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C00002 00002	The 1421s - or Not only in the Shire
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The 1421s - or Not only in the Shire


	The  hobbits  born in 1421 were numerous, and many had golden
hair. Not much more is said of them in the Red Book except about
Elanor  the  Fair,  daughter of Master Samwise.  She became a Maid of
Honor of Queen Evenstar in 1436, but only went to Gondor in 1442 with
her  parents where she stayed after they left until 1449
when she came back to the Shire.  She married Fastred of Greenholm  on
the  Far  Downs  in 1451, and gave birth to Elfstan Fairborn in 1454,
and in 1455 Fastred was made Warden of Westmarch, a  territory  added
to the Shire by the King in 1452.

	Well,  there's  more  to it than that, and the writers of the
Red Book, or at least the parts of it  copied  by  the  scribes  from
Gondor, had reasons for what they left out.

	The  1421s  were  the  first hobbits to love adventure.  When
they were little they heard all about the War of the Rings  from  the
hobbits who were there.  They compared all the stories and wrote down
all the variants at the urging of  their  school  teacher,  old  Mrs.
Bluebell  Weedcutter.    When  they  were  seventeen, they made their
famous trip to  Bree,  got  caught  by  the  King's  constables,  and
returned  to  the  Shire  in  disgrace.   If men couldn't go into the
Shire, then hobbits shouldn't go out,  especially  halfgrown  urchins
with  hardly any hair between their toes. Well, they didn't all go to
Bree - only thirty-three of them, but that seemed like a terrible mob
to  the  Chief Constable.  He said he thought they were Orcs when his
men first told him there was a camp of strangers two  miles  west  of
town.He  claimed  he was ready to shoot them full of arrows when they
came up to the gate the next day, but that was an  exaggeration,  the
landlord told them.

	After  that  came  the  visit  to Tom Bombadil from whom they
learned a lot and making the private trail through the Old Forest  so
they could get to Bree without meeting the constables.

	Some  hobbits  thought  they were the best thing ever seen in
the Shire and others didn't know what the Shire was coming  to.   Old
Master  Sam  never really said what he thought, and most people think
Elanor told him a lot more than he  wanted  to  admit  knowing.   The
Thain,  on the other hand, made no secret that he thought they didn't
show enough respect, they weren't proper hobbits,  they  might  never
come back if they went into the Old Woods again, and they should obey
the King who was so good to the hobbits.  If the king thought hobbits
should stay in the Shire, he probably knew what he was talking about.

	The first chance for any of them to see the world came in 1442
when Elanor and four young male hobbits of her age went to Ithilien
with Master Sam and his wife.  Elanor took up her position as Maid of
Honor to Queen Evenstar, and the others went first into the King's
guard and later to the Eastern frontier to serve as scouts into the
Orc territories east of Mordor.  Their small size and their hobbit
talent for being inconspicuous fitted them for being scouts.  Our
Elanor sent many letters to her friends in the Shire and later to
her mother and father after they returned to the Shire.  Here are
some of them:

Most foolish brother Frodo,

	Yesterday I started being a Maid of Honor and the boys started in
the King's Guard.  They gave me a tiny room in the top of the palace.
It has a dresser and a huge (for us hobbits) bed and a wash stand.  It
also has a bell so the Queen can call me, but they tell me she won't
do it very often, because I am a Maid of Honor and not a real maid at
all.  It also has a little fireplace with a chimney going up to the
top of the palace.  I decided to wriggle up the chimney so I could
see what the city looks like from the roof.  It was very dirty and
there are bird's nests in the top of the chimney where bricks are
missing.  There seem to be all sorts of interesting things in the
nests, but I didn't have time to look, because I had to go back down
and clean up to attend the Queen.

	There are six of us Maids of Honor and today we took turns
reading to the Queen from stories of the War of the Rings.  It was
mostly about orcs, great nasty things.  I asked the Queen what
baby orcs were like, but she said she had never seen one, didn't
know anyone who had, but supposed they were just as nasty as the
big one's.  Eoria (she is from Rohan) told us that when they were
cleaning up Mordor at the end of the war, they got rid of lots of
orcesses and baby orcs by poisoning the wells and walling them up
in their caves.  I said I thought it was very mean to kill baby orcs
when maybe they wouldn't be bad when they grew up, and Eoria said
that was just like a dumb hobbit, and the Queen said it was a mistake
to think of the orcs as any kind of people.  I asked here if it was
true that Sauron had bred the orcs to imitate elves, and she said
that many elves believe it, but she didn't know how they knew.

	After that we sewed for a while on some real elf clothes
that the Queen brought from Rivendell.  It is very, very fine and
needs very small stitches if you want it to look good.  It looks
like hobbits would be good at this kind of work, because only the
Queen can make finer stitches than me, and she is an elf.

	Fastred came by from the guard house in his new clothes.
Hobbits look funny in men's clothes, but Fastred got angry when
I laughed at him.