I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.
Home is behind, the world ahead, and there are many paths to tread through shadows to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight.
Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty que...
Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate; they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.
His poem is like a play in a room through the windows of which a distant view can be seen over a large part of the English traditions about the world of their original home. (Tolkien on the author of...
His hopeless challenge dauntless criedFingolfin there: 'Come, open wide,dark king, you ghatsly brazen doors!Come forth, whom earth and heaven abhors!Come forth, O monstruous craven lord,and fight with...
Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.
Help means ruin and saving means slaying.
He was dark-haired as his mother, and promised to be like her in mood also; for he was not merry, and spoke little, though he learned to speak early and ever seemed older than his years. Túrin was slo...
He smelt cake.
He [Bilbo] fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.
Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’ ‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For n...
Go back? he thought. No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!
Gandalf thought of most things; and though he could not do everything, he could do a great deal for friends in a tight corner.
For those interested in observing the gradual evolving of The Lord of the Rings from its earliest drafts to its published form, I highly recommend Christopher Tolkien’s account, which appears within f...
For still there are so many thingsthat I have never seen:in every wood in every springthere is a different green.
Far over misty mountains coldTo dungeons deep and caverns oldWe must away, ere break of day,To find our long-forgotten gold.
Escaping goblins to be caught by wolves! he said, and it became a proverb, though we now say ‘out of the frying-pan into the fire’ in the same sort of uncomfortable situations.
Don't tell us about dreams – dream dinners aren't any good and we can't share them.
Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather t...