Tall ships and tall kings Three times three, What brought they from the foundered land Over the flowing sea? Seven stars and seven stones And one white tree. (The Two Towers)

Mind your P's and Q's.

The burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

What course am I to take?" "Towards danger; but not too rashly, nor too straight.

You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.