Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Fairbairn the Fat gets his own thread, having run out of the SDS Training Thread

Fairbairn is the founder of Mushroom Modernism, the most famous of the many schools of Hobbit art. He lives in a house, not a hole. Fairbairn grew up in a hole in Michel Delving but inherited a house in Hobbiton from a bachelor great-grand-uncle whom he had never met. When he turned up at the house Fairbairn was delighted to discover that it had two storeys.

Unfortunately, long before he moved to Hobbiton, Fairbairn had earned his epithet, and though he amply enjoys the ground floor of his inheritance, has never been able to squeeze up the staircase. Hence his visionary art, an attempt to gaze with the inner eye at the space above his head that he himself has never seen.

Rules: anyone is welcome to contribute to the thread, just so long as they don't annoy me, post stupid comments, or otherwise denigrate the good name of Fairbairn the Fat with body shaming slurs, unkind observation as to his character, or dead badgers. Please note that as a matter of fact Fairbairn is NOT FAT, it is just that his mighty muscular Hobbit chest has slipped down a bit and appears to those who know no better as a rounded belly.

Fairbairn the Fat needed a holiday. Physically, he was exhausted from his fast sprint home the other night when a clan of badger skeletons had attacked him at the Shire Defence Squad training grounds. But now he was also emotionally and mentally drained because he had been painting night and day this last week, and his art took it out of him.

He had no regrets - how else could one hope to paint an upstairs that one has never seen but by intense focus and concentration? One has to put one's whole heart into one's art. But normally the results cheered him up and gave him a feeling of catharsis, while all he had to show for his hard work now were 12 large canvases depicting the badger sett that he now saw whenever he raised his inner eye to the upstairs of his house. And Fairbairn had started to doubt that the usptairs of his house really did look like that. He was starting to suspect that he had been caught by some malevolent badger spell. He needed a break, needed to look up and see not the ceiling but the sky, needed to wash his mind clean.

On return, with fresh energy and new enthusiasm, he would ask the dragon if he could again borrow the Seeing Stone housed in Elostirion, and attempt a realistic depiction of the upstairs.

He wanted to travel to Bree. He had heard good reports about the breakfasts at the Prancing Pony. But it cost money to stay at the inn, and Fairbairn had run out of money.

Fairbairn reviewed his dozen recent painting of the badger-sett upstairs. 'Hmmmmmm'. The germ of an idea was percolating. He consulted his Shire guide book, looking up Brandy Hall.

Long ago Gorhendad Oldbuck, head of the Oldbuck family, one of the oldest in the Marish or indeed in the Shire, had crossed the river, which was the original boundary of the land eastwards. He built (and excavated) Brandy Hall, changed his name to Brandybuck, and settled down to become master of what was virtually a small independent country. His family grew and grew, and after his days continued to grow, until Brandy Hall occupied the whole of the low hill, and had three large front-doors, many side-doors, and about a hundred windows.

'Well, if that is not a badger-sett I don't know what is'. He took three slips of paper, wrote on each 'Brandy Hall, by Fairbairn the Fat', and attached them to three of the canvases. He reckoned he could sell one at each main front door, with none the wiser to the duplication, at least for several months. Then he thought of other ancestral and many-tunelled mansions in the Shire and wrote 'Great Smials' on three more title slips.

Then Fairbairn had a new idea. He pulled down an obscure volume of poetry from a high shelf and looked up 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil'.

Out came Badger-brock with his snowy forehead
and his dark blinking eyes. In the hill he quarried
with his wife and many sons. By the coat they caught him,
pulled him inside the hole, down their tunnels brought him.
Inside their secret house, there they sat a-mumbling:
‘Ho! Tom Bombadil, where have you come tumbling,
bursting in the front-door? Badgerfolk have caught you:
you’ll never find it out, the way that we have brought you!’

On three more slips Fairbairn wrote 'Bombadil captured!' Then continued reading.

‘Now, old Badger-brock, do you hear me talking?
You show me out at once! I must be a-walking.
Show me to your backdoor under briar-roses;
then clean grimy paws, wipe your earthy noses!
Go back to sleep again on your straw pillow
like fair Goldberry and Old Man Willow!’
Then all the Badgerfolk said ‘We beg your pardon!’
showed Tom out again to their thorny garden,
went back and hid themselves a-shivering and a-shaking,
blocked up all their doors, earth together raking.

Fairbairn wrote out 'Bombadil escapes!' on three more slips and attached them to the remaining three canvases. Then he gathered all the newly painted titles and set out to find some Tooks and Brandybucks with more money than sense.

Fairbairn had hit a gold mine. His upstairs-sett painting were selling like hot cakes. Not only had the Tooks and the Brandybucks eagerly snapped up his first dozen but he now had several dozen advance orders from Brockhouses scattered around the Shire and even beyond - two had come in from Combe-under-Bree! The Brockhouses just could not get enough of Fairbairn's domestic paintings. He was considering hiring a wagon in a few days to transport half a gross of 'sett' painting to the main Brockhouse ancestral mansion up north in the Brockenbores, by the hills of Scary.

The queer thing was, Brock was an old Shire word for the badger, still widely used in speech in the country-round. So the Brockhouse clan of Hobbits were presumably so named because the 'brock' builds complicated and well-ordered underground dwellings or 'setts'.

What about Bagshot Row in Hobbiton? The etymology was obscure, but Bagshot might mean 'land of the badger'. And then there were the second adventures of Tom Bombadil, which replayed the first only with Badger-brock and the other badgers replaced by those four Hobbits who had gone and had an adventure down in the South. Fairbairn tried to recall the absurd story about badgers and their queer ways that Tom had told to them, but could not remember what it was.

He was beginning to wonder if the badgers were the aboriginal dwellers of the Shire, and if the Hobbits had been interbreeding with them for time out of mind? Maybe he was part badger himself?

Fairbairn shuddered. 'What an abominable idea!' But he could not quite put it out of his mind as he returned to his latest sett painting, this to be titled: 'Tom Bombadil's Story'.

Great Smials

Having delivered 9 pre-ordered sett-paintings to one of the Great Smials front doors, Fairbairn entered the Took ancestral tunnel-mansion in the Westfarthing and made his way to the famous underground Library, where he found Tobias Took smoking a pipe whilst leafing through an old collection of genealogies. Fairbairn explained to Tobias what he was after.

You see, my Old Toby, I want to know what Hobbits have had to say about badgers, and also what other folk might have said. Are there badgers in the old stories?


Tobias trundled off into the shelves and returned with six large volumes, which he plonked on the desk. Fairbairn carried them over to a small desk with a comfortable chair, sat himself down, located the first of the six, and began to read a Prologue, which said nothing at all about badgers. Then he continued on to the story of the party.

By the end of a very long day, Fairbairn had only four notes to show for his many, weary hours of reading. Likely he would burn his notes - or was that his inner badger speaking? He felt very tired as he folded up his notes, put them in his pocket, picked up the six books and returned them to the Librarian, who was still studying the same old genealogies, and who gave Fairbairn a short if friendly grunt as he said goodbye.

Back home in the downstairs of his house in Hobbiton, Fairbairn ate a second breakfast, sat down with a cup of tea, and unfolded his notes.

Book 1
'You are always badgering me about my ring.’
‘I had to badger you. I wanted the truth.'

Book 2
‘There must have been a mighty crowd of dwarves here at one time,’ said Sam; ‘and every one of them busier than badgers for five hundred years to make all this, and most in hard rock too! What did they do it all for? They didn’t live in these darksome holes surely?’

Book 3
‘It is said that the Hornburg has never fallen to assault,’ said Théoden; ‘but now my heart is doubtful. The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?

Had I known that the strength of Isengard was grown so great, maybe I should not so rashly have ridden forth to meet it, for all the arts of Gandalf. His counsel seems not now so good as it did under the morning sun.’

‘Do not judge the counsel of Gandalf, until all is over, lord,’ said Aragorn.

‘The end will not be long,’ said the king. ‘But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap.

Fairbairn pondered. One Hobbit invokes badgers in criticizing a wizard and another in expressing wonder at the tunnels and halls of Moria. The only other moment a badger is invoked in Middle-earth is in an ancient Númenórean tower, the speaker the King of Rohan, who will not be a badger in a trap - sad, bloody, brave, not very moving - so he sits on a horse.

Hmmmm. And the 4th note.

Book 1
He waited for an opportunity, when the talk was going again, and Tom was telling an absurd story about badgers and their queer ways – then he slipped the Ring on.

Tylwyth headed to the ancient scrolls to see whether the original meaning of badgering a person was to repeatedly pester them using an actual badger, or even many badgers.

On the ancient worldwide cobweb scroll, Tylwyth read the following with interest:
"Archaeological evidence suggests that badgers have inhabited the British Isles* since the last Ice Age, making them one of the oldest surviving mammals in the region. Throughout the centuries, badgers have been both revered and reviled, their image intertwined with folklore, mythology, and traditional beliefs."
*Ancient mispelling of Middle-earth, obviously, to stay in character world zone.

Also on the World Wide Cobweb, Tylwyth read "Badgers Unearth Medieval Anglo-Saxon Warrior Burial Site".
They truly are amazing mystical archaeologists, she thought, before remembering she needed to tidy her house and not muse on the prowess of badgers.

Fairbairn was still hearing the badger in his dreams. Only the badger had the face and voice of a Hobbit-lass. This was both good and bad. Good, in that the badger-visitations inspired his Sett paintings, which continued to sell like hot cakes (Fairbairn now had enough cash for a river trip to Gondor, and on to the Sea, and back again). Bad, in that it suggested that he still needed some practice in the dark arts of necromancy by which the ideas of another are pick-pocketed.

Maybe the badger could be bought off with a cut from the accumalating sett-painting profits?

Book 1
'You are always badgering me about my ring.’
‘I had to badger you. I wanted the truth.'

Fairbairn scratched his head. The one who is badgering, in this case the wizard, is like the dog that baits the badger in the old and terrible sport of badger-baiting. The one who names the wizard a badgerer names himself the badger.

The wizard accepts the name.

But if Hobbits are badgers, what is the King of Rohan?