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Elanor was old. Just as she was first, so she was the last living remnant of her generation.
"I passed old Mr. Bilbo, I did," she liked to say on cold evenings as one of her grandsons or granddaughters tucked in the ancient quilt around her lap and pushed her chair close to the fire. They grew used to her ramblings and eventually realized they weren't conversations, at least not with the living, so no replies were necessary. This was a relief to them as they didn't always understand what she was referring to, not even the ones most familiar with the Red Book.
"Eldest I am, that's what my name is," she liked to say, and they'd nod above her head. They may not all have completely understood what she was on about, but they knew what mattered, and that was keeping their precious treasure safe in Undertowers and warm by the fire, even on summer evenings when there was usually a nip in the air after sundown.
"It's the hills, you see, they focus the wind, like, can make it very drafty to the old ones like our Gammer," they'd say as they folded the quilt's ends with care, almost swaddling her like a baby sometimes.
She did not like it when they did that. It made her cross and when she grew cross, it made her mind wander back to the old times, the time of the book. How she loved those times, even the dangerous parts and the sad parts, of which there were many.
Just because she was old and infirm in her bones and sinews and liked to mumble out loud to confuse her clan did not mean she was unable to outwit them, for she was still sharp as a tack and enjoyed the occasional battle of wits and will.
Outwitting them meant waiting until all was quiet and then slipping out of her favorite chair or her bed before stealing outside to make her way to the closest tower. It didn't matter that it took her a long time to get there, even with the stout walking stick to help her keep her balance when traipsing up hill. She actually liked that it took a long time. As far as she was concerned, she had all the time in the world.
So it was in the 133rd year of her life that Elanor escaped her kindly keepers and made her slightly tottering way to the Elf tower nearest to her home. It was almost dawn, and the mist was thick, but she could have found her way in pitch dark. She knew the path that well.
She recited little snatches of verses and excerpts from the Red Book, sometimes changing the words slightly to amuse herself. "Elanor remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn … or was it the first Fairbairn? Yes, that's it, I was here when the first Fairbairn came and it begins to look like I'll be here when the last one passes on." She would have cackled at that but she had reached the tower's slope and was a little winded from beginning the steep climb.
Her advanced age notwithstanding, her lungs still had a lot of power left in them and they saw her to the top of the hill and the base of the tower in one piece. She sat down on her favorite piece of tumbled stone to catch her breath. The stone had fallen from the tower's top ten years before, and she considered that right neighborly of the tower to have given her a seat raised to the perfect height of a hobbit lass getting on in years and not quite as bendable as she used to be. "Thank 'ee kindly," she'd actually said when she sat down on her new chair and patted the white stone for the first time.
Her chair looked to the west.
"Hmph," she said this early morning, just as she always did when she sat down. "What makes you think I want to look that way? What's there for me? Just old ghosts that never come back." Though she could never explain it to anyone's satisfaction and it was one of the reasons people smiled behind her back (oh, she knew it) when she mentioned it, she was sure the tower always smiled gently at her when she made her complaint. "Or is it your Elvish way of telling me I should be on my own way? Have I stayed too long? Have you a ship to bear me hence?" She always finished in dramatic fashion, her voice deepening in tone and rising in volume. Today she coughed at the end. Well, it was a steep climb and she'd taken it rather more quickly than she'd grown used to doing.
As usual, the tower's only answer to her declaimed questions was its invisible smile, but Elanor didn't mind. What she wanted was a nice long rest in this very spot on this very hill, looking out in the direction made for her. She'd even brought Mr. Frodo's old quilt along with her, though it had now been mended so many times with so many patches that very little of the original remained.
Elanor sat so long that the sun started to rise. The fog remained thick enough that it seemed to her as if she was floating above a sea of mist. The image puzzled her and her puzzlement made her restless in mind and body.
"Where did I hear of that bit about a sea of mist before?" she grumbled aloud, wishing her bones didn't ache quite so much when the morning was foggy. "Oh, right. That's an early part; they're barely out of the Shire then."
But the sight of the mist reminded her of something else, something that tugged at her more recent memory (though still long ago, considering her age) until finally she sat up straight and exclaimed, "It was just like this the morning Sam-dad left here! That's what's been fussing at me. I'll settle down now that I've got it puzzled out."
She didn't. Instead, she grew melancholy and lonesome. That was the trouble with visiting the tower. These past few years, when she visited the tower, she returned to the past until it grew so present that the poignancy of her final parting with her father overwhelmed her. Truth to tell, that was what distressed her family and made them keep an eagle eye on her, though she always snapped at them when they came to take her back home.
No one came that morning, or perhaps it was just that time seemed to stretch out before Elanor until she slipped into a state where one minute felt like an hour. She sat on her stone chair with the quilt over her lap, and she looked to the west.
She was not surprised to see the two hobbits appear out of the mist, though there was only one place they could have come from and that place should have made no sense. After all, the tower itself marked the boundary of hobbit habitations. Undertowers was the smial farthest west (unless there was a smial in the Uttermost West and who knows, maybe there was). Though hobbits now lived in the Westmarch, the towers themselves were still considered dangerous and Elanor and her family more than a little eccentric for living so close to them, even under the King's orders and protection. But then it was well known that the connections between the Fairbairn family and the Baggins family (not to mention the Tooks and Brandybucks) were strong, so perhaps it was not so strange, in a manner of speaking.
"Well, now," she said as the two old hobbits, one wearing a very familiar bag-like hat on his head, reached the crest of the hill and stood in front of her with shy smiles. "Now that's what I call wishful thinking come true. If you're real and I've not completely gone off my head." She cocked her head. "But you …" She pointed to the blue-eyed one. "You I've only heard tell of, being too little to remember you before you went away. Mr. Frodo, I presume?"
He nodded.
"Aren't you supposed to have a head of ebony curls, or some such nonsense?"
Frodo turned to Sam, who blushed sheepishly.
Elanor said, "Ah. I see. Well, Sam-dad, are you here to take me away?"
"From the Shire, Ellie lass? Never that! No, Mr. Frodo and I just thought we'd like to see the place again. We're passing through. We thought we'd have a little adventure, p'raps go up as far as Bree and see old Butterbur."
Elanor snorted. "You mean Butterbur's grandson, don't you?"
Frodo and Sam shrugged. Frodo cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. "I'm afraid we did not really think things through as clearly as perhaps we should have. To tell the truth, Miss Elanor--and you're as lovely as you were when I saw you last--I'm not quite sure …"
Elanor snorted, which stopped Frodo in mid-flow. His speech reminded her of the one he gave at the Prancing Pony when he got up on the table and made a fool of himself. As interesting as it might have been to let him continue, Elanor suddenly thought of something more important. She stood up and pointed at Frodo with a bony forefinger. "I've passed Mr. Bilbo, I have!"
For a minute, both Frodo and Sam stood still with gaping jaws. Then Frodo laughed as understanding grew. "Congratulations, my dear! I'm sure Bilbo would have been delighted that you were the one to do so. Well done!"
"Thank you." Now that she had imparted that bit of information, and to those who best understood its significance, she was ready to move on, though she remembered her manners or perhaps it was Mr. Frodo's famous politeness that helped that along. She dropped a curtsy and then was sorry as both knees popped and crackled alarmingly on the way back up.
Now something happened that Elanor never expected, though she'd played this scene over in her head many times over the years in her longing for their return. They all grew silent and awkward and stared at each other with round eyes, as though they had nothing to say to each other. How very strange it was to Elanor, she who had had so many conversations in her heart and mind with both Frodo and Sam. As she grew older, sometimes she thought she lived more with them in her head than she did with her family in the green Shire.
The shy smiles returned to Frodo and Sam's faces, and Elanor found her own mouth curling up in a reasonable facsimile. Finally Frodo said, "I think it's time for us to go, my dear. We are very happy to have seen you again, but we mustn't linger."
Sam looked up at the sky. "Morning's almost here, sir. We'd best be on our way." A raindrop fell on Sam's outstretched hand. "Good thing we brought our cloaks." He looked at his daughter. "But you? Surely you've not come out without a cloak?" His eyes widened. "And in your nightdress?" He shook his head and then grinned. "Here, best take this, my treasure," he said and put his hat in her hands. He was careful not to touch his fingers to hers; she noticed that. "There. That'll keep you dry until you get home. Best start right away."
She didn't start right away. She didn't start at all. Instead, Elanor said goodbye to her father and to Mr. Frodo and watched them make their way down the hill. Just as they reached the base, she called out, "Will you pass this way again? Should I wait?"
They turned and smiled up at her. They shrugged.
Oddly, that did not disturb her, but that might have been because as soon as they left the hilltop, she grew sleepy, so sleepy that she lay down on the stone. She said under her breath, "Are you real?" but she was too tired to pursue the line of thought. She drew up her feet and tucked the quilt around her toes. The last thing she remembered before closing her eyes and letting something like sleep (but better) take her was tugging Sam's hat down around her ears. It was most definitely real. Its ancient material enclosed her with its rich scent of a life well-lived and, with it, everything she'd ever seen herself or read in the Red Book washed over her.
She murmured, "I think I'm ready for another adventure … now where did I hear that before?"
Her grandchildren found her an hour later. The mist had dissipated and the sun was high in the sky. The late March air was warm and fresh.
"I don't know how she could have made her way up here, not with her infirm ways," one of them said.
"If you ask me, that was mostly an act."
"I think she knew she was going to die. You know how she loved this place."
"Hmph. So you say. Don't you remember how sad it made her?"
"Well, being sad doesn't mean she didn't love it."
"And it doesn't surprise me that she left us on her own birthday. Just like her to do such a thing. All dramatic-like."
"Hmph."
On and on they went as they knelt by Elanor's side and wept over their lost treasure. After a while, when the first storm of grief subsided, the eldest grandson said, "What an odd hat. Where in Middle-earth …"
The youngest granddaughter, who was of a bookish nature and very sharp for her age, so of course she was named Elanor too, said, "You don't suppose it's Great-granddad Sam's hat, do you?"
Eldest and youngest stroked the old felt and wondered. Elanor the Younger said, "I could have sworn I'd seen everything in that old trunk, but maybe I didn't. Did you ever see it before?"
"No. She must have kept it somewhere else."
Neither of them felt that was right. They knew there was something missing in their guess and that they had missed the mark, but neither of them ever managed another explanation. Both of them being of a fanciful nature, rather than their severely practical brothers and sisters, they did not mind the mystery.
As they took their grandmother's body back to Undertowers, Elanor said, "I like it, you know."
"Like what?"
"The hat. After all, she is going on a journey. The hat makes it look like she's going to homely parts." She cried then a little more for she already missed her Gammer dearly. In her heart of hearts, though she told no one, not even Eldest, she had missed Elanor for many years as she watched her fade slowly from them.
Eldest patted her hand. "Then let's think of it that way, shall we? Where is she headed, do you think? What is her quest?"
"Oh, to find Sam-dad and Rosie-lass and Fastred. And Mr. Frodo! Though she always did like a ramble through the Shire and up north, so maybe she'll take her time."
"All the time in the world, I think. And quite right, too, Ellie. Quite right."
The little cortege arrived at Undertowers. They stopped outside the smial. Elanor the Younger bent down and stroked Elanor the Brave's joyful face. "Well, we're back."