#also femslash

I was reading the above fic, and it gave me ideas. (Everyone, that’s your cue to tremble in fear.) You really should read it, if you're in the hobbit fandom. It's marvelous. ten out of ten, would recommend.

Also, this plotbunny will make no sense otherwise.

Hobbits have firm ideas about the importance of offspring, and of the lives of others. The land is good to them because they are good to the land and one another. So when some of the Tooks, out on their rambles, come across the site of several murdered dwarrows, they’re horrified, and more than that, outraged. It isn’t right, it isn’t decent, lives should not be ended so suddenly.

So in the oldest tradition of the shire, they take a few locks of hair from the dead, and braid them into seeds. They don’t even know if hobbits can grow dwarrows, but they’ll be damned if they’ll not at least try to fulfill the obligation.

Many of the seeds fail, and it’s a matter of great mourning, to intern the remains with their parents. But a few flourish, and soon enough, the shire has a fresh crop of fourteen little dwarrows, six girls and eight boys.

(Most of them are sort of undifferentiated characters, but three of them are very clear. There’s Nettle, the oldest in group, who is bold and stubborn and has no patience for people who can’t keep up with her. Then there’s Briar, her twin brother, sweet natured and long suffering, with a well hidden streak of mischief. The next is Isaphylla, raised by Lobelia Sacksville-Baggins, who has light fingers and a charming smile that gets her out of trouble, and presents her foster-mother with bouquets of silver spoons she’s stolen.)

Once the Dwarrows are old enough to travel – age fifteen, or thereabouts – their foster parents set off, with them in tow, to deliver them to the nearest dwarf settlement, so that their people may have something of the children’s murdered parents back. The nearest dwarf settlement being the Blue Mountains.

The Blue Mountain settlement is so, so not ready for a horde of hobbit-raised baby dwarrow to be set loose on them, even with the foster parents sticking around till the children are adjusted. Cultural differences abound, especially since the dwarf fertility rate is much lower than the hobbit one.