Chapter Text
From the field journal of Doctor Haedi Thamas, PhD, Professor of Early Human Archaeology at Anor University.
21st May, 2376, Sev. A.
Today was the day! After a week of preparation, we finally broke through into the first cave.
I have to admit I felt a certain amount of regret at breaking apart the wall at the entrance. Unlike Lossam, who breaks into graves with the same gusto he cracks open bottles of that ghastly dessert wine he always brings on digs (yuck!), I do feel some level of conflict about what is, in effect, grave robbing. The people whom we rob may be long gone (and I most certainly do NOT believe in ghosts, unlike Revia) but it feels a little sacrilegious to break apart what they spent so long building. The information their graves give us on the state of the world thousands of years ago is of enough worth to justify the ransack, I think, but still.
Anyway, I am rambling once again, beating around the bush rather than getting to my main point. I did that last night, too; I wrote a lot of silly things in this journal about the import of our findings, trying to comfort myself with the pomp and circumstance of it all. Really I was just pouring out my nerves onto paper. I was deathly nervous, more so than I have been on any other dig. The number of homo quendi graves we’ve been able to find are so painfully few, especially compared to those of homo khuzdul or the ancient peoples of Arnor and Gondor. To think that I’d be entrusted with leading the excavation team, for a site this crucial, this unique - I think anyone would be nervous! I felt like an undergrad again, fumbling my tools and making a mess, as we dug out each individual brick from the wall that blocked off the chamber. Khuzdul researchers would have laughed themselves silly at us, picking out each one (not to mention Dinen sketching the wall itself for a week before we even laid a single tool to it), but let them. We don’t have piles upon piles of elven bricks to sit around writing an entire journal about! (Though I will of course encourage Dinen to compare their construction with dwarven equivalents in the inevitable paper he’ll be authoring on the subject during winter semester. Maybe they’ll even publish it in their endlessly boring brick journal!). Elven builders employed bricks fairly rarely, especially in later settlements; that was, of course, what first tipped us off to the fact that these graves might be older than anything we’d yet found.
Anyway. Rambling. What I meant to talk about - what I am, in fact, so excited about that I feel I can hardly put the words down on paper, so I keep circling around them like a dog worrying a bone - is what we found inside the tomb.
It was pristine. Really, truly pristine, like one of the stories from those Sixth Age archaeologists who broke open all the untouched barrows in Rohan’s Valley of Kings. We just stood there staring for a minute, when we’d cleared away enough of the wall to look inside; I don’t think any of us could really believe what we were actually looking at. And there’s always that sadness, of course, when you find the grave of a child. This little one looked particularly small and helpless, dwarfed by the interior of the cave, a tiny, fragile little bundle against all that monumental stone.
Then, of course, we started clearing the wall with a fury, desperate to get inside and document everything before all the new air rushing in started to go to work on the grave goods. And a good thing, too; there was a shroud wrapped around the body, and the relative lack of moisture had kept it from degrading too badly. I think I went a little mad when I spotted that! I didn’t even wait for the wall to be removed, I just shoved myself through the first vaguely human-sized gap, and got to work. Earned me a couple of rather nasty scrapes and a lecture from Magdaleth when we got back to camp, but bagging that shroud before the air could get to it would’ve been worth breaking both my arms. Real elven cloth! Still mostly intact! Every archaeologist from here to Uiven is going to be green with envy when they see this. (And yes, I did take pictures of the body in situ before bagging the shroud, though I admit they were probably a little perfunctory in my haste. I could just see it breaking down- well. What’s done is done. Lossam put down a rock in place of the body, thinking himself very funny, I’m sure). On a similar note, there were also a pile of wooden (!!) beads still intact, in a circle that suggested they were once linked into a bracelet. Elves of this period usually used metal, so that’s another exciting find to investigate!
There was a whole dragon’s hoard of other artifacts on the stone around the body, which we haven’t touched yet. Just thinking about the fact that the hands that placed these here did so over six thousand years ago brought honest-to-Ilúvatar tears to my eyes. It’s hard to put into words exactly what I was feeling. It was like I could see something of their thought in the way they’d placed the items on the stone; it was a moment of connection, of the sudden realisation that those people who lived all those thousands of years ago were just as real as you.
Revia took the rest of the photos - she is supposed to be doing the tech, after all. She spent the whole afternoon with her nose practically pressed up against the camera screen, then came up with some crazy theory over dinner about the child being both human and elven, based on the particulars of the grave goods. Sounds crazy to me - elven/human hybrids are just a myth, at least so far as the evidence I’ve seen - but we were going to send a sample from the child’s body off for testing anyway. It’ll turn up anything unusual. Meanwhile, Revia gamely agreed to lay a bet with me about whether or not her theory was correct - loser buys the winner a bottle of their favourite poison. Looks like we’ll turn her into a proper archaeologist yet!
11th June, 2376, Sev. A.
Well, it looks like I owe my PhD student a bottle of her favourite liquor.
The lab called me - actually called me, which they have never done before of their own volition in nearly thirty years of working with them - to tell me about their results from the Blackglass Child. While I do often accuse them of- well, let’s just say, things that would be covered by the phrase ‘slow on the uptake’ - I can’t deny they seemed to realise immediately the absolute ground-breaking gob-smacking import of what they’d found. I actually sat silently on the phone for a good thirty seconds after they told me, staring down at my desk like I’d been struck between the eyes by one of Professor Ringten’s precious dwarven forge hammers.
But the DNA doesn’t lie: the Blackglass Child is the first - the FIRST EVER - human/elven hybrid we have ever discovered.
I really had to sit there and take it all in for a moment after I got off the call. Is this what the Ithil Five team felt when they uncovered the Tomb of Elessar, I wondered? The sudden knowledge that they were about to change their entire field, that their names would be remembered for years to come?
Hell, I haven’t even considered what this is going to do to the Elessar researchers. They’ve been arguing about whether he really had an elven wife and half-elven children for over two hundred years; Blackglass Child is about to really put the cat among the pigeons.
And to think Revia worked it out immediately from just looking at the grave goods! I knew she was going to be someone special when I read her thesis proposal, but I didn’t think she’d be this good. Of course I immediately invited her to co-author the paper; it would feel too much like stealing to write about her theory under only my name. She made some perfunctory noises about finishing her thesis, but I told her I’d convince the department to let her have another year. After this discovery, I don’t think her stipend will be much of an issue!