A thousand years passed without note...

Long since did the fellowship of the ring part company in the Grey Havens. Gandalf, Frodo and Bilbo set sail with the high elves unto Valinor whilst the hobbits left behind returned home. Samwise Gamgee and Rosie, Pippin and Merry are now but distant a memory of the hobbit consciousness. The songs sung in the Green Dragon of the heroism and valour that saves Middle Earth from Sauron now long forgotten. Hobbits themselves are a now fading race that inhabits the hostile margins of middle earth shunning contact and readily able to hide from those they are wary of. To you or me they would seem but a rustle in the undergrowth, or a flash of brown akin to a hare that is disturbed in the grass. Yet make no mistake, these reticent creatures suffer no fools. So warned then take note and leave them be; for they are a fading race and will suffer the long road ahead for no-one less than a descendant of the king.

The king had indeed returned at the end of the third age and with him came once again order and a return to the pastoralist notions that Hobbits so welcome. After the world mourned the passing of Aragorn and the noble, beautiful Arwen their half Elven kin took control of middle earth and for the first centuries the world was renewed and all rejoiced in the peace that settled therein. The shadow had failed utterly at the end and it retreated behind the impenetrable passes of the east to gnaw on its defeat and brood for millennia on revenge.

So what now of the Elves and Dwarves, Hobbits and Ents and Men and Orcs? Here is the story of the fall of all to the shadow that ended the fourth age of middle earth...but it is not the part of this story to tell of the intervening years through this age. Of the great, enduring peace and the swift rise of men to now take dominion over all others in middle earth. But in the end men faltered and waned despite the promise shown at the inception of all they created. So it is now as the world changes and once again a dread creeps into the forests and plains that the shadow has again returned does the story begin.

The autumn was advancing borne aloft on the demise of summer. Long shadows crept across shorter days and the Mallorn long bereft of Galadriel’s care cast down their foliage and held up their boughs to the western wind. On such a day came three wanderers from the west and their rainment was of the hues of fall. Long bronzen cloaks swept away the leaves at their feet and their hooded features shrouded old, grey eyes. For once again the Istari had come to middle earth.