Once upon a moon on the brink of June by

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Fanwork Notes

This was written for the Beginner's version of the Secret Gate challenge. The two mystery novel prompts were a quirky protagonist and a sudden veering from the brink of defeat to an unexpected triumph.

This piece is a crossover with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and especially with "Once Upon A Time", a poem published by Tolkien in 1965 and later reprinted in the appendix of the 2014 edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

The piece features canonical mystery characters. It was Tolkien who didn't specify their gender; I have highlighted this, as a late little nod to Pride Month.

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Quirky Tom is stumped in his investigation; his partner delivers the goods. (Deliberately misleading summary inspired by the challenge prompts! See Story Notes for more reliable information.)

Major Characters: Goldberry, Tom Bombadil

Major Relationships: Goldberry/Tom Bombadil

Genre: Crossover

Challenges: Secret Gate

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 576
Posted on 5 July 2023 Updated on 8 July 2023

This fanwork is complete.

Table of Contents

Once upon a moon on the brink of June

Comments

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I love that Goldberry does know more than Tom, and that the whole piece feels like one of his poems, with excursions around the central image.

I love the idea of enigmatic Tom being baffled by something — and found it very funny, if understandable, that he was not a little put out that they didn't stay to chat with him... only to have Goldberry laugh and offer to introduce him!

I'd never read the poem before, so thank you too for this introduction; it has such marvellous imagery that really resonates with magic and beauty, and you've brought it all together into Middle-earth so marvellously.

Lovely!

(Tee-hee, I actually went and looked lintips up because I thought they might be a local common name of some European species of something!)

 

I'm glad I was able to introduce you to the poem! I only just found out about it myself. (I have an earlier edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil that doesn't have the appendix.)

I think Tolkien would be delighted and amused that you thought the lintips were a European species!

Thank you!

Tom being baffled is already in the poem itself, but I expanded on it a bit!

Interestingly, I noticed that the bit about Tom's list of names according to Elrond has some resemblance to Gandalf's list of names according to himself. Which might not mean that much, really, because Tolkien likes names, of course, but I was reminded how Gandalf compares himself to Tom toward the end...