[Child of the 7th Age]

Child looked into Pio's face with trusting eyes. She did not want to hurt her friend, but she felt it was essential that the Elf share whatever knowledge she had with the others on board. If Piosenniel did have direct experience of First Age Beleriand, that understanding could be crucial to everyone on the ship. Indeed, it could be the one critical component which determined whether or not they were successful in finding and reuniting Kali's extended family.

But there was something else too. Something which Child could not admit even to herself, let alone to her friend. Child desperately wanted there to be more to the hobbit past than to have her people dropped down in the middle of nowhere on an Anduin River bank some two thousand years ago. And she wanted that past to have some dignity and meaning, even if it was humble by Elven standards.

How many times had Child heard men, and Elves, and dwarves arguing with great passion about their ancient roots, how their people had been favored by one of the Valar or the Maia, or how they had trekked West to follow the Light? She had listened time and again to tales of great battles, or marvellous inventions. But, in all these splendid tales, no one spoke of hobbits.

Many hobbits who contentedly tilled the soil and loved the earth did not bother their hearts with such questions. But Child knew she was not the only one to find the silent gaps in her people's past intensely disturbing.

One time, she had asked Bilbo about where the hobbit people had come from, and exactly what their relation with the big folk was. He had shaken his head sadly, and said, "I have spent the past fifty years learning the lore of Elves, and also that of men, but however much I learn, one piece of that puzzle is missing. And that piece is where my own people come from, and what brought us to this point in time. I cannot even explain why hobbits are divided into three clans, or why we have a feeling for the green earth and small growing things, beyond all other living creatures in Middle-earth."

Child remembered that Bilbo had sighed and reached out an aged finger to softly stroke the cover of his large book of translations from Elvish lore. And he had stared off into the distance, at some point known only to himself, as if gazing at a blank sheet of paper could somehow will the words of hobbit history to write themselves. It was the closest that she had ever seen him to weeping.

And then he had whispered the final words he had ever spoken on the subject. "Perhaps, sometime and somewhere, our people came to realize that the green earth is not to be taken for granted, but is a special gift of the Powers, even when we do not call those Powers by a name. Some tragedy perhaps, or some mishap, awoke in hobbits a fierce love of the soil, and the desire for a quiet life."

She remembered quite clearly how he had laughed and looked down at her, an orphan and a girl, hardly a likely candidate for adventure. Yet there was something more in his words that day, some hope passed from older to younger, some sense of a task left undone. "Perhaps, Child, you can help find the missing piece, and, if you do, remember these words I have given to you today."

Child drew in a long breath. She suddenly realized she was on a mission to rediscover part of herself, and to fulfill a promise she had silently made to her teacher that day. But child knew she could not do it without her friend's help. She turned to Pio.

"Pio, we'd like you to tell us first whether you or your parents ever lived in Beleriand. I believe you told me once that your mother was a hobbit. I had no idea then that your heritage might extend so far back in time."

"If this is true, how did your Elven father and hobbit mother manage to meet and have a family in such troubled and ancient days? Was it difficult for them? I have never heard such tales among my own people. Even Bilbo, who knew and loved ancient tales with his whole heart, was never able to search out these truths. And, even in his long and happy life, I believe it made a little hole that he could never quite fill."

"Please, Pio, for me and my people, for Kali and his kin, tell us what you know."

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]