User blog comment:Pippa's Ghost/Ideas for Agents -- Agent Hild/@comment-900674-20140504174417

I quite like her. Partially that's because I'm the resident Tolkien expert on the Board (see: Netilardo), and thus seeing someone who actually slots very nicely into Middle-earth's socio-political dynamics is always a plus (I once spent ages trying to convince someone that, no, your random character from the northern Misty Mountains can't be half-elven without some serious explaining...). I don't think being Dunlending/Rohirrim makes her speshul - it's a perfectly valid genotype. (One possible pitfall - most badfic authors have never heard of Tharbad, so how did one dream up an entire story about it? Possible answer: well, she thought better of it pretty quickly!)

I also like the optimistic angle. We don't see it all that often, and in this case it's pretty justified - we're talking about someone from hardscrabble living, far away from civilisation, among a generally hated people. Working somewhere with regular meals, no mosquitoes, and no-one trying to kill you. Well, almost no-one - this is the PPC, after all.

I think you're overstating the case with 'washed once a week in the muddy river'. Leaving aside the question of how much that would actually clean you, muddy rivers are a good source of, oh, diptheria, typhoid, malaria... I think you'd be more likely to have 'when it rained'. That said, I'm not sure how fast the Greyflood moved at Tharbad - the fact that Boromir lost his horse suggests it was quite rapid, so it would be less muddy. Of course, that still means you wouldn't bathe in it...

The general dirty-water situation also means she wouldn't be used to drinking, well, water. The traditional purpose of alcohol is to make water safe to drink - that's what wine and beer were both for, and I suspect most of the others, too. Beer is made from wheat or barley (and ale specifically barley), and so require a grain-raising agriculture... or trade, technically, but it's a long way to the Forsaken Inn, and I doubt the Fords of Isen were open to Dunlending bandits. Some form of cider might be brewable - it can be made from any fruit - or mead, if there's wild bees (and if they're relatives of Beorn's, that might be a lot of honey).

The point to all that is that she would already have had an intimate familiarity with alcohol, and in fact would have spent a lot of the time partially drunk. Does she like light ale because it's, well, lighter than what she's used to, or because she used to only have cider/mead and likes the new version? That's one to think about, not necessarily to answer aloud. ;)

(Also, that all means she may have another 'modern life' hangup - has she quite got her head round the idea that water is now safe to drink? It's a bit of a shift of outlook)

All in all - she sounds like a good 'former peasant in HQ' character. I think she'd be interesting to read.