The Prancing Pony Podcast

I don't drive or have a phone, so never got into podcasts, but I just listened to The Prancing Pony Podcast and, holy cow, they're amazing -- funny, well-spoken, great readers of Tolkien's text (they even do voices!), and they prepare with much useful background research. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to them.

The following two episodes are about Saruman. Both reference a 2016 open-access article of mine, from the Journal of Tolkien Research, that reads Saruman closely together with Plato's Republic, which is how I found the podcast. When they posted the episode on twitter, someone kindly thought to tag me.

Anyway, here are the episodes: 

Episode 217: Fooling Yourself (The Angry Old Man). They begin talking about my article at around the 51 minute mark, although the set-up begins at about the 48 minute mark. They continue talking about it for a fair bit.

Episode 218: The Renegade. Mention of my article begins at around the 34 minute mark, though the set-up comes a bit earlier, though this mention only lasts a few minutes.

The podcasters also make great use of another open-access article, Jay Ruud's 2009 piece published in Mythlore. This just goes to show how valuable open-access can be ..... it drastically increases the number of interested people who can read your research.

Anyway, I highly encourage people to check them out.

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