Do Balrogs Have Wings?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

You know me, Underhill: post now, research later.

It will be good to have more time to draw pictures of Florence and listen to The Goldberg Variations. Perhaps, too, the audience will be captive enough to listen to my new theory: if one were to put all of Tolkien's writing from all sources into chronological order, take every twelfth word and write them as one continuous stream of letters, then take every twelfth letter of the sequence and translate the resultant words from their respective languages, it will give the sinister connection between the Cotton Library fire of 1731, this picture by Louis Wain, a freemason's headstone in Repton churchyard and the disappearance of the S.S. Waratah. The Medici popes and the Kennedy assassination might be involved too, but that depends on the size of the publisher's advance.