by JanieM
From the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring:
The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government’… There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the high king at Fornost, or Norbury as they called it, away north of the Shire. But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years, and even the ruins of Kings’ Norbury were covered with grass. Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.
This post grew out of my recent sidetrack into barn basketball memories, but it starts with a travel story.
Once upon a time, when my kids were small, we three went traveling. As soon as we were inside the terminal at Logan, one kid toddled one way and the other crawled the other, and there I was in the middle, stuck with the luggage and trying to decide which kid to go after first.
Out of that experience came “The Rules of Travel”:
1. Stick together
2. Keep track of your stuff
3. Be nice
Those rules obviously weren’t ancient, and whether they were just or not, they were at least short, sweet, and in the case of the first two, concrete.
They worked pretty well.
Skipping over to barn basketball…