25 Lord of the Rings Podcast Episodes - exploring compelling themes in the LOTR trilogy

Over more than 3 years, we have spent hours with the LOTR trilogy -- analyzing it, joking about it, and realizing more depth within it over 25 podcast episodes. Most of the episodes look at the series through themes like Love, Courage, Race, or Loneliness. We also have some special episodes including discussions sorting the personalities of particular characters, deep-dive Character Spotlights, and an analysis of a brilliant LOTR article.

CHARACTER SPOTLIGHTS

These episodes will be added as new ones launch and explore a single character each time! They will include a favorite quote, highs and lows of the character, ships, lessons learned, some fun AU fanfic ideas, and more!

FAVORITE THEME EPISODES

These first 4 episodes here are some of our favorites, and then we put all of the rest in chronological order below...

SPECIAL EPISODE

We had a blast with this discussion in 2021 of Tolkien's context for Sam and Frodo's romance (that is thoroughly textual). The discussion centers around Lee Ostertag's amazing Polygon article called "Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents" and although we highly recommend reading it, you don't have to have read the article to listen to the episode. We hope you are as inspired as we are by her impressive (and entirely canonical) analysis and artwork!

ALL THEME EPISODES

SORTING CHAT EPISODES

When we aren't pairing compelling themes with some of our favorite famdoms, we are sorting characters from them into their rightful Hogwarts Houses! Sometimes it's more difficult than you'd think.

Find out where we put everyone from Frodo and Sam to Eowyn and Saruman!

And if you want to listen to more of our Sorting Chats for other series, go here!

You can also look at some amazing fanart of some of the ships we discuss, like this amazing art of Sam and Frodo here.

Want us to do more LOTR podcast episodes? Let us know here!