Even some Brandybucks found Frodo odd occasionally. For example, on the anniversary of his parent’s drowning, instead of visiting their graves as was proper he took a small boat and drifted down the Brandywine to a certain small pool and moored there with a book and a picnic.

The first few years Esmeralda accompanied him, but when older he went alone, and did so whenever in Buckland on that date.When asked why he didn’t throw flowers into the river as did others who had suffered similar losses he would reply, “Why drown something else that is precious and beautiful?

Esmeralda didn’t visit the graves of her little daughters on their death dates, but on the anniversaries of their births. She had not shed a tear since Lilias had died two days after Linnet.

Folk assumed she wept there, but she did not. She would sit on the hill, beneath the beech tree by the single marker and look out over the Brandywine while relating the doings of the family; of their da and their mischievous brother Merry that they had never known, and Pippin, his shadow.

Tookish behaviour others would have said had they known, but they never would.

Merry was a teenager when he first fully understood that had they not died Lilias and Linnet would have been his older sisters. He had difficulty thinking of them as older than he, because he had only seen their likeness’ in a sketch done just a month before they had died.

He sat by their graveside on occasion, not knowing his mum did the same. He felt odd speaking to them as he hadn’t known them, so he sang or hummed as he weeded, or whittled them offerings of birds and little ducks, and left them gifts of daisy chains.

Bell Gamgee’s grave was on property belonging to Bag End, in a beautiful spot where she had sometimes liked to sit and do her mending, near her husband and her Sam as they tended the gardens.

She herself had chosen this as her resting place with Mr Bilbo’s blessing, knowing her time was short. Her family kept her place lush with her favourite blossoms and roses climbed the shade trees alongside.

Years later Sam would sit and watch his own children at play near his mother’s grave and know that she watched them with him and shared in his joy.