Just for me, I'm looking at what evidence Tolkien gives us that the story can be trusted. I think we get more evidence later, yeah. We do, yes. And I think that becomes sort of the nail in the coffin, pun intended, if you will. Own that pun. That's right. I will.
But yeah, I think for me, I can see where Tolkien's head is at in trying to prove this step by step in some sort of logical argument. I like that he's doing that for us, though. He's not just telling us this. He's telling us how we know this. right? He's not just telling us a story. He's telling us how the story came to him because he's just the translator of these stories. But anyway.
All right, Don, we do find some more evidence. Would you take us away? I would love to. But King Elessar, when he was crowned in Gondor, began the reordering of his realm. And one of his first tasks was the restoration of Orthanc. where he proposed to set up again the palantir recovered from Saruman. Then all the secrets of the tower were searched.
Many things of worth were found, jewels and heirlooms of Eorl, filched from Edoras by the agency of Wormtongue during King Theoden's decline, and other such things, more ancient and beautiful, from mounds and tombs far and wide.
saruman in his degradation had become not a dragon but a jackdaw at last behind a hidden door that they could not have found or opened had not elisar had the aid of gimli the dwarf a steel closet was revealed Maybe it had been intended to receive the ring, but it was almost bare. In a casket on the high shelf, two things were laid. One was a small case of gold attached to a fine chain.
It was empty and bore no letter or token.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the Elendilmir found by Aragorn?
But beyond all doubt, it had once borne the ring about Isildur's neck. Next to it lay a treasure without price, long mourned as lost forever, the Elendilmir itself, the white star of elvish crystal upon a fillet of mithril that had descended from Silmarion to Elendil and had been taken by him as a token of royalty in the North Kingdom. Every king and the chieftains that followed them in Arnor
had borne the Elendilmir down even to Elessar himself. But though it was a jewel of great beauty made by elven smiths in Imladris for Philandiel, Isildur's son, it had not the ancientry nor potency of the one that had been lost when Isildur fled into the dark and came back no more. All right, before we go any further, I said coffin, and I meant casket.
Earlier when I was like, there's another word that doesn't mean what you think it means. Coffin means exactly what you think it means. Casket does not. So I just wanted to correct myself there.
Chapter 8: What implications arise from Isildur's missing remains?
Because... we almost always think of a casket as meaning a coffin, right? A thing that you put a dead body in before you bury it. But you know, a casket can just be a small thing. A casket can be a box. It's just a box. It's what it means. Okay. So that's why we're not talking about like a six and a half.
Well, you know, it'd be an eight foot long casket if it was meant to bury a Newman Orient in, but you know, we're not talking about a humongous box like that in a giant walk-in closet. We're talking about a much smaller, you know, in wall closet.
hole that has a tiny little box anyway we'll get to more of that i just want to make sure i'd said coffin i meant casket so there you have it also you may not have the ancient tree nor potency of the co-hosts but i do i have both the ancient tree and the potency i just wanted to make sure you know that the potency comes with the ancient tree Oh, yeah. See?
Did you notice that both ancientry and potency are kind of combined? It's potent because it's ancient. See? Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't think I put those two together, but now that you mention it, I'm kind of... It had not the ancientry nor potency. That's, well, it didn't have the potency because it didn't have the ancientry. Sir, between you and I, I have the ancientry.
So next time you make that old joke, I'm going to be all right. I'm going to be all right. I'm sure the intro for next episode will reflect that. It should have included this. I can't believe I didn't include this. I'm here with a man of the West who has both the ancientry and the potency. We did skip a paragraph before you read what you read here.
It was one that talked about when the council determined that the One Ring had been found. And that paragraph also serves as a really helpful segue between the end of the disaster of the Gladden Fields and Isildur's death in Third Age II and the time of the Lord of the Rings more than 3,000 years later.
The text describes it as the third age of the elvish world waning and how it was at this time that the council discovered the ring had been found, specifically near the western side of the Anduin, near to the north end of the Gladden Fields, but that no sign or clue of Isildur's body had been found. That's right. And that is also when the council found out about Sodom's secret project.
He'd been searching in the same area looking for the ring. And while he obviously didn't find it, the council had no idea what else he did find. And that is a great lead-in to the section we did read, which starts in Third Age 3019 or shortly thereafter, once Elessar began his job of getting Gondor back in order. He has got a lot of work to do, really.
But one of the big projects is getting Orthanc back up and running. Saruman's been there for 260 years. It's a bit of a fixer-upper now that the Ents have gotten hold of the place. And since he has the Palantir that belongs there, he takes it back to get it set up and presumably calibrate it.
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