Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it's just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean.

One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.

I will take the Ring", he said, "though I do not know the way.

There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.

Each of us embodies, in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time & place, universal truth and everlasting life.

Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.