IN THE SHIRE-RECKONING by Diane Finnis-Robb  

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Part Three; Chapter Four "Things to Say to One Another"

   Knowing what must come next, Bovo took his leave of Youngbuck and his uncle, offering to see to the ponies and whatever arrangements might be made for a proper breakfast. He eyed the big four poster bed somewhat longingly despite the rumpled and dirty bedsheets; it had been over a week since he had known such a luxury and his heart told him it would be many months before he would enjoy such a thing again.

   Berty took a moment to wash his dirty face and hands in an unused bowl of water. Then he found some wine and some cheeses for their conversation. Neither the wine nor the cheese were particularly good, but Leufred seemed to have supplied himself in plenty if not with taste.

   ‘Uncle I am so very glad to see you that I hardly know how to begin,’ he said.

   ‘Nor I,’ Twoody replied, ‘and there is much to say. But we should begin with you, this adventure that you have set your course upon and all those that you have met. I will tell you how I knew to come here looking for word of you, but not before you tell how you came to be here. In the Swiftook tent of all places!’

   Without restriction Berty told his uncle everything; of how his plans had changed along the way, of the meetings with the Youngtook and the Zaragambas, of what he knew regarding the Lausa-folk here in Waymeet and Nobottle and elsewhere throughout the Tooklands, of the meeting with master Undundol and even of the Bargain they had struck. He told Twoody of coming to Greenholm and of the mapping of the Far Downs, of Bovo’s finding of the moo-cow Belle and, saddest of all, of Gormadoc’s death. Berty explained how, filled with grief, he had ridden all last night to throw Reginard Swiftook out of Waymeet and take the Dragonsword from his clutches. He spoke of the worthiness of these Lausa and how he planned to help them, and any who may wish to join them, settle here in Waymeet and in the Far Downs. He told his uncle Twoody of all that he had seen and all that he decided and all that he believed that he should do but Twoody, wise to Berty’s mind and his behaviours, noted that his nephew seldom talked about how he felt.

   For his own way, Twoody asked very few questions and interrupted only a handful of times. Even so, the story took an hour and more to tell and Bovo had come back a few times bringing them breakfast and offering his own insights on occasion.

   ‘I’ve had a chance to speak with some of these Waymeet hobbits this morning,’ he added, ‘and this younger son of the Old Took was not well-liked. There are many of the Lausa here in Waymeet from large families who have come here to earn their way to a home of their own; a few distant relatives of the Zaragambas, some Bardagambas, Langhams, Labingis and Lothrans, some Gaukrogers, Galbassis, Goolds and Galpsis and Elvellons1 they are called, if I have their names right. They have left their families behind at the Tooks’ bidding to work and build here and further west. They say that the Old Took employs Big Folks at the Ford who are mostly thugs these days and no help to any hobbit. Some say they think there’s more of the Big Folk to come.’

   ‘These hobbits must be terribly hard-pressed in the south to come here without their families and looking for trade on our borders, no matter what other purpose Reginard may have had,’ Twoody said. ‘Such a sad condition to drive decent hobbits into.’

   ‘But, uncle,’ Berty said, ‘we must do something about this! If the Tooks are bringing Big Folk in to run the South-farthing it will be just as it was fifteen years-’

   ‘Now calm yourself, Berty,’ Twoody told him. ‘I see that you have acquired a fine new heirloom in that sword, but that doesn’t make every battle your own. I do happen to know a few things that are going on in the Shire outside of what you have learned here in the West. We had a report that a dozen of the King’s own mounted soldiers crossed the Stonebows on the same night you four ran off and they were looking into these Big Folk in my brother’s employ. Bovo’s own father took all of the Reeves with him and set out the very next morning. So I should think that all that business is quite settled by now.’

   ‘Our messenger Leufred Swiftook will have quite a surprise in store when he gets home,’ Bovo said with a smile. ‘I think that this is news some of our new friends in Waymeet would like to hear.’

   ‘And I shall be the one to tell them,’ Twoody said, getting up from the table. ‘The two of you have done a fine job introducing yourselves to them as heroes and liberators. Now it seems my turn to meet them as neighbour, distant cousin and,’ he found himself smiling sadly to say it, ‘in my capacity as Chief Assayer.

   ‘Beside all of that,’ Twoody continued,’ it does not sound as if either of you has slept in more than two days and on cold ground at that. I suggest you curl up in the comfortable bed the Swiftooks have left behind and take a few hours rest.’

   ‘But, uncle,’ Berty said, ‘you say that you still have much to tell me and I still have many questions-’

   ‘It will wait, Berty,’ Twoody said with the same sad smile. ‘I am overjoyed to so unexpectedly find you here that I too hardly know where to begin. Sleep a bit and we will both be the better for it this evening.’

   Bovo also rose and shook any remaining dust from his clothes. ‘I will admit to wanting sleep, Youngbuck, and to thinking that you need the same. And that bed is a tempting comfort. I suggest we use the last of our nearly-depleted energy to strip off these sheets first, for I’d rather lay in my dusty travel clothes than under the Took’s dirty linen.’

 

*****

   And after this had been done Berty and Bovo took off much of their outer garments and belts, washed their feet and climbed into the big four post bed for some much needed sleep. This came easier to Bovo, as sleep always had, than to Berty who lay long awake. His anger was now mostly abated, but his grief and frustration would not let him rest. Now, with bitterness, he remembered his own dream from just six nights past, a dream before waking that he now, laying in the comfortable featherbed, remembered with greater clarity than he had all week.

 

   In his dream Berty had sat at a workbench atop a great tall tower under an unfamiliar sky- unfamiliar to Berty as the dreamer it seemed, though somehow familiar too, as if he had lived and worked in that tower for many years under that starry sky. Dusk had gone and the evening came on. The Moon would be three-quarter full again tonight and, in the dream, Berty had sat facing east, just as he knew that he did most nights in that dream, holding his treasured instrument in his hands. “Sitara yab, he had called it,” Berty had heard himself say in his dream, “taker of the stars.”

   And then in the dream as Berty recalled it now, the first bright star of the evening had risen. “Carnil,” Berty had heard himself call it; bright red in the northeastern sky, a messenger summoning all the others. In the dream he held the instrument with his left hand and put it to his eye, his right hand marking the angle and height of the star with a charcoal stick on a little slip of paper as, in the dream, he had done so every night. Then he had done the same with five other major stars as they awakened, naming them as he went along; “Luinil the blue, Nénar of mourning, Eärendil the mariner, Alcarinquë the glorious and Lumbar the shadow home.”2 Berty had seen himself in the dream writing down the position of all these stars and knew that in the dream he had done this every night for some years.

   Beside his arm and his notepad on the workbench atop his familiar but unknown tower home in the dream there had been a map, one which Berty knew that he himself, in that dream, had worked on for years. It showed the movement of those six stars across a great dome, an open field which must be the sky above him, as seen in his dream calculations, over a period of time. The map had numerous mathematical equations and citations that Berty, here in his recollection of the dream, could not recognize but knew to be his own. Next to this map on the workbench in the space above this tower there had been a drawing in an oval frame. Berty recalled watching himself pick the drawing up in the dream and study it again as he had all his life; a dark face in black charcoal silhouette, eyes and features barely indicated, while behind the figure was a bright night sky which showed particular attention to the placement of stars with luminous white chalk on the cool grey of the paper. And in his recollection of that dream from one week before Berty heard himself sing:

   “...I will not say the Day is done...”

 

   As he lay awake in the four poster bed Berty knew that a week before today he had awakened from this dream, the charcoal drawing of the face and starry sky fading from his vision. It was still before noon now, but a week ago the evening had set and the Moon had been three-quarter full and high overhead. ‘I sat facing east then,’ he remembered saying at the time and thinking to himself now, ‘am I still faced that way today?’

   And finally he let his grief and his frustration go for a time and sleep found him.

 

*****

   When Berty woke it was late in the afternoon and coming on toward dusk. The tapers in the lanterns had burned out but there was still a soft light coming through the high flaps in the tents which served as windows. Bovo was sleeping soundlessly beside him and so Berty withdrew himself from the bed with equal quietness. He looked down at his friend’s face and, for the first time in all this week, noted how changed it was. Bovo, always calm-seeming yet always restless for something else, looked very much at peace in a way that Berty never had seen him before. He gently touched Bovo’s right hand with his own for a moment and then, picking up the Dragonsword and his traveling clothes, dressed and went softly from the tent.

   The random shops and cookfires of the hobbits of Waymeet seemed to have organized themselves into more of a circle while Berty slept. They had lit a communal fire and were discussing things there with one another. His uncle Twoody was among them and, more to Berty’s surprise, so was his uncle Clooty. Their backs were turned and so they did not see Berty as he stepped down from the doorstep of the tent and quickly turned to the other direction up the muddy path.

   ‘Going somewhere, Youngbuck?’ A voice said. Berty turned to see his friend Gilley standing off to the side of the path tending to four ponies. Cinders, his own pony, let out a light-hearted bray at seeing his master.

   ‘Gilley!’ Berty replied with joy, ‘how long have you been here?’

   ‘Oh, your uncle Clooty and I rode from the Far Downs at first light,’ she replied. ‘Just as soon as we heard you and Bovo were heading off on another dangerous adventure without us.’

   Berty could see the smile on her face as she teased him, but also the comfort at knowing that her friends were safe and, for now at least, their adventure ended.

   ‘We rode every bit as hard as you two upstarts,’ she continued, ‘and what do we find when we get here? Two sluggard heroes, praised by the people of Waymeet, still dirty from your trials, asleep and snoring in a big featherbed of all things!’ Gilley told Berty of all that she had heard from Twoody about the taking of the Swiftook property and she complimented him on his ingenuity.

   ‘It was largely Bovo’s plan,’ Berty confessed. ‘I think I was a little less cautious than either you or he would approve of, but it did draw the snake from under the rock as Bovo would say.’

   ‘Well, then I must congratulate him for that, I suppose,’ Gilley said with a smirk, ‘if he doesn’t sleep straight through until morning that is.’

   ‘And have you met Belle yet?’ Berty asked her, smiling coyly.

   Gilley’s face turned bright red. ‘I have,’ she said, also smiling and laughing nervously, ‘Oh, I have, Youngbuck. And then Bovo has told you-’

   ‘I could not be happier for the both of you,’ Berty said and they both laughed together at the joy and the obviousness and the unpredictability of it all. ‘You have both found your way far along from home without any of my silly plans.’

   And at this Gilley began to laugh and to cry all the more. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we have found our Far Along together.’

 

*****

   Berty and Gilley talked for a few minutes more about how things were for the Zaragambas and Poppy. She told him that his uncle Clooty had already signed Gormadoc’s claim and would be ready to process the others as soon as they were complete. The families of the Zaragambas were well provisioned to make a good start, Gilley told him, but there was much work to be done now that the Summerdays had come and gone and the time for planting had passed. Poppy has pledged his support to Gormadoc’s wife and family and been made very welcome among them. She told him that when they had come to Waymeet and found what Berty had done there Clooty thought that the willingness and hard work of these vendors might come in useful for supplying the Far Downs and the Delvings alike. Berty’s two uncles had already set to their planning and Gilley had left them to it.

   ‘But we must leave sometime tomorrow and return to bury Gormadoc, of course,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry, Youngbuck. We could all see the friendship which was forming-’

   ‘He was my responsibility,’ Berty said curtly, his mood changing. ‘He was my responsibility and I failed him.’

   Gilley, her mouth now open and her face stunned as if someone had struck it, stared back at her friend. ‘Youngbuck, you couldn’t possibly have prevented the accident-’

   ‘Prevented, no,’ Berty interrupted hotly, his anger rising again with his grief and frustration. ‘But accident? I might have pushed the rock on top of him myself.’

   ‘Oh, Berty,’ came a soft and comforting voice from behind them. ‘Oh, my boy.

   'Gilley, will you leave us for a little time, please? We have hard things to say to one another, this Youngbuck of yours and myself, but things which must be said.’ It was his uncle Twoody, of course, and Berty could not, embarrassed by his anger, look him in the eye.

   Gilley nodded and softly said, ‘Of course.’ She placed her right hand in Youngbuck’s left and, drawing it to her lips, kissed it gently and then, leaving the two hobbits, strode quickly down the muddy path and back toward the tent.

   As they were standing near to where the ponies were stabled Twoody took two small saddles and, searching to find some less muddy spot, put them on the ground across from one another, the path running in between. Now well into his fifties Twoody was still very spry, but he used his old walking stick to lower himself to the low seat on the saddle. He then laid the stick before him and motioned for Berty to sit as well.

   But tears had filled Berty’s eyes as he and Gilley had talked of Gormadoc’s death and, in that moment, he wanted more than anything to leave; to jump on Cinder's bare back and ride out of Waymeet. Maybe he would ride southest, the Dragonsword still in his hand, and confront the Tooks who had left him, and his frustration, wanting. Then perhaps his anger could find its answer. He did not want to sit with his uncle and be consoled and advised. He wanted, as all young people do, to set his own course of action.

   But today, after all his adventures and his failings, he was not as rash nor as bold as he had been a week ago. Eventually he looked into his uncle’s eyes and saw what his heart knew that he needed most; the offer of comfort. And, as was his way, Theudebert Youngbuck trusted his heart in its immediacy.

   So he sat with his uncle.

   ‘I have not seen that walking stick before,’ he said, wiping the tears from his eyes.

   Twoody picked up the black stick, feeling its lightness and its strength, and looked at it with a small smile of memory. ‘I have not carried it for many years,’ he said, ‘but it lay in the back of the closet of our front door all that time. Your father carved it for me on our very first trip through the Shire.’

   Berty had no answer.

   ‘Your own looks much the same,’ Twoody said.

   ‘I carved it from the old tree at Greenholm,’ Berty replied. 

   ‘I see. And you have the Dragonsword now.’

   ‘Yes. Well, no, not really. It is not mine of course, but I could not bear to think of the Swiftooks using it to lord themselves over the Lausa-folk and I knew, from the very moment that I heard that it was here we should retake it. Do you know how they came by it?’

   ‘Hmmn. Should I tell you what I suspect, Berty, even though I know it will only make you more angry?’ 

   ‘Angry at the Swiftooks? Should we not be?’

   ‘Were you angry at them a week ago?’

   ‘Uncle,’ Berty said with some greater frustration, ‘ignorance is not a good shield against anger. I have lived my whole life in the Shire without being told about my blacksheep cousins and you think I was the better off for that?’

   ‘Not necessarily,’ Twoody replied with a nod and a soft smile, ‘but if that lack of anger gave you a happier childhood then I am glad you did not lose your ignorance sooner.’

   Berty thought about that for a moment and came to realize that while he did not agree with being left in the dark for so long on such an important matter he could see nothing but his uncle's love and goodwill in doing so.

   ‘How do you think the Swiftooks came by the sword of your grandfather?’ Berty asked again. 

   ‘I suspect that my brother stole it from my father’s house at his funeral fourteen years ago.’ 

   ‘Stolen at the funeral! And this is fine with you?’

   ‘Of course not. But I did not know that Childy and his sons had it until you showed me the sword this morning and told me your tale, Berty. Are you asking me what I might have done if, like yourself, I had known of it sooner?’

   ‘Yes, I suppose that I am,’ Berty answered hesitantly. He hadn’t realized that this was indeed his question until his uncle had said it.

   Twoody thought for a moment, his face looking upward to the late afternoon Sun in the west.

   ‘I think I should have left it with him. I think-’

   ‘But how can you say that? This is the Dragonsword of your famous grandfather and a symbol to all hobbits who have ever heard of its legend. How could you leave it as a tool for the Swiftooks?’

   ‘He was Childy’s grandfather as well,’ Twoody said calmly, ‘and my father had long since taken that symbol down from his wall to make his own way rather than live in the shadow of his own father’s deeds. Childy does not think in symbols the way you suggest, Berty. He probably saw it as yet another valuable resource in mustering the Lausa-folk and little more, sad as that is to say.’

   ‘Sad, perhaps,’ Berty replied hotly, ‘but all the more reason why I should have come here and taken from him five days ago, when first I learned that Reginard had it.’

   ‘To what purpose? You have it now. Will you use it to command the Lausa and unite the Shire?’

Berty sat and thought for a long moment as he looked to the darkening skies in the east.

   ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘That is not the legend I have heard of your grandfather and his sword. But the Swiftooks have used it so, and I am glad to have taken it from them. The Lausa have as much right to build their homes here in the Shire as any other hobbit and the Swiftooks have used their cunning and this sword to keep them in a form of bondage, forcing labour for the land which they hold in abundance. This is not the situation which Priamus and the Dragonsword would have led them to. Was I wrong, uncle? Would you not take from the Swiftooks what is yours to claim and has been sorely mistreated?’

   ‘No,’ Twoody said immediately, and then he paused for a long moment looking west and the bright light of the setting Sun was in his eyes causing them to squint and tear. ‘I would teach you to argue your claim when you might, but personally I could never take or demand a thing which is not mine from a brother or a friend.’

   He had much more to say then and he chose not to.

 

   Then, after a short time, Twoody did go on to say; ‘But you are not me, Berty. “Youngbuck” your friends call you, but you are not your father either, nor are you your mother nor, if you should ask me, are you simply marked and described by what we three have done and the choices we have made. Your choices are your own and here, today, I think we both begin to see that-’

   ‘But my choices have been wrong!’ Berty said, and then the worst of his tears, those which he held in check since learning of Gormadoc’s death, came on him in fits. Twoody did not get up, did not go over and embrace his nephew nor take his hand but sat and let his own tears come with their own reasons.

   Eventually, amid his sobbing, Berty was able to say; ‘I showed him the rock, uncle! I put it into his mind that it would make a good border to our lands, I practically told him to move it even though I knew I would never help him do so, I would never cross into the Elvish lands, because I had promised, I had promised but I still wanted it, still wanted to lay a stone at our borders as my uncles had done, I wanted to be accounted for it, I wanted to take it just as they had done...’

   ‘You were faithful in that promise not to go into the West,’ Twoody said, ‘just as you were faithful in your resolve to help the Zaragambas.’

   ‘But I wanted to see the West too, as far as I could, to go to Greenholm and look out from the very borders of my promise, but if I had listened to my heart, if I had turned back here to deal with the Swiftooks...’

   ‘You can only make the choices on the road which fate lays at your feet, Berty,’ Twoody said. ‘You can never truly know where they will deliver you. Oh, I am becoming a sad old hobbit now and have a different view of fate as I may have seen it a week ago,’ Twoody continued, letting his own tears flow easily. ‘But it is our choices that shape us, my boy, no matter what fate may bring.’

   And while this brought their conversation to a close the two hobbits remained together with their sorrows. They sat for a while afterward unspeaking and if other of their friends saw them there by the ponies at the end of day they wisely and sympathetically left them alone with their grief.

 

*****

   After the worst of the tears were gone Berty closed his eyes for a time and, while he remained fully awake, another dream came to him. He was not present in the dream as he had been in the other, indeed, there was no one present that he could see at first and only the soft glow of dim candlelight led his gaze over walls which seemed both familiar and also very odd. He thought that he was looking at some of the hallway in his home under the second hill of Sarehole, the Great Smials it had since been called, but it now looked very old and musty and disused. There were shelves everywhere that he could see, lined with dust and cobwebbed, and on all of them there were books and letters, toys and rusted tools, cracked plates and broken umbrellas, tarnished spoons, stuck clocks, toothless haircombs and splintered hand-mirrors. His gaze followed the candles’ light down the hallway past many other rooms similarly cluttered with old and unwanted objects, all old and showing likewise disuse, as if his home had become a collection place for all the things which no hobbit could choose to throw away.

   His gaze followed the light until it came into his very own old bedroom and there, at his very own old desk, sat a young hobbit doe with beautiful long and golden hair. Spread out on the desk before her were many letters and books and carefully folded copies of THE SHIRE-RECKONING, long since yellowed and chipped with age. With her right hand she was writing on a long scroll of paper with a hand that was both deft and elegant. By her left elbow, as a paperweight, lay Berty’s own sitara yab, but it was long rusted now, its marking mostly worn away, and the eyepiece was cracked.

   The golden-haired doe turned to look in Berty’s direction then, almost as if she could feel him come into the room even though he was not there. Then she smiled and returned to her work singing:

“Though here at journey’s end I lie In darkness buried deep,

Beyond all towers strong and high, Beyond all mountains steep, 

Above all shadows rides the Sun And Stars forever dwell:

I will not say the Day is done, Nor bid the stars farewell.”3

   Berty then opened his eyes and saw his uncle Twoody still sitting across from him. Now night was coming on and Berty was facing east.

   ‘Look, uncle,’ Berty said, pointing to a spot over Twoody’s shoulder and behind him in the sky. Twoody stood to turn around and Berty stood with him on the muddy path leading out of Waymeet. There they remained for a moment together watching the stars quietly awaken. Twoody’s eye was caught by a bright red twinkling of light in the northeast as the sky darkened around them all.

‘“Carnil”, Berty called it.

 

end of part three

Chapter End Notes

Notes (07/31/2026)

1)  The names of these hobbits were gathered from the “Hobbit Name Generator” that I’ve been using for most of my writing in Middle-earth. Within that random generator there are a handful of names that do not seem to have the more obvious Shire connection (like “Rumplebelly” or “Mugwort”) but are closer to how Tolkien imagined his hobbit language to work. “Zaragamba”, for example, literally means “old buck” in Tolkien’s notes, making them the direct lineage for Bilbo and many other later characters. But the ten names here represent, as far as I will go with it, the ten Lausa families who accompanied Reginard into the south of the Shire.

2)  These stars and their descriptions can be found on Tolkien Gateway and, coming from The Silmarillion, most of these names are Quenya.

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