Chapter Text
T.A. 2824
The trouble, of course, began with Gandalf the Grey.
Gandalf! That disturber of the peace, that disreputable old shag-bag, that master of firecrackers that delighted all! More than one young hobbit he had swept away in his wake, only to return them (if at all) with tales of adventure and wild, unlikely places. One heady spring morning it was Gerontius Took gone off with him: Gerontius, son of Fortinbras the Thain, likely to become Thain himself in his own sweet time. Eleven months gone he was, and then back he came with a spear for a walking stick and braids in his hair: shocking! Shocking! There was no wizard with him, which was one small mercy—but what Gerontius had gone and done was far, far worse.
Because he’d brought dwarves to the Shire.
The rumor flew on quick wings, down the Bywater and over the Hill, across the Downs and through the four Farthings. Bluebell Cotton heard it from Laila Took, who told it to Yarrow Bunce over a plate of of pickled mushrooms. Adamanta Chubb even saw two of them, wandering lost along the Waymeet road.
“All bloody and covered with hair they were,” she told her confidantes later, at a hasty tea party got up in her kitchen. “Like bushes with legs! And all over with metal, even their feet. Poor lads. One of them at least, I was able to send Home.”
Her friend Daisy, wrung with envy at Adamanta’s reflected glory, cried, “I shan’t sleep a wink tonight. Dwarves in the Shire! What can Gero have been thinking of, bringing dwarves back with him? It’ll be Big Folk next, popping in when it’s not at all respectable. You’d have done better to send them both Home, Adamanta dear. The sooner they’re all gone, the better for us all.”
“I suppose Gero thought he ought to do his duty, as was very right and proper of him,” said Hilamy Goldworthy stiffly, for she was a Took on her mother’s side.
“I’m sure I can’t say,” said Adamanta. She had her own opinions of Gerontius Took, with his saucy smile and his twinkling eyes. “But as for you, Daisy Hemstrong, it’s one thing to say one ought to send two dwarves Home, and quite another thing to do it. Dwarves are very different things from hobbits, I’ll have you know! Though you’ll discover that for yourself soon enough, I expect.”
In this, Adamanta proved more prophetic than she knew. For the dwarves, once come to the Shire, did not seem eager to leave. How many of them there were, even Gerontius couldn’t rightly say. Perhaps there were a dozen. Perhaps there were a hundred! They ambled around the Shire in their armor, dazed and bewildered, falling into rivers and tumbling down wells. They were disconcerting guests to be sure, bristling with weaponry in a land where the most dangerous thing about was the blackberry cordial Harmon Gamgee brewed every autumn.
In fact, if the dwarves hadn’t already been dead, they would have been quite an alarming addition to the neighborhood.
Predictably, there were complaints.
“Berrin Chubb says they’ve been sitting on his tomatoes,” Fortinbras informed his son, who was untangling his fishing line with the aid of several dwarves. “Lavinia Noakes says three of them keep showing up for tea to watch the family eat. And Aunt Mabiginia says one of them has been following the triplets around everywhere they go. Even when they bathe, she tells me! It’s not respectable.”
“They like children,” Gerontius said, showing not the least remorse for the troubles he’d brought to his father’s door. “I expect they’re watching to make sure the children don’t get into trouble. As for Berrin’s tomatoes, I don’t see how dwarves sitting on them would do the tomatoes any harm. He’s welcome to send them Home if he likes.”
Fortinbras sighed. While it was true enough that being sat on by the shades of the dead did nothing ill to prize-winning vegetables, it was likewise true that it did no good, either. It seemed to him that there was a great deal to being Thain that no one had warned him about before he’d taken the job.
“Cheer up, Da,” Gerontius said encouragingly, winding the reel and taking his pole up onto his shoulder. “I sent one Home just this morning, and Hilamy told me she sent one Home last night. At this rate, they’ll be gone in no time at all.”
“More than enough time for the Shire to beat a path to my door,” Fortinbras said gloomily.
“What they think you’ll do about them?”
“I expect they’d prefer we take them back where they came from.”
“We can’t do that,” Gerontius said, rather shocked. “It wouldn’t be right. You should’ve seen where they were stranded, Da. All sand and rock, nothing growing at all. And goblins everywhere, scrabbling along with their great scabby feet—and where there weren’t goblins, there were wolves! No, they’re better off here. We can’t send them back.”
Fortinbras sighed again. But he was forced to admit that the dwarves looked better than they had when they first arrived. In the weeks since, the terrible wounds that had killed them had closed over gradually until most of the shades were hale and whole again. The pale-haired dwarf who followed Gerontius wherever he went had started with a great hole in his chest and arms drenched to the elbows with blood. Nowadays his hands were clean and his armor whole, and the glazed look in his eyes had changed to one of friendly intelligence. Even now, he was pointing out where Gerontius’s best fly had gotten lost in a basket of wool.
“Happen we can’t have folk report back Home that Shirefolk aren’t hospitable,” Fortinbras said. “But if I’m not to be driven there myself you’d best find a way to keep the from interrupting Lavinia Noakes’s teas with their staring.”
“You’re a wise one, Da,” Gerontius said admiringly, avoiding his father’s retaliatory swat with the ease of long practice. “I’ll be doing that right after I catch our lunch, shall I?”
In the event, Lavinia’s dwarf problem proved perfectly reasonable once Gerontius made his case. They left Lavinia’s tea table with much bowing and doffing of helmets. Lavinia, whose poor nerves were truly lacerated by the uninvited guests, was so appeased by such courtesies that she allowed as how she wouldn’t mind having dwarves for tea no more than three times a week. Shades, being incapable of either eating or speaking, were admirably suited to be tea guests, being disinclined to stealing the last lemon scone or interrupting an epic tale of market bargain shopping. So peace, in one smial at least, was restored.
Not all complaints were so easily solved however. Marjorie Gamwich interrupted Fortinbras’s elevenses one morning over the dwarf who refused to leave her water closet. And the horde of them around the forge was rapidly driving the blacksmith quite distracted with their frowns and reproving headshakes.
“Bad enough they’re dwarves,” he said bitterly at the Green Dragon over a mug of home brew. “To have ‘em shouting at me all day long when I’m doing nowt is enough to drive a hobbit loolally. And don’t be arguing they can’t shout if they can’t make a sound,” he added, wagging a threatening finger at Fortinbras. “I’ll stand any hobbit to watch them who’ll say I’m wrong.”
“The problem is, we can’t send them all Home,” Fortinbras told Gerontius later that night, after Barley took himself off to find comfort at the bottom of a steak and kidney pie. “It’s no use telling me they’re different from hobbits, because I know that. But it’s only a handful of folk seem to have figured the knack for sending them off at all.”
He nodded across the room where Tobias Baggins sat at a table, speaking quietly to a dwarf. There was a dim, warm light around the dwarf’s body: as though he were standing in a doorway before a blazing fire. While they watched, the dwarf abruptly flared white and then disappeared, and a wave of peace swept through the room like a great ripple from a dropped stone. Around the room, hobbits cheered. What dwarves were present stared at the empty spot left, longing or alarm in their hair-covered faces.
“Well, there goes another, anyway,” Gerontius said, while hobbits gathered to clap Tobias on the shoulder. “Funny thing that. Bagginses, Chubbs, Tooks, Brandybucks, and Gamgees the best at sending them Home so far—“
“No rhyme or reason to it!” Fortinbras said in despair, for while others had sent Home one or two, only those five families showed any talent towards doing so consistently and well. “Old Barnabas was telling me Men are the same, when they end up shades in Bree. You’d think they didn’t want to go Home.” It was a baffling thought to a hobbit, who thought of the Halls of Mandos not with fear, but with a gentle nostalgia—like the memory of an old sweetheart.
“They’ve had a hard time of it, Da. Can’t expect them to know up from down, the way they were going about being dead.”
“And that’s another thing,” Fortinbras said, reminded. “If that’s just one lot, who’s to say there aren’t more out shades there, making a hash of being dead? Tooks aside, there aren’t many among the Shirefolk would look kindly on the thought of having to go hunting for the daft things. I suppose we have a duty.”
“A duty to go on an adventure! Now there’s an idea.”
“We should ask the Wizard. Drat him! Never here when we want him. Maybe he could tell us what trick we’re missing for sending this confusticated lot Home. No offense, Master Dwarf,” Fortinbras added for the benefit of Gerontius’s blond-haired dwarf.
The dwarf grinned at him. Gerontius suggested comfortably, “Well, no doubt you’ll figure it out. Likely it’s some joke of Old Gran’fer’s. Sit tight, Da! He’ll sort it out one way or another.”
‘Old Gran’fer!’ Thus did hobbits refer to Mandos, the Doomsman of the Valar, keeper of the Halls of the Dead where all who are slain return. An irreverent name for so grim and feared a Vala! But the dignity of the great rarely survived an encounter with hobbits. No doubt Mandos knew what he was about when he made his small children the way he did.
“Well, they can’t be here forever,” said Fortinbras optimistically. “After all, the Shire is for Hobbits!”