And then.. [Short Story Competition!] - CLOSED

[Winddancer]

Welcome to the 4th installment!

He bent over the massive book and continued writing..

I ask that you please post your story here, as it makes it easier to read and judge :)

Deadline April Fools day!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

An original work of fan-scholarship as preserved in the archives of the fellowship of unimaginative friends.

The Curious Affair of Peregrin Boffin

March 8, 1939. A house in north Oxford. Occupied, but the man who lives here is abroad – he has gone north to deliver a lecture. Another man is on the grounds, having entered the gate he stands in the garden by an open window, peering into a study. This second man is not a professional burglar. His name is Peregrin Boffin and his face is a picture of enchantment. His rapt gaze has been caught by a magic stone that had appeared on the desk inside the room earlier that day. The stone looks round and captures his heart; an object of impossible beauty. A great desire awakens in him to step through the window and touch the stone, cradle it within his hands. He hesitates, steps through the window into the room, picks up the stone, and vanishes.

On that day when the stone in the room materialized, Boffin had been watching the house in Oxford for over a year. The man who lived in it was a friend of a friend, and some years back Boffin had attended a party in the man’s garden. Apparently, the man’s best friend (long dead) had once laid down a most peculiar rock garden, which the man had reconstructed in his own garden. When he was done, he had invited the neighbourhood to a garden party where they could see it for what it was. Boffin would never forget that evening. He had felt queer the moment he had arrived, and to this day could not recall how, around midnight, he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with the Cambridge Professor of Anglo-Saxon pushing over the great stone at the entrance. Nor could he ever recollect without an embarrassed shiver his frantic polishing with his pocket handkerchief of the newly revealed underside of this tall, tower-like, now toppled stone, as a group of befuddled antiquarian enthusiasts searched its still muddy bottom for hidden inscriptions. All but two of the guests had engaged in similar antics, with a couple of emeritus history professors and a visitor from Denmark even digging holes in the lawn. Afterwards the rumour circulated that the beer so liberally handed out had been spiked. Boffin, however, had always felt there was something more sinister behind the whole affair.

That might have been that, had it not been for a chance observation in late December 1937. Passing the man’s house as he walked home with his Christmas shopping, Boffin had seen the man stepping into his garden with a single, comfortable-looking and newly polished stone in hand. Slowing his pace, Boffin watched as the man placed the stone carefully next to the herb garden outside the kitchen window and then returned into his house. The man was making a new rock garden! Stealthily, Boffin opened the garden gate, hid his shopping in some bushes, and crept to the large bay window of the study. He saw that the man was now sitting at his desk, pen by his hand, but the paper before him was blank. Hidden under the eaves, Boffin had watched with wonder as a stone began to appear on the paper.

This is Boffin’s story. He began it, though other hands have continued it. Even now it is not yet finished and already it has cost us many weary hours of watching and writing, argument, rethinking and rewriting. We labour gladly on behalf of our society, the Fellowship of Unimaginative Friends, founded by Boffin. Today, small groups of fellows still meet on occasion, and when three or more are gathered the conversation is usually amicable, as we swap notes and compare theories on the great rock garden, until the conversation turns, as it always does, to Boffin; then the talk gets heated, with snipes replacing banter between opposing factions as tempers rise. And when the talk is talked through the end result is depressingly familiar: each one of us has a different theory about that fateful night when Boffin disappeared; none can say truly what happened to Boffin.

The unimaginative friends, of whom your present scribe is (naturally) a humble fellow, unofficially began as simply the friends of Boffin – the friends, that is, in The Green Knight public house on that cold December evening in 1937 to whom he recounted the laying of the new stone he had witnessed earlier that day. That night it was merely received as a good story, sparking renewed discussion of the wild garden party when the rock garden had been vandalized some years earlier. But as luck would have it, one of the regulars at The Green Knight was the postman, and the next morning, delivering a special letter to the man’s children, he had struck up a conversation with the man about the new stone in his garden. Truth be told, the postman had not fully understood the explanation, in the giving of which, he reported, the man had become very animated. But the postman came away with the definite impression that the man was still angry about the vandalism in the old rock garden and had formed the idea of using his new first stone to ‘turn the tables on the guests!’

Naturally, this set tongues wagging in the public house; and beyond, for many corners of respectable Oxford had felt hot under the collar following the orgy of destruction at the former garden party, and did not wish to see such a disgraceful disturbance in their town again. Several of the guests at the old rock garden party now became regulars at The Green Knight. Still feeling embarrassed and a little embittered at their own antics a few years back, they feared the man’s revenge would entice them with good victuals and gorgeous trappings and then leave them stupefied all over again, full guests feeling unaccountably foolish.

Some, chiefly the younger drinkers, laughed at the greybeards and said this was likely to be a different story altogether. Even if this new stone signalled another rock garden, they said, most likely the stones and flowers would be borrowed from elsewhere in the man’s garden and not from that once more forgotten pile of stones heaped once again in an unused patch. Certainly, this first new stone looked homely and kindly in comparison with the great, grand, unbelievably ancient looking tower-like stone that had stood at the entrance to the old rock garden. Yet there was no denying the general concern that the new garden party would generate some unexpected occurrence; for though the man was not known for doing very much, the rumour was that he was an “elf-friend.” And so, while the design of the new rock garden seemed clouded by impenetrable fog, there was a shared feeling of apprehension that the man had some trick up his sleeve, or rather, magic hidden in his house. Around the end of February 1938, with a collective resolve to discover the magic, the fellowship was formed with Boffin as its president.

Naturally, nothing happened for some months. The man simply stopped working in his garden; most days he got on his bicycle and left the house. At this point there were only the two stones, the first, the party stone, where the mischief was expected, and one terrible central stone. Boffin had not been surprised to see this second stone erected; indeed, his reputation at The Green Knight went up considerably after this, because all those who had seen the three terrible central stones of the old rock garden felt a tremor of recognition when they glimpsed this new central stone. This new stone was larger and, if anything, more foreboding than any of those three monstrous stones, yet bears a family resemblance to all of them. A progenitor, it was whispered in the public house.

One bitterly cold day in January, when nobody was likely to step into the garden and he knew the rapidly falling snow would cover his tracks, Boffin had entered the garden and inspected the central stone at close quarters. You needed to know what you were looking for but, yes, worn markings traced the face of a monster long vanished from the face of the earth. The face of the monster was human, but his eyes stared at you with a cold mythological hunger. And on closer inspection the surface of this apparently coal-black sheer rock revealed embedded lumps of semi-precious amber, entombing frightening-looking winged insects from a primordial age of the world, trapped and held for time out of mind in the fossilized sap of some prehistoric northern tree. Boffin had drunk no beer but only spirits that night.

Alarmed by Boffin’s report, the fellowship tried various tricks to gain entrance to the house, where it was generally agreed the source of the mystery was to be found. They recruited a neighbour to the conspiracy, and before he was unmasked the neighbour many times disturbed the man at his work, asking a favour but really spying on his study. This neighbour told the friends a strange story of an enormous canvas and a vast painting, of which he could recall agonizingly few details. After some while, though, he stopped coming to The Green Knight and rumour had it that he had hung up his hat and entered the picture. He lived there for a while, it was said, with his own wife. But Boffin and many of his friends said that a picture was not so different to a rock garden, of which they had already dug up one, and what they wanted now was to see the inside of the man’s house.

One idea that sounded feasible was to impersonate an elf-friend. It was generally agreed that the man’s door was open to them. But nobody was too sure what an elf-friend was, although it was thought that the man’s best friend had been one. Today we suspect that the man’s third son was also one, as likely were a few select acquaintances back then, but none dared attempt recruit any of the man’s close friends to the conspiracy, let alone his children, and all those who took it upon themselves to impersonate elf-friends were given good morning at the door and sent on their way.

So the friends had to settle for Boffin’s walk-by garden observation approach, which they now performed in pairs. And though for some weary months the walker-watchers reported nothing, all of a sudden one day in the summer their efforts were rewarded: the man stepped out into his garden and revealed an unmoving third stone of the rock garden. The watchers reported that the man had shifted the soil before laying the stone, placing it in the middle of an up-down-hill, so bringing into view what had always been there. This report started the rumour that the third stone was ‘uncreated’ and so, for a while, it was agreed that all the magic of the new garden party was contained in this one, singular, third stone.

But soon after the laying of this third stone, around the autumn of 1938, as the leaves fell and the wind began to nip, the man raised a mound of earth so that the top seemed to touch the stormy weather, placed a small flower upon it and then pierced it with a dark splinter of the terrible central stone. All talk of the third unmovable stone now ceased, for it was agreed by all that it had no bearing whatsoever on the terrible piercing of the flower. Everyone was most concerned, and Boffin now became obsessed with discovering the mystery of this new and terrible rock garden.

There is not much more to be told of Boffin. He and his friends kept a keen watch on the study after this, but his friends began to keep a wary eye on him – though, in the end, our watch was not wary enough. In the new year the man stopped working on the rock garden and in March he left his house and travelled to Scotland. During these winter months the regulars at The Green Knight began to lose interest in the new rock garden – all but Boffin, who talked endlessly of the relationship between the stones and the flowers, till the other regulars begun to shuffle in their seats and his friends avoided his table. It was only out of a sense of duty that I myself accompanied Boffin on his daily walk past the house on that fateful day in March 1939.

What I am telling you now, I saw with my own eyes. When we walked past the house the rock garden was just as it had been left at the close of 1938. But Boffin insisted on entering the garden and peering into the window of the study. I stood at the gate and waited, but Boffin signalled to me that he was going to remain under the eaves. My feet were growing cold and the snow was starting to fall, so I left him to it. But that evening a group of us from The Green Knight grew worried and we went to the man’s house to see if Boffin was still there. We were just in time to see what happened, but alas too late to intervene. An odd light appeared within the study, Boffin carefully and silently opened the window and stepped into the room, reached out for the stone that was the source of the light, and vanished!

Boffin’s disappearance was more than a nine-day wonder. A search over the whole of Oxfordshire and even the Berkshire Downs failed to find any trace of him. But then, one day in the late summer of 1940, Boffin inexplicably reappeared. But he was changed, almost beyond recognition. He now wore wooden shoes and it was clear that something nasty had happened to his feet, but he refused to tell us what, or even to talk at all about his experiences between his inexplicable disappearance and unaccountable reappearance. He was now grim of face and refused to have anything more to do with our Fellowship of Unimaginative Friends, of which he was the founder and the first president. To this day he keeps himself to himself and most days is to be seen working in his own garden, making endless rock gardens of his own. The less charitable among our fellowship say that he has turned from the true path of lore and now spends his time chatting with creative friends in a place with the uncouth name of plaza. But we will not forget Boffin, the first and greatest of our unimaginative fellowship and one day, or so we hope, we will discover the truth of what happened when he touched that stone and so bring him back to his true home, which as all know in their hearts, is Lore.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: A curious case indeed. A great crossover story between our reality and Arda's, connected to lore. Original, I liked it reading!

[Aikári Salmarinian]

I have mentioned a few times about it. But still I am unsure if it is really fitting in the concept of this competition. So it is posted offline, Dependent - Stolen Dreams. Chrys little story above inspired me to it, Tolkien who travels north. I didn't want to withhold it. It is about the lecture of the professor himself of 8 March 1939, seen through a pair of could be students of about 25 years old, are wrapped up in a reality they can't escape no longer from. It is also inspired upon the stories my paternal grandfather told me from his days in a military field hospital as healer, of the Dutch and German patients he treated.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

"They had the ships, they could travel anywhere." Aiks, what an unexpected pleasure. Thank you for the link. I very much enjoyed reading this. What a novel perspective on the St Andrews lecture! Wonderful. Thank you!

[Winddancer]

Just a few days left!

[Dungeon Delver]

The Myth of Callisto

Finally, after years of research, talking with suspicious locals, and hunting through monastic ruins for manuscript fragments, he finally had enough parts of the story to piece together what really happened. The myth of Callisto, the first skin-changer, was a well known one, at least that was what Rangrim had thought before he set out on this task. She was a woman who became a bear and had a child. There were other parts to the story of course, other nuances and details, but the more he searched, the more he realized he had only scratched the surface of the true story. Her legend might have been well known, but the reality of her story, the tragedy, humiliation, and horror she experienced was a real thing. Rangrim had been a scholar all his life, from his carving to now, a hundred and fifty-eight years ago of study and analysis. He had never imagined the tapestry he would uncover when he began to pull at the strings. And now, here he was, he was ready to start compiling the story of Callisto, the real story.

He took a sip of his lemongrass and cinnamon tea and inhaled the smell of his study deeply, looking over the massive pile of paper, some pristine some worn with incalculable age. The last five years were coming down to this. He felt a weight on his shoulders, a responsibility to tell the true story, not just the comfortable one. Callisto was a tragic figure, a figure that often gets overlooked because to look at what happened to her too closely would force the storyteller and the listeners to examine their own beliefs and often find them wanting. She was an innocent, a girl who wanted nothing more than to run free through fields and forests and leave behind the political mechanizations of her father and the people around him. She might have been a pawn in a game that she never understood, but she was a person too, a person with her own fears, beliefs, joys, and sorrows. The story everyone knew about her erased her from the story, took her for granted and assumed the listener didn’t need to care about her to tell the story in which she was central. Rangrim had noticed this the more he searched, when a woman was the central part of a story, her agency was stripped to the barest of bare bones and the audience never said boo to it. It was a sad state of affairs. How could one look back on the mythology and folklore of a region and feel it was complete when it ignored half the deeds and emotions of its characters? Rangrim, the more he searched and found this common, rancid thread, decided to spend his time making sure all the folklore he found was rounded and each character was given her perspective.

He'd found bits and pieces all over the place from dwarven libraries to elven poetry to Rohirric sagas. Not all of them spoke directly of Callisto, but many referenced things on the periphery of her story. He used them to round out the era in which she lived. The ‘when’ too was quite a mystery. Some tales said she lived in the Second Age and lived in Rhovanion, other stories said she was a woman of the First Age and lived in the area now claimed by Umbar. The more research Rangrim did, the more he felt the story had to have taken place in the First Age, there were too many inconsistencies in her story to have taken place in the Second Age, references to elven kings and kingdoms that had long since turned to ruin by the time she was born. There were some sagas of story that mentioned Callisto that Rangrim couldn’t translate. Despite being a dwarf of a dozen different languages and dialects, he simply could not understand them and, in his mind, pointed to a much older origin. The Second Age was all about coming together, about the unification of disparate kingdoms and people, the First Age was wild and unruly with a dozen languages and cultures that rose and fell almost without anyone noticing at all. Callisto had to have belonged to one of these groups.

Callisto was a devotee of Nessa, around whom many cults arose of various degrees of devotions. Around what would become known as the Bay of Balfalas, a cult arose that prized the virtue of virginity, seeing it as a fount of untapped strength. A huntress’ strength was tied to her chastity, to her purity. While we might not see it as such today, given our more progressive views, in the ancient days of early man, virginity was equated with freedom. A woman who remained a virgin remained unbound to a partner and thus was allowed to follow her own whims. It was only later that stories of unmarried crones transformed into stories about bog hags and forest witches. Callisto was the daughter of a king of some petty kingdom whose name has fallen out of the historiographic sphere. Some tales say he was a wild man, a man punished for the cruelty he showed his sons by being forced into the body of a wolf. There are no tales that exist that tell of his name or the name of his kingdom, he is one of many that have been lost in the mists. Callisto, his only daughter, escaped his cruel grasp and was raised by a woman named Artemis whom Callisto began to harbor feelings for.

It is interesting to note here that in the First Age very little has survived in the way of stories involving women loving women. Surely it must have existed at the time as it is far from a new concept, but much of the history found from this era only mention it in passing wit airs of dismissal and disgust. It should also be noted that many of these sources were written by old Númenórean men with devote conservative leanings. One text was found among the dwarves, a few lines in a greater poem, that mentions Callisto and her lover in a very positive way. It makes this old dwarf proud that we knew this sort of love has always existed and celebrated it as equally as we do any other sort.

One day, whilst on a hunt chasing a mighty elk, Callisto was spied out by a spirit. Some of the texts say that this spirit was a Maia, others say he was an elf, but most say he was just a spirit of the land with only the most tenuous connection to the Valar in the west. He was consumed with her, obsessed and infatuated. He tried to seduce her, but she refused him. He chased her and yet she continued to deny him. Three times he begged her to allow him to take her virginity and three times she denied him. She was the faster of the two and soon he was left alone, brooding upon his failure. Some texts give the name of the man as Jupater or Zeuspater, but it is the opinion of this scribe that his name does not matter. Both of these names are connected with characters in other stories with sordid backgrounds and personalities. He is not worth the ink to explore him here.

He was not done though, having been turned down by Callisto, rejected and spurned as a lover, his lust for her only burned the brighter. But he had to be canny, if he was to have her, if he was to steal away her virtue, then his disguise would have be the best he’d ever created. He disguised himself as Artemis. He knew enough about Callisto to prey on her love of her mentor. Many of the Dúnedain sources overlook this, but many of the elven source I have found see this particular act as a great betrayal, an exploitation of trans and queer identities. Zeuspater tricked Callisto into his embrace and revealed himself only after he’d cornered her. He raped her then, there is no easy way to say this, and I will not allow the trauma Callisto endured to be ameliorated with pretty, obscuring words. Once he had, as it is with so many men, he lost interest in her. He abandoned her after stealing away her virginity and defiling her. She tired to hide what had happened to her, but soon it was apparent that she was with child and there is no belief in the early days of immaculate conception. She was humiliated and cast out of her cult. Again, many Dúnedain sources overlook the trauma of this particular act. They reduce this part of the story to a few lines before moving on to the next part of the story. She was cast out because she had broken her oath, willing or not. In the eyes of her people, her once erstwhile companions and sisters, she was a liar. My heart breaks for her. She was deceived, tricked, beguiled, then abandoned by everything and everyone. And yet her punishment was not over.

Zeuspater had a wife bent on vengeance. Artemis, as it turns out, was a companion and friend to her, Hera. An elven source tells of how they were drinking together one day and the topic of Zeuspater’s constant infidelity came up. Artemis bragged about throwing out a girl who had been tricked by him and left with a child. Instead of her wrath burning against the man who had perpetuated the attack and the violation, Hera sought to find Callisto and punish her. The husband escaped judgement entirely, though the source does go out of its way on several occasions to point out how unelven this is. I believe whoever this man was, he was, in fact, an elf. In my mind there can be no reason for this particular text to proclaim how “unelven” this event was without prompting. Elves are known to be carriers of guilt and the severe condemnation might have been a way to alleviate some of their own societal guilt.

Hera found Callisto, just as she’d given birth to a young boy she named Arktos and turned her into a bear. The boy was left wailing and screaming. Hera saw her punishment complete and never gave this woman another thought. She inflicted even more mental and physical trauma on a victim of a crime and decided that justice had been served. How strange things were in the old days of the First Age.

Fifteen years later, the boy has been rescued by another king of another petty kingdom and made his heir. Arktos is strong and agile, owing to his elven father and huntress mother and a capable leader of men. He is charismatic and open handed, intelligent and virtuous. Many stories go on and on about him, there are even some sagas that are devoted wholly to him, barely mentioning his mother or his uncommon birth. Suffice to say, he is the son of his mother, not his father (unlike a similar child born of dubious circumstances that took after the father more than the mother). A Rohirric saga tells the best, most complete, version of what happened next. Arktos was out hunting when he came upon a bear. He did not recognize her, nor did she recognize him. They fought and just when Arktos struck a killing blow against his mother, Varda herself, the Matron of Stars and Lady of Twilight, intervened and changed Callisto back into a woman and though a killing blow had been struck, was able to spend her final hours with her son. When she did die, she was brought by the Star Kindler and placed within a constellation all her own, Ursa Major, where she could watch her son forge a kingdom of his own. His children portrayed several ursine traits and soon it was rumors that the family line of Arktos were skinchangers. When he died, Varda took pity on him and placed him next to his mother, Ursa Minor.

Even though their kingdom falters and they were forced to migrate in the face of the oncoming storm that was the Númenórean colonization of Middle-earth, the descendants of Callisto lived on, persisted into the wild fields of Rhovanion where there now lives a man named Beorn, whom some say is the spitting image of his forefather Arktos when he is glimpsed as a human, and the picture of his foremother Callisto when he takes the shape of a great black bear.

I do not know how much of this story is true or how much is mythologized, but I do believe this: Callisto was real, and her trauma was real and we must never overlook her or humiliate her again by belittling her experiences. I look up now, and I can see the great Mother Bear looking down on me in my room. I feel a sense of peace, as if I am being watched over.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Roll over Gaius Valerius Catullus. I was wondering if Peregrin Boffin would stand alone. I am now blown away and honoured to stand in the shade of the terrible, awful, and awesome first age tale of Callisto.

There was a growling sound outside, and a noise of some great animal scuffling at the door. Bilbo wondered what it was, and whether it could be Beorn in enchanted shape, and if he would come in as a bear and kill them. He dived under the blankets and hid his head...

[Winddancer]

A bit late, my apologies!

Winner is Frost!

I really enjoyed all 3 entries, thank you so much for participating! Especially Chrys for venturing out of the Lore forum

[Chrysophylax Dives]

burgled!

[Dungeon Delver]

Many thanks @Winddancer for running the contest and giving me the chance to work out an idea I've had in the back of my mind since reading Circe.

Well done @Chrysophylax Dives and Aiks for joining in and add your own special flavors!