G.B. Smith is best known from John Garth’s book Tolkien and the Great War and from the unreliable 2019 biopic, Tolkien. In this chapter, Garth brings to bear new evidence about Smith’s background in family and culture that reveals him as a borderland figure, straddling English and Welsh influences, working-class background and intellectual aspirations, industrial roots and aestheticist taste. He surveys Smith’s early years and writings prior to Oxford University and argues that these formative polarities made him more brilliant in person than on paper: a mercurial figure, a cultural gourmand, and a conduit for ideas and influences that would prove vital to the astonishing creative efflorescence of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.