Author’s Notes

When I first set out to write this story, I had in mind a simple one-shot, or at the very most a three- or four-chapter story detailing Merry’s prank, Frodo’s return prank and any outcome of that. However, Merry lingered, refusing to tell me his prank (he in fact had no idea what it was himself) and as I continued to write, I realized that there was much more going on in the City at this time than I had previously suspected. The end result is my second-longest novel, after The Tale That Grew in the Telling, and this very much is a tale that grew longer with each chapter written!
 

The Pranks

It was clear from the start that Merry really didn’t want to prank Frodo, but he had made a vow and so was bound to keep it. That he and his co-conspirators also sought to discover what was going on with Aragorn, who had become even more close upon becoming King than a certain bushy-eyed wizard, was a complete surprise to me. I had no idea what they had in mind for Aragorn. It’s possible that they didn’t know either, but once they pieced together his little secret, they agreed that there was little they could do for him other than to help him wait for Arwen. The bar wenches were entirely Merry’s idea!

It isn’t entirely canon for hobbits to play pranks. Tolkien writes them as fun-loving and enjoying the simple pleasures of life, and it is clear that they have a rather canny sense of humor. I can easily enough see them enjoying a harmless prank now and again, to help pass the time and liven things up a bit. I myself never participated in pranks as a child – my mother would not have been pleased with me if I had! – so writing hobbit prank war stories is my way of living vicariously through them in this regard. When I wrote my first ever prank some years ago, I had no idea how to do it and had to rack my brain for days before coming up with one that seemed halfway plausible. Now, the pranks just seem to fall in my lap. It appears I missed out on a natural talent, but at least the hobbits are able to enjoy it!
 

The King’s House and the Pelennor Fields

Reconstruction being the long and arduous process that it is, I cannot imagine all the citizens of Minas Tirith swarming back to the city as is described in the book. There would be very little food after such an extensive battle, except for what could be brought in from lands not as adversely affected by the war; many of the buildings in the lower circles, and the Pelennor especially, would be completely destroyed and ransacked. Where were these people to live and what were they to eat? Certainly many of them did return as soon as they discovered the war was won and the King was returning. Such an historic event was not to be missed! But I can imagine many others waiting for things to settle, even more relocating elsewhere where the immediate prospects are better, and yet others deciding this is the opportune time to go to the capital and make a name for themselves in helping to restore the city in some manner.

The Citadel in the book, and in Tolkien’s partial sketches, is described as having lanes and many buildings upon them, rather than just one large building, tower and tree as depicted in the movie. While writing this, I had to figure out who would be living in these buildings. The obvious answer are the lords of the City, the counselors and advisors, though they do not by necessity have to live there. The embassies and ambassadors of outlying provinces and countries would also house in these buildings while staying the City. The King’s House and Steward’s House would be on either side of the Guard’s barracks, with the Great Lawn between them, where Aragorn and Arwen are wed. The King’s House has four levels, the first level for private meetings and entertaining of select guests. The second and third would house the servants of the household and their families, if any, as well as any special guests that are visiting the King and Queen. The top level is for the King’s personal dwelling.

The King’s House would have been kept up over the thousand-odd years it stood without a king, so it technically would not require reconstruction or redecoration. The people of Gondor would be appalled if their new King were made to stay in an embassy house, or worse a tavern, because they fell lax on keeping up the palace. However, much as each new president redecorates the White House, I could see Aragorn, and Arwen now that she has arrived, slowly going through the rooms and making them feel more like home. Certain items would be required to remain, for tradition's sake, but others could be moved or put into storage to make way for things they wished to have there.

The least damaged parts of the Pelennor could be replanted immediately to guarantee at least a partial harvest, enough to see the people through a lean winter. It wouldn’t be until the following year's harvest that the rations could be eased, if not done away with entirely, and things would return to normal, at least so far as food and goods are concerned.

Elrohir, Elladan and Arwen

This is the one AU element that snuck into this story, and it was entirely by accident. When combing through Return of the King and the timelines, I missed the two dates concerning the twins’ departure from Gondor and meeting up with the escort of Arwen. Silly me, I was looking for reference to ‘Elrohir and Elladan’, but Tolkien had referred to them instead as ‘the sons of Elrond’ and so my eyes just bounced right over those two dates until I was about eight chapters into the story. So I made up the excuse that they had agreed to stay in the city to help with the redecoration of the King’s House, as they would know best what Arwen would like. I then arranged it for them to depart when Aragorn and Gandalf went to harvest the White Tree so that they could then join Arwen’s escort and still be riding at the head of it as described in the book.

Whether or not the hobbits figuring out that Arwen is coming to the City to be wed to Aragorn is an AU element, I leave up to the reader. Tolkien certainly makes it appear that the hobbits had no prior knowledge, but much as Merry was made a dupe by necessity in regards to Dernhelm, I interpret this as a case of ignorance of the character for the benefit of the reader. Tolkien didn’t want to give away his surprise ending, and so by necessity Aragorn couldn’t tell the hobbits. However, I find it incredibly unfair to the hobbits, and the others of the Fellowship, who traveled alongside Aragorn for months, that the good people of Rohan knew about Arwen before they did! I’m fairly certain the hobbits would share that opinion. And whether they figured it out ahead of time or not, Frodo’s words to Gandalf at Arwen’s entrance to the City still read the same, which is why I was vigilant to include that quote from the book. Therefore, my hobbits do know about Arwen, but they were courteous of Aragorn’s wishes and refrained from telling even him (at least directly) that they knew the truth. And Frodo, being the wise hobbit that he is, refrains from hinting at their knowledge when putting it down in the Red Book.
 

The Healing Stones

Healing stones and dwarves just seem to go hand in hand. I once read a story by Auntiemeesh in which Gimli used healing stones on Pippin and that idea struck a chord. Of course, if there is any race in Middle-earth that would understand the healing nature of stones and rock, it would be the Dwarves. As with all other methods of healing, I figured that all dwarves would understand the basics – your first-aid line of defense. More intricate healing needs would require a master in the art. Gimli is no master, but he knows the basics and was given a brief crash-course by his father, who likely learned from the Master Healer himself, before departing on the Quest. It would give him something to do when he was on watch or when the Ring started to whisper to him: go over the stones in his pouch and repeat their qualities, uses, and placements and patterns on the body.

The healing stones work wonders for Frodo – for now. The healing stones only work as well as you allow them to, and there are some things that they simply cannot combat at all, such as Frodo’s anniversary illnesses. So while they will make his life more bearable in between those illnesses, at least at first, they will not be able to prevent his ultimate sailing over the Sea. The only stone that is able to help Frodo with his illnesses in any degree is the one given to him by Arwen, and even its power dims against the darkness of the Shadow.
 

The Haradrim

In my universe, there are five Houses, or sultanates (kingdoms), within Harad and Far Harad. The Houses of the Moon, Stars and Sun are the Faithful Houses, in which the leaders resisted the influence of the Black Númenóreans and Sauron. Surrounding these sultanates are the Houses of the Sea and the Earth, the Dark Houses; these Houses were led by the Black Númenóreans and were under the full sway of Sauron upon his return to Mordor. When Sauron first came to Harad and gained control of these two Houses, they created a sixth House, the House of the Eye, so that their number would equal the Faithful. The physical location of the House of the Eye is known only to those in command of the Dark Houses. It is believed among the Faithful that the House of the Eye is actually Barad-Dûr itself, now destroyed in the desolation of Mordor, but they cannot be certain. It could just as easily be one of the many temples that were built in tribute to Sauron after the destruction of Númenor. Sauron may now be gone, but the Black Númenóreans still rule the Dark Houses and they will not go down without a fight. The Faithful Houses took advantage of the confusion following the destruction of Mordor to get an embassy through Harad into Gondor, so that a peace treaty could be forged, but they are in no delusion that their own war is over. A civil war is brewing and there will be much social unrest until matters can be settled there.

Betrayal was once rife among the Faithful Houses, in the years following Sauron’s initial return to Middle-earth. He convinced the Southrons that He was a god and was able to convince the subjects to turn on their rulers and leaders. Assassinations and disappearances were common occurrences, as were thievery and trafficking. Due to the machinations of the Houses of the Eye (those being the two Dark Houses, and the House of the Eye itself), the Faithful Houses long ago came into the habit of removing their eldest living son or daughter, the heir to the throne, to another location away from the palace. There they would carry out intelligence operations and clandestine patrols and attacks against the Enemy at need. 

In order to survive, the Faithful Houses closed their borders, forbidding anyone to enter or leave without permission. They relaxed the demands on their slaves to encourage loyalty to the sultanate. Due to the history of betrayal, it became the custom of the royals, for their personal welfare, to surround themselves with slaves and servants who are forbidden families of their own, knowing that one will look to their family’s safety before that of the sultanate at large. To serve the sultan or sultana, one can have no attachment other than to his or her master or mistress. These slaves are chosen at a very young age, are allowed almost no contact with their former families, and are raised as members of the royal household, so that by the time they come into their full service, they will be completely and wholly loyal to their sultan and sultana, and will do as they are commanded without question or hesitation. These slaves command the highest positions allowed to their kind and the greatest respect for their service. To betray that trust is to betray the House itself and is the highest form of Treason.

The younger children of the royals take up positions within the militaries as commanders, or in politics as advisors, ambassadors or judges. Hence the reason why Shahzad is present in the City with his mother and father, while his eldest sister is at home, taking over the Sultana’s duties. His brothers are left in charge of the army and courts. Shahzad’s position, as the youngest child, will be an ambassadorial one, which he learns at his father’s side and will one day take over.

The Haradrim are tedious about their hygiene, believing that cleanliness is the highest form of purity. Even the most poor of the People will take daily baths in the rivers and lakes. They are ruled by sacrifice: of physical comforts, and personal wishes or desires.

The Haradrim do not believe in foiling one’s mind with drink or drugs. To do so is to open oneself for deception; only the Dark Houses believe in the validity of such questionable magic. This does not include the wiseman or wisewoman. Such people are Chosen and have the ability to navigate the Outer Worlds to discover the Higher Truth. They do not use drinks or volatile drugs to do this, but are instead capable of going into trances, with the assistance of certain Pure Herbs, such as frankincense, or even stones of pure quality, such as lapis lazuli, to transcend the barriers of the physical world. They were given these abilities many thousands of years ago, upon the arrival of the Blue Wizards, who have since disappeared from their lands. It is said by some that the Blue Wizards merely awakened this ability in those who already had it. It is a known fact that the ability tends to run in families. 

The Haradrim calendar is set by the lunar cycle, so that it has thirteen months of 28 days each month. The extra day falls in the middle of the seventh month, and the leap day on leap years falls between the last day of the thirteenth month of the old year and the first day of the first month and the new year.

Basing the Haradrim on Persian culture, with some influences from Turkish, Arabian and Egyptian cultures was a natural choice for me. Their lands would be in that general area.
 

Original Characters

I’m fortunate in that my original characters come relatively easily to me. Most of the time, I require an OC for a story and so just make one up. I know already what function that OC is to perform. The personality and characteristics just seem to fall into place from there. Finding the right name is not always so easy, and that has been known to change various times throughout the drafting process, but the character itself changes very little once he or she first appears on the page.

There are other times when I know that I need, as in this story, some Riders of Rohan to remain in the City after Éomer and Éowyn leave. Someone needed to be there to watch over Théoden’s body, after all. 12 sounded like a good number to me and so I went in search of twelve names. Erkenbrand and Ceorl are obviously from the books. The others are names that I found at baby name websites that just sounded ‘right’ to me, so I wrote them down. As a scene with the Riders came up, I would consult my list, find a name, and the character would just start forming himself as I wrote the scene. Four in particular grew on me almost immediately: Penda, Wulf, Osric, and Ecgberht. Cuthred took longer to figure out, as he is a rather reserved young fellow. The others served their parts as needed but never really made much of an impression on me. Finally, as I was writing the second to last chapter, I realized that I never even used two of the characters at all, so I was pleased to discover them in the kitchen when Merry came to call on Erkenbrand. They seem like amiable enough chaps, and I’m rather sorry I didn’t get to know them sooner. I have no idea where they've been this whole time. Perhaps they were among the guards chosen to follow the hobbits about the city and see that they came to no harm.

There are times when an OC will just show up, quite without my asking them to or even needing them to. That would cover nearly all of the Haradrim! I was as surprised as anyone else when they first arrived on the scene. I wasn’t even sure if they should be there until I found the quote in “The Steward and The King” briefly describing Aragorn’s pardon of the Easterlings, and his making of peace with Harad. Rather hard to make peace with a country without meeting with them. So the embassy came into town, and with them came Shahzad, and the revelation of Isengar’s and Hildifons’s adventures in the Sunlands, as the Hobbits call Harad. (Of course, in Harad the term 'Sunlands' refers only to the lands of the House of the Sun.) Shahzad was so obviously the Haradrim equivalent of Pippin, that the two ended up bonding rather quickly and breaking the ice in a way no one else could.

The Sultana and Sultan would obviously require translators (or so I thought at the time – I had no idea at first that the Sultana spoke fluent Westron!) and so Soroush and Ashtir arrived on the scene. Ashtir actually revealed himself to me somewhat later, and his role in the story slowly unfolded with the rest of the tale. Ioveta and her daughters are lifted almost entirely as they are depicted here from a story that Rick tells Frodo and Sam in “The Blue Wizard Blues”. There were some minor changes made to their tale so that it fit into this story, but their role was already told for them. Petras came to me as a side note; I needed a few more examples of the sort of people Pippin was researching to possibly invite to luncheon and he just happened to be one of them. So when I decided there was time to visit one more person in need, I chose him and what a blessing, for he is very much the physical embodiment of Frodo’s own inner turmoil.
 

Osric and Jamila

Now these two particular OCs drove me nuts! Don’t get me wrong. I love them dearly, if only for the pain they have caused me, and I am extremely happy that I was able to get that storyline to work out the way it did and that it was able to contribute something substantial to the narrative so that it wasn’t a complete waste of my time and yours. But my lord! What started out as a cute little side story ended up causing the most rewrites and shuffling of timelines and plot points than anything else that appeared in this story, and it nearly destroyed the peace treaty in the process! Let’s just say that I am extremely glad that Pippin finally remembered that the Sultana’s maids are strictly hands-off, because otherwise, heads would have been rolling, hopefully only figuratively. And I was also relieved to discover that the Sultana is a much more clever woman than I am. The end result is that Osric and Jamila were spared the ultimate punishment, and the peace treaty was saved, but it was a very close call indeed.
 

Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor

In all my longer fics, I always end up having to trim things out or move them around. I have many of these deleted or alternate scenes as a result of this story. In fact, this whole story started because of a bit a dialogue that was cut out of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Hobbits” because I was afraid that bit of dialogue would take that story in a direction I didn’t want it to go and end up running away from me. Gee, wonder what made me think that! This little bunny would have made the Energizer Bunny proud. ;)

Many of the scenes that were cut ended up being revised and put back into the story at different places. Others just didn’t make it at all, at least one I never even transferred from paper to computer. (Yes, I still use paper and pen at times.) Thankfully, none of the cut scenes from this story are biting at my ankles, but it is a shame not to share some of them, or their alternates. I have put these on my DreamWidth journal here: http://gamgee-fics.dreamwidth.org/94681.html. 
 

Weblinks

I thought I would post links to some of the sites I used when researching information for this story. I am not in any way associated with any of these sites, am not responsible for the validity of any of the information on these sites, and make no profit from them. They were used solely as source material.

Arash Dejkam’s Traditional Iranian Music - This is contains pictures, descriptions, uses and sound bites of traditional Persian instruments.

Anvari - All the Persian dishes mentioned in this story come from this website. They are untested by me.  

Baby Names World - This is one of the more compressive baby name websites I’ve come across, and contains both Old World and contemporary sources. I used this site for nearly all of the OC names in this story.

Gemstone Gifts, Sparklecove, and Beadage - These have some very thorough information on healing stones, as well as pretty pictures.  

Mystic Familiar - This was the most useful site I could find about charkas. This uses the traditional Eastern chakra system, though there are many others.  

The Encyclopedia of Arda - This is naturally the best source of everything Tolkien on the web, and has come through for me in a pinch on several occasions.  

About.com - Next to EOA, this is a very helpful site to use when researching just about everything else. It was quite handy when it came to Gimli’s cement and mortar recipes.

Thank you to everyone who read, and especially those who took the time to review. You stuck in there with me and made the writing of this story that much more enjoyable. I only hope that you found it as enjoyable as I did. Until next time!
 
 

GF 11/24/09
Published 11/28/09