A Prescient Understatement

Friend and fellow member of “Tea Club and Barrovian Society” (or “TCBS”), G.B. Smith, writing to Tolkien in 1915: “It struck me last night that you might write a fearfully good romantic drama, with as much of the ‘supernatural’ as you cared to introduce. Have you ever thought of it?” (quoted in John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 105)