on the audio

So it's been done and put out in public. Last week, I was audio-interviewed over the internet by a fellow using the handle the Longwinded One, who is doing a Tolkien-related podcast that's partly his D&D campaign in Tolkien's world but partly serious interviews with Tolkien scholars, all of whom he has lined up on this page. He has Verlyn Flieger and Michael Drout and Dimitra Fimi and Corey Olsen and Ted Nasmith, and now he has me.

We talked about how one becomes, or at least how I became a Tolkien reader and then a scholar, about the concepts of sub-creation and Elven magic, about the three styles that I identified in the prose of The History of Middle-earth, about whether Ungoliant still exists and what Tolkien thought of cats, and some other things.

So you can listen to it there or, if you're like me and prefer to read than to listen to long podcasts, I've put up a transcript.