Editing Nameless Things (section)

===Tobold's Old Manuscript & Ephemera Society===

No one can quite agree whether Tobold Hornblower (known as "Tobold the Younger, a descendant of the famous Old Toby) was born in Bree, Staddle, or somewhere further afield — he claimed all three at different times, depending on who was buying the next round. He was a stocky, affable hobbit with a knack for growing things that ought not grow together, and for finding things other folk had long since lost.

Tobold came back from one of his “little wanderings” — which may have gone no farther than the Old Forest or as far as the southern vales of Anduin, depending on which version you hear — with two things that set the course of his later years:

A battered satchel full of papers and trinkets — maps with no place-names, faded letters in strange hands, seeds no gardener could identify.

A fondness for telling long, winding stories about how he came by them, each more unlikely than the last.

At first, Tobold invited a few friends to meet in a side-room at ''The Prancing Pony'' to help identify the seeds, swap cuttings of rare plants, and argue over whether certain herbs were better dried or fresh. Soon, papers and artifacts from his satchel became part of the gatherings, and the talk wandered from gardening to genealogy, from old songs to curious stones dug up in gardens.

Somewhere along the way, the ''Old Manuscript & Ephemera Society'' was born — though none of its members remember deciding on a name. Tobold simply began calling it “the Society” and insisted on keeping a “register of proceedings” in a heavy, leather-bound ledger.

When Tobold passed on — some say in his bed, some say on the Greenway, still chasing a rumor of a giant’s footprint — the Society carried on. Its members still meet in quiet corners, still bring in the oddest things they find, and still tell long, improbable tales in his memory.

Some Bree-folk say the Society’s nothing more than a bunch of harmless old gardeners and gossipers. But there are others — a very few — who know the ledger Tobold kept hides stranger accounts, and that some of the “antiquities” in the Society’s keeping are better left undisturbed.