Adam Hornblower

Adam Hornblower is placed among hobbits by his surname before anything else can be said of him. The Hornblowers are one of the settled Shire families of some standing in the published narrative: they stand in the list of kindreds bidden to Bilbo Baggins's farewell feast at Bag End, ranked beside the Bagginses, Tooks, Brandybucks, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots, which is to say among those households whose connections reached into the older and better-known families of the Westfarthing. No hobbit bearing the given name Adam, however, is named anywhere in the works Tolkien published in his lifetime, and the individual so called is preserved only in his working papers; what those papers say of him belongs to the account of the drafts elsewhere in this article, not here.

The form of the name follows the convention Tolkien set out for himself in the appendix on translation, where the text of the Red Book is presented as an English rendering rather than a transcription. Hobbit first names, he explained there, were mostly meaningless in ordinary speech and were therefore replaced by familiar names of our own tongue, while the more ambitious families, particularly those of Fallohide descent, kept a taste for sonorous or high-sounding forms drawn from older legend. A plain, unadorned name of the everyday register sits with the first of these classes and carries no etymology within the Shire's own speech. Family names, by contrast, generally came from nicknames, from the places a household held, or from a trade; Hornblower reads transparently as a name of the last kind, one who sounds a horn, and is offered in English as such rather than glossed from any Westron original.

Where the Hornblowers can be located more narrowly, the published texts point south. Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom in the Southfarthing is remembered as the hobbit who first raised pipe-weed in his garden, in the days of Isengrim the Second, and the leaf of that district afterwards carried his village's name far beyond the Shire's borders. The family is not assigned in the published books to any one of the three strains from which the hobbits of the Shire were reckoned to descend, the Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides, and nothing in the surname requires a particular line; a Hornblower may accordingly be taken simply as Shire-folk of the ordinary settled sort. Any bearer of the name is to be understood within that setting, a hobbit of the later Third Age Shire rather than a figure of the wider history.

No deed, journey or turning-point in the published narrative is assigned to a hobbit bearing the given name Adam. A chronology under this heading can therefore only be the chronology of the household and the district to which the surname attaches, set out from the dates the published books actually fix. That record is unusually full for a family of the Shire's middling rank, because the Hornblowers happen to stand at the beginning of the one Shire enterprise Tolkien troubled to date with any precision, and because the fortunes of that enterprise are followed through to the last years of the Third Age. What follows is that sequence, given in the Shire's own reckoning with the corresponding Third Age years, and the reader should understand throughout that it is the family's history rather than the individual's.

The fixed point falls about the year 1070 of the Shire's reckoning, which is to say around the year 2670 of the Third Age, in the days of Isengrim the Second. In that season Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom, in the Southfarthing, is credited with raising the pipe-weed plant in his garden for the first time within the Shire's bounds. The plant was not native there. Meriadoc Brandybuck's later treatise on the subject, from which the published Prologue draws its account, held that it had come north out of Gondor, where Men had long grown it for its flowers, and that it reached the Southfarthing by way of Bree, where the practice of smoking it was older still. Tobold's contribution was thus cultivation and the beginning of a trade rather than discovery, but it was enough to attach the family's name permanently to the district's chief crop.

From that beginning the Southfarthing plantations grew into the Shire's principal export, and the strains raised there carried the names of the village and of the first grower alike into common use far beyond the Farthings. Over the intervening three centuries the leaf travelled with Dwarves along the East Road, with the Rangers of the North, and with Gandalf, who had taken up the habit himself; by the closing years of the Third Age it was known in Bree, in Rohan and in Isengard. The published books record no further Hornblower by name across this long middle stretch, and the family's standing must be inferred from the trade rather than from any chronicle. The one glimpse of them as a household comes at the very end of the period, at Bilbo Baggins's farewell feast in 1401 (Third Age 3001), noticed elsewhere in this article.

The trade's reach becomes evidence in its own right in the first week of March 3019 (Shire-reckoning 1419), when Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took, sitting in the wreckage of Isengard, found among Saruman's stores barrels of leaf from the Southfarthing marked with the growers' brands. The discovery mattered less as comfort than as intelligence: it showed that goods had been passing south and west out of the Shire in quantity, by arrangement and over some time, and that the Shire's isolation had already been breached from within before any enemy crossed its borders. The leaf in those barrels came from the district the Hornblowers had planted, and the traffic that carried it there was the same traffic that would shortly be turned against the Shire itself.

The years 1418 and 1419 brought that consequence home. Lotho Sackville-Baggins had bought up much of the Southfarthing, plantations included, and the crop was carted away south while the Shire went short; the buying was funded, as became clear afterwards, from Isengard. What followed was the seizure of the Shire's own machinery of order, the imprisonment of the Mayor and others in the Lockholes at Michel Delving, and the arrival of Saruman himself. The rising came in November 1419: the ruffians were broken at the Battle of Bywater on the third of that month, in which nineteen hobbits were killed and some thirty hurt, and Saruman was cut down at Bag End the same day. The Southfarthing's growers are not individually named in the account of these events, and no Hornblower appears among the hobbits recorded as fighting there.

The last date that touches the family's trade is 1420 (Third Age 3020), the year of restoration, when the Shire's fields and orchards yielded as they had not done in living memory and the pipe-weed of that harvest was afterwards remembered as the finest anyone could recall. The Southfarthing plantations, stripped and plundered the year before, thus close the published record in recovery rather than ruin. Beyond this the chronology cannot be carried, and none of it can be attached to a particular hobbit named Adam: the sole attestation of that name lies outside the works published in Tolkien's lifetime, among the unpublished working papers, and belongs to the account of the drafts given elsewhere in this article rather than to any history of events in Middle-earth.

Nothing in the works published in Tolkien's lifetime assigns an office, a function or a station to a hobbit of this name, and the honest statement of his role is that he has none on record. What can be described instead is the narrow field within which such a role would have had to fall. The Shire recognised very few positions of authority: the Mayor of Michel Delving, chosen every seven years at the Free Fair and combining the duties of Postmaster and First Shirriff with the largely ceremonial business of presiding at banquets; the Thain, whose title had passed to the Tooks and whose command of the Shire-muster had long since become nominal; and the Master of Buckland, whose writ ran only east of the Brandywine. Below these stood the Shirriffs, a dozen men employed chiefly in rounding up straying beasts, and the Bounders who walked the borders. No Hornblower is named as holding any of these.

As to powers, the published texts are unusually explicit in denying them. Hobbits worked no magic and possessed no art beyond the ordinary; what looked uncanny in them was simply an inherited knack for slipping out of sight quietly when large and clumsy folk blundered near, a skill sharpened by long practice rather than granted. Their real capacities were of the plain kind: keen sight and hearing, dexterity of hand, considerable accuracy with thrown stones, and a toughness that recovered quickly from hardship and outlasted the expectations of taller peoples. Where a hobbit of the Shire proves capable, the published narrative attributes it to endurance and to nerve found late, not to anything latent in the race.

The limits are correspondingly firm. The Shire-folk had grown unwarlike, keeping weapons mostly as ornaments or for hunting, and the muster existed on paper rather than in the field; the peace they took for granted rested on a watch kept by others outside their borders, of which they knew almost nothing and for which they gave no thanks. A hobbit of the settled families was therefore a householder, a grower or a tradesman, with such standing as land and connection afforded and no reach beyond the Farthings. Any claim of influence, skill or importance for a figure attested only in draft material would exceed what the sources permit, and none is made here.

Hobbits reckoned kinship with unusual care, and the Prologue to the published narrative makes that habit a defining trait: families of any standing kept their descent in mind, and the compilers of the Red Book thought genealogical tables worth appending to a history of wars and rings. That is the measure against which the silence here has to be read. Of the four hobbit lines set out in tabular form at the end of the work — the Bagginses of Hobbiton, the Tooks of Great Smials, the Brandybucks of Buckland and the forefathers of Samwise Gamgee — none is a Hornblower table, and no Hornblower is entered by marriage into any of them. For a household otherwise treated as a family of consequence, this leaves no parent, no spouse, no child and no cousin that can be named from the published books.

What the record does preserve is a relationship of a different order, between the family and the hobbits who wrote about it. The Shire's memory of the Hornblowers is not their own; it survives because Meriadoc Brandybuck, who among his other studies compiled a treatise on the Shire's herbs, took an interest in where the leaf had come from and set down what he could learn of the first grower. The Prologue's account depends on that work, as the wider history depends on the books kept at Great Smials and Undertowers by Bilbo, Frodo and their successors. A Hornblower is thus known through a Brandybuck's scholarship rather than through any family chronicle of his own, and a name that entered no table entered no memory either.

Nor is there an enmity to report. Where the published narrative does trace a hobbit quarrel it does so in detail — the Sackville-Bagginses' long designs upon Bag End are followed through three generations and two lifetimes — which shows how visible such a relation becomes once the sources have one to give. For the Southfarthing growers there is nothing comparable: the hostility that reached them in the last years came as purchase and requisition, directed at land and crop rather than at persons, and no grower is named as anyone's adversary. Allies are equally absent. A hobbit of this name stands, on the evidence, without recorded kin, friend or opponent.