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An Alphabet Book for the King's Children  by Larner

X

            “Dearest of dearlings, have you figured out a proper topic for X?”

            “A topic for X?  Well, not exactly….”

            “Not exactly?  What do you mean by that?”

            “Well, X isn’t exactly a popular letter.  It’s rarely used even in the Common Tongue, and to be quite honest I cannot find a single word that starts with it, not in any language in any book Grandda Gerontius, Bilbo, Frodo, or you own.  I’ve explored all of the grammars Bilbo and Frodo used when studying the Elvish languages, but didn’t find any in any of the volumes they had here, in the Great Smial, or in Bag End.  Nor has Folco found anything in any of the books he has!  He used to copy for Bilbo, you know, back before his mother tried to curry favor with Ferumbras by snubbing the old fellow.  I’ve even gone through those extra books Sam sent me last week.  They turned out to be lists of words that are used rarely—extremely rarely from what I can tell, in Sindarin and Quenya.  Not even a single example!  Not even the Rohirrim appear to have used X all that often, and certainly not at the beginning of words.

            “I’ve even tried the works that are written in Adûnaic.  Now, there was an exercise in futility.  Frodo’s library of books written either in or about Adûnaic is extraordinarily sparse in number, and the attempt he made to put together a dictionary was anything but exhaustive.  In fact, it ran to a mere twenty loose pages, and he’d not yet put those into alphabetical order.

            “Now, there are some languages that might be useful, but I hope I may be excused from going through tomes on the Black Speech, because Bilbo and Frodo didn’t have any of those.  In fact, the only examples of Black speech I’ve found includes what was on the Ring and a few words someone explained to you all at one time or another, such as Sharku meaning Old Man.  But although I did find some of Frodo’s notes indicating he’d found at times he could understand orcs in the Black Speech perhaps because he was carrying the Ring at the time, I think we can excuse him for not wanting to make a grammar or word lists for the tongue.

            “I did find an extract from something Bilbo copied in Rivendell that indicates there are languages in countries far east of Mordor that appear to have used X to begin words, but other than that note there’s nothing.”

            “Hmm.  It sounds as if your attempt to find X words was exhaustive, but only served to exclude it as something it’s even possible to do.”

            “Both exhaustive and exhausting, my love.  Perhaps we should just put a large red X on that page in the book and be done with it!”

            “No—wait!  I have an idea!  Let me do this one, dearling.  Oh, but I’m getting excited now….”

 





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