This chapter interprets Smith’s poem ‘Rime’ as a debate between a ‘man of action’ and a ‘scholar of gramarye’ in a medievalist setting of a tower, perhaps in a city under siege. The man of action has had many hard experiences, but the scholar is unabashed: he has seen similar sights, and his work too is important in the struggle. It is not hard to see real-life parallels between the two figures in the poem and the two friends and writers G. B. Smith and J. R. R. Tolkien. Smith, having finished his degree, is the man of action, already serving in the British forces on the Western Front, while Tolkien is the scholar of philology, still studying in his college, who nevertheless responds to his friend’s challenges with an assertion of the relevance and applicability of their studies. During this verse debate, the influences are Romantic and medievalist: images of tower, clouds, night, and sea and ideas of gramarye and magic. In his later writings, Tolkien took these images from Smith’s poetry and gave them new life and significance.