Middle-Earth, Drúadan Forrest: T.A. 2992
Marmadoc Goodchild had loved his cousin, more than any cousin really should as far as propriety went. But to his defence how could anyone not love Halfred Gamgee, how could anyone not hang on that hobbit's every word, how could anyone not follow that hobbit into oblivion? Many a young hobbit had done so, Blarney, many an older hobbit had done so, for who could just sit by and watch as Halfred Gamgee marched?
There would be no more streets to march down now, no more rallies, no more heroics to their names, for Halfred Gamgee was sure and truly dead. But Marmadoc wasn't, nor were the many hobbits who had followed him as he fled the Shire. He had fled because he would be killed if he stayed, and really what was there for him to risk that? Nothing now that Halfred was dead, he had nothing, but he was not ready to follow his love into death, not yet. Maybe it was cowardice that made him run that day, but he couldn't bring himself to care anymore.
Couldn't really bring himself to care about anything other than staying alive, anymore.
The hobbits that follow Marmadoc Goodchild do so now, not out of any misguided loyalty to a dead hobbit's memory, or even because they particularly trust the youth that led them over the Brandywine River, past Bree, Rivendell and down into the plains of Rohan. Many of them didn't follow him at all; some dropping out of his party at Bree, some wandering away to see the Elves, some finding their way to Lake-Town and Dale. No, the ones that stayed did so simply because they saw no other alternative; many of them had never left the Shire before, many of them had never seen a man before, let alone an elf. They were shy, and barely near petrified whenever one came near them. They couldn't bear to stay in a settlement full of the strange tall creatures.
As for Marmadoc he couldn't bear to stay in any place that seemed so peaceful or ordinary; it reminded him too much of the Shire, reminded him too much of the love that he had lost to the hangman's rope. He just wanted to forget, and if he was ever going to be able to do that than it would have to be in a place that was so bizarre, so odd, so the exact opposite of the Shire that there would be nothing that would remind him of Halfred. Nothing at all that would make his heart ache so, that would make it stall in his chest and shudder to a stop. With each new place they passed through Marmadoc had prayed they'd find it, but with each new place, Marmadoc was only reminded of Halfred more by the strangeness of the places.
Bree, Rivendell, Rohan, they were all too strange and yet too similar. He had begun to suspect that he would never find a place to call home, that he would be leading these cold and tired hobbits across all of middle earth till the day he keeled over and just stopped moving altogether.
And then they found the Forest.
Truth be told they had not meant to stop there at all. Marmadoc had heard many a fine tale of the splendour of Gondor from the old tales Halfred would read him when they were young. And while memories of his cousin would forever mar the splendour of the white city, he was becoming tired of his travels. Nearly tired enough to accept his fate to be forever reminded of his loss, for it seemed no place would free him from that memory. Thus, he had intended to lead the few hobbits that still followed him into Gondor, it was only the Forest that stood in their way now.
They called it the Forest for they did not know the name of it, many of them having been too tired or too afraid to ask the large people of the Rohan; and they did not mean to stay long enough to give it one themselves. They had not thought it worth their time, believing this forest would only be a minor hurdle on their road to a new home. It was somewhere around the second week of stumbling around in the near pitch blackness below the Forrest's treetops, that they began to seriously rethink this view.
Two hundred and fifty hobbits left the Shire in the wake of the Revolt of Hard-bottle, twenty-five followed Marmadoc Goodchild into the Forest of Drúadan, and absolutely none of them made it to Gondor.
***
Three weeks later
The followers of Marmadoc Goodchild were many things: they were highborn; they were lowborn; they were Tooks; they were millers; they were shopkeepers and farmers; they were cold, they were wet because it had rained non-stop for nearly a week and oh yes, they were going hungry because some fool had forgotten to refurbish their provisions.
The Took had not been the only one of his family to take part in the riots against Proudfoot, but he had been the only one who had had to leave the Shire over them. At this point in history, the Took family were so vastly wealthy that they could do practically anything and get away with it. Valar, maybe if a Took had been the one who killed the lass in the Brandywine river, Proudfoot would have never come to power in the first place. So, it was no real surprise that when everything had quieted down, and the dust of the riots had settled, no one was calling for the heads of the Tooks who took part in the disaster. The young fools would be allowed to live out their days in comfort and splendour, unspoiled by the folly of youth. Maybe they would be encouraged to go on an adventure in a few years' time, but then what was that to a Took? Strange lot the Tooks, they all went on adventures some time in their lives, but they nearly always came back from them.
This Took would not be coming back from his adventure, for what fool of a Took would ever call this journey an adventure? Perhaps if he had not been so eager to prove his worth to his lower-class comrades maybe he would be back home, in his comfy bed. Maybe he should have just cut his losses and stayed with the elves. But he knew, deep down, that he couldn't do that… after all, he was the last of Halfred's inner circle besides Marmadoc and Will Whitfoot to have survived the hangman's noose.
Back in the early days it was just talk and planning, but the Tooks had been right in the thick of it as usual. It was said that those with Fallowhide blood– which the Tooks had an abundance of thanks to many generations of arranged marriages to cousins - were natural leaders. This really was not the case these days, but most hobbits believed it to such an extent that they'd ignore the obvious flaws in their leader if he had the right Fallowhide spring in his step.
Secretly, the Took wandered if even the Fallowhides of yesteryear were so much to fuss about. After all a hobbit was a hobbit, and it wasn't like there were a great deal of differences between those of Fallowhide ancestry and those of Harfoot or Stoor. An opinion that Halfred Gamgee had shared, because while Tooks were allowed to take charge of leading hobbits in the everyday activities of organizing this coup, the big decisions were left to Halfred's inner circle. Which up until he'd joined had been entirely made up of the more rustic of hobbits. Who hadn't particularly approved that there had been a Took let into their ranks, but they wouldn't have said anything, because no one went against Halfred Gamgee.
He was still resented though. There seemed to be a theory going around that the only reason someone like a Took would join their cause, was because they thought it all some great big adventure. The Took would have said something in defence of his kin, who at the end of the day were putting themselves in as much danger with this venture as any upstart Gardener's son. Yet he couldn't really deny what was arguably the complete and utter truth. Many of his cousins that had joined the rebellion, did consider it all some great big adventure; he might have excused it all as the stupidity of youth, yet it was hard to say such a thing to Halfred Gamgee, a boy of little more than twenty who already had the hard, care-worn face of a general, and the bright shimmering light in his eyes of a visionary.
To this day, the Took didn't know what had motivated Halfred Gamgee to trust him so, yet the point remained that he had, and it was for that reason The Took had led his battalion on the Lord Mayor's office itself. Fat lot of good it had done though, just got them all killed didn't it?
Perhaps he could have stayed, even though he had just turned thirty three and was considered fully an adult by the Shire's laws. Perhaps he could have used his family name, the only name he carried in these wild lands, to escape punishment like his cousins or Will Whitfoot had. But no, he couldn't do that, he didn't deserve to do that, none of them did. Why should the Tooks get to live their lives as if they had done nothing wrong, when they had led so many to their deaths. An entire generation of hobbits thinned till only the cowards stood.
Perhaps that was unfair, many of the hobbits he travelled with now were not cowards, despite their skittishness around the big folk, but he was. He was a coward, maybe if he wasn't then he would have stayed and let Proudfoot's men catch him. Maybe he would have stayed and followed his leader to the hangman's noose. But he hadn't, and now he had to live with himself. The small acorn bouncing around the hollow of his throat an ever-present reminder of what he had lost on that bright Sunny Morning in
Hard-Bottle.
He should have been looking where he was going, maybe then he would have seen the trap. Maybe he wouldn't have fallen into that hole, maybe he wouldn't have been knocked unconscious.
***
The first thing the two hobbits noticed when they woke again, was not their surroundings, or the lack of the hobbits that had travelled with them, no, what Marmadoc Gamgee and the Took noticed first was their bare necks. The acorns they carried with them always, the symbol of their rebellion, had vanished.
This more than anything his captors could have done to him, terrified the Took. He began scrabbling around in the dirt at their feet, desperately hoping that it had somehow just slipped off accidently. Yet as time ticked on and the only fruit Goodchild's search produced was his own dirty fingernails, he had to admit that they properly had been taken by whoever held them here. Though for what purpose he could not begin to fathom, for surely, they would be worthless keepsakes to anyone who wasn't a hobbit.
The tent they had lain in while they recovered was red, but with the sun shining through the thin material just so, the whole thing turned a sunset pink. He didn't know why but somehow that colour made him feel so very drowsy, and perhaps he would have just nodded off right there and then, if the tent flap hadn't been pushed aside by…by her.
The Took was one of the few who had known of the love between Marmadoc and Halfred; though he had never understood it. Not because they were both male, or even because they were first cousins, but because, The Took had never experienced anything of that magnitude in his life. Never had that shock that told him this person, or persons - the Shire had always been rather lax in that regard - was the one for him. Yet he felt such a feeling now, as his eyes met those of the lass who had stepped through the tent's door.
He called her a lass, yet truthfully, he found it hard to tell what age she really was. Her features were so strange and alien in their beauty, that he could scarcely tell whether she was a maid of thirty or an old matron of eighty-two. She was not a hobbit, of that her small feet and nicely rounded ears made quite clear. Yet she seemed much too small to be of the race of man – or at least compared to the men he had seen on his travels. Her forehead sloped back, and her brows were thicker and more refined than that of a hobbit. Her head bore a more elongated shape than he was used to seeing, and her skin was the most beautiful shade of olive he had ever beheld.
Falling to his knees, he proclaimed in a voice as loud as he could muster.
'Lady of this most wondrous Forest, I am at your service no matter what you may ask of me.'
For a second, she just stared at him, and then, in a voice more enchanting to his ear than the song of a nightingale, she said.
'My Father calls you both to meet him in the Chieftain's Chamber, I am to take you there. Come, quickly, he is not a patient man.'
These were a strange people, Marmadoc concluded; stranger than men or elves combined and considering, well...men and elves…that was really saying something. It wasn't how they looked, although their flat foreheads and their strange glowing eyes, were quite disconcerting in the middle of that strange forest. Nor was it that the Took seemed to be following their guide like a love sick youth; it was a bizarre sight, but then again not what made these people so strange.
No, these people were strange… truly odd, because they did not seem to find the hobbits themselves odd. Everywhere else they'd travelled; the hobbits had always received strange looks or outright stares and complete confusion from the truly rude. Yet these people did no such thing, as Marmadoc and his bewitched companion moved through the camp he spotted hobbits from their own party milling about as if nothing untoward had happened to them at all. They were talking, they were bent over cooking pots, they were washing clothes and doing all the things one might expect a hobbit to do. Yet they did all these things with the strange folks that had found them standing not but a hair's reach away, it was as if they were not among strangers at all, as if… as if they had finally reached home.
And perhaps…perhaps they had.
***
One Year Later
It did not surprise the Chief of the Wild Men of Drúadan in the least that the creatures known to them as Hobbits asked to stay. Perhaps it would have before he'd met them, before he'd seen them, but it did not now. Marmadoc's people were welcomed whole-heartedly into the community and before long it was like they had always been there. And for a while things remained little changed for the people of the Large Wood, even despite their new friends, new comrades and lovers. That was until the day the first child of a hobbit and Wild Man was born.
In truth the Chief had not thought about what would happen should these strange folks from the kindly west marry with his people. The child, the eldest of his own daughter and the strange hobbit who called himself Took, was such a mixture of her parents features and statures that she seemed to be a completely different species altogether. Perhaps not so much that you would notice if you had not been looking as he had, perhaps she was just a hobbit with strange eyes and a slightly sloping forehead, or a wild man with large feet and slightly pointed ears. But he knew that she was something else, he knew it the moment he held her, and her neck almost snapped back when he didn't hold her head properly.
Her neck was not strong enough to support her head, that discovery had almost been worth the lecture he'd received from his irate daughter as she snatched away her screaming child. His Granddaughter was the first of these strange new children, but she was not the last. This was the future; this was how they would continue. It had come to him years ago that they were a people in decline – they'd never been a people that reproduced with great abundance, not like other Men, and with their taller cousins' habit of hunting them for sport, the Woses were not a race that would last long after the dominion of men took hold.
Yet this, this was a hope that maybe their people would live on, through these children. Maybe they wouldn't fade as had been often thought, maybe, just maybe they would change. Yes, that would be good, he could live with that.
Change is in the very nature of hobbits, to be near one is to know change at a fundamental level; of course, no one told the hobbits this. They considered themselves slow to change safely tucked away in their different corners of the world yet compared with the other races of Middle-Earth, they moved at the speed of lightning. After all no matter how, content they might grow as a species, they could not change the very nature of their being, their entire species had come about because of change, thus they could not but help to inspire it in others.
The change that came from what was later to be called The Great Hobbit Migration was perhaps slightly different in nature to the change that they usually provoked. For one thing it was of a far more obvious nature, and another of a far more carnal. For the one thing you must understand about hobbits, other than their incredible capacity for change and their love of food, was their attitude to coupling. They lacked the shame Men seemed to have developed over the years. While it was considered good manners when a couple married that they no longer seek partners of the opposite gender – note the same gender was considered quite alright so long as it didn't bother your spouse, since it was unlikely a child would be produced –those rules were not always adhered to.
And whatever rules there had been, had been thrown out the window as soon as they'd left the Shire. It wasn't so scandalous, after all many of the rules of marriage wouldn't have applied anyway. Since many of those that had fled the Shire after the riots were unmarried youths and lasses. Many of them only just reached their thirty-third birthday, there was the odd couple who had said their vows the night before they left, or a mature one who had chosen to leave with their exiled child or children. But for the most part the hobbits that travelled through the other lands of Middle-Earth were completely single.
Which was why it was a surprise to no one, well no hobbit anyway, when the next generation of the men of Dale, or Lake-Town, or even to a much lesser extent Rohan were born with very blatant leaf shaped ears, larger than normal feet and gargantuan appetites. Perhaps it would have been noticeable in Bree as well, if hobbits hadn't been living with them for generations, so no one really saw the difference in this generation compared to the last ones they had.