The Rings of Power Wrap-up is a new show from the team at The Prancing Pony Podcast, covering the new Amazon Prime television series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Alan Sisto and Shawn Marchese began The Prancing Pony Podcast in 2016 and more than 250 episodes later their trip through the legendarium of Middle-earth is going from strength to strength. The show won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Online Content in 2020 and 2022!
Now that the Amazon show has finally hit our screens, Alan is joined by two new co-hosts for the Rings of Power Wrap-up: James Tauber and Dr. Sara Brown!
MEET YOUR HOSTS
ALAN SISTO
The Man of the West
JAMES TAUBER
The Sage of the South
At the age of eleven, James Tauber was obsessed with two things: computers and The Hobbit. For his twelfth birthday, his aunt bought him The Return of the King, but not having read the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings, James was reluctant to start reading the main text. Instead he dived into the appendices, particularly the information on languages and writing systems.
With this seed planted, James ended up majoring in linguistics at university and combined this with his interest in programming to work on marking up mediæval and ancient texts electronically for linguistic analysis. Although working professionally as a technologist and software developer in the two decades since, he has maintained a scholarly involvement in historical corpus linguistics and digital humanities especially in the context of Biblical and Ancient Greek texts. He blogs regularly on that topic at https://jktauber.com/.
In 2017, year James formally extended his scholarly interests to the Germanic languages, undertaking studies at Signum University in comparative philology and both Old Norse and Old English language and literature.
DR. SARA BROWN
Shieldmaiden of Rohan
Sara first encountered Tolkien when, at the tender age of eight, her father handed her his copy of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in an attempt to find something, anything, that she couldn’t read in a day and then demand to go back to the library. She was a Goth in her youth (the music kind, not the marauding kind) and hopes that the photos will never see the light of day, but her favorite band of all time is The Manic Street Preachers. She is still obsessed by Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories, but can get lost for days down the rabbit hole of the ‘History of Middle-earth’ series.
If Sara could live anywhere on Middle-earth it would be Lothlorien, because out of all living things (including humans) she loves trees the most. Also, there would be a good chance of finding a quiet flet where she could read in peace without fear of constant interruptions. She notes, though, that at 5 foot 2 and definitely not willowy it would be very difficult to pass herself off as an Elf.
Sara’s day job is as Chair of the Language & Literature Faculty for Signum University, where she has worked alongside Corey Olsen since 2012. In her spare time, Sara has also worked on the Tolkien Experience Podcast and loves to attend academic conferences, where she often gives papers on topics guaranteed to raise the blood pressure in certain members of the audience.