Back to the basics

Today on the Covert Nerd podcast we will do some Tolkien Talk Next we will look at the state of Dark Horse Comics finally we will review a few comics. Links in the episode: Dark Horse comic title list Local comics: Lenny Vernon ComicTransient Comic Stow Away Comic Goadkicker Podcast Covert Nerd ----more---- It’s good to be back, I haven’t been gone if you are a regular listener you know that. However the format has been different than from the beginning. It’s nice to be back to how it started almost 2 years ago, just you and me talking nerdy topics. It’s like meeting up with an old friend who you haven’t seen in a long time you simply pick up where you left off. Let’s get right to it. When you were in school did you like history? Statistics show most people don’t. However in our entertainment we want to know the history of our characters. We want prequel movies, we want origin stories. We want to know why our hero does what they do. We don’t want to know the dates we want to know the why. This leads to the first topic. The announcement from Amazon about their Middle Earth TV series will be set in the 2nd age has me excited. If you are unsure about when that time is I will try to explain, if you watched the movie at the beginning of the LotR they talk about the war of the last alliance when the ring was cut from the hand of Sauron by Isildur. That was at the end of the 2nd age and the beginning of the 3rd age which the movie take place in. The TV series will take place during that time frame. There are some great stories they can use. Stories of kings and queens via for power. In fact I have a feeling they will tell the complete story of the war of the last alliance which they told an extremely condensed version in Fellowship of the ring. This will give you the backstory on many characters like Isildar, Elrond and Saruon If you didn’t know I am a big fan of Tolkien, I wouldn’t say I’m a super fan, knowing how to speak Elvish, but i would say I am above average in the fact I have read the LOTR, Hobbit, Silmarillion and a few of the other more obscure books from the legendarium as is referred to in Tolkien circles. This is what I find interesting about the obscure background information in Middle earth and other fiction. Knowing the why behind the characters and places is interesting to me and hopefully you will too. JRR Tolkien is the author of The popular Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books. Telling the tale of Hobbits or Halflings travel across the mythical world of Middle Earth full of mythical races of Dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs. What most people don’t know about his more obscure book of the Silmarillion and his 12 volume called The History of Middle-earth is a series of books published between 1983 and 1996 There are also other books in addition to the 12 volume set. All of this extra literature was assembled by his son Christopher. What his son did was to scour through his father's notes and piece together the partial stories he started but didn’t complete. Imagine the work to do this. For example he might find a paragraph in a notebook referring to Gandalf before the hobbit, then a few weeks later find another paragraph that goes with that same story. This painstaking effort has gone on since his death in 1973. The latest book to be release is Beren and Luthien. Christopher claims this is the last. I believe it might be since Christopher is in his early 80’s and couple that with the TV rights being sold to Amazon seems to signal a change in how Tolkien's works will be handled. I will admit the Silmarillion is a harder read than either the Hobbit and LotR. However it has some great stories. It’s basically a bunch of short stories with a small common thread. Based on what I said previously what Christopher did with his fathers writings after his death this makes sense. In the case of the Silmarillion it is a little different, it was roughly put together by Tolkien himself but he submitted to hi