“Frodo, my lad?”

Frodo stopped what he was doing. This did not sound particularly pleasant. “Yes, Uncle?” he said, as casually as he could manage.

“Would you care to come into my study and explain the meaning of this?”

Frodo emended his observation. It sounded downright unpleasant. “I’m coming,” he said.

When he stepped inside the study Bilbo had in his hand a number of papers. Frodo recognised them as his latest essay and swallowed nervously.

“I do not recall ‘Translations and ancient myths are dull and I wish I could go down to the Water right now’ as part of the Tale of the Darkening of Valinor.”

“You’re right, Uncle. They aren’t. But it’s true.”

“You know, you simply could have told me if you disliked your lessons.”

“Would that have kept you from giving them?”

“Of course not! Uncle, I was missing a few lines, and I wanted the essay to be done with, so—”

“Well, if you thought I wasn’t going to read the thing you were quite wrong.”

“Well, I suppose I wasn’t thinking much, then. But I did want to go down to the Water.”

“And so you did.”

“An hour after the fact!”

“And that, my lad, is because you rarely get to do what you’d like until after all the hard work is done. And sometimes not even then.”

Frodo harrumphed.

“Now, what particularly about this myth is dull, may I ask? I for one found it to be one of the more fascinating ones.”

“Well, let’s see—there are some trees people care about, and a spider comes and kills them, and no one fights back and some people whose names begin with ‘F’ die and everyone mourns. No quests, no exciting journeys, not even a battle; just a lot of weeping.”

“Not ‘some people.’ One person. Which one?”

“I don’t know! Their names all start with F!”

“Finwë, High King of the Noldor. And the spider’s name?”

“Something very nasty-sounding.”

“Ungoliant.”

“Why does it even matter?”

“Because without that, so the elves say, we wouldn’t have the sun and moon. And without the theft of the Silmarils the Noldor would never have come to Middle-earth and had all sorts of adventures. It started all the rest of the tales.”

“About things which happened very long ago and have little to no effect on hobbits of the Shire.”

“Now, that, my lad, is not true! We owe a lot to those same elves, and their descendants.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Well, they did teach us how to build, and then there’s the matter of their beautiful tongues—”

“Yes, they are quite beautiful, but they’re also terribly confusing, and no one speaks them anymore!”

“No one?”

“Well, except for the elves themselves, I suppose, but when no one ever sees them that hardly matters.”

“Ah,” said Bilbo.

“What?”

“I do believe we’ve come to the heart of the matter. If I were to show you some native speakers of the elven tongues, might I then entice you to pay a little more attention during your lessons?”

“Really? You’d take me to see the elves?”

“I can’t promise anything, since they do not stay in one place in our land, but I can at least start taking you along the paths they use. But you must start showing a little more dedication in your lessons.”

“I suppose I might,” said Frodo. “I don’t mean to be rude but you do a terrible job with accents and I can’t help but wonder what the language really sounds like.”

Bilbo sighed. “No offence taken; you’re quite right, my lad. Now, you will have to rewrite this essay, but if you get it done before tea we’ll see about a nice long walk tonight, shall we?”

But after that night Frodo never returned to the Tale of the Darkening of Valinor again, and the spider’s name never stuck in his head until it was too late.