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Shire: Beginnings  by Lindelea 2 Review(s)
PSWReviewed Chapter: 19 on 2/8/2025
Good news for Pick, but a sad state the rest of the little ones are in. I’m glad Elladan came across Thorn (😢), hopefully they will get some rest and good food now.

Author Reply: Poor Elladan. He was a bit distracted, what with Glorfindel's wounding and illness, and the warning he received was relatively vague and required keen attention.

(I will blame JRRT for the losses described in this story, reflecting his observance that Hobbits' oral histories "hardly looked back further than their Wandering Days", which is most easily explained by the catastrophic loss of most or all of their memory-keepers at a dark time in history.)

FantasyFanReviewed Chapter: 19 on 12/27/2003
Pick is very much like little Pippin here with his questions and curiosity and flitting from topic to topic like a lightning bug. Here again you show how close the hobbits are to the life of the earth, with Pick recognizing the difference in a bluebird's call west of the Anduin. I think I forgot to mention it about an earlier chapter, but their awareness of the water when crossing the river and of the weather in the mountain crossing really makes the land almost seem like a character in the story. It's funny that once they settle in the Shire, they become so insular and unaware of anything outside their own borders.

Maybe you should title this chapter something about a good deed returning, or being reunited with friends. They've made friends with the wizard and the elves earlier and were willing to help them when they needed it, now that help is being returned when the hobbits have the need. And I was wrong before when I said that Gandalf was the only being who recognized and could help them. Elladan also turns up just when he's needed the most. By the way, did Beech die, or is he just still out of commission?

I'm looking forward to seeing the people's reaction to Rivendell. To make friends with Elladan and Elrohir is not the same thing as making friends with Elrond (although they did manage Glorfindel just fine).

Author Reply: It's interesting how centuries of soft living can put a barrier between people and nature. And JRRT himself described how hobbits became insular after settling in the Shire:

...as the region of the authority of their Thain, and a district of well-ordered business; and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk. They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it.

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