Bíld son of Bóurr to Maddoct son of Haddoct, warm and affectionate greeting.
I am sorry to write so late and so little. From the time of my last letter to this one I was in a frenzy of studying, and then sewing and practicing when I was invited not only to attend but play at that Elvish soirée, and then packing and packing and packing in anticipation of our return. I send this letter at the very last second; it is like to arrive in your grasp only moments before I do, to deliver you the embrace of friendship and love in person.
I come with the translated healers' lore from Khazad-dûm, the transcribed notes of an Elvish healing-song, and a mind rattling with many a new idea and question. I hope you will have time and patience to listen to me patiently during our trip west, for I expect I will be very trying — and I shall be competing for your attention, too, with the most formidable of possible rivals, your cousin-in-affection, Cyanite.
From the letters we had exchanged — mine full of fear and foolishness and hers full of warmth and encouragement — I knew already that I dearly loved your cousin before I met her. What I did not know, though in truth I did not find a surprise, was how beautiful and lively she would prove in the flesh. How lovely she is, and clever, and kind! It is a great struggle for me to hold myself back from bothering her at all hours just to converse about this and that, even though I am sure she would at least sometimes rather spend time with just Seimurr or Master Thrufi.
To say that I am grateful for your introduction seems laughably insufficient; even to thank you for giving me a wonderful friend is not enough. Truthfully, your decision to risk her confidence on me was life-changing in the best possible way, and I doubt I will ever be able to fully express to you the happiness that has resulted.
Now with new friends, new knowledge, and gifts, we depart Rivendell for Bree-land. And in addition to my warm sentiments, I bear some concern about the state of things in the latter; a letter I received from Miss Jackilyn about her new beau — can it be true! how badly did she strike her head after all! — and one that grieved my heart from Miss Liffey, whom I hope you have been able to visit and tend, and lastly a strange one from Maurr (though too alarmed concerning that I should perhaps not be, as he ever has his own peculiar way of doing things). But I hope all is well and you have not had much cause to grieve and that soon we shall be chattering together about all of these happenings and more.
No more at this time, for I must take something like sleep before we ride!
But I am honored to remain,
Yours faithfully,
Little Bíld.
Bíld son of Bóurr to Maurr his brother greeting.
I write to you even more hastily than you last wrote to me, for I pen this on the very eve of our return journey! Do not fret, for I have nothing ill to report. Your letters to Arlis and Rofda I distributed without unsealing, and from the latter I send faithful love, of course, and the following message: that she ‘thought you might be but was unsure.’ I know not what that means, but apparently you will.
I write chiefly because there are two important instructions I must give you:
First, you must bring in two bedframes and mattresses to Rofda's rooms in Bree-town so that our guests, Lady Cyanite and Master Thrufi, her escort, may rest there in comfort during our stop-over. I am not sure if and when they may be returning to Bree-land, but since it is like that Maddoct will, I assume they will do the same; borrow the beds long-term or buy them, and Rofda will see to returning or selling them when they are no longer needed.
Second, but very importantly, you absolutely must not smoke around my honor-sister Arlis when we travel and stay together; I neglected to tell you last I wrote because I forgot you practiced that habit while in the west. Dwarvish styles of pipe-weed are particularly repellent to her, so if you are able to avoid it while around her, I will be very, very grateful.
Arlis has also a strong aversion to being grabbed at and touched, so I implore you to make no attempts at hugging her or kissing her hand, both for her sake and for yours, as she could well have a faster draw on her axe than you on yours.
I would rather no wagers be made on it!
No more at this time but my faithful fraternal love and promise to keep safe and well upon the road.
Yours always,
B
Bíld son of Bóurr to Captain Hrávanis, hail.
Already have I told you of the long thought I have given to what sentiments I might here write, what words I might employ to express my gratitude and wonder, the depth of my joy, or the fierceness of the hope our conversations have in me kindled. I conclude always that there is nothing I can say that is sufficient; the experience of making your acquaintance is not only profounder than the limits of my vocabulary but perhaps beyond the scope of what any Third Age Longbeard can truly understand.
But I cannot well say nothing, for despite it all, you have been a true friend to Arlis and me during our short stay in the Valley, and a friend deserves a warm farewell. So I beg you not to be offended by my few and clumsy writings here.
Thank you for everything. I am sure to you it feels very little, but I am sure also that you understand how much that little was to me and for that reason bestowed it. That is honor and kindness, and my heart sings to receive it.
For the warmth of Dunland wool, I am grateful. For the recollections of Khazad-dûm, rarer and more precious now than drops of mithril, I am grateful. For the lullaby a Dwarf-lady once there sang, that her beloved children might dream dreams full of sweetness and ambition, I could cry (and have cried). But, somehow, to look at the work of Lady Svava — but a model, a draft for a construction long-ago completed and walked over no more by Dwarves — moved me so, and in a way I am not sure I can describe even with all of my effort.
I know that the proof of Svava's existence, her struggles, her craft and her passion, exists in my person, my hands, my Longbeard features, my life that somehow came to be despite everything our people have had to endure before and since. I know that ought to be enough. But I am, as they call us, greedy; it is not enough. To be cognizant of the anonymous existence of a long line of ancestors, each of whom laid a metaphorical brick in the creation of the Dwarvish civilization I today inherit, does not satisfy me. I want to touch the actual bricks. I want to study them, the choices made in their artistry, and their imperfections, and through them know those ancestors not as lofty, reverend kinsmen but people who struggled and suffered and bent the whole effort of their lives to laying each just one small, small brick.
I wish we yet had Khazad-dûm and Gundabad.
That is not a rare sentiment among Longbeards, and when I entertain it, I wonder if you would consider them — and me — to be mired in an unhealthy obsession with the past. A lament for Khazad-dûm from the lips of a Longbeard is near to a cliché; it is something I only became able to perceive through the eyes of outsiders recently, during my travels in the lands of the Secondborn, when my dear heart and best friend, the Hobbit Finnric, asked after I sang the Oakenshield's song if we Dwarves write any poems besides elegies. It was a fair question and a reprimand I took to heart: I do not want to become one of those who, in performing endless longing for the paradisiacal past, becomes blind to the present, passionate and alive, shimmering with beauty and pain.
Yet I wish we had Khazad-dûm. But I think I wish for them not out of a longing to return to the glorious days of Durin past, but because — Svava, and Durin, and all the rest worked so hard, lived and died, to build that mansion out and out into a better and richer and more beautiful home for us, the little Longbeards of the future, to inherit and build into something even more fantastical, more amazing, to dream up a Khazad-dûm our ancestors could not then even imagine. And it was taken from us.
When I was small, just beginning to play on the harp, of course I was taught to sing the Song of Durin — the song, above all others, with which beardlings of my generation are instructed to represent ourselves, Dwarves, Longbeards, to the outside. Therefore Khazad-dûm to us means ‘shining lamps of crystal hewn, undimmed by cloud or shade of night’; we learn to imagine it at the height of its glory. But by speaking to you, I have received the gift of imagining Khazad-dûm differently. In my mind I can now can see much more clearly a still-young mansion suddenly swelling with refugees from the west, throwing its gates open wide in welcome and building as fast as it could. I can picture Lady Svava's Khazad-dûm, changing rapidly, embracing new art and knowledge, inventing yet more when that was not enough. I can picture it lively, contentious, tumultuous, transforming; and that that was taken from us, Svava's Dwarrowdelf, is what makes me angry enough to cry hot tears.
I know not how it can be done — but I want to have it back. I want again to walk on that bridge and to see all around us the craft of dwarrows past, the marks left by their personalities on the world. And I want to build on top of that in the passionate present, fight and argue with every other artist in the world on how to shape and change what we have received. And I want to give all of it, all those bricks lain over thousands of years, and my one small brick too, to the future, for the Dwarves of another Age to make something I cannot even imagine. I want to spread my arms wide to embrace all of it, past, present, future — see all of it, know all of it, every name, every passion, every Dwarf dead or living or yet to be born. I know that to be mad ambition, hubris, a ridiculous dream; if anyone could feel everything, perceive everything, remember everything, it would be an Elf, not a mortal, an accident, an Adopted Child. It is ridiculous, impossible, a greed beyond greed.
But to possess an impossible ambition means never to stop chasing it, to keep flying till the moment that he dies. And o what a glorious gift that is to receive.
Thank you for your part in giving it to me.
I am honored to remain,
Yours deeply,
Bíld, the Dove.
