Beyond the Brandywine

Hello wanderers, and welcome back! As part of our episode notes, we've created this "Wandering Trail." In our seventh episode of Beyond the Brandywine, we turned our attention to the unsung, the overworked, and the downright doomed — the worst jobs in Middle-earth. Not everyone gets to be a king or an Elf-lord; somebody has to clean the stables, deliver the mail, and yes, build ships for a king who thinks he can challenge the gods. Tolkien's world is famous for its grand ques

Hello wanderers, and welcome back! As part of our episode notes, we've created this Wandering Trail. In our sixth episode of Beyond the Brandywine, we ventured into territory both cozy and chaotic — a question so practical it borders on absurd, yet so fundamental it reshapes how we see the Shire itself: Are the animals in the Shire hobbit-sized, or are hobbits living in constant danger from full-sized livestock? What began as a simple question about proportions became a spraw

Hello wanderers, and welcome back! As part of our episode notes, we've created this "Wandering Trail." In the fifth episode of Beyond the Brandywine, we continued our discussion on the Most Haunted Places in Middle-Earth, traveling back to the First Age. We descended from the haunted surfaces of Middle-earth into something far more ancient and terrible — the deep places where evil first took root, and the primordial battlegrounds of the First Age where darkness reached its ze