Adelard Took

The name Adelard belongs to a class of grand, old-fashioned first names that the hobbits of the Shire were fond of bestowing, and which the Tooks used more freely than most families. In the note on translation appended to the chronicle, Tolkien explains that such names were largely without meaning in the hobbits' own speech, being inherited forms whose sense had faded; in rendering the Red Book into English he therefore replaced them with names of comparable character and antiquity, drawn for the most part from Frankish and Gothic sources. Adelard is such a substitution rather than a word of the Shire-tongue: a continental Germanic compound whose elements carry the senses of nobility and of hardiness. Its dignified ring is the point of it, matching a fashion for high-sounding names that the chronicle treats as a family habit rather than an individual distinction.

The family name is likewise a rendering. Took stands for the hobbits' own Tûk, anglicised in spelling and sound for the reader, and it names one of the oldest and most considerable houses of the Shire. The Tooks were reckoned to keep something of the Fallohide strain in them, a people readier than other hobbits for oddity and adventure; they held their lands in the green hill country of the Westfarthing, with their chief dwelling at Great Smials in Tuckborough, and the office of Thain had come to their head and remained there. Adelard is one of the many bearers of that name recorded in the Took genealogy set out among the appendices, a member of the wider kindred rather than of its ruling line.

That kinship explains his standing at Bag End, for Bilbo's mother was Belladonna Took, and the Tooks were accordingly his mother's people and frequent guests at his table. Of Adelard himself the narrative preserves almost nothing beyond his name: no office, no dwelling, no words of his own. What character he has comes indirectly, from the pointed wording of a present addressed to him, and that belongs to the account of the farewell feast rather than to his origins.

The chronicle fixes Adelard Took to a single week. No dated deed of his is recorded before the autumn of the year 3001 of the Third Age, which the Shire reckoned as 1401, when Bilbo Baggins kept his hundred-and-eleventh birthday and Frodo his thirty-third on the same day, the twenty-second of September. The Tale of Years enters that year as the one in which Bilbo held his farewell feast and left the Shire; the narrative gives the occasion at length, since it was the hinge on which the Ring passed from one keeper to another. Adelard stood within the wide circle of kin and neighbours who could expect an invitation, the guest-list running long and leaning heavily towards the families to which Bilbo was connected on his mother's side. He is not named among those who spoke or acted that evening, and his presence at the field below Bag End is an inference from what followed rather than a statement of the record.

The custom that brought Adelard's name into the chronicle was the hobbit practice by which the celebrant, rather than the guests, did the giving: on a birthday one handed out presents instead of receiving them. Bilbo kept this on a scale suited to the number, distributing gifts through the day and dealing with the greater part of his possessions at once, since he meant to be gone by nightfall. Some things were given directly at the feast; the rest were left behind in the house, each with a label attached naming its recipient, to be collected by those who called for them. Several of these labels carried more than a name. The chronicler notes that a number of them were barbed, and that certain recipients failed to catch the point while others took it well enough.

The label that fell to Adelard was tied to an umbrella, and its wording did not merely name him but pressed the point of ownership, setting the article aside as his and no one else's. The chronicler supplies the reason in a single dry aside: Adelard had over the years made off with a good many umbrellas that bore no owner's name on them. The joke turns on that absence. An unmarked umbrella in a crowded hall belongs to whoever picks it up, and Bilbo's remedy was to give one that could not be taken by mistake or by convenient forgetfulness, because it announced whose it was. The gift is therefore both a present and a correction, and it is the whole of Adelard's characterisation in the work: he is a man who goes home with other people's umbrellas, and the fact is reported without comment or reproach.

The distribution itself belongs to the following morning, the twenty-third of September, by which time Bilbo had already vanished from the pavilion in mid-speech and walked out of the Shire in the dark. Bag End was besieged from early in the day by callers who had come for their labelled goods, and Frodo, left as heir and executor of his cousin's whims, handed them out until the house was nearly emptied and he was obliged to shut the door on the last of them. Adelard's umbrella reached him from a giver who was by then well away on the road east. The scene closes with the arrival of the Sackville-Bagginses, whose own labelled item carried the sharpest edge of all, and with Frodo's refusal to be drawn into an argument about the estate.

After that morning the record lets him go. He plays no part in the events of the following seventeen years, nor in the War of the Ring, and when the narrative returns to the Shire at the end of the quest and describes the rising against Sharkey's men, the Tooks who are named are Paladin II and his household in the Tookland, who shut the roads about Tuckborough and held their hills against the ruffians. Adelard is not among them, and nothing indicates whether he was still living. His name survives in the family tree set out among the appendices and in the single label of 3001, which is a fair measure of the chronicle's method with the Shire's minor households: a hobbit may be preserved entire in one sentence about an umbrella, and the work is content to leave him there.

Within the work Adelard Took is a recipient and nothing else. He holds none of the few public offices the Shire maintained: he is not Mayor of Michel Delving, whose holder presided at feasts and stood at the head of the Watch and the Messenger Service, nor is he numbered among the Shirriffs or the Bounders who walked the borders, and the hereditary dignity of his own family rests with its ruling line rather than with him. Nor does the chronicle give him any of the informal standing by which a hobbit might carry weight — no farm, no trade, no reputation for judgement, no following. What he possesses is kinship, which is enough to place him on a guest-list and to give him a claim on a labelled article, and it is the whole extent of his purchase on events.

His function in the narrative is comparative. He stands in a small gallery of recipients whose gifts were each chosen to answer a known failing: a bookcase left bare for a borrower who never returned what he took, a basket for a lady given to writing letters, writing materials for a cousin who never answered them, a mirror for a young relation thought too fond of her own looks, and a set of silver spoons for the kinswoman suspected of removing such things. Adelard's umbrella belongs to that series, and the series is the point. Taken together the labels sketch the ordinary vices of a comfortable community — acquisitiveness, vanity, neglect — with no crime among them and no consequence attached to any.

The limit of his part is best measured by what he stands next to. The occasion at which his name is fixed is also the occasion on which the Ring changed hands, and the chronicle records no effect of that on him whatever: he is in the neighbourhood of the one object of real power in the book and it passes over him entirely. He is given no knowledge of what has happened, no share in the decision, and no later part in its working out. Hobbits in general have no faculty beyond the ordinary, unless their quietness of foot and their capacity to go unnoticed be reckoned one, and in Adelard's case even that has been turned to a joke about property. The chronicle grants him a habit rather than an ability, and declines to make anything further of him.

The family trees appended to the chronicle are the only place where Adelard's connections can actually be seen, since the narrative supplies him with no companion, no household and no interlocutor. There he stands on a collateral branch, drawn like the ruling line itself from Gerontius, the Old Took, whose great number of sons supplied the Shire with Took cousins for three generations together. The Thainship in the year of the feast lay with Ferumbras III, who died without issue, and passed after him to Paladin II, whose son Peregrin left the Shire in the Ring-bearer's company. Adelard belongs to that kindred without standing anywhere near its succession, and the tree enters him as it enters most of its names, by descent and issue alone.

The same tree grants him what the story withholds: sons. Reginard and Everard are set beneath his name, and one of them crosses the narrative at the very gathering that fixed his father in it, for Everard Took climbed onto a table with Melilot Brandybuck and danced the springle-ring there before the company. The pairing is worth remarking. Father and son are each preserved by one moment of that evening and nothing else, the one by a label, the other by a dance, and neither is followed afterwards. It is a fair sample of how the chronicle treats the crowded middle ranks of a great family: a name, a single characteristic gesture, and silence.

Outside his kin the chronicle preserves one relation only, and it runs to Bilbo. What it discloses is not warmth but long familiarity: the giver knew the habit well enough to turn it into a public joke, and trusted that the company knew it too. The other half of that relation is a set of neighbours who are never identified, hobbits whose property had quietly become his over the years and who evidently made no complaint worth recording. Set against the Sackville-Bagginses, whose designs on Bag End made them enemies in plain earnest, Adelard measures what the sharper labels of that day were not aimed at. He is teased rather than opposed, and the Shire keeps him among its own.