IN THE SHIRE-RECKONING by Diane Finnis-Robb  

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Part Two; Chapter Eleven "From Eumaeus"1

*Author’s Note:

   And so it was that the seven hobbits, the four young Bucklanders and the three Zaragamba brothers, went into the west to make their mark. They discovered many marvelous things there and grew together in their fellowship, and more of this shall be told later in this story. But now, for a time at least, it seems I must shift our attention to the return of the Oldbuck and the ramifications it had within the rest of the Shire community.

   The work of Goldilocks Took née Gardener does not delve into this area of our story. If she had any interest to do so it is believed that she would have had the same historical data from the time as we have now. She does tell us of the feud which began with Gondo’s return, of the tragic results it brought, and toward the end of her tale she records the eventual reconciliation of the families three hundred years later. For it was the purpose of her document to recount as a gift to her fiancée the long history of his family which many Shire-hobbits had forgotten. But of the actual sundering of the friendships between Took and Buck in Year Twenty-Nine she tells us very little.

   It has been my intention to take all the existing and newly discovered fragments of this history and, through the scope of my research and the prism of my writing, expand them into a fuller story of the Shire’s early days than any that has yet been presented. I hope to tie up the loose ends which historical records do not always provide and to do so I have had to recount stories which are woven out of existing rumours and popular conjectures; not the most scientific method of course, but one that every storyteller must consider when historical evidence is otherwise spare.

   Therefore I have decided to add this chapter much as I did earlier with “distant music”, that chapter which dealt with Gondo and Alaura’s courtship. I do so because I believe it to be useful for modern readers and also because I believe that what happened to the friendship between the founders of the Shire may give us a more accurate picture of the depth of faithfulness that is so important for our understanding of these humble, forthright and forgiving people. But to tell this part of the story we must spend some more time in the arena of rumour.

   The events of Year Twenty-Nine and “The Feud between the Bucks and Tooks” is the first great gossip of the Shirefolk that we know of and it continued to grow in its telling for many generations after. As historians we are now able to examine the material as it was rendered or recorded by Arbogastes Bophin, who it seems tried to chronicle the story long before Goldilocks Gardener ever did. Whatever intentions he may have had for telling the story of the feud, and how those intentions were met by friends and family from his time, has long since been lost though may be worthy of further study.

   Very little is known of Arbogastes Bophin. It is a matter of record that he was the fourth child of Ermenberga and Euric Bophin and born in Year Twenty-One of the Shire. As we have noted before, that means he was still a fawn when these events took place and most certainly not a witness. While he was indeed first cousin to Theudebert Youngbuck he was far too young for them to have spoken during those days of the story which is unfolding. When or how his mother’s letters and diaries came into Arbogastes’ hands is quite unknown, but she herself passed away in Year Fifty and her writings, always personally archived and overly detailed in her statement of purpose, make no mention of what should be done with her many papers and correspondences after her death.

   But in that same Year Fifty, Arbogastes began to publish “THE WITTICISMS AND INSIGHTS OF EUMAEUS SANDYMAN” in THE SHIRE-RECKONING broadsheet under his own name. These articles brought some attention to the young hobbit as a humourist and even as a political satirist (a role which seems to be another unfortunate invention of second-generation Shire-hobbit society). How much of these ‘witticisms’ were taken directly from the source is unknown; Eumaeus Sandyman himself, then more than ninety years of age, was still very much alive in the Delvings and always happy to receive visitors. Arbogastes, who seems to have written nothing about himself and certainly leaves us no account of his travels, is believed to have lived in Frogmorton quite a good distance to the east. There is no record or rumour of their meeting and no introduction to be found in either the published papers or his discovered notes. So if these works come directly from interviews with the older hobbit or are a pure fabrication by the younger author drawn from hearsay is also unknown. But the events do seem to jibe with the story as others have recounted it and the style of Eumaeus’ speaking (though it is undoubtedly lampooned) fits with descriptions we have from more reliable (and more friendly) reports of those hobbits who knew the old fellow well.

   So once again I am departing from Goldilocks’ translated text that I might provide more of the story. And once again I remind the reader that Twoody, Gondo and Alaura, architects and founders of the Shire, were three friends who had shaped the land’s destiny faithfully, boldly and fairly, alongside their own; if they were much talked about it is because they were much loved for these qualities.

   In the earlier chapter “distant music” I fell back on one of the novelist’s easiest justifications to allow a free recording of the past; the adage that “history forgives a good story.” I believe that to be true. But, once again, we are faced with the problem of recording, for the purpose of story, a series of events rendered only in the artful gossip which well-wishing friends have left behind. Whether the hands of Arbogastes, Ermenberga and Eumaeus were guided by style or artfulness- or even by gossip’s more venial motivation; the intention of being noticed for the telling of another’s misfortune- we cannot say.

   The research which I have done has led us here: I cannot, as a novelist, leave the choices of Alaura Fairheart out of this second arc of the story and cannot, as a historian, account for the historical accuracy of anything which this chapter and chapter thirteen may tell you. It all comes filtered through gossip from a less than respectable commentator and is rendered underneath the veneer of style with which these two principal witnesses, Eumaeus and Ermenberga, speak or write. Yet through that veneer I hope to give you a glimpse of what may have happened; I will try to tell you about the sundering of Gondo and Twoody, the origins of the feud between the Bucks and the Tooks, and how Alaura came to earn and hold her own name of Fairheart.

-D.F.R.

 

●  His disguise still mostly intact, Gondo decided to remain off the Road now as the early morning light was coming on. He knew many things since his meeting with the younger hobbits- and began to guess at more- and this new knowledge made his need to see Alaura, like a pain in his heart, all the much more keen. He knew that he must get to Sarehole as quickly as possible, but he also worried that if he followed the Road, not the straightest path but the easiest, there might be morning travellers or even a small farmhouse along the way where he might be delayed or, far worse, recognized. He knew, from his talk with young master Bunce, that this was the morning of the last day of Lithe, the Summerdays as Shirefolk called it, and, knowing this, that same keen birdsong in his heart told him that he must get a message to the Buckland tonight or his hopes would wither like the season. Through memory (or some other urgent sense) he also knew he might take the off-road way, east-southeast, but worried that it might take him past this new settlement of Waymeet and this undesirable Swiftook character he had been told about. Gondo had no time for dealing with the scoundrel if it would keep him from Alaura’s side. So he set his quickened pace toward Waymeet through open lands, planning to turn south at the first sign of the encampment and leave the villain there to receive justice by another hand.

●  In this way Gondo thought to remain unseen and unrecognized for many miles before he should, perhaps, have to choose the Road again to reach Sarehole by nightfall. But, as chance would have it, he turned the corner of a small low-lying hill and there he saw, quite unexpectedly, an old friend.

EUMAEUS: “It should be remembered that I myself was bound for the Delvings on business and am not, by any habit or repute, a lurker on hillsides. It was not by any means unknown in this area for desperadoes, folks from the south so most say, who had next to nothing better to live on abroad in the land than waylaying and generally terrorizing peaceable pedestrians like myself in some secluded spot outside of a proper hole or settlement. Famished and itinerant loiters perhaps who might be hanging about, or even roving marauders ready to decamp with whatever booty they could get their hands on in one fell swoop and at a moment’s notice. Not to put too fine a point on it, a word of caution regarding the dangers of chance meetings proves to be the best medicine in due course through that area and I myself, unprepared for such unwanted chances, was simply enjoying the morning sun but a mile or three from Waymeet where, as the saying goes, I needed to see a fellow about some goats.

“So preparatory to anything else it should be said that I, myself as I was at the time, was in no way nor in no manner readily accepting audiences when from around the turning of a small hillock came a figure of middling hobbit height, evidently on the morning prowl, and calling: “Mace! Mace!” to me in a clear voice of some peculiar accentedness. So suddenly nearby was the intruding figure that I started rather dizzily and, actuated by motives of inherent delicacy inasmuch as I have always believed in the minding of my own business, moved off but nevertheless remained on the alert with just a prudent shade of anxiety. In any case I had a consummate amount of cool assurance intercepting people at that hour of the night or morning.”

 

●  The stories do not quite tell us what Sandyman was doing there in the hills around Waymeet. It remains unclear what was meant by the expression “see a fellow about some goats” and that is just one of the many loose ends to be found in adjusting to his manner of speaking. The goats had apparently been left in Waymeet the night before, but what had happened to Sandyman’s pony, Whistler?

●  The surprise that Sandyman felt upon meeting his old friend Gondo in the hills around Waymeet, while certainly entertaining, is much too lengthy for our purposes here. It seems certain that the Oldbuck did not try to disguise himself now as he had earlier and, after some reacquaintance was made, the subject of his long absence was addressed.

EUMAEUS: “And so I, still at a quandary as to any explanation of his overlong absence but, bringing common sense to bear upon the issue at hand, pondered suitable ways and means (always assuming that there was such a thing to be found), to tell him just what he had missed. Being a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in the matter of shrewd observation, I turned to think of an appropriate answer regarding the current state of affairs.

   “The crux was that it was a bit risky to bring him up-to-date as it were regarding his home at Sarehole, of which he inquired most immediately, due to the eventualities which might possibly ensue (remembering somebody having a temper of his own sometimes). Accordingly after cautiously dodging a few such preliminary askings, and taking the Oldbuck on to one side (conspiratorially so to speak) and knowing I had an uncustomarily dolefully ditty to tell, I had the yeoman’s service to do by saying; ‘twenty-five years and more you have been gone and given up as dead.’”

● The reaction which the Oldbuck had, according to the Sandyman version of the events which we have been given, seems to indicate that the returned hobbit had suspected as much and, moreover, was somewhat unfazed by it.

EUMAEUS: “His mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady with the proffered information; rather nonplussed, but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him to take some measures on the subject for the nonce, I would say that he took the time to take some stock. Being handicapped by the silence of the circumstance, I also took the same stock of my own situation and noticed that one of the black buttons of my own storebought trousers had, to use the very timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons. Therefore, entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing alongside my long-lost friend, did I find my own meager way to dwell upon our unexpected loss.

   “‘Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say,’ said I after a long pause, heroically making light of our shared mischance.”

 

● While this recording of events is but a brief collection of the many notes and draft versions of “THE WITTICISMS AND INSIGHTS OF EUMAEUS SANDYMAN” as found in the notes of Arbogastes Bophin, the next section has the greatest number of rewrites. Many are in scraps from different notebooks, lending credit to the idea that they were dictated or constructed at various times, frequently altered and perhaps never fully realized. It is not set down like a dialogue and we are therefore less than certain of what Oldbuck asked or said than we are of the things which Sandyman may have said. But it seems that after establishing how long he had been gone the second thing that Gondo asked was about Alaura.

EUMAEUS: “The question so soberly approached, it seemed to me as highly advisable, touching the much vexed problem even in open ground and on the spree as we were, needed a forthright and immediate answer and, so far as I could see (and faultfinding being a particularly bad habit and the odds twenty to nil that there was really no secret about it) I answered kindly but directly. I have long lived by the notion that it simply led to trouble all round to say nothing when you knew much.

“‘Oldbuck, my dear and desperate friend,’ I told the bold Buck bravely, ‘in the seventh year of your absence you were, against all our hope and by some of our new and hapless courts, declared dead. Your great home at Sarehole, for which you held no written and established title (or so some naysayers did say) reverted to your business partner, your friend of old, Twoody Swiftalk, who was the first to pay any rent on that land.

   “‘And in the ninth year of your absence Twoody married Alaura,’ I continued cautiously, for his bright face had soured at this first bit of news and there was indeed more items, propitious and inauspicious both as I knew them to be, of news to yet be told. He looked sad and surmounted, my long-lost friend, and while professing not the least surprise at the intelligence I had offered, he lowered his shoulders in a manner of defeat. But even a fellow on the broad of his back could administer a nasty kick if you didn’t look out and so I continued carefully: ‘And together they have raised the son of your own body, born in the first winter after your departure. A beautiful son you have, Gondo, bright-eyed and keen-minded like yourself, with the same gentle manner of leading his friends and the same wild ambitions of travel and adventure. You have dandered along and as it so happens in due course and with you turning up at the thirteenth hour so to speak, the Shire has moved on without you. But rejoice, my friend if you may!’ I offered, cautiously again. ‘For you have a son you have never known and who will be glad to finally meet you.’”

● And it is here that Sandyman (or Aborgastes Bophin) recounts directly a thing which Oldbuck is credited by all accounts for having said:

EUMAEUS: “He heard all of these things which I told him and then looked back to the west and the direction he had come and the way in which he had become lost. And then turned himself back east into the morning fretfully. After a long pause he inhaled with a kind of internal rumination of dissatisfaction and said; ‘Yes. I am sad to say that I believe my son and I may have already met.’”

●  Most of the papers and notes for Aborgastes’ “THE WITTICISMS AND INSIGHTS OF EUMAEUS SANDYMAN” are fragmentary and found alongside his other set of notes drawn from the diaries of his mother Ermenberga Bophin which we will regard later. It seems clear that the young hobbit was engaged in a kind of literary detective work regarding just what happened on that last day of Lithe in the Twenty-Ninth Year of the Shire. What other news of the Shire Oldbuck was then given remains uncertain, but from the notes we can glean the plan made by Gondo on that morning.

●  A hasty letter was written by Gondo. Eumaeus, ever willing to help his friend, would carry it to Sarehole as quickly as he may by going the faster route over the Great Road. He assured the Oldbuck that he could make it there before nightfall. He was to tell no one of their meeting or of the Oldbuck’s return and simply deliver the letter to either Alaura or Twoody, whomever he saw first.

EUMAEUS: “I did not presume to dictate to him in any way, nor suggest alternate plans of attack for so difficult a problem, but wondered at why he should not go himself, with utmost speed perforce, into the breech as it were of his home at Sarehole. ‘You could go back,’ I hazarded, thinking of the very unpleasant scene this might engender, though trusting in the all too obvious love which those three friends had for one another in past times (even though.the two, those current tenants of the house, had quite unintentionally euchred their third companion). On the idea of whether Oldbuck had allowed himself to be badly bamboozled, he offered no expression of any kind. I myself could neither make head nor tail of the whole business of this esteemed lady having two husbands and what possible arrangements might come from such an unusual situation. ‘You could, you know,’ I offered again in a quiet and particularly unanimated way.

   “There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion however, such as it was, for the Oldbuck’s mind was without doubt being busily engaged in repicturing his family hearth as from the last time he saw it. His heavy glance actively roaming about the page as he wrote his brief missive defied my further questioning. No, I myself thought, I wouldn’t personally repose much trust in the boon of companionship if I were the one wearing his hat.

   “Dead he wasn’t. Simply absconded off somewhere. Surely his long-time friends would have to accept the evidence of their own four eyes. Still, people were superstitious about such things as regards the return of dead husbands and longlost homeowners. You were lucky if they didn’t set the dog at you directly in the front yard of your own property. Then a lot shillyshally usually followed; you came up against the fellow in possession of your long abandoned properties and had to produce credentials as a claimant; too many Toms, Dicks and Harrys about in the Shire these days who had never once met the Oldbuck and could cause trouble for all those involved. ‘A prudent course,’ I told him, not wishing to be overly effusive, ‘would be to sound the lie of the land first.’”

● And so it was, with Eumaeus Sandyman as courier, the Oldbuck set off on the last leg of his journey. He would travel off the road, avoiding the new settlements, particularly at Waymeet, and return to the very center of the Shire. What would happen then he could not guess but, as he had done all of his life, he went boldly forward into hard decisions trusting in the love of his friends.

Whether or not Eumaeus saw the return of his goats no further story reveals.

 

end chapter eleven

Chapter End Notes

Notes (07/11/2025)

1) There are no notes for this section other than this longer explanation of its very peculiar style. Readers who have come this far will know that my other great passion (and my day job) is in teaching the work of James Joyce, particularly his novel ULYSSES. There is a certain chapter of that novel (Joyce preferred to call them “episodes”) which parallels Homer’s hero, Odysseus, returning in disguise to his kingdom of Ithaca and meeting with a loyal goat herder, Eumaeus. The herder brings him up-to-date on the current state of affairs and introduces the lost hero father to his own, now grown, son. Together they lay plans to take back Odysseus home from unwanted suitors. I had always wanted to use some of this for Gondo’s return and so “Eumaeus” became the name for one of the groomsmen in the “Astron” chapter. But Joyce’s own chapter of this meeting is written with a completely overblown style and, as this novel took its own shape, I felt a desire to emulate and copy that style. This chapter took the longest of any to write; almost eight months. I don’t like AI tools for aping a writer’s style, so I had to strip the actual language down from Joyce’s text and then modify it to suit the situation. It makes for a very confusing chapter in some ways, but one which I hope readers will find as funny as I do. I cannot say if we will hear more of the witticisms and insights of Eumaeus Sandyman further in this novel, but it was fun spending time in that verbose style while I could.

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