Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: nostalgia. As a formal linguistic and technical term, nostalgia itself is only a few centuries old, but the sense of idealized pasts, ‘things were better then,’ and other forms of trying to escape, actively or passively, into a place that’s supposed to be far superior than the present has been noted in various forms for millennia and more besides. That there’s evidence of nostalgia playing out in various ways in Tolkien – most commonly, but not solely, in the Middle-earth legendarium – is perhaps axiomatic, given his own small-c conservatism on many fronts. But at the same time, a deeper dive into how these impulses are discussed and presented in his formal work shows that whatever patinas and idealizations he demonstrated, he also conveyed a certain unsureness with it as a solution or safe space for his characters and societies on a wider level. What memories do your hosts have of the times they first started reading Tolkien heavily and how do they regard them now? How do different societies like the hobbits, the elves and the men think about the past with regard to their presents, and what are the different lenses through which they experience such issues? Where does nostalgia play out in the non-Middle-earth works, as well as in his own direct writings in his letters and elsewhere? And do Middle-earth’s denizens in fact write fiction of their own?