(Click second thumbnail above to watch video)
 
Museum-Quality Matte Paper Print available in two sizes:
12" x 16" (30cm x 40cm): $35.00
24" x 32" (60cm x 80cm): $48.00
 
"This account of the end of the Third Age is drawn mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch. That most important source for the history of the War of the Ring was so called because it was long preserved at Undertowers, the home of the Fairbairns, Wardens of the Westmarch." - Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien 
 
Without Sam Gamgee’s descendents, the Fairbairns of Westmarch, carefully stewarding the lore books that passed to him via Frodo and Bilbo, we would never have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or The Silmarillion. Some 3,000 years after Gil-galad, the High King of the Noldor, built the three white towers at Emyn Beraid in token of friendship for Elendil, King Elessar grants new western lands to the folk of the Shire. Sam’s daughter, Elanor, settles there at Undertowers with her husband, Fastred of Greenholm, and there the lore is kept alive and we come to hear of the wonderful Red Book of Westmarch.
 
In this grateful tribute to the Fairbairns, Elanor’s 33-year-old son, Elfstan, and her daughter, Fíriel, are ostensibly out tending the family’s sheep in this rocky coastal new home, but as you can see, the hobbit lad and lass are consulting the lore and trying to orient themselves to the ancient legends that permeate their land. Their parents are in the distance, gardening, and the door of their smial is beyond. 
 
J.R.R. Tolkien gives us so few details about these incredibly important hobbits whose story takes shape after the events of the War of the Ring, which ended the Third Age of Men. We can only daydream about when and how much Elanor would have told her children about where their grandfather went after his journey to the Grey Havens. Sam left the lore with Elanor, meaning that Fourth Age hobbits had access to the wisdom of the elves and of the most noble men whose histories are based on their awakening as the first and second-born children of Eru. We know that hobbits became more interested in their own histories and affairs outside their borders in the Fourth Age, and I believe their encounter with the lore must have been a remarkable catalyst to this.
 
If you would love to turn a corner of your home into a hobbit history museum, then a museum-quality print of the Fairbairns of Westmarch should have a place of honor in your collection. Given the tradition that J.R.R. Tolkien somehow encountered and translated a copy of the Red Book of Westmarch, we are forever in the debt of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Elanor, and the Fairbairns as the mothers and fathers of our Tolkienian tradition.