Young Krimgar woke up, opened his eyes at once and, for a moment, did not know where he was. He found himself lying on a bed in a room he did not recognise, with whitewashed walls, a pair of large windows to his right through which the morning light streamed in, and an opening to his left with no door. He noticed three other beds, one of them occupied by a sleeping figure who was breathing heavily, oblivious to him. Some of the candles on the wall shelves had gone out, and a small cupboard stood beside each bed. That detail proved crucial in realising where he was: at the inn where he had arrived a few days earlier after a perilous journey through places infested with evil creatures. He was in the bustling settlement where, despite being surrounded by people, he felt lonelier than ever.
He took a deep breath and sighed as he lay on the comfortable but narrow bed. It struck him just how far away he was from the place he had once called home. A very recent past—barely a few weeks ago—but one he felt he had just left behind and would never return to. Ever since he’d arrived in Bree, he’d felt overwhelmed by this prospect, for within him two powerful impulses were at war.
On the one hand, he felt the urge and the need to walk through the square, the orchards and the lanes of Mossward and Swanfleet, where he had grown up and spent a childhood and youth that now seemed to him to be good and desirable. Returning to the past, to the days when he used to have breakfast and dinner with his mother after working all day, seemed to him a comforting place to take refuge. Those days would never return. Not since his mother had died that spring.
On the other hand, he wanted to stop being the stocky lad at the beck and call of Mossward’s farmers and cattle-breeders. To stop being the son of the hapless Vemund and the elderly Birna, whom everyone used for their daily chores in exchange for a few copper coins. He wanted to stop being the young man with short-cropped hair whom Officer Eleri kept a close eye on because his arguments with others so often ended in a fistfight. He wanted to be the virtuous and renowned jeweller who crafted marvellous pieces from gems and precious stones. He wanted to be someone important and respected by others. And he was afraid he wouldn’t be good enough to achieve it.
When his worries began to cause him distress, he sat up and made the bed to banish the dark thoughts from his mind. He opened the cupboard with a small key and stared motionless for several long seconds at a scroll of parchment tied with a strip of string. He picked it up carefully, untied the knot and unrolled it. On it were two figures drawn in charcoal: a man and a woman, both smiling and looking happy, each wearing a wreath of flowers on their heads. The illustration was smudged in places due to its age, as it had been drawn on the day his parents were married in Dale. It had been a gift from Birna’s father to the young bride, and the scroll had always been regarded as a family treasure in their home. In fact, it was the only possession of his mother’s that Krimgar had decided to keep.
When he felt his eyes welling up, the young man carefully closed the parchment and tried to focus on the present. He took some clothes out of the wardrobe and put on the trousers and jacket his mother had bought from some dwarf merchants a year earlier; leather garments partially dyed green to replace the clothes that were already becoming too small for the huge young man. He glanced at all his belongings inside the wardrobe, hesitating over what to take. As he couldn’t make up his mind, he decided to put the matter aside for the moment, put on a pair of leather shoes and lock the wardrobe. Krimgar stood up and left the room, heading for one of the buckets of water in the corridors. He washed his face, tied his short red hair into a small ponytail at the back of his head, and stroked his beard, of which he was proud, as it made him look older than his eighteen years. Without further delay, the young man set off down the long corridors towards the inn’s great hall.
The Prancing Pony was the inn that everyone the young man had asked on his way to Bree had recommended to him. And his expectations had not been misplaced: that building was larger and wider than any structure ever built in his native Mossward. The taproom took up most of the ground floor of the building, with room for more than fifty patrons at a time. In the few days he had been in Bree, he had never seen the place with fewer than twenty people inside – a mix of locals, travellers stopping off, hobbits chatting animatedly, dwarves eating and drinking – and, all in all, a welcoming atmosphere for anyone who walked through its doors. The landlord, Barliman, wasn’t particularly friendly, but one had to give him credit for making the place work for all his visitors.
Once seated at one of the tables with a bowl of porridge and a jug of mead brought to him by one of the waitresses, Krimgar ate his breakfast with his eyes fixed on his food, lost in thought. When he lived in Mossward, his daily routine dictated what he had to do at every moment. Now there was no one to put pressure on him, nor anything to force him to do anything. Breakfast these days was the time to plan what to do during the daylight hours ahead of him.
Should he take all the ore he’d mined the day before and head to Three-Farrow to smelt it and make some jewellery to sell? Krimgar’d got a valuable gold coin for selling the hovel where he’d lived with his mother, but even so, he had to find a way to earn a living so as not to run out of money. As a jeweller’s apprentice, he was able to work with copper and silver, but he hoped to meet a dwarf master there who could help him improve his craft.
Should he offer his services as a porter or errand boy? In a place as bustling as Bree, surely someone needed a pair of strong arms to carry crates, move livestock or carry out tasks that others didn’t want to do or didn’t have time for. Hobbits were particularly prone to lazing about and hiring others for the less pleasant chores, something he’d seen for himself with the halflings of Stoor Valley. But Krimgar reasoned, with some regret, that if he were to do this, there was no need for him to have travelled so far from his village and crossed dangerous lands where he had risked his life.
What about becoming a warrior? A Bree watchman or a mercenary for hire? He certainly had no shortage of physical ability, and his imposing stature was intimidating. The scar running across the left side of his forehead helped him look like a rough sort. Perhaps Second Watcher Heathstraw could give him a simple job as a watchman. Or he could offer his strength at the skirmish camp on the outskirts of the town’s south gate. But Krimgar didn’t like to put himself in the line of fire and confront others, although when he felt pressured, he would get angry. More than once he’d landed a punch on some ungrateful bloke who’d got him into trouble with Officer Eleri. When he’d arrived in Bree, he’d seen the prison and the stocks used to punish criminals, and the young man had no desire to go through that experience.
The bowl of porridge was already empty, as was the second jug of mead. And since he couldn’t quite make up his mind, he settled on the simplest option by process of elimination: working with the minerals he’d gathered in the fields to the west, on the other side of the river. He still had several amethysts and agates that he’d found and polished in Lhan Garan. Although he was still only an apprentice, it was in that Dunlendin settlement that he’d learnt to smelt metals, set small gems and create simple jewellery.
He could have devoted himself to that today, but… he felt a little embarrassed about working at Three-Farrow. On his first day, he peered inside and observed the frenetic activity taking place there: experienced craftsmen creating beautiful necklaces, sharp weapons, garments of exquisite quality, intricate wood carvings and sturdy armour. All of this overwhelmed him and made him feel small and out of place, a world away from his aspirations of greatness. But if he wanted to fulfil the dream that had led him to leave his village behind, he would have to overcome that embarrassment.
With his third jug of mead in his hand, Krimgar thought of his friend Skardí. In truth, the dwarf blacksmith was largely responsible for the young redhead finding himself in Bree. Ever since he was a child, Krimgar had spent a great deal of time with the blacksmith of Mossward, the only dwarf who lived there. The boy was fond of the blacksmith’s blunt and gruff yet honest and loyal nature, and he adopted many of the dwarf’s ways. The boy spent many hours in Skardí’s smithy, especially after his father’s death on the cliff near Radlaw. He loved listening to all the dwarf’s stories about the outside world, for, like his parents Vemund and Birna, Skardí came from the other side of the Misty Mountains.
But one story in particular captured his imagination more than any other. It was the story of his father, Mindir Bendblade, a renowned goldsmith who had travelled far and wide, learning from the finest masters and working with precious materials to craft the most beautiful jewellery in all of Middle-earth. Skardí always spoke proudly of his father, hailing him as the greatest Dwarf jeweller who had ever lived. Once, Krimgar questioned his father’s worth, and Skardí, offended, went into the back room of the smithy and brought out a small, lockable iron box. He made him promise never to tell anyone what he was about to see, and the young man agreed. The dwarf opened the reinforced box and, inside, Krimgar saw the most beautiful ring he had ever laid eyes on. An exquisitely carved silver ring, flawless and set with a spectacular, brilliant red stone – an impeccably polished garnet that shimmered magically in the candlelight. The dwarf told him that his father had travelled to the far south, far beyond where the great river meets the sea, much further still than the imposing city of Gondor. And in an exotic and dangerous place called Mûr Ghala, his father had forged several of these precious jewels, which he had given to each of his sons. Skardí allowed Krimgar to hold the ring for a few moments, and the very feel of it and the garnet’s glow captivated the young man. Although the beautiful piece was put away shortly afterwards in the reinforced box and he never saw it again, the image of such a marvellous sight never faded from his mind.
Perhaps that story and that stunning piece of jewellery had prompted Krimgar’s recent decisions. A year earlier, the young man had decided to learn a trade other than tending animals and farming, so he set off on long stays in Lhan Garan to learn mining and goldsmithing. There, in the Dunlending settlement, he felt much freer than in Mossward, where he felt judged by the gossiping neighbours in his home village.
But just two months ago, whilst he was in Lhan Garan, news reached him that his mother had died of a fever. Krimgar rushed back home as fast as he could, but no one was waiting for him at the family cottage. He buried his mother, and many of the villagers were there to bid her farewell. But Krimgar struggled to come to terms with the loss. Guilt began to gnaw at him for not having seen his mother for weeks, for not being at her deathbed.
Frustrated and irritable, despite his neighbours’ expressions of support, the young man was surly and unfriendly towards their attempts to reach out to him in the days that followed. He ended up confronting some of them and accusing them of letting his mother die. The neighbours began to avoid him and every night, alone in his little cottage, the young man cursed the Valar and fate for such a disastrous ordeal. Sullen and unsociable, the atmosphere in Mossward became unbearable for Krimgar. And in an act of arrogance, he decided to leave the village and become someone important, just to rub it in the faces of all his neighbours.
Krimgar sold his cottage at a knock-down price to the farmer who lived next door and packed up his belongings to set off on the old mare he’d inherited from his mother. The only person he visited to say goodbye to was his old friend Skardí, to whom he promised that one day he would return with a garnet ring like his father’s, forged by his own hand. And he assured him that by then everyone in Mossward would have to acknowledge his importance. The dwarf tried to talk him out of it, for even he, the grumpy blacksmith, could see that the young man was deeply distraught by his mother’s death, harbouring an unjustified grudge against his neighbours. But Krimgar would not back down and stood his ground in the face of his friend’s attempts to bring him back down to earth. The most the dwarf could get out of him was a promise to write to him so they wouldn’t lose touch and to let him know he was all right.
That day, Krimgar left Mossward, vowing not to return until he had become a master jeweller who would make others bow their heads in awe of his brilliant skill with jewellery. But now, far from home and alone, surrounded by strangers in a bustling inn and with his fourth jug of mead in his hand, the young man had lost all his arrogance and felt quite lonely and lost in that bustling city.
