I don't own Lord of the Rings. Or The Hobbit, or Romeo and Juliet, or Commedia, or Batman for that matter. But what really matters is: I do own Isildur the dog. Not Boromir. Me.
Boromir was trying to write a tale. As far as it goes, he hadn't had much luck.
"Chorus: Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil bloods makes civil hands unclean."
'No!' Boromir scratched the whole paragraph. Then he ripped the page off and threw it in the campfire. 'This doesn't sound like a masterpiece, it sounds stupid!' And then he started to muse over what else he could write, to Middle Earth's grief.
He needed something action packed, awesome, great! Then an idea popped up in his head.
"Bruce Wayne was getting out of the Theater with his family when a thief came out of nowhere and killed his parents."
He had barely finished the sentence when Pipin came out of nowhere, or most likely sneaked up on him, and asked "what are you doing?", making Boromir scream, accidentally scratch the page horribly and close the notebook as fast as he could.
"It's none of your interest! Go away!" Just saying that probably wouldn't make the blasted boy go, so he added a growl and an evil glare and just for the effect of it reached for his sword. Pipin was gone in the blink of an eye.
Boromir was relieved and reopened his manuscript. He read what he had just written. But he couldn't remember where that story was going at all. And he had a feeling it was such a good one! Blasted Pipin, curse him! He threw that page in the fire as well.
Then he kind of psych-graphed the next idea.
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
Mi ritrovai per uma selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita."
'What the...' Boromir stared at the notebook. What language even what that?
He decided it was safer to finish his dinner before he wrote anything else. Yes, it was the hunger. Of course. That was the one possible explanation. Yes. He was not going mad, thank you very much.
Why is Boromir writing randomly, you ask? Well, it all started in a fated night in which he decided to write a letter to his father and discovered he had The Gift. You should have seen how brilliant that letter had been. It could be considered the greatest letter ever written by someone. Therefore, he decided he should put his gift to good use. He had some notebooks Faramir insisted he took with him for some reason he couldn't understand before. But now he saw it. He saw it perfectly. He thanked his little brother from the bottom of his heart.
Good. Now Boromir ate something and the reader is not dramatically lost as Dante was in the forest, we can continue this cracky fic. Boromir had an awesome idea while he ate.
"In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit."
No, scratch that. Boromir was under the impression he had heard that before. The last thing he needed was some random writer somewhere suing him. A shame, really. It was a good idea.
"Boromir was trying to write a tale. As far as it goes, he hadn't had much luck."
No! Why was he even writing that down? Scratch.
Now Boromir stared into the fire. He couldn't come up with anything. It just didn't come. And when it did it was in blasted Quenya and he was too scared of being, who knows, possessed by that wicked Sauron to keep writing. Hmmm…
Maybe, he was not supposed to come up with something completely from his head. Maybe he was supposed to base in his surroundings. Yes, that seemed good. He looked around the fireplace, eyes resting in two figures and a smile touching his lips. Gimly and Legolas seemed to be arguing once again.
"Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, there were two bittering old ladies. They argued every day over every single little thing and did nothing but disagree with one another."
Oh, very good. Very good indeed. Now he needed something to happen next. A plot twist that would make the readers jump ten feet in the air. He glanced once again at the elf and dwarf and felt a little sad. If it depended on those two, he would have to go on with "they kept arguing until they died and then their souls kept arguing forever in the Undying Lands." And that didn't seem a very interesting plot twist. Besides, for that his ladies would have to be elven ladies and this would change everything. His mental image of the Old Ladies would be shattered. Because elves didn't get old. Blasted immortal stupid elves.
This was when Aragorn went to talk to the old ladies' muses. They shut up immediately and listened with attention. Oh, that he could use.
"They had a dog named Aragorn" No, wait. Aragorn will make it too obvious. He needed to make his story impossible to track to the real life. So he scratched Aragorn and wrote instead: "Isildur. This dog would be the only thing that stopped their arguing. They always listened to him and his wise words. The problem was, Isildur was a dog. Dogs don't speak. But they believed if Isildur could speak he would bless the world with his beautiful stories and the peace would reign, so awesome they believed he was. So they went on a journey to find someone to make him speak."
'No, scratch all that. Who is making the dog talk? Gandalf? Why did I even start with once upon a time in a place far, far away? It is a good way of starting a story, of course, so much better and original than the other ones I had tried before, but this is just not going to work. I can't send my characters out on an adventure when I myself am in an adventure. I may end up making self-insertion and this is the worst thing I could ever do! No, no, no!'
Boromir stared sadly at the remnants of the rabbit soup that Merry, Sam and Pipin argued over.
"Once, there was a rabbit. Then he was caught in a rabbit trap and became a rabbit and potatoes soup."
No, what kind of story was that? It was so sad. Faramir would cry if he read it. He had to change the ending. He scratched the last phrase.
"Once, there was a rabbit. There were people trying to hunt rabbits and they made a trap our protagonist almost fell into. In the last second, a dog came and warned him of the danger. It was a shabby black dog who had really wise eyes so the rabbit believed in him. They ended up becoming quite good friends. The dog said his name was Isildur. The hunters had to eat only the potatoes of the potatoes and rabbit soup that day."
No, that was still sad. The hunters shouldn't be so sad. Boromir imagined those poor guys crying around the fireplace because they had no meat. "Not a single piece of meat. They were a failure as hunters and therefore a failure as humans as well. They were going to be fired of the duty of hunters and then wouldn't be able to feed the two bittering old ladies that were their grandmothers. Without that job, they would starve to death as well as the old ladies."
Boromir wiped away a tear. He was not such an horrible person to do that to his characters, no, he was not. But he couldn't kill the rabbit as well. This was so, so, so sad. He had to change the ending.
"Isildur, being a wise dog, saw all that. Then, he decided to sacrifice himself to save that family."
THIS WAS EVEN WORSE!
But it was so beautiful. He doubted he could change the ending without destroying that beautifulness. But he couldn't get Isildur to die just now. He hadn't been a fan of that dog in the beginning, but now… No! He couldn't do that.
Aragorn was starting to get worried about Boromir. He had been there with that notebook the entire evening. Sometimes he laughed all of sudden, other times he screamed and seemed to have an anger fit, and he had almost killed poor Pipin just for asking what he was doing. Now the guy was crying like a baby. Aragorn wondered if he could do something to help that crazy dude.
"When they were about to skin Isildur" 'Wait. You only skin the animal when he is already dead. This won't do. I don't want a paranormal story with a zombie Isildur. Ergh.' "When they were about to kill the poor dog, the two Old Ladies interrupted them. One of the ladies had always been a vegetarian and was trying to convince them to go her way. The other one didn't agree so much with the no meat part, but also didn't want the dog dead. In the end, the first lady won and managed to convince everybody to change works and become farmers and focus on agriculture. Thus, Isildur was saved. They were thinking of adopting the dog."
There it was, now Boromir remembered why he didn't like that dog so much. The thing was too lucky, everyone loved him. Why did those stupid farmers want to adopt him? He never liked much the farmers anyways.
"But that wouldn't do because they already had dogs. Two dogs. They were brothers, and the most loving dogs one could ever want to have. They were Stark and Smart. Stark, the oldest, was the strongest and bravest dog they had ever seen, once defended them against a wolf! Smart was a little weaker, but really intelligent and they loved him almost as much as Stark. Almost. Then they decided to give Isildur to a random elven woman that passed by."
Perfect. And don't you dare tell Boromir he just did self-insertion.
But Boromir thought that there was something missing. It was… It was angst. The tale didn't have angst enough.
"The elven maiden needed a dog, differently than the farmers-that-once-were-hunters. She needed one very badly. She had just recently lost her beautiful gray hound she had called Silmaril, so great was the animal. It had been her companion for twelve years, many for a dog, and a blink of an eye for an elf. Now it had died of old age and lung cancer, a slow sickness that had been caused by the awful darkness and that stupid smoke of Mordor that polluted the skies and somehow managed to affect the dog all way up to Rivendell. It had greatly saddened her and she was slowly fading because of the horrible grief! Then she got the dog Isildur and everyone lived haply forever after. Except Sauron because his smoke caused lung cancer on him as well and he died. The end."
Oh, a masterpiece, indeed! It was over. Now he just had to name it.
Firs he thought of Roverandom, but the dog's name wasn't Rover. Then Isildurandom, but it just sounded weird. Then he took some artistic liberty to create a cliché title because nobody cared much for the title anyways, what mattered was the inside of the book, it's content. He called it The Tale of Isildur The Dog.
Now it was up to find a good Beta.
Boromir spent the rest of the travel searching for the Beta, actually. First he thought of Gandalf, but just wouldn't come up with a way to start the conversation with the old man, and most of the time he was too busy saving their lives with wicked-looking spells. Then the wizard died and Boromir didn't know what to do.
He thought of Aragorn, but Isildur the dog could end up offending him, after all, Boromir didn't know how the man thought of his blood line. Maybe… Legolas? Elves were supposed to be smarty weren't they? But again, Legolas would probably tell Aragorn of Isildur the dog and he was going to suffer the same much, that if he didn't recognize himself in the vegetarian old lady and put an arrow trough his eye. No, definitely not an option. He was going to hand it to Faramir when he got home.
Then he died.
The notebook was forgotten in the woods.
Then an orc arrived. He was an Uruck-hai. But he had hurt his foot and the other orcs simply left him behind. He was so annoyed. Those freaking idiots. He was going to punch every single one of them and then kill then and then EAT THEIR FLESH.
Well, of the ones that survived, because he passed this place where many orc corpses had been left, as well as some clothes and boats and a notebook. He was angry. These could be the guys they were after, that had been captured and taken to Isengard already. He couldn't arrive there empty-handed. He decided to investigate on the stuff that was left behind. And so he found the notebook. This orc couldn't read even in Black Speech, it is too much to expect him to read in Westron. Therefore, he deduced the obvious. That book contained the most important war information that Saruman would thank him greatly for handing him, with all the plans of the Free People of Middle Earth.
Therefore, he took the notebook and went to Isengard.
He passed by a pile of dead Uruk-hais in the way and recognized his second to captain's head impaled in a spear. Well done for them. Bunch of idiots.
The notebook arrived in the hands of Saruman, that laughed so hard.
Saruman decided to cut the story short to the part where Isildur "died" and show it to Sauron as if he had written it. Sauron laughed as well, translated it to the Black Speech and published. It became a Best Seller in Minas Morgul, but not so much in Mordor because most orcs were analphabets.
Then Grima took the book, translated the rest of the story and published clandestinely as the "Uncensored Version", that became a best seller even in Mordor, maybe because the orcs expected it to have a detailed description of Isildur' head being chopped off and then the preparing of the meat, how it bled when they skinned it… This kind of things.
When Sauron discovered what it was about, the book was prohibited and all the exemplars, as well as Grima and Saruman's biographies were burned in the Great Eye (since both had died by that time, but they had still to symbolically 'burn' them as well. They managed to find some random Saruman's biography in the Witch King's library and then just took Grima's diary).
By the time the Ring was destroyed and Mordor imploded this had all been forgotten and the new Mordor best seller was a teenage vampire story where the vampires seemed more elves than anything.
I guess the moral is, Isildur the dog didn't have such an interesting life if you stop to think of it.
A.N.: Boromir's attempts at writing are respectively: the beginning of Romeo and Juliet's chorus, Batman (duh), the first lines of Commedia, by Dante, and the first phrase of The Hobbit.
Er... I might have to apologize for this story but the thing is metalanguage rocks.
Do I get any reviews?
