January - The Year of The Party
At first, Frodo thought it was just the gentle tap of new raindrops come to launch a fresh attack on the thick, white snow as he sat in his study one January morning. However, the tapping persisted, and it occurred to him that it was far too loud and rhythmical to be rain. Perhaps someone was at the door?
He made a barely audible disgruntled noise in the back of his throat as he stood, pushed back his chair, and pattered along the hall to the round green door, all the while wondering where Bilbo was.
As he neared the door little scuffles and patterings and the occasional tiny sigh could just be distinguished through the heavy oak, and he smiled.
He drew open the door - not without difficulty, for the snow was piled up in drifts around it - to reveal a hobbit standing on the doorstep. There was nothing remarkable in that. Nor in the fact that this was a little lad of about seventeen, who had curly dark hair and large, inquiring brown eyes and who was shifting awkwardly from foot to foot in the snow. What was, however, somewhat unexpected was that the lad was carrying what appeared to be a hoe slung across his small, strong shoulders.
Frodo took it with a smile. "What's this, Sam?"
"The - the Gaffer found it, Mr Frodo, in our shed when he was lookin' for the shovel, sir." Sam's teeth were chattering. Frodo lifted him in over the mound of snow and set him down on the mat, ruffling his hair.
"You needn't be standing on the mat, silly. Is it ours? You know far more than I do about our tools."
"Yessir. Mr Bilbo's, leastways."
"Well..." Frodo shrugged and leaned the hoe against the wall, under the coat-pegs on which hung many weird and wonderful garments untouched for decades. "Is your Gaffer finished with you?"
"Yes, sir. The others are helping him, but he says there's too much snow for one as little as me."
Frodo smiled at that. "Never mind, Sam. Would you like to stay here with me?"
Sam's eyes shone. "Yes, ever so much, Mr Frodo."
"Very well." Frodo shut the door and took Sam's hand. It was very cold, and the nail-beds were faintly blue. He rubbed it between his own larger hands, and then raised it to his lips and blew on it, spreading the warmth of his breath down the small work-hardened fingers to Sam's callused palm. "You're cold, Sam."
"Not so much, now," Sam argued valiantly.
Frodo shoved the door again just to ensure that it was firmly shut. "Well. Come on. I can't say I'm sure where Bilbo's got to."
"He can't have got out, Mr Frodo."
"No, that's true." Frodo sighed and ran a hand distractedly through his brown curls. "It must have been rather difficult to get here from Bagshot Row, Sam; that snow looks two feet thick."
Sam shook his head. "Weren't so hard, sir. I just sort of tunnelled, like, with the hoe mostly."
Frodo smiled and patted the little lad fondly on the cheek. "You needn't have bothered."
"Well..." Sam shifted his weight sheepishly from foot to foot. "I - er - I wanted to see if you needed any help, Mr Frodo."
Frodo knew perfectly well that Sam was merely bored, a small, vulnerable figure in a family full of big, snow-shovelling brothers, and that he hoped Frodo would play with him. It was not an uncommon occurrence, and he never tired of co-operating in upholding the illusion that Sam actually wanted an odd job to do.
"Hm." Frodo raised his eyes to the ceiling and furrowed his brows. "Hm. Well, I suppose - yes, come to mention it, Bilbo's books are all mixed up. They need a good sorting-out."
"Which books, Mr Frodo?" Sam interjected breathlessly.
"Oh, all the Elven stories," Frodo continued to the ceiling in the same tone. "You know, the adventure stories; in fact I think the last time I read the tales of Beren I may have bent the pages. We'll need to go through and straighten them all, of course."
"Yes, sir," Sam said quietly, gazing awestruck at the ceiling too as if he expected to see a great face to whom Frodo was dictating.
"Well, Sam," Frodo said, taking the boy's little brown paw in his hand, "Come on, if you're coming."
He led the well-trodden way down a side passage to the library. Frodo's desk was set at the end of the long room, beneath the round window through which a feeble white sunlight poured. It was a mass of recalcitrantly disordered papers, most of which were - as Frodo admitted -of no importance at all.
he wandered over to it without a second glance at the rows of leather-bound tomes in their cases, turning his back on Sam deliberately until he could control his mirth at the lad's awestruck expression. Sam had seen the library a multitude of times before, but it never failed to amaze him.
To distract his attention, Frodo carefully selected a sheet of paper from one of the disarrayed piles and beckoned to Sam. When he hurried over, brown eyes wide and expectant like those of a puppy, Frodo presented him with the paper. "Who's that, Sam?"
Sam glanced down at it. To the trained eye, it was a fair charcoal sketch of a small boy with wildly curly hair, huge eyes and a broad, disarming grin. To Sam it was a masterpiece created by hands blessed with Elven-magic. "Is it - is it me, Mr Frodo?" he ventured.
Frodo nodded. "It's you." He laughed. "Bilbo said it looked like a baby in a wig, but what does he know?"
"An awful lot more than you do, Frodo my lad," came a gruff but light-hearted voice from among the many bookshelves. Both Frodo and Sam jumped, startled, as Bilbo emerged carrying a large green book. He wandered over to stand between them and patted each of them on the head. "Did I frighten you?"
"Rather," Frodo admitted, smiling weakly. "Please don't do that again, Bilbo; I don't think my nerves will stand it."
Bilbo laughed and ambled to the door with the book. "Enjoy your elf stories, Sam lad," he said, smiling.
Frodo shook his head ruefully and clicked his tongue. "Did you get a fright, Sam?" he inquired.
"Nearly jumped out of my skin, I did," Sam informed Frodo gravely. Frodo struggled to maintain a straight face.
"Yes, Bilbo does have that effect on people," he said airily, removing a lop-sided mountain of yellowing paper, liberally sprinkled with Bilbo's spidery handwriting, from the leather settee. "What's this he's writing now?" he continued, half to himself, as he set the papers down on the floor.
"Is it stories?" Sam asked breathlessly, his dark eyes wide and earnest. Frodo glanced at his eager face and smiled. "No, Sam, it isn't stories. It's - poetry, I think. It doesn't look Elvish; I should think it's of his own invention.
Sam scurried across the floorboards to crouch by Frodo, peering down at these new words, this untold story. It amazed him sometimes to think that there were so many stories inside Bilbo's head, waiting to be written; these were stories over which Bilbo had complete control. If he were to lethargically dismiss the whims, they would fly silently away into the realms of oblivious shadow where nobody would ever hear of them. Those stories, however, that Bilbo chose to inscribe on parchment in his thin, wandering hand; those ones would be there forever, to be read before the fireside for years to come, fiction surviving when its author is long-forgotten. What was most amazing to Sam was that the factor that controlled which stories gained a place in history was, more often than not, merely Bilbo's mood.
Frodo noticed the familiar contemplative expression on Sam's face and smiled softly, a smile of pleasure and understanding rather than mockery or amusement. That look was perhaps what Frodo loved most about Sam; it displayed on his small face the depth of his thought while the thoughts themselves remained an enigma, and it seemed to Frodo that in those moments Sam's eyes seemed to darken, as if they had become some portal to an eternity of peaceful contemplation. It would have been an old look for a lad in his late tweens, and Sam was not yet eighteen.
The appearance of that expression on Sam's small, grave face brought forth the usual conflict within Frodo; an unsurety of whether his desire to know the nature of the thought was deeper than his love of watching Sam's face like that; seeing his eyes cloud and glow, pupils swimming in a never-constant sea of memory and musings. Eventually he tapped Sam on the shoulder. "Sam? What are you thinking?"
The cloud fled Sam's eyes and he looked up at Frodo, but the furrow remained in place on his forehead. "I was just thinkin'," he began slowly, "How Mr Bilbo has so many stories in his head, and I was wonderin' how it is that he decides which ones he writes down, and which he doesn't. You see, Mr Frodo, if a story comes when he's tired an' he can't write it down, like as not he'll forget it, an' it's dead, so to speak. But if it comes 'afore breakfast an' he puts it on paper, it'll be there forever and ever. Do you see?" Sam looked very earnest and concerned, but at the same time so small and young and innocent that Frodo marvelled at the wells of theory and wisdom that lay unchallenged inside him.
"That's true, of course, Sam," he replied after a moment, climbing up onto the settee and hauling Sam up after him. "But it isn't only Bilbo who has stories in his head. Why, there are stories in mine all the time, and I know there are tales in yours." He drew his feet up onto the seat, drawing Sam in to curl against his side.
Sam pondered this for a moment, and then nodded slowly. "But the tales in my head, they aren't what you'd call proper stories, Mr Frodo. Just nonsense."
"Nothing's ever nonsense, " Frodo assured him. "Why, there are stories all around us, happening to real people just as the Elven stories did, but nobody ever writes them down. Who's to decide what's nonsense? Who decided to write about Beren and Luthien's tragic love instead of Lavender Bracegirdle marrying Haldo Hornblower and having seventeen children?"
Sam giggled a little at that. "I s'pose they write down what's interestin'," he said.
Frodo nodded. "Exactly. And if you think the stories in your head are interesting, then they can't be nonsense."
Sam smiled, and cuddled into Frodo, twisting his waistcoat button idly between thumb and forefinger. "My Gaffer says Elves is nonsense. But I know they aren't, I know as there are Elves. Elves are all fairer than flowers, and they never die, 'ceptin..." Sam frowned suddenly, and straightened up. "Why do so many of the Elves in the tales die, sir, if mostly Elves never do?"
Frodo smiled, and pulled Sam back down towards him. "That's what I'm explaining, Sam. Storytellers write about the exceptions, not the rule. I'm sure most Elves' lives would be just as dull to us, if we were to read about them, as Lavender Bracegirdle's would be to them. Stories are all about tragedy and blood and sacrificial love, but I wouldn't want to be in a tale like that. Those are the tales that everybody knows, but that doesn't mean the others aren't worth knowing. They matter to the people who are in them. Why, we're in a story right now, Sam, and it'll never be dead just as long as we're here, even if we never think about it again - and sometimes, we tell parts of our own stories again and again, because those are our favourite parts, and those bits will live for as long as the other people who heard about them, beyond you and I."
Sam grinned. "Do you mean like the time you fell out of the apple tree and got your britches caught on the lowest branch, sir?"
Frodo laughed. "Yes, Sam, exactly. All the people you told about that, maybe they'll tell others, and the story will grow. Maybe some parts of your story won't ever be forgotten.
There was a pause. Then Sam said, "You did look funny dangling from that tree, Mr Frodo."
"I'm sure I did," Frodo agreed with a smile.
After a little while Sam requested softly, "Would you read about Beren, Mr Frodo?"
Frodo laughed. "You still like Beren's story best, Sam?"
Sam shook his head. "O' course, I like my own story best. Our story. But it ain't no fun, hearin' your own story. Beren's is the best to hear, Mr Frodo."
"Of course that was what you meant, Sam," Frodo agreed, half-twisting to take down the book from the shelf behind them.
Opening the battered tome with a care that amounted almost to reverence, he began to read. "Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures..."
Frodo's voice was warm and lulling, tracing the words in the air so that they melted deliciously in Sam's mind, and before Beren had retrieved the hand of Barahir the lad was asleep. Frodo smiled, and continued to read to himself until the drowsiness overcame him too and the book dropped onto the settee by Sam's feet.
Outside the window flurries of snow traced delicate patterns on the white-carpeted world, and the story went on into the gathering darkness.
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Story notes: I multiply hobbit age by 7/11 (21/33, coming of age numbers) to find relative age. Therefore picture Frodo as almost 21and Sam as about 11. Note that appendices D and C contradict each other as to whether Sam is 12 or 15 years the younger. I use 15.
