Adalgrim Took

The name recorded for this hobbit in the genealogical tables is Adalgrim Took, and both halves of it are, by the fiction the book maintains about itself, translations rather than transcriptions. Appendix F explains that hobbit personal names have been given in forms an English reader can hear, and that the Shire families of standing were fond of first names with a grand, old-fashioned ring, drawn from tales rather than from anything meaningful in daily speech. Adalgrim fits that habit exactly: it is built from Germanic elements of the kind Tolkien used to signal antiquity and rank, and its second element recurs across the family, in his father Hildigrim and in the earlier Thain Isengrim. Read against the tree as a whole, the name is less an individual coinage than a marker of house style, one of the ways the Tooks are shown announcing their own consequence.

He belongs to the hobbits of the Shire, and within them to a family the Prologue singles out for its unusual temper. The Tooks are described there as the leading house of the Shire, holding the Thainship, and as carrying more of the Fallohide strain than most of their neighbours, which is offered as the reason for the streak of adventurousness that occasionally surfaced among them. The heading of his own genealogical table places the family at the Great Smials, the ancestral delvings in Tuckborough at the heart of the Tookland, and it is that setting, rather than any recorded deed, that the tables assign to him.

His descent runs from Gerontius, the Old Took, through Hildigrim, who was not the eldest of that long family, so that Adalgrim stands in a junior branch rather than in the direct succession of Thains of his own day. Hildigrim's marriage to Rosa Baggins gives him a second line of kinship, since it makes him a first cousin of Bilbo on the Baggins side as well as through the Took descent that Bilbo shared by way of Belladonna. The same tables carry his own children forward into the two households that matter most in the later narrative: a son who would hold the Thainship, and a daughter, Esmeralda, whose marriage joined the house to the Brandybucks of Buckland.

No deed of Adalgrim Took is narrated anywhere in the published work. He survives as an entry in a genealogical table, and the history that can be written for him is therefore the history of a position: the point at which one branch of a family passes its descent forward to the generation that the story does take up. The tables themselves are presented as a compressed selection from much fuller matter, the sort of record the Shire-folk were said to keep with great care and to consult with more enthusiasm than outsiders could easily understand. What follows is accordingly a chronology of the frame around him rather than of his own acts, and every date in it belongs to somebody else's life.

The generation above him closes with the death of Gerontius in 1320 of the Shire Reckoning, at the age of a hundred and thirty, an age the book treats as remarkable enough to be used elsewhere as a measure of longevity. Adalgrim's father Hildigrim was one of that long family, and the descent through him fixes Adalgrim in the century of quiet that the Shire chronicle records between the passing of the Old Took and the disturbances at the end of the Third Age. It is the stretch of years in which, by the reckoning set out in the Tale of Years, Bilbo made the journey east and returned, and in which the Shire's own annals note little beyond harvests, mayors and the ordinary business of the Four Farthings. Nothing places Adalgrim in any of it; the tables give him a generation, not a career.

His significance in the record begins with his children, and specifically with the fact that two of them founded households on opposite sides of the Shire. His son Paladin continued the Took line at Tuckborough; his daughter married into the ruling family of Buckland, so that the descent split between the two hobbit communities that keep their own customs and their own heads. From the Buckland marriage came Meriadoc, born in 1382, and from Paladin came Peregrin, born in 1390. The two are thus first cousins through Adalgrim, and the tables make this the only structural consequence of his life that the narrative later leans on: the closeness of Merry and Pippin, taken for granted from their first appearance, rests on his fatherhood.

The second consequence is the Thainship. The office had descended in a senior line of the Old Took's family, and it did not reach Adalgrim himself; the tables show it held by Ferumbras, who left no issue, after which it came to Paladin. That transfer moved the headship of the Tooks, and with it the titular headship of the Shire's ancient muster, out of the elder branch and into the junior one that Adalgrim represents. By the years of the War of the Ring the Thain is Paladin, a fact the narrative states plainly through his son, and the line runs on to Peregrin, who succeeded to the office in 1434 according to the later entries of the Shire chronicle. The tables record no title for Adalgrim at all, which is itself informative: the honour arrived one generation after him.

When the Shire is finally reached by the troubles of 1418 and 1419, and the Tookland shuts itself against the ruffians and answers them with arrows from the banks above the Smials, the hobbit named as directing that resistance is Paladin, not his father. The narrative of the return names no elder Took of the preceding generation among the living, and the tables give no indication that Adalgrim saw any part of it. It is reasonable to read him as belonging wholly to the years before the disturbance, but the record does not say so, and the honest limit of the entry is that the last event it can attach to him is the raising of his own children.

That limit is worth stating rather than concealing, because it is characteristic of the whole appendix. The family trees exist to let a reader locate the four hobbits of the story within a web of kin, and the names on the intermediate lines are preserved for that purpose: they are the connective tissue of a genealogy compiled, within the fiction, by hobbits who cared about such connections for their own sake. Adalgrim Took is one of those names. Whatever he did in the Great Smials in his own lifetime went unrecorded, and the tale keeps him only as the joint between the Old Took's long generation and the two young Tooks and Brandybucks who leave the Shire.

The question of what power attached to a Took of the Great Smials has an unusually exact answer, because the Prologue sets out the Shire's arrangements in detail, and the answer is a modest one. The Thainship that ran in the family carried the mastership of the Shire-moot and the captaincy of the muster and of the hobbitry-in-arms, but the moot and the muster were called only in emergencies, and since emergencies had long ceased to arise the office had shrunk to a dignity without duties. The single official with regular business was the Mayor of Michel Delving, whose principal function was to preside at feasts, and who doubled as Postmaster and First Shirriff. The Shirriffs themselves were twelve, three to a Farthing, and were occupied chiefly with straying beasts. That is the ceiling of what any Took could have exercised in his own country, and Adalgrim is not recorded as holding even that much.

Nor does the book allow any personal faculty beyond the ordinary endowment of his people. Hobbits are described as possessing no magic at all; the quickness with which they can put themselves out of sight, which strangers took for enchantment, is presented as inherited aptitude sharpened by practice, and their other attested skills are equally plain ones — sure aim with thrown stones and the bow, quiet feet, an endurance out of proportion to their size. Whatever of this Adalgrim had, he had as a hobbit and not as himself, since the tables that preserve him record nothing about his person. The honest statement is that he shares the general capacities of his kind and is credited with none in particular.

What remains is the one kind of authority the Shire actually distributed, and here the Prologue is again the relevant witness: government scarcely existed, and families managed their own affairs, so that real direction lay with the heads of households rather than with any office. A senior Took living at the Smials would have exercised exactly that, over his own household and dependants, and it is the only power the record permits us to assume for him — unnarrated, undated, and inferred from custom rather than from any statement about him. It is worth naming the inference as an inference. The line between what the appendices establish and what the Prologue makes plausible runs directly through this entry, and on the far side of it there is nothing to report.

Adalgrim Took exists in the book only as a point where lines meet, and the relationships attached to him are therefore of an unusual kind: entirely genealogical, never conversational. No character speaks of him, no scene sets him beside a kinsman, and the affection or friction that ordinarily gives a family its shape is nowhere on the page. What the tables do show is that his descendants ended up at the head of both hobbit communities. His daughter Esmeralda married Saradoc Brandybuck, who by the years of the War of the Ring was Master of Buckland, while his son held the Thainship in the Tookland; so at that date the Mistress of Brandy Hall and the Thain of the Shire were sister and brother, and the two offices that the Shire recognised were held within one household of the preceding generation.

The generation below him is more fully recorded than his own. Paladin's marriage to Eglantine Banks produced four children, of whom three were daughters — Pearl, Pimpernel and Pervinca — with Peregrin the youngest and the only son, a position the narrative later exploits when it makes him the heir of an office rather than merely a truant. The Brandybuck side gives Adalgrim one grandson, Meriadoc, sole child of the Master's house. The Took grandchildren were not raised at the Great Smials: Peregrin tells the Steward of Gondor that his father's land lies about Whitwell near Tuckborough, which places the branch among the farming gentry of the Tookland rather than in the ancestral delvings themselves.

The one relationship of his making that the story actually uses is the one it never explains. Merry and Pippin are introduced as intimates and treated throughout as a pair whose loyalty needs no account, and the reason lies a generation back, in the marriage that carried a Took daughter into Buckland. The narrative assumes the bond and leaves the tables to supply its cause. That is the whole of what kinship does for him: it passes through, and lodges elsewhere.