Don’t hear this as a critique, but your podcast makes me think of a trailer for either the trilogy itself or the movie (makes me wonder if Tolkien needed so many words–but now I’m treading on the territory of a fan…). To ensure that I mean this as anything but a critique, one of the things I like about your podcast is the use of language. You really have condensed the plot, which might strip the story of its conflict and interest, but your attention to sound and repetition stylistically make the summary itself interesting.

The only thing that really stood out to me was the first constraint, using “To begin with…” It feels tacked on at the beginning there. You might have considered a way to interpret it metaphorically or with sound so that you could make it cohere better with the rest of the piece.

Really strong evaluation–I appreciate the reference back to the Oulipo reading at the beginning (“the origin of language might be traced back to a man who had a stomachache and wanted to express that fact… //Of course he didn’t succeed in expressing this; never could succeed; nobody will ever succeed”) as well as your final insight that technology (at least in this case) may add layers of texture and meaning to language but it can’t necessarily overcome the limitations of language altogether.