Tevildo

It is.

Uh, and I can't wait to get to Tevildo, Prince of Cats.

He's one of my favorites.

[laughs] Tevildo's everybody's favorite, no doubt.

Right? Now, this show wouldn't be anywhere near as successful as it is without a big team of folks working so hard behind the scenes.

Mm-hmm.

Like, if Sauron was supposed to be the Prince of Cats...

So just to clarify, Tevildo the Talking Cat was going to be featured in a story that is personally my favorite chapter of anything the Tolkien has ever written.

It's called The Tale of Beren and Lúthien.

It's mentioned briefly in the original trilogy and then gone into way more detail in the Silmarillion.

yeah Everyone says hello.

She says hi back.

Anyway, yes, Tevildo the cat, one of those very bizarre things that Tolkien took in its very early infancy and transformed into, I'm going to make this the big bad guy of a trilogy.

Like, I want you to think for a second how much less menacing it would be if Sauron in the movie...

And there are three characters that you can see influence Tolkien's development of Sauron.

The first one is Tevildo, the Prince of Cats, who is here with us today.

Joining live, Tevildo, the Prince of Cats.

Tevildo is a proto-Sauron character, so he's not actually himself Sauron, but he has some characteristics that'll end up being scavenged by Tolkien and used or integrated into other characters that then contribute to Sauron.

The second character is Tu or Tuvo or Thu, the wizard, the necromancer, the lord of werewolves.

These are all different names that he gets.

And he's just kind of integrating different versions of these characters or different characteristics to inform the different modes of Sauron.

So, for example, in The Hobbit, the necromancer is like explicitly Thu and incorporating all of these explicit aspects of the Thu character from Book of Lost Tales.