A Geek History of Time - Episode 186 - Ed's Talkin' Tolkein with Office Hours Again

Episode Date: November 26, 2022

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, This is a geek history of time and this is a special edition. Some time ago Ed and I both guested on another podcast called Office Hours which we strongly encourage you to go check out, subscribe, rate and review because they do an incredible job. Anyway we wanted to be able to share what we did over there, over here. So this next episode is one of the three that we recorded with them. And we hope that you enjoy it this week as a bonus episode. As always, as Ed would say, keep rolling 20s. Welcome to Offsars with Dr. C and that be me your host and so we are joined in the office

today with a couple of guests from a neighboring podcast, the Beak History of Time, Ed and Damien, if you would introduce yourselves. Okay, well, since you named me first, I guess I'll go first. My name is Ed Blalock, and I'm a World History teacher here in Northern California. Yeah, and Damien and I do A.B. History of Time together, and Damien, you go ahead.

Yeah, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin and drama and history teacher up here in Northern California as well, at the high school level. I am the other half of a Geek History of Time, the lesser half of a Geek History of Time, and all around Union Thug. Yeah, and we're really happy to be here. Thank you very, very much for having us on.

Yeah. Big fan, big fan of your work on TikTok. So yeah, I'm excited to be talking to you again. Also, you're welcome because we have dozens of listeners. And at least half of them will switch over. Yeah, you know, as McFully would say, the dozens and dozens. We have tens of listeners. Yes. You know, it was, yeah, I was, I was really flattered to hear you call us a neighboring podcast.

I'm like, oh, we've moved into a better neighborhood. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, no, no, we are six. Right. We are a very firmly red line. I am so sorry to tell you that right now. My, my, my more comfortable there than I am in the middle class.

Yeah, but you have been kind kind of, a little bit. So, just a little bit of context. I was on Y'all's podcast a little while ago where we talked about the punishment, that kind of thing. And after having such a good time with y'all, I thought, let's carry this over into ours. And just as a bit of a disclosure, a bit of a warning for the audience. Anytime you're in an internet space and there are upwards of two, in this case, four, presumably like heterosexual, cisgendered men, you might be nervous and that's reasonable. Don't worry. None of us are seeking to profit from misogyny.

So or anything like that. So you're in an okay place. So is that a content warning? That is our content. Kind of. I know. Dude, do we get a little cred that I'm just heteropresenting? This is fair. Yeah, you know. That's fair.

That's fair. So actually speaking of heteropren. We're here to talk about token. Yes. Right. So here's an intro. That's great. Yeah, so it's deleted. It's good.

And some might say the archetype of a dead old straight light guys. One of them. One of them. And yeah, sort of complex. For some ways that we'll get into now. Yeah. So, so we were talking about what to do for this episode and we decided, you know, Ed and I are huge fans of Tolkien, um, maybe Barry and Damien are

honestly that's ancillary to the point because it's about our level of Tolkien at this point. Um, but this idea in particular of allegory because, yeah, Ed Bonti describe the pop reference of Tolkien and Alligory? Well, you know, the thing is that there are a couple of levels on which everybody looks at Tolkien's life and his experience is, and then they look at the Lord of the Rings. And I'm mostly going to be talking about the books, although some of the stuff in the movies is by virtue of necessity going to kind kinda come in. But you look at Woody Rowe, and you look at his life experiencing, well, okay, obviously.

And this was critics during his lifetime saying, well, this is very clearly a Christian allegory because he's Catholic, so how could he write anything else? And then you also look at a lot of the overarching themes in his work and his very clear distaste for industrialism, his intense dislike of technology. You look at the things that he wrote outside of the books in his correspondence to other people talking about

how deplorable he considered basically everything that happened in World War II and the development of nuclear weaponry. And you're like, well, you know, obviously this is simultaneously or separately depending on which school of critique you come from. This is in allegory for World War I. And what I find really remarkable is that all his life he insisted with, I mean, just vicious force, all his life, that no, I didn't write an allegory. That's not what this is. And reducing it to an allegory is, I think he would probably argue that it's an insult to his faith and kind of an insult to his work, but he'd be more concerned about an insult to his faith.

And he was like one of his buttons was to say that his work was an allegory, and he insisted to the end of his days that it wasn't one. But, you know, you read it and you realize that like you don't always have control over what it is you're writing about. And rule number one on a geek history of time over the course of the 150 plus episodes that we've done, we've developed a number of rules on the podcast. rule number one is that authorial intent don't mean fuck all. Like it is it is pointless. It's there. Once you create something and put it out into the world. There are there are levels on which interpretation should probably take authorial intent into account. Like if we're if we're looking at whether somebody

like needs to be put up on the historical wall of shame, then we should probably look at an authorial intent or take it into account at least somewhat. But by the same token, if we're just looking at what does this work mean, you know, then the meaning is subjective. The meaning is whatever does anybody else takes out of it. Yeah. And you're, what are you, you got the first pun in. I'm just how do you?

Yes. Yeah, by the first token. And we're gonna talk about his son later, but right now we're talking about. Yeah, okay, first token. Yeah. That was great. Well done, which his son's name was J.R.R.

our token junior, right? So J.R.R. our token J.R. Yes, that's it. are our Tolkien junior, right? So they are Tolkien J.R. Yes. That's Since I was the one to make the first pun, I didn't get to say this, but good day, sir. You get nothing. I think we made it a whole five minutes in.

Yeah, yeah, remarkably enough. It's so so. So, but okay, so let's let's unpack because there's a lot to die set here. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to pull apart. Let's let's Sorry a little bit of context who token was in his time, right? So we have a young man grew up in England Served in World War one, right? Which we all know to be the sexiest of the world wars, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I've absolutely agree with that Yeah, that's where they came up with the term trench running. I mean, it's okay. I want to turn off your filters at work for that, but yeah, there's no wrong way to eat a Reese's. That's all I'm saying. I didn't lose you a sponsorship. So, so earlier

when we talked about like what the rules are for discourse. So yeah, so number of puns per minute you need to watch. Two puns per three minutes. That's what I banked six minutes. So, dammit, I mean, listen. So you owe us a break. That's kick-at. That's totally different. Oh, yeah. We should have noted at the top that Damien is also a comedian. Yes. I run a pun tournament called capital punishment out here in Sacramento. So it's just baked into what I do. Just you're just reaffirming what Fox News is told me about the West Coast being donless. So yes. But okay, so going back to trenches. So Tolkien serves in World War I, is I understand it, that's when he starts sketching out the very first inclinings of no pun intended,

Jesus marrying Joseph, that was not a pun. That was not a pun. He would later become a member of the group called the inclinings. The inclinings, yes. But that's where he started for a start to sketch out, you know, the beginnings of mental earth and that kind of idea. Yes, depending on depending on where you want to draw the roots of middle earth too, because he actually he started a little bit earlier than that with some stuff, because of course he was a linguist,

his academic background, and the majority of his life he spent as an academic, he was teaching old English. And so he had a very deep and abiding interest in love for old Norse mythology and the Edas and very early English poetry and Beowulf was a big thing and all that. And so he started essentially writing like Norse mythology fanfic, you know, before then, but the first thing that we can point to is being recognizably something like Middle

Earth is around the time that he was in World War I. I want to say off the top of my head that it was during his convalescence, after he'd been in France and been injured. I believe he'd been gassed and he came back to England to recover and he was on the invalid list. And while he was recovering with nothing else to do with his time, that's where he started writing. I want to say it was the beginnings of Baron and Luthian. Okay, which is a great story just because that is the nerdiest thing ever.

Is to write a love story about you and your wife and dress it up in fanfiction effectively. And when we talk about, he was, when we say that he was greatly influenced by like, you know, Norris Middleton, things like that, as the old saying goes, good writers, borrow great writer's steel, old boys stole, chronologically. Yeah. Oh, like, yeah, like a, like a mob and I was gonna say inform it But like a mob agent like he did yeah just ripped everything off the walls. Yeah, so So he does all this and he is so he starts a model one He is his son Christopher started in World War two, I believe right more than one of his sons actually He had he had a couple boys and I don't remember which one of them one of his sons was actually in the RAF during World War Two

and I think Christopher was in the infantry if I'm remembering right I don't know if Christopher actually went overseas But I know he was he was in the army and so yeah, he saw all of that going on. Yeah Yeah, so he and so even more than just the personal investment of a person in England At World War Two he obviously had, you know, a children who were involved in it and that much more paying that much more close attention, certainly working his nerves that much more with all that investment. But again, we also referenced that he was Catholic and not just Catholic, he was like super pro-Batican one Catholic because Vatican two roles around intensely traditionalist Catholic like

I genuinely think you can only be as Catholic as Tolkien was if you were Catholic in England specifically before Vatican two because you also have a love of language well yeah so you go to Vatican two and suddenly you're allowing the mass and the volgate. It's, if you're going to, if you're going to be a linguist in England, you're going to be upset about that. So yeah, and I'm sure probably part of his issues with Vatican II had to do with his intrinsic love of older languages. And probably his intrinsic belief,

because he was such a traditionalist, and because of his upbringing. And he was an orphan who was largely raised by a priest who was a friend of his mother, who was his biggest father figure, and was his literal father figure after his mother died. And so his emotional attachment to the Latin Mass was probably off the charts.

Yeah, and that was that was the end of the reason. I wasn't aware of that, but that is a really salient point. And so just taking some rip from the headlines kind of stuff about the token books, like when you think about trench warfare and then you think about the siege of Eisengaard, right? Oh, yeah.

We're the enslay waste to Eisengaard and Orthank and Saremons forces, which are very heavily industrialists, are just being torn down. And so I'm thinking in my mind if you're serving in World War I, if you're in the trenches and your artillery is your worst enemy, right? Combined with someone I came who had a love for the agrarian and the pastoral and the outside and seeing what like, you know, I don't know that he was at that he would have seen what Verdun was like, right in France, but knowing what was being done to the land as a, as a my product of this,

absolutely had to have left impression. And then going back to things like, so in Catholicism, we're funny about the ways in which God does or does not intervene in the world. Yes. Some might say capricious. On my, my, my, Calvinist would, Calvinist would say a lot of things. That's one of our, one of our most disdainian contrigger at any time he mentions Calvinists. Yeah, sorry, sorry, I need to take a deep breath. Okay, Calvinist miss theology. What if we're just a pile of s***?

And then there's a magical napkin on top of us, and the napkin goes away what we're now. Yeah. Okay. No, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to hit back on the punching noun thing about Calvinist. No. Look at, look at literally, look at literally every American born, uh, uh, religious movement since the second grade awakening. And no, we are not punching down on Calvinists. They're all Calvinists with fancy names. It's Calvinism with extra steps.

Like no. No. No. Uh, that's, that's, and I'm sorry. Sorry. I was, I was raised in Mormon. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

There you go. That's Calvinism with extra steps. There is our wisdom. We added a lot. Yeah. Calvinism with genocide. She know what they say about marketing. You got people to do it. And honestly, it's new. I knew you have no long.

I was going to get this canceled. I just felt it in my bones. You could not have me on with Ed's thing. So, but one of the things that we did part of the Catholic faith understands about the way in which God operates is that like the Holy Spirit is a guiding force. But it is not a, it is not like a, to go back to North mythology, like a thunder and lightning kind of thing, right, with Thor or anything like that. It is a nudging to go back to North mythology like a thunder and lightning kind of thing, right? With Thor or anything like that. It is a nudging force. And so like I was talking to a buddy of mine

Who was really upset that Gandalf did not just throw fireballs everywhere and he's like why why isn't Gandalf Literally just setting everything on fire. I said well I would suggest this because Gandalf is the Holy Ghost like that's a lot of where that influence comes from because he is there to nudge and guide and make sure that humans can stand on their own, which is very much lining up with a lot of perspective of how the divine intercedes. Yeah. And our one. This also gets the argument that people do about like why didn't like Vince Gill and Don

Henley and Joe Walsh, like just give Gandalf a ride to you know mount doom and of course Ed Said it to bait me and I'm not going to rise to it. Yeah Yes, and it said it in such a Ed said it in such a way that my son ran around the house Repeating it for months and months afterwards And apparently it had to do. Would you like to quote yourself or you want me to? What do you prefer?

I love hearing you say it. Okay, the Eagles represent the grace of God, you ignorant f*****. Yeah. That's my, that's because, because we're talking, I have often associated Joe Wash with divine mercy. And I'm not.

And he's a freaking. He's a deacon. I mean, yeah, you know, it's right there. Yeah, yeah, it pretty much is. There is a thing around here though in my neck of the woods of taking like old classic rock songs and turning them into Bible hymns. So for example, like my mom grew up hearing covers of almost

at parodies, but covers of take it to the limit by the equals only in church was take it to the Lord. And so, you know, she's a child. That doesn't, that doesn't track like it was the 70s. It does. If you're pushing abstinence, because that will dry everyone up. Like, right then. Right.

Yeah. Man, not wrong. Oh my God. Wow. OK. So, you know, the idea of Gandalf as the Holy Spirit, I think is, I'm sure somebody at some point has written some level of critique of the work that brings that up.

And what we have come around to on our podcast when we talk about this kind of stuff is with Tolkien and the elements of his work that are very clearly coming from his Catholicism, or when we look at Heinlein and we look at, well, he was a naval officer specifically in engineering and technological stuff. So yeah, obviously that's going to be part of what he writes. I think the case is really strong that Tolkien couldn't help but write in allegory. Like he, he, he got violently, I agree, or as close to violence as he ever got, he was a very mild mannered individual,

but, but he got, he got worked up with people saying they wrote in allegory, but like he couldn't help it. Um, you know, Gandalf is obviously an angel, um, an angel and an agent of the Holy Spirit. The Eagles are, as I've already said, representative of the grace of God. They show up when you don't expect them, you can't count on them ever. But I have the job as a middle school history teacher of explaining to some of my kids, depending on their grade level, about the Reformation. And what that means is I have to spend a certain amount of time explaining to them, okay, so before this event, we call the Reformation, this is how

God worked. And if you're Catholic, this is still largely how this does work. Is you spend your life trying desperately to do the right thing all your life. And you put in all this effort and all this effort and all this effort. You are never going to be able to earn your way into heaven. You can't do it. You can't earn your way into heaven. However, you do the works and then God reaches down and pulls you up. Now Martin Luther, because of his background, basically decided, works don't mean anything. You're a sinner, you're never going to be worthy and it's grace alone. So la Gratia. And so grace just reaches all the way down and picks you up. And the eagles very much represents a Catholic outlook

on the idea of the grace of God. You have put in all of this work and you have done all of the sacrificing. And you are literally on the verge of death and there is nothing that is going to save you. You are no sh** doomed. And then the clouds break and here are the eagles. Mm-hmm.

So it doesn't matter like the attitude you carry toward it, either. No. Like you could have just the most violent disposition or I don't know, a peaceful, easy feeling. And you know God won't let you down. Okay, that wouldn't hurt. I like to, I like to think that the, I like to think that the battle of

Pelopelanor fields was, was talking, haven't been influenced by deciduous rasmus, who for those that don't know, was a 16th century theologian, who is most famously known for saying, quote, fight me, you elitist cowards. Yes. Yes. And that undergirds just toe, uh, uh, that undergirds a lot of aerogorne story arc. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, big, big, yeah.

I'm sure that, that, that I had never made that connection before right now and it totally makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, again, because I wouldn't expect anyone to know. Erasmus was a Dutch, who was a Dutch humanist philosopher, who basically said, we're wasting times with these books. You cowards get out of your ivory towers

and put your feet on the ground. Now I like to think he was a fighter, anyway. But again, we've already covered this ground of Tolkien didn't think that he was writing an allegory. And he did say, I think in a letter to one of his editors that, you know, I can't deny that there are things that are showing up here that this is a Catholic tale. And to that point, though, I think part of the polysemic nature of the text and to throw around a fancy word, policy meaning the it is open to interpretation

from a variety of angles and views is that it has that kind of resonance but it isn't exclusive to it, right? Because there are people who absolutely get a variety of things out of the materials. They don't have anything to do with aspects of Catholic theology or even environmentalism necessarily. I mean, a lot of folks, for a lot of folks, the redeeming quality is the matter of, excuse me, is the matter of like the emotional intimacy among male

companions, that there's a lot of emotional depth there, and that, or even maybe the subversion of story types and tropes in the sense of Sam being the hero, right? Yeah. Yeah. And and Frodo Frodo as the hero and Sam to a similar degree, both of them being nonviolent heroes. Both of them are killing spiders. Count as nonviolent. Well, you know, I mean, occasionally you get a punch in Atsi like it just, you know, itviolent? Well, you know, I mean occasionally you get a punch in Nazi. Like it just, you know, it happens. But, you know, I think the point I'm trying to make applies more to Frodo in that he is a nonviolent hero figure. There is not really any point at which Frodo goes on the offensive. He is protected by his uncle's mithril shirt.

And he carries sting early on, but the only companion of between him and Sam, Sam is the one who actually, like, you know, goes on, you just sh** sting going against Shaylob. Stabby, stabby. Stabby, stabby. Again, you know, literally a daughter of the, but you know, a first generation descendant of the mother of all spiders.

When you, when you get into the extended mythology, he's like, oh, so he just killed the spider equivalent of like an ancient dragon. Like she loves mother, she loves mother, I'm going to consume this night sky and stars. Yes. Yes. Essentially, the appointment she love must have been right. And then a hobby sticks out with like 36 stick attack damage.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I don't, I don't even know. I, you know, trying to stat any of the stuff out is like, I don't, I don't know how it worked. Yeah. They had a very forgiving game master. Can I interrupt you there? Because you, you brought the Frodo and Sam thing in our podcast.

And I love what you did to talk about that because if I recall correctly, you said Frodo was a stand in for Tolkien. And Sam was a stand in for, frankly, the people that he idealized. Yes. Do you mind jumping in a little bit? Oh, yeah. So it's really important on the level of it being an unintentional allegory of World War One or of the emotional damage done by World War One to the people who participated in it.

Tolkien was an officer. Tolkien was a left-tenant, if I remember correctly, I don't know whether he got promoted beyond that point, but as a man coming from a gentleman's background, when he joined the service, he got a commission and he was an officer. And so he was put in the position of being in command of men who were from more working-class backgrounds than his own and He was put into position of having to give them orders from which many of them did not come back and it profoundly affected him

as it must for anybody who's ever in that position. And he responded to that by idealizing the common men of England who showed up and did what they had to do in order to defend Queen and Country, and then went home and went back to being gardeners and coal miners and industrial workers and whatever. And so Sam being the hero, I think, is a real tell for Tolkien's view of himself and his own position in the kind of defining conflict of his life. When he was called to stand up and do this moral thing and make the sacrifice, he could not have done it and he would not have succeeded without the Sam's who were under his command. And in his view, they were, they were the heroes. That's particularly interesting when thinking about,

because I have read the Lord of the Rings years ago when I was a much younger man, but I go back from time to time and read excerpts from that kind of thing. And one that stood out to me was Sam's observation, I think in, I think it's in, might be in two towers, it might be in, they're turn the king, but where Sam observes a dead, I think it's a dead Harajim.

It's one of the races of men that fights for Sauron, it's either the harajim. It's one of the racism men that fights for Saran, it's either the harajim or Nisha Link. And he says he wonders to himself, was he really such a bad man or was he just caught up in something that was beyond his understanding? And then, and that's a moment of medical empathy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it helps kind of mitigate the subconscious Victorian racism involved in all of the tropes that are involved there, which is also part of the legacy that, you know, as somebody who loves the work, it's something that, you know, we kind of have to wrestle with as that's there. There's a quote that Tolkien has about Hitler, where he says, or he, I'm paraphrasing

here, but he says something on the lines of, he's a demented little man. And he is taking the great northern spirit of Europe and can perverted into something terrible and twisted. And there's just that line of the great Northern spirit. I'm like, oh boy, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. John, can I call you, John? Love your work. Can we sit down and have a talk for a moment here about unconscious bias. Can we, can we, we're making some assumptions here that maybe need to be reflected upon? Can we, can we do that for a minute? Yeah, you know, he did, he was at least open to critique because he did basically reinvent the dwarves.

Oh, yeah. For, so like if anyone's not aware and, and we'll head towards the end of that, so put this note, you know, token drew heavily from Norse mythology and we'll head towards the end of the episode, but this note, you know, Tolkien drew heavily from Norse mythology and also his understanding of Jewish culture to create the dwarms. The names, the physical appearances, are all lifted out of light Norse mythology, but the warrior diasporic people who are, you know, artisans and crafters and creators that's straight out of, you know, stories about the Jews and things like that. Also, I have to interject here, he was a linguist. Yes. And the structure of the Dwarvesh language is Semitic. Oh, yeah, it's based on Hebrew. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Ever by half. And yeah. And then he at some point, it's pointed out to him that he's like,

you know, these are kind of anti-Semitic tropes a bit like you, you made, you made Thorin go gold crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little problematic there. It's actually taking that idea of like Thorin's obsession with the Arconstone and the Horde in the other. And then looking at how Gimli addresses the matter and I think it's the fellowship or it's the fellowship because they're going through the minds and he says, you know, we don't carve stone for the sake of owning the precious. We enjoy the beauty and wish to see, you know, wish that everyone else could see it as well. And that's a paradigm shift. Uh, if we're talking about the perspective of how the

door of sea thinks from one book to the other. Yeah. Um, so, you know, one of the things I appreciate about him, and this is not to give a pass to any of the stuff that, that is really unfortunate in the books, but he was at least someone who was open to grappling with his own ideas. Oh, yeah. And, and, you know, I think if, if he had lived longer and lived into a time where those tropes were being interrogated, we probably would have, I like to think anyway, that because of his, essentially, I'm going to say, his intellectual honesty. And I think that's kind of at the core of it. His intellectual honesty and his spiritual honesty, for lack of a better word, I would hope that he would be open to growing and grappling with those things on a continuous basis,

if the times in which he lived and eventually died, he passed away in the 70s. And so at the time he died, people weren't really grappling yet with so many of the issues that are there in his work. I think the kind of feminist underpinning problems with the roles of women in his work, you know, an A.O.N. being kind of a token character. You know, that was just beginning to be something that people were talking about.

It isn't work. Even at its time with his representation of women, it was still pushing a lot of boundaries to have. Oh, yeah. You know, like A.O.N, at the same time, you know, if we were to say, take a look at the children of Huron. Yes. Yeah. And Turin and Iniel, who have an incestuous relationship,

but that works at Greek tragedy. Yeah, it literally. It is. That's very clearly him reaching across a couple of aisles in the library and going straight to, you know, edipus, but I'm going to change a couple of the relationships around. No, no, it's not his mom. She's a sister. It's not as bad.

Like it's still a curse. It still occurs. It's still bad. They all die. But it's not quite as gross, right? Right. It's my favorite of his works that I've read an entirety. I should point that out because I've never finished this so merely and probably never well. For the same

reasons, I won't finish the Old Testament. Okay. But it is, you know, yeah, absolutely. Anyway, I was trying to find a way to work in the fact that, you know, this Tolkien's Order of the Rings would be a masterpiece if only he had Father Christmas arrive with weapons to give to child soldiers. But that's that's a discussion for the day. Yeah, well, that's the one thing Lewis got right in my opinion. You didn't like lying, Jesus. Well, okay, there's a there's a cartoon going around on Facebook right now that is one of my

absolute favorite things and it's, you know, the difference between J. Error Tolkien and CS Lewis and the first top panel is some college student asking Tolkien. Professor Tolkien is, is Lord of the Rings really, you know, an allegory for your experiences in World War One? And Tolkien says to this kid, no, it is not. And if you continue saying that, I shall call the police. And then in the panel underneath it is CS Lewis sitting in his desk, riding with a four-learn look on his face. And in a thought bubble, it says, if even one reader does not understand that the lion is Jesus, I will kill myself. And that's the two of them, like in a nutshell, like it's perfect. Just also like the fact that I believe that token immortalized Lewis as tree, as

tree beard. Yes. It's my best and be his friend. He's loud as shit. And it goes on forever. I know how he feels. Home home. All right. So on that note, let's pull to a close. So where can folks find y'all? Well, collectively, we can be found on our podcast,

a geek history of time, where we take history, we retake nerdery, anything you pick it, although we tend to have a tendency to concentrate an awful lot on wrestling. And comic books are probably our two biggest overall categories. Ronald Reagan. Oh, well, yeah, see, that's the other half, is we take something out of Mercury and we connect it to real world history. Because we're both social study teachers. And that's the other thing that we're both like hyper fixated on is like, oh my God, I've seen all of this before.

You know, and so it's our kind of our way of coping with that. So that's that's our podcast at Geek History of Time. Damien, you want to tell them where they can find that because you can find that on the Apple podcast as well as Stitcher. I think we've pulled ourselves from Spotify for reasons, but Stitcher and the Apple Podcast you can find there. You could also find it on our website. If you don't want to go through one of those services and subscribe, you can just go to geekhistorytime.com and you can scroll through and I mean I say it's a buffet. You come for the asparagus, maybe you stay for this

officer. It's up to you what you do. I just ask that if you listen to an episode, make sure it's the first of a series. Like if you start an episode three of, you know, the Tolkien one, you're a monster. What are you doing? You need to start with one. Like, yeah, we're trying to have a civilization here, people. Um, but so to check, that's to be observed. Exactly. It's most. Yes. But yeah, that's where you can find that. You can find myself at Duh Harmony. There's two ages in the middle of that on Twitter and Instagram, as well as Duh Harmony one on the TikTok, where I have a hashtag going how I torture Ed. And it's just some of the most brilliant wordsmithing you'll ever see he'll never

admit it's it's a Network and they find he's trying he's trying to trap you all it's puns I can be found I can be found on tiktok is mr. underscore blalock I don't post them off a lot the biggest thing I have right now is my own opinion about how Georgia would this give us the worst possible interpretation of the Jedi Council that like anybody could have come up with. Yeah, that was so fun that by the way. We do. Yeah. Several of them because I'm a sword nerd outside of, you know, everything else. And I can also be found as EH Blalock on Twitter. Thank you very much. And thanks for dropping out of office hours and we'll catch you next week. All right folks, eh-boylock on twitter. get Gmail back. Alright folks, we'll catch you next week.

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