Maiar

They didn't necessarily know everything.

So when they were writing about the Valar and the Maiar and the building of creation and the creatures of the world, it didn't mean that they had a sense of everybody in it.

There were things they didn't know.

And Tom and Goldberry squarely fit into that category.

And then one of them in particular, Elway, wanders into a wood, meets a really beautiful woman, fucks her for 200 years.

It turns out she's a Maia, same order of being as Gandalf and Sauron and Radagast.

And the two of them, if you believe Tolkien, stand there holding hands for so long that his own people give up looking and leave without him.

The longest and possibly best first date in history? I don't know.

They wear iron, and ordinary heroes kill them in numbers.

So Tuor kills five with his axe, Ecthelion kills three with his sword, and the warriors of the king's house take down two, score 40.

Only later, much, much, much later, did Tolkien rethink them as like a rare fallen Maiar.

And he scribbled on a typescript that there shouldn't be supposed to be more than three or at most seven ever.

But the kind of mysterious like ostinato that he does for the stranger theme, this like do-do-do-do-do-do.

It's for a Maiar like Gandalf.

He is so warm and breath of fresh air.

I think that's a great way of putting it.

And of course, there's gonna be more as we get through the text.

And if there is one other thing to keep in mind, it's the question of who is Tom Bombadil and who is Goldberry? What are they? Where did they come from? Are they some sort of nature-spirit combination? Are they Maiar? Are they Valar in some sort of way, like a representative of somebody at a distance who is now embodied in Middle-earth somewhere? Are they Eru Iluvatar himself? Or are they something else completely? These questions have come up before in the show, and this is not a surprise topic.

This is one of the most intriguing topics I would put on the top 10 list somewhere of the things that people discuss and debate about Tolkien's work.

And I don't think that we have a distinct answer to this.

It absolutely is.

But there's a lot of important and interesting things that don't get brought up in the novels because, again, they're not necessarily part of the story, of this story.

Another example would be who Gandalf really is, the fact that he's a Maiar.

It doesn't really come up in the text of the story because it doesn't need to.

Heading back to Valinor, she wouldn't be ruling anywhere anymore.

She wouldn't even be particularly powerful, given all the Valar and Maiar and even more ancient elves there.

So she refused to go back to Valinor until she eventually grew wise and humble enough to accept that new, lower position.

It's worth noting that Galadriel and the Calaquendi elves who stayed in Middle-earth did try to proactively preserve Middle-earth and make it better.

It's all a Catholic pantheon.

And then there's the Valar, the archangels, right? And the Maiar, the angels.

Yeah, there's some discussion about if it is actually a Catholic or Christian pantheon at all, or if it's something completely more based in mythology and stuff like that.

Mythology, yeah.

yeah yeah yeah we already put let the hunt begin at the marketing slogan so we gotta we gotta find something yeah

yeah so we see the Sauron the Sauron fighting the Balrog using his crown to block him as you can see it's Morgoth's crown now I don't know why by the way FYI Sauron never teamed up with Durin's Bane in case anyone wasn't sure did this happen in the lore but we have to remember these are two members of the same race of Maiar so they're kind of on the same playing field here but yeah what What do we think of this shot, Johnny? Why is he using the crown? Why is he talking to the Balrog? What's going on?

are you expecting me to know what's going on I don't know what's going on as you said this is not why the crown we don't know what's going on why the crown I don't know it's been we know it's been revealed to be Morgoth's crown he's using it himself now as he's naming himself a type of a king the king of middle earth it seems to be as good a weapon as any I don't know seems pretty cool he used that to Who used that? Somebody used that to kill someone.

The orcs used that to kill Sauron in season two, didn't they? Or in season...