“Your lullaby would waken a drunken goblin!”

“Clap! Snap! the black crack!Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!And down down to Goblin-town You go, my lad!Clash, crash! Crush, smash!Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!Pound, pound, far underground! Ho, ho! my lad!Swish, smack! Whip crack!Batter and beat! Yammer and bleat!Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,Round and round far underground Below, my lad!”

“What shall we do, what shall we do! Escaping goblins to be caught by wolves is like out of the frying pan and into the fire!”

“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.”

“Seek for the Sword that was brokenIn Imladris it dwells;There shall be counsels takenStronger than Morgul-spells.There shall be shown a tokenThat Doom is near at hand,For Isuldur's Bane shall waken,And the halfling forth shall stand.”

“I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.(on reading the Cynewulf lines about the star Earendel)”

“He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.”