IN THE SHIRE-RECKONING by Diane Finnis-Robb  

Part Two; Chapter One "The Youngbuck"

   Berty, or Theudebert Youngbuck as he was called at the time, had a great respect and an equally great contempt for the subtle art of accounting. He believed strongly, as his uncle had impressed upon him, that a clear and reliable balance sheet might be the key to a comfortable future. But as he sat at the ledger books and tried to make sense of their long pages of names and numbers, his mind invariably became clouded by abstractions and distracted by ideas of escape.

   ‘I don’t know how to explain it, uncle,’ he offered as an apology. ‘I feel that I may just have no head for such matters. I come to the office each morning with a clear notion of what’s expected and what needs to be done. The course of the day is as clear as the grain on the surface of a block of pine and I know, walking into these offices, how I might whittle away at it. But then you put these ledgers in front of me and a knothole appears which I can’t seem to scrape, carve nor sand my way around.’

   ‘Hah!’ Twoody laughed at his nephew’s response. ‘You’ve your mother’s gift for metaphor even if you’ve learned very little from me of accounting. But let’s go a bit further with the metaphor, shall we?

   ‘You, Berty my boy, are no blockhead,’ Twoody continued. ‘I should say that you, for better and for worse, have a mind like a lumber-room. It's filled with many marvellous things; lengths and scraps and shorts, wide planks and jagged cuts of refuse from older jobs that are now forgotten. Some of these things you are quick to make of use when recognizing a job which is called for, for you are a person who knows how to use the materials at hand to meet fresh problems. But when you don’t wish to do a job, or find that job too boring to hold your attention, well, then you are very much the person who enjoys sitting in that great lumber-room of yours and discovering all of the other things you might make rather than solving the problem you were set to.’¹

   Berty looked down to the ledger books and then earnestly back into his uncle’s eyes with a slight, challenging smile on his face. ‘Well, yes I suppose so, uncle,’ he said. ‘But tell me; does this lesson in metaphor mean you think I’d make a better carpenter than a banker?’

   ‘You should be so lucky!’ Twoody responded with another laugh. ‘Your uncle Clooty can’t take you west and away from us that easily!’

   This conversation was happening on a bright summer day in the Twenty-ninth Year of the Shire-reckoning in the three-room offices of the Assayer of Titles and Deeds in Buckland, just nextdoor to the Buckland Postal Offices. These two buildings adjoined one another and Berty (Youngbuck to his friends) had spent all of his young life running between one office to the next. His mother, who held many titles since the founding of the Shire, had comfortably settled into one which she felt was the most important; Post-Master General (though there were some hobbit-folk who couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the gender declination and preferred to call her “General Mistress”). From her offices nextdoor Berty’s mother set the paths of volunteer mail-carriers throughout the Shire and continued to distribute THE SHIRE-RECKONING, her hand-copied broadsheet of all of the important news of the land. The offices of the Assayers of Titles and Deeds, uncle Twoody’s establishment in the adjoining building, was the most important stop for all hobbits wishing to move to the Shire and register their holding of lands. It was only recently that Buckland had become a central location for conducting these two very important governmental affairs, but the need had developed quickly as hobbits moved further into the west.

   Berty’s uncle Theudebald Swiftalk, as he was known then to his friends, was a “townfather” and had been an ambassador to the King. He was one of the most illustrious figures in the birth of the Shire and a major policy-maker during the land's early growth. During all of his young life Berty knew his uncle Twoody to be one of the most respected and talked about hobbits of his time. Berty had other respected uncles of course; for “the discoverers” of the Shire, Marcho and Blanco were his mother’s older brothers. But Berty had met them only once and never heard anyone in their family say much of anything about their further story. They lived far away in the Bree-land and, it seemed to Berty, they had no interest in coming into the land which they were famed for discovering and for little else beyond that. One of Berty’s other uncles (the very same carpenter which he and Twoody were referring to in their talking), one Clothair Pudifoot by name, was also quite famous and the youngest brother of Berty’s mother. “Cloot the Builder” people now called him and he travelled far outside the Buckland helping new settlers to build homes and farms in the western lands. He had been a good friend to Berty’s father in the early days and many Shirefolk had come to seek his advice in the establishment of towns and wells and farms. Uncle Clooty had helped to raise Berty as an infant and there was a great love between them; it was he who first called Berty ‘Youngbuck’ and it had certainly been a name which stuck to the boy well before he knew of its origins.

   For Berty was told from a very young age that, beyond the notoriety of his mother and his uncles, he was also the only son of that other famous “townfather”, the illustrious Gondolpho Boldbuck, now called “the Oldbuck”, who had gone lost among the Elves while exploring the western regions of this land.

   There was a drawing of his father in an oval frame above the mantle in their home at Sarehole. Berty, who had quite a keen hand for drawing and a careful eye for looking, had studied the picture all his life. It was, curiously enough, a self-portrait of Gondo made on a summer night some time before Berty’s birth; a dark face in black charcoal silhouette, eyes and features barely indicated, while behind him there was a bright night sky which showed a careful attention to the placement of stars, of luminous white chalk on the cool grey of the paper. There were nights when Berty himself would climb to the top of his parents’ home and look for the same arrangement of stars above his head. He would hold a mirror in his lap and try to imitate the mysterious look of the hobbit in that portrait; but he never felt that he quite got it right.

   ‘He drew that the night before we departed west,’ Berty’s uncle Twoody had once told him. ‘Oh, I am glad to have taken it from him before he just let it go to waste like so many other of his drawings. It captures him very well, Berty,’ Twoody had told his nephew, ‘though more in mood than in likeness. He cared very little about likeness, his own or of other things he drew, and cared much more about placement and moment. He achieved likeness as easily as he did most things; and if your father could achieve a thing easily he cared about it less. That’s why this portrait is so dear to your mother and I; one can see through it that he cared much more about the stars than his own self. Ah, I bless him and miss him, my boy, but his disregard for his own skill at hand was but a condition of his wanderlust, and that has cost our family much.’

   Gondolpho Oldbuck, once called Bucklestrap and later Boldbuck, had been the first great pioneer of the Shire. Together with his lifelong friend Twoody he had been first ambassador to the King. Those two friends, bravely exploring the farthest reaches of their land, had in the year of Berty’s birth, met the Elves on the western borders. Stories and gossip in Berty’s own time regarding his father were sometimes different from those things he heard from uncle Twoody and his own mother, but the general agreement was that Gondo had been beguiled, enchanted or somehow tricked by the Elves and had disappeared forever. Berty’s mother seldom spoke of him, but Twoody, and all the other folk of Buckland, always did so with great respect. Berty never pursued these stories much; for to be compared to his father was a condition Berty avoided whenever he might.

   ‘But I am just so much better with a chalk and ruler in my hand than I am with a counting-device, uncle,’ Berty said, staring across the desk filled with graphs and bills of sale. ‘And I can draw a map much better than I can write a contract.’

   ‘Yes, you certainly can, my boy,’ Twoody replied gently. ‘But for now, and for this summer at the very least, you are apprenticed here and will learn what I can teach you. But at your next birthday, not so long away! you will be twenty-six and fully of age. You can make decisions about your own future then, though I dare say your mother might have something to add when the time comes.

   ‘Now,’ the older hobbit said, looking at an hourglass beside his desk, ‘back to work! I can tell you from personal experience that complaining about ledgers will not make them go away!’

    Berty returned to his arduous task and said little else for the rest of the afternoon. With great effort he managed to balance the accounts of twelve deed-holders and estimate the tax revenues against the cost of the new road west through Buckland and out toward the Delvings. Thankfully there were no visits to the Assayers Office that afternoon, it being on the cusp of a holiday. With no distractions to take Berty’s young mind off of the boring work of sums and charges he was able to present his uncle with the reports in a fairly short time.

   ‘Well done, my boy!’ Twoody said with his usual warm smile. He looked once again to his hourglass with grave seriousness.‘Well,’ Twoody said quietly, ‘ I think you’ve earned yourself a little free time for the end of the day and before tonight’s gathering. Now, best go out the sidedoor so that your mother won’t see you and press you into her service. Off you go!’

   And Berty, wisely taking his uncle’s advice, was out the door at a run.

*****

   For this particular summer day was June 20th, “Lithe”² it is called in the Shire calendar, first of the Summerdays, and a time for communal feasting. Some of Berty’s friends, old enough to be out of school like himself yet still too young to spend their off hours in public-houses, would be heading to the large family dinners and entertainments going on in the town square of Buckland and elsewhere throughout the Shire. The Summerdays were the main cultural holiday in every town and settlement and, in typical hobbit fashion, there would be feasting and drinking and singing and dancing from sunset tonight until morning two days hence. All the Shire-hobbits of all ages would join in the celebration and it was generally considered to be the most anticipated and enjoyable of Shire traditions.

   On other such occasions, Highdays and Yule and Birthdays and Namings, Berty’s mother and his uncle Twoody would play a position of great honour at most public festivities. They were “the townfathers” after all, and such duties were expected of them. Uncle Twoody would be called upon for speeches, Berty’s mother to give blessings and wishes for new babies and the whole family would often be called upon to travel to some of the more faraway places of the Shire. These were favourite memories of Berty’s youth; for at those times he got to see more of the world around him and learn of his family’s importance in the land’s history. It made him proud of his parents and of his lost father, and, less comfortably, it placed upon him an understanding of the role he was expected to play in the Shire’s future. Through the actions of his mother and his uncle, as well as the reputation of his lost and unknown father, Berty had become prominently engaged in the workings of the Shire even from his earliest years.

   But on the Summerdays Berty's family, quite contrary to the behaviour of all their neighbours, stayed home and did not take part in public celebrations. They feasted well on these days to be sure and, like all the Shirefolk, they did not go to work or see to other responsibilities. Yet their feasts did not celebrate the changing year or welcome the new one with the same joy as other hobbit feasting did. For it was on a LitheDay, twenty-six years before, that Berty’s father went forth with the Elves and so it was generally accepted as a day of loss within Berty’s household. In remembrance of this loss Berty’s mother would accept visits during the Summerdays only from family members and immediate friends. These were not public parties (though there were doubtlessly many neighbours who, for political reasons, wished to attend) but very private occasions. No invites were ever made, for inviting friends to grieve would be a very un-hobbitlike notion indeed. But each year, and with an increasing number, many hobbits from Buckland forsook their own Summerday feasts and showed up at the Sarehole to offer their respects to Berty and his mother. And while there was a great solemnity to the matter of who would attend, this was by no means a dour gathering. Guests drank and talked and ate for all three days as they told their stories of older times. It was, in that respect, very much like the parties which the celebrants in the town held in their welcoming of the new year. It was never, not since the earliest moments of Berty’s memory, a time solely of grief. It was neither a somber nor lamenting occasion but, unlike the other public feasts of Summerdays in the Shire, the “Buck’s Days” up at Sarehole were clearly meant as a time of remembrance rather than celebration. Stories were told of the early days of the Shire and the role of Berty’s father within it. Those stories were often comical, recounting a pioneering hobbit who settled the land like a lone pilgrim and then led others here like a proud chieftain, yet they were told with the genuine humour and sadness of people who missed “the Old Buck” greatly. There was no weeping for loss (except perhaps in the earliest days of Berty’s memory), but the tears, which remained plentiful, were accompanied by the smiles and the joy of fond memories. ‘Not all tears come from bad things,’³ his uncle Twoody was fond of saying and it seemed that he said it every night standing before the big dinnertables set up in their yards during the Summerdays.

   More and more in recent years some of the older generations of Shirefolk had begun showing up at Sarehole in honour of the Old Buck. There had been as many as sixty guests last year from the surrounding area and even from as far away as the Bree-land. They were never invited, not one of them for all the reasons of solemnity already mentioned; but likewise no guest which Berty’s father had known in his life was ever turned away. And, as they were all hobbits with well-developed and old-fashioned habits of propriety they seldom showed up empty-handed and were, of course, ever-willing to pitch in and make the occasion more comestible. But Berty’s mother and his uncle Twoody were famously excellent hosts who had a reputation to provide a very good table and so, this being the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Oldbuck’s disappearance, the family spent many months of the springtime anticipating the needs of their yet undetermined number of guests. In these past three months Berty’s young (and admittedly inexpert) hands had been put to the job of building tents and pavilions, tables and chairs, hammocks and holes for the many of the forthcoming uninvited-but-likely-to-attend guests which his family foresaw. Taking his uncle Twoody’s advice and running out the sidedoor on this June day meant that Berty kept himself from potentially being roped into some last minute tasks which his mother might need done or something new she might have in mind; but it also served Berty’s more secret purposes.

   As a tradition of old, Berty and all his siblings would be expected to put candles in all the windows of Sarehole in hopes that the Old Buck might find his way home. As the home itself grew, so did the task. Berty could remember doing this alone with his mother and his uncle since he had first learned to walk. He had later learned to make a game of it with his younger siblings. But it was not a custom he looked forward to repeating this year on this auspicious anniversary. Berty knew, just as his uncle Twoody most probably did in suggesting the sidedoor, that he would be late coming home for dinner tonight. Indeed, Berty knew, as his uncle could not, that he did not mean to come home at all.

   Running out of the Assayers Office (and looking about to make sure he hadn’t been spotted by his mother or anyone else who might question where he was going) he darted between the buildings toward the West-farthings road and, quickly as possible, out of the village of Buckland. Berty and his friends had their own secret plans for the Summerdays and he would not be caught nor distracted by other responsibilities.

   He would not be home for dinner, would not light the candles for his father’s return and, more horrifying indeed, through his actions tonight he would court his mother’s lasting disapproval.

   But on these Summerdays just before his coming of age, Theudebert Youngbuck, with approval or no, would be going into the west and, he hoped, eventually leaving the Shire.

end of chapter one

Chapter End Notes

Notes

1)  This expression comes from FoTR of course, in a letter to Frodo in which Gandalf describes Butterbur; “his memory is like a lumber-room: things wanted always buried.” I’ve always loved that, but wanted Twoody to use it differently here to describe his nephew's artistic nature (and, in many respects, my own).

2)  “Lithe” is derived from the Old English word líða, which was the name of the months for June and sometime July. It seems to have referred to the first new moon around the summer solstice. In the Shire calendar this time is more accurately accounted for than it was in the Bree-land calendar. Lithe is the first of “the Summerdays” consisting of three to four days (with the condition of a Leap year) and is celebrated with a long feast.

3)  This is an extension of Gandalf’s comment near the end of RotK when he says “I will not say do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” I have always loved this quote and tried to remember it in every genuinely joyful moment of my own life.