A Most Unusual Find

The library missed having visitors, and had pushed just a hint at the young boy’s curiosity to make him step in. It had been fairly disused already, but it was home to various eccentric books, scrolls, volumes, and loose-leaf collections that explained anything from the perfect dimensions of the dinner second dessert spoon (which Percy figured had been invented entirely for the purposes of the essay, even after his mum had confirmed that yes, it was a thing, “although I doubt even the Blacks have any, these days.”), to an odd little fist-sized volume that was bound shut with magitape — easy to seal, easy to break, hard to tamper with, a sure mark that whatever in there was useful but not to be used unless one knew what it was — and proclaimed, from what he could read between the thick lines of tape, to contain “the most powerful ward that can be deployed in no time at all.”

In usual times, all Weasleys came and went around this library occasionally, to look for something or just wander around. His dad would take up visiting cousins and leave them to have a gander, and he would bring whichever one of his sons he had hanging on at the time. Percy thought younger-him liked the trips; Arthur knew better, but what four year old enjoyed being taken away from the sun and grass to hang out with boring adults in a library?

Cousins didn’t visit anymore, though. No one of the family did, and those not of the family wouldn’t have been able to find the way in the first place. The library had gotten quite lonely, and when a lonely young witch had come close enough in search of something, anything to do, well. The library had provided.

There was a drab come upon the world, Percy had heard someone say at the dinner table. Cousins didn’t visit, but many strange adults did; it wasn’t for fun or food, though, even if they all liked his mum’s cooking (who didn’t?), and they talked low inside wards. There was a war out there, he knew, and Stanley had gone because of it. He missed him, strangely, though he had only really known him for an hour. With him had left a friend: more, it was the first loss Percy had felt.

In that library, in a corner near a window (and perhaps a seat could be glimpsed under the mess) sat a haphazard pile of much of everything, that looked as if a storm had gone through a room and deposited its quarry here, of all places, in one abandoned corner of an odd library¹. There were scarves among quills, flagons thankfully stoppered among yellowing postcards, chess pieces among books with gleaming, even glittering, covers. It was one of these that took to Percy’s eye.

It had been read, but not many times. The spine was still stiff, and it smelled new. It sported colourful pronouncements that danced happily at being looked at again, like “best-seller in the Muggle world!” and “includes author’s all-original ward and rune schemes!” and wasn’t that odd? Muggles had no use for wards, or couldn’t use them, or couldn’t make them, Percy wasn’t too sure what the lesson had been. But they certainly wouldn’t be interested in wards and runes, so how was this book popular in their world? That deserved further attention, he decided, so he pulled the book out for closer observation.

Gideon Prewett, read the first page, in messy calligraphy with a very informal flourish on the closing ligature. “They could be honorary Weasleys, those two,” he had heard his dad say. Percy liked Gideon, as well as Fabian, and wondered at how his mum always seemed to be able to know which was which (usually to scold them after a particularly disastrous bit of fun). The twins were going to be named after them, but they had put their foot down: "legacy is a tough burden, Molly; as we all well know. Plus they’re old-fashioned names now, wouldn’t want to give them Old People names before they’re even born!" Percy thought there was more to the conversation: it always seemed so, with adults, but the gist (“core, heart, nucleus, kernel, core, or crux; essence, substance, quintessence, or significance,” he chanted under his breath, recalling for no particular reason² an entry in a thesaurus³⁴) was clear enough, for once.

So a book that belonged to them would have to be alright. He kept reading:

• A Journey in a World not quite like Ours,
• To go There and come Back Again,
• The Adventures of an Unlikely Traveler, Bilbo Baggins,
• The Hobbit.
• by J. R. R. Tolkien, ward of his House.

That was, he thought, quite wordy for a title.⁵ Certainly wordier than many books in this library, or any other library in the house⁶⁷, although he had one book on his night-stand⁸ about a certain Alexander, which came close. He could even understand all these words!

A House Ward writing a book, that was odd indeed. Not being a House Ward, that was quite common, no, but being only a House Ward and no other titles, that was very odd. Most of the books Percy had were either written by Heir This or Lady That, by Professor Whichever and Potion Master Whomst, by Sir Proper Name or The Indigo Mistress of That House There. But no-one who Wrote Books For Young Witches was just a House Ward. Just for that, Percy was intrigued. In conjuntion with his original interest, that was enough to gain a place on his to-read list. He carried the book to a growing pile nearer the exit, then resumed his search in the disaster of mess.

Much later, hearing the meal call, he looked, quite satisfied, at his to-read tower of books: it was almost as tall as he was! That would give him enough to read for quite a while, without having to make more fetching and searching trips. He dithered, pondering how best to carry his carefully-selected treasure of words down to his room. His mum’s calling was getting insistent, though. Decisions decisions… oh, perhaps Dad would be at dinner and willing to help!

With the book problem (hopefully) sorted, he flew — not literally, toy brooms were not allowed inside the house — down stairs and banisters (only where he knew he wouldn’t be seen, by people nor portraits) and slid into his seat just as his mother set the last dish on the table.

“Put your serviette on, Percival.” she instructed without missing a beat.

“Yes mum.” he said as he dutifully did so. (One full name was okay. If the middle name came out, well, that was when things were about to become loud.)

“Fred, don’t stick your tongue out at your brother,” Molly warned without turning.

Fred looked spooked and forgot to pretend to be George, as the twins had taken to do recently. Percy smirked: he had no more idea than Fred did about how their mum did that, but more experience to not be surprised anymore.

—- TK check Fabian and Gideon status re above

It was much later in the week that Percy rediscovered the book by Tolkien House Ward J. R. R., whatever those initials could be. He’d have to ask an adult about the Tolkien name: not one he’d heard while eavesdropping⁹ and not one mentioned in lessons at school or otherwise.

The book looked enticing though. It looked like it took Percy seriously, and not like a child. Percy acknowledged he was, but if being babied by grown-ups was exasperating, being babied by books was just exhausting. He had a “discarded” pile next to his “read” and “to-read” piles¹⁰ where all such offensively babyish books now resided, as well as boring treaties (cauldron thickness wasn’t all that interesting) and books with too many words that the dictionary didn’t have an entry for.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

“Hobbit” was not in the dictionary, but Percy figured it would be explained further along, given it was in the title. He had skipped everything that even looked like a preface: he could always come back, he thought, once he determined that the book was worth being read. And with that thought, he kept going.

No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage.

Percy wondered briefly about a Burrow with a horizontal layout, instead of the vertiginous vertical affair he had lived in all his life. "Perhaps hobbits cannot fly," he wondered aloud. Witches, with their featherlight charms, their brooms, the whole apparating business, and their Floo connections, had no real problem travelling vertically as well as sideways.

So engrossed was he in discovering this strange yet consistent world that he completely missed night falling and the air chilling (ever so slightly, this was a magic house after all, and it was quite protective of the children living within). He awoke from his reading when he was pulled out of it by his Dad, just before Elrond was about to explain what moon-runes were.

“But daaaad, booook!” he complained intelligibly.

"It must be good, then, but is it as good as your mama’s cooking that you’d stay up here without dinner?" Arthur asked with a twinkle in his eye.

Percy hesitated for just a moment, and his stomach took that half-second to growl with anticipation.

"Alright, I guess." He still looked longingly at the book as he stepped backwards out of his room and until he could move no more without breaking eye contact with it, at which point he turned around and promptly collided with his Dad, who was bracing for Percy in case he’d trip and fall while walking backwards.

"Ah, an excellent book this must be, that you’re that entranced by it. But go on down ahead now, your Mama’s a-waiting and your plate may get cold." No chance of that, with stasis spells, but it never hurt to add a little more incentive, Arthur reasoned. He had noticed the minute hesitation and while he had already been planning to check the book later for a compulsion charm, this level of infatuation increased his worry. It could be innocent, but better be safe than sorry, especially in these times.

His standard array of detection spells returned nothing at all, save for a minor anti-theft ward, though it didn’t feel of Weasley make. Setting a contingent alarm spell, he carefully opened the book… and carefully relaxed when he read Gideon’s name in the inner flap. Out of precaution, he still took time to check the signature for authenticity and tampering, but smiled when it returned clear. “The Hobbit,” he read. A half-memory tickled at him, of happiness and laughs and amusement; nothing alarming, at least. His worry assuaged, he grabbed the Burrow’s inner wards, twisted, and stepped out smoothly into the dining. His children turned every so slightly and smiled just as he came in. A quirking quick enough that others may have missed it, but he always caught it: it gave him life, to see his family.

Percy finished the book mid way through the afternoon the next day, and thought the final words were very much different what he’d been taught about prophecies.

“Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” said Bilbo.

“Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?

The witching guidance around prophecies was that they were most often self-fulfilled, and hard to interpret before the fact in any case. "Take no prophecy at face value," Dada had said, "and always bring it to another to interpret… then bring it to yet another, in case there’s more to decipher. But always keep in mind that prophecy can be twisted and twisting, and will entrap those who attempt to either follow or prevent."

"Prophecy are one side of a galleon, and luck is the other. Both shine in the light, and both are desired, yet neither should be trusted, for they are fickle and care only about their own conceits and deceits." That was the textbook speaking, and they had spoken nothing of it in class. Prophecies were powerful, clearly, but witches didn’t want anything to do with them.

Gandalf’s perspective, as fictional as it was, seemed healthier, somehow.

Gandalf was nothing like any wizard Percy knew or had heard of, and Smaug was nothing like any dragon Charlie had ever ranted about. Goblins were not bankers, but vermin… though perhaps some wizards would agree with that characterisation, but Percy had been drilled into respecting those who held onto their gold, even if they didn’t have a lot of it ("the Malfoys ought to have more care", Arthur had muttered, though he probably hadn’t expected Percy to hear). And dwarves… dwarves here were only spoken of in legend. Dwarves in that story were magnificent! Industrious crafters, proficient jewellers, war masters, hoarders of treasure. But the people that Percy thought mirrored his own soul most were Hobbits. Creatures of habit, yet flexible when the time called for it, clever and brave when needed, and cunning too, empathetic to a fault, though not without faults themselves, but a steadfast friend always, even through strife and even when the right thing to do by friends was the hardest of all.

Percy closed the book… then remembered about the prefaces he’d discarded and never came back to.

The Hobbit was first published on the occasion of Beltane 1935. It did dismally this side of the magic-mundane divide, and was re-edited without the spells, rituals, and circles for a Muggle release in September 1937. It achieved tremendous success there, reprinting four times before its 1951 second Muggle edition (fifth impression), which contains a significantly revised portion of Chapter V, “Riddles in the Dark,” which brings the story of The Hobbit more in line with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, then in progress. Further revisions were made exclusively for the Muggle world. In 1966 it reached its sixteenth printing for its third edition. In 1978 we at Allen & Unwin & Edmunds fully re-edited the Witching edition as well as the Muggle edition together, including all previous amendments and revisions of the ritual and circular constructions. To keep the text flowing, these constructions are hidden until after the first reading, and may be toggled at any point off and on again by a rap of the wand along the spine while open at the maps appendix.

Oh yeah… the cover did mention that there were ward and rune schemes inside. As good an excuse as any for a re-read, really.

In chapter one, along with an illustration of Bilbo’s hobbit hole external door, was a reproduction of the invisible mark Gandalf had set on it. Right under the title plate for the next chapter was a description of a contract schema for adventuring parties from two to fourteen, complete with enforcement, payment, and get-out clauses.

After Elrond’s announcement of the cleaver named Orcrist and the warhammer Glamdring was a ritual for Naming swords and enchanting them.¹¹ While he enjoyed the story again, there was no added content for some number of pages, save for a footnote that Percy was only half-certain hadn’t been there before, after the sentence: “Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted,” reading as an apology for any goblin or kinned readers, "if you haven’t already ordered a war party to murder me," and an assurance that the storied goblins were entirely fictional.

Any goodwill that may have been garnered by the apology would surely be squandered by a construction shown five chapters later, which looked like something that could be mistaken for a House ring, both physically and magically, and the words inscribed inside in one of Tolkien’s own runic script spelled out something much more terrible than the most terrible scary story Percy had ever heard. The ring had been frightening to a young witch on first reading, but having the actual circle inscribed on a page showing how to apply it to an actual ring? Eeech.¹² Percy turned the page quickly, then kept turning, as a quick annotation about magical tinder boxes was the only other addition for quite a bit of the adventure. Useful without a wand, perhaps? Percy couldn’t see why any wanded witch would carry around a tinder box, magical or not, given any of a myriad spells could serve, and faster at that. Children and the unwanded, though, well. Those weren’t often thought of.

—- TK below: check if 7th weasley was born yet, and maybe add something for it

Though he expected something more for chapter seven, due to the arithmantic potential, it only contained a variant of something called the Animagus potion, though no explanation was given as to the difference of effects, or even the original’s purpose at all. Later he found a method of apparating using small hand-drawn circles without noise nor air displacement. Besides it, a note advised to “talk to elves for more.” Elves? As in house elves? But no more was written. Without any elves, house-bound or otherwise, to talk to, Percy moved on to a handy spell pattern for hardening and strengthening any kind of material, with some small variants for water-, dust-, and air- tightness, as well as a lengthy and thorough discussion of the weakening of spells when immersed in various common bodies of water — he was most impressed to read there was a difference in the magic abrasiveness of seawater depending on which side of the Gibraltar Strait a vessel was ("who would think of checking this?").

The next few inserts only presented some small creations that looked rushed and like incomplete filler work: a minor intent-based camping protection ward with a side effect of acting as a zone-wide deodorant, a limited transfiguration model for the purpose of swiftly creating and hooking permanent knotted rope structures from loose or coiled rope, a (theoretical, Percy hoped) dragon riding harness design, clearly and thankfully designed for real dragons rather than sentient armoured hoarders like Smaug, and some ritualised doggerel verse to reliably obtain light without a wand. Percy immediately tried that last one and, to his great satisfaction, littered his room with floating luminous blobs.

Patience was rewarded by an unfolding double page, which grew to a huge circle construction plan and pushed his comforter off his bed as it unfolded wider and larger than Percy’s own bed, including hundreds of very tiny runes that looked familiar though unlike any magical runic script the young witch knew of. The title-plate announced this complex pattern as a ward to hide an entire city, though he couldn’t see anywhere an indication of what kind of a power input would be needed for the feat. He spent a long time poring over the intricate details and multitude of ant-sized notes adorning the parchment.

That was clearly the extent of grandiose offerings. Under a lavish illustration of Thorin on the battlements, three tiny lines described a spell system to grant human speech to ravens. Percy wondered if that was similar to what Salazar Slytherin had infamously done with snakes. Tolkien’s system required feathers of each individual to be given words, and as such probably was borderline dark. Later, an improvement on the simple Point Me spell, to look behind protection wards and enchantments using the same kind of space-time high wizardry that the Floo network was built with.

The ante-penultimate chapter included no protection against falling rocks nor roving armies of goblins, as Percy had hoped, nor even a spell of invisibility, but instead a dual Sonorous, letting the caster speak softly to nearby confidants and loudly to a farther audience without constantly and conspicuously switching.

A few page turns later, only a set of original formal blessings was written, interleaved in all the right places with the text, for farewells and adieus. Percy was somewhat glad of it: this wasn’t a merry passage.

That was the end of it for the main text. A pleasant surprise awaited him in the appendices: a full description of all runes in Tolkien’s own scripts, including arithmantic equations. And that’s where he’d seen the script used for the gigantic array in chapter fourteen! it was entirely composed of Tengwar. The other two scripts, named Cirth and Black Speech (though that one was left incomplete as the author found it distasteful, according to a note by the editor), were present as extra notes here and there throughout, which Percy had initially taken to be decorations.

The Hobbit was not just an engrossing tale of adventure and friendship, Percy realised. It was a grimoire, save that it had been shared to the world rather than kept in a family. Unusual, perhaps, but apparently unused or at least unknown: asking his dad had yielded no word of a Tolkien House except recognition of the author of the book he was reading (he had preened slightly at the attention it displayed), and the editor’s preface indicated the first edition had done very poorly, a circumstance that evidently had repeated itself for the edition he was currently holding. He felt sad for J. R. R. Tolkien (and he still did not know the actual names behind the initials), yet he couldn’t help but feel it was in a way fortunate, as it meant fewer people were running around with this particular kind and practice of magic.

“Ours”, he crowned in imitation of Gollum’s manner, then dissolved into giggles and hopped off his bed in search of some kind of late-afternoon snack. High Tea, hobbits called it. That had a nice ring to it.