Baggins, riding on horseback, was much quieter than usual, and even his urging of the horse seemed listless. He was nearing his homeland, yet he had only just left it. He felt neither the poet's anxious reluctance at approaching home nor the joy he had imagined.
This was supposed to be a long-awaited day. Everything in Bag End was something he missed terribly, yet he now realized that he was even more reluctant to part with the adventures of the past six months. They were a story that belonged only to him. The dwarves and Mr. Aine had all been characters in it, while its backdrop was something most people who lived their entire lives in ordinary circumstances could never imagine—vast and magnificent, with every rise and fall capable of terrifying mortals. And he had actually made it through.
The hardships and dangers of that journey had finally reached their end. Even that long escape, which had seemed as though he would never get away from it, had simply vanished behind him. The nights spent resting around fires beneath trees, the dusks when they stood at cliff edges with wooden bowls in hand, gazing into sunsets painted red across the sky, the stories each of them told during idle chatter, the songs everyone had sung, the dreams they had confided...
It was all over now, without exception, and there was no avoiding it.
The friends he had made, the things he had experienced, and the scenery he had seen had all become the past.
They had changed from the story he was living into memories that would remain forever in his heart. Even if he told others about them one day, even if a large group of children gathered around him and gazed at him with astonishment and longing, those