Meriadoc Brandybuck

Meriadoc Brandybuck was born in the year 2982 of the Third Age, which the hobbits themselves reckoned as 1382 by the Shire count. He was the only child of Saradoc Brandybuck, head of his family and Master of Buckland, and of Esmeralda, a daughter of the Took line, so that from birth he stood in the direct succession of the house that governed the lands east of the Brandywine. His home was Brandy Hall at Bucklebury, the great warren of tunnels which the Brandybucks had delved into the hillside and which sheltered a numerous and sociable clan. Kinship bound him closely to the other hobbits of the Fellowship: through the Brandybuck descent he was a first cousin once removed of Frodo Baggins, who had himself been raised at Brandy Hall after the death of his parents, and through his mother he was cousin to Peregrin Took.

Buckland was a late and slightly irregular settlement, founded when Gorhendad Oldbuck crossed the river, took land on its eastern bank and altered his family name accordingly. Its people kept habits that other hobbits found odd: they went on the water in boats, some of them could swim, and they set a door in their houses at the back as well as the front. Living with the Old Forest at their shoulder, they raised the tall hedge called the High Hay and shut their gates at nightfall, and they were held by the rest of the Shire to be a queer breed, an impression owing something to the strain of Stoor blood that persisted among them and among the folk of the Marish. Merry's own cast of mind — practical, watchful, at ease with maps, rivers and arrangements — belongs recognisably to that stock.

In the fiction of translation that governs the Red Book, his true Westron name was Kalimac Brandagamba, commonly shortened to Kali, a form carrying the sense of gaiety and good humour. Tolkien rendered this as Meriadoc, whose familiar abbreviation Merry preserves the same suggestion in English, while Brandagamba became Brandybuck, its first element echoing the river-name and its second the buck of the family's older style, Oldbuck. The Celtic colouring of Meriadoc was chosen deliberately, since Bucklander names struck other hobbits as strange and required a correspondingly unusual flavour in translation. By the conventions set out for Elvish and adjacent names, the final consonant is a hard k, and the vowels of the second and third syllables are sounded apart rather than run together. Among the Rohirrim he was later known by a name of their own tongue, Holdwine, built from elements meaning faithful and friend.

Long before he left the Shire, Merry had gathered the secret that governed his cousin's life. As a boy he had seen Bilbo Baggins vanish from sight, and in later years he had contrived a glimpse of the old hobbit's private book; when Frodo began quietly to arrange the sale of Bag End in 3018 of the Third Age, Merry was already the organiser of a small conspiracy of friends, with Samwise Gamgee as its reluctant informant. It was Merry who bought and furnished the house at Crickhollow that served as the pretence of Frodo's retirement across the Brandywine, and who led the company through the Old Forest a few days after they left Hobbiton in late September. There he came nearest to an early death, swallowed by a crack in the trunk of Old Man Willow and freed only by the intervention of Tom Bombadil; two days afterwards, on the Barrow-downs, he woke from the spell of a wight speaking with a memory not his own, and took from the mound a long dagger forged by the Men of Westernesse against the power of Angmar.

At Bree he suffered his first direct encounter with the enemy, walking out from the inn at night and falling under the shadow of a Rider before he could be carried back senseless. He reached Rivendell with the others in October 3018, and when the Company of the Ring was chosen he was included over Elrond's doubts, the wizard Gandalf arguing that friendship counted for more than strength in such a matter. Merry's contributions on the road were of a practical kind — the ponies, the baggage, the firewood carried up the shoulder of Caradhras — and he passed with the rest through Moria in January 3019 and into Lothlórien, where Galadriel gave him a silver belt with a clasp shaped as a golden flower. On 26 February the Company broke apart at Parth Galen; Merry and Peregrin Took drew the orc-band away from Frodo, fought beside Boromir until he fell, and were bound and carried westward across Rohan toward Isengard.

The captivity ended at the eaves of Fangorn at the close of February, when the Riders of the Mark under Éomer destroyed the orc-company by night and the two hobbits cut their bonds and slipped into the trees. There they met Treebeard, eldest of the Ents, drank of his draughts, and by their account of Saruman's felling of the woods helped move the Entmoot of the first days of March to a decision that had waited an age. Merry and Pippin rode with Treebeard to the assault, and saw the Ents break the circle of Isengard and drown its works on 3 March 3019. Two days later Gandalf came with Théoden and Aragorn to the ruined gates and found the pair sitting at ease among the wreckage with the salvaged stores of Saruman. That night the palantír of Orthanc separated them: Pippin was carried away to Minas Tirith, and Merry remained with the King of Rohan.

In the days that followed Merry laid his sword at Théoden's feet and was accepted into his household as esquire, receiving harness and a helm and riding at the king's side to Dunharrow. When the host mustered there under the darkness that came out of Mordor on 10 March, Théoden judged him too small for the pace of the ride and ordered him left behind; a young rider calling himself Dernhelm took him up in secret beneath a cloak, and so he crossed the Drúadan Forest by the paths shown by Ghân-buri-Ghân. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields on 15 March he found himself lying in the wreck of the king's fall before the Lord of the Nazgûl, and, creeping up behind while Dernhelm held the creature's attention, drove the Westernesse blade into the sinew behind its knee. The stroke broke the spell that guarded the Witch-king and allowed Éowyn to end him; the dagger itself withered away, and Merry's sword-arm was left cold and useless. He heard Théoden's last words to him, wandered the city in a stupor of grief and the Black Breath, and was found by Pippin and brought to the Houses of Healing, where Aragorn recalled him with athelas.

Too weak for the march to the Black Gate, he stayed in Minas Tirith until the Ring was destroyed on 25 March, and was brought to the Field of Cormallen in April for the reunion with Frodo and Sam, and to Aragorn's crowning on 1 May 3019. He rode north with the funeral escort of Théoden, and at the burial at Edoras on 10 August Éomer confirmed him a knight of the Riddermark under the name the Riders had given him, while Éowyn made him the gift of an ancient horn out of the hoard of the dragon Scatha, taken north by the forefathers of the Eorlingas. That horn served him at once on his return: finding the Shire under the rule of ruffians in the service of Saruman, he and Pippin roused the country, and on 3 November Merry led the hobbits at the Battle of Bywater and cut down the ruffians' captain. The war ended in his own land within a day, with Saruman dead on the doorstep of Bag End.

In the design of the book Merry occupies the position of the capable ordinary person: no heroic lineage, no inherited gift, no magic. What he contributes is observation, memory and arrangement — the quiet gathering of what his elders wished kept hidden, a working knowledge of country and river, and a habit of preparing for what others have not yet noticed. His decisive interventions are made by speech and information rather than by arms, most plainly in what he was able to report to the Ents about the felling of their woods, where the outcome turned on testimony rather than on any strength of his own. He serves besides as the hinge between the Shire and the Mark, the one hobbit of the four to take formal service under a king of Men.

Little of his effectiveness is properly his own. The Prologue credits his whole people with a hardiness out of proportion to their size and a knack of slipping quietly out of sight when larger folk blunder by; these are the qualities on which his part at the Pelennor rests. The virtue of the stroke that broke the Witch-king's guard belonged to the weapon: a blade of the vanished realm of Westernesse, wrought long before with spells against Angmar, and no other weapon would have wounded him so. To this belongs the old word remembered in Gondor that the Lord of the Nazgûl would not fall by the hand of man, a condition which a hobbit and a woman met without contriving it. The horn Éowyn gave him carries a comparable inherited property: blown, it puts fear into enemies and heart into friends.

The limits are set out as plainly as the achievements. Merry has no training in arms and never prevails by strength; he is taken at Parth Galen, carried bound across Rohan, and freed by the intervention of others. Théoden's refusal to let him ride from Dunharrow was a sober judgement about pace and stature, and the blow he did strike was possible only because he came unseen from behind while the enemy's whole attention was fixed elsewhere. It cost him the dagger, which perished in the act, and the use of his arm, and it left him under the Black Breath beyond the reach of ordinary care. He was still too weak to march with the host to the Black Gate; the deed made him no warrior.

Among the hobbits Merry's bonds run in unexpected directions. Though the younger by more than a decade, he stood toward Frodo in something close to the position of an elder: it was he who watched, arranged and quietly took charge, and the habit persisted long after the journey, when he and Pippin rode over from Buckland and found Frodo ill on the anniversaries of his old wounds, told nothing and permitted to do nothing. They were at the shore for the last parting and rode back together with Sam in silence. With Peregrin Took the tie is of a different kind. The two are treated by nearly everyone they meet as a single article, and they are separated only twice in the whole account; but Merry is consistently the one who has thought a step further, and Pippin the one who blurts, asks and stumbles into consequence. A third friendship of the early days had a domestic sequel: Fredegar Bolger, who kept the pretence at Crickhollow while the others went east and was later imprisoned by the ruffians, was brother to Estella, whom Merry married.

Beyond his own kind and the Rohirrim, Merry has a knack for being taken seriously by the very old and the very great. Treebeard, who measured everything against ages, ended by counting hobbits among the living kinds worth remembering, and the acquaintance was resumed by letter and visit afterwards. Aragorn, who called him back from the Black Breath, kept up the connection as king. Toward his enemies his manner is markedly unimpressed: he answered Saruman's contempt with mockery rather than fear, and the powers that nearly killed him in the Old Forest and on the downs were never adversaries he could argue with, only accidents of an older world. It is characteristic that his one deadly opponent was met not in a quarrel of his own but in defence of others.

In the earliest written stages of the sequel to The Hobbit, the figure who became Merry bore the name Marmaduke Brandybuck. He belonged to a shifting and much larger group of travelling companions gathered around a hero who was then not Frodo but Bingo Bolger-Baggins, a son of Bilbo; the other hobbits of the party included an Odo and a Frodo of the Took family, so that the name eventually given to the Ring-bearer was for a long while attached to a minor companion. What is striking in these drafts is that the Brandybuck's function was fixed well before his name was. From the first sketches of the flight from Hobbiton he is the one who knows the eastern country, who goes ahead with the baggage and sees to the house on the far bank, and who is at home on the river; the practical, forward-looking part was written before the character had acquired either his final name or his kinship with the hero.

The party was reduced by stages, and the process left its marks. Odo proved the most troublesome of the companions: Tolkien wrote him in and out of successive versions, and his parts were divided among the hobbits who survived into the published story, with the comic and impulsive strain passing chiefly to the Took. Only as the travelling company settled into four did Marmaduke give way to Meriadoc, which had the further advantage of yielding a natural everyday shortening. The elaborate account of the name as a rendering of an untranslated hobbit original, and the Buckland genealogy that goes with it, belong to a later stage of reflection than the character himself, who existed for years under a name Tolkien later discarded.

In Ralph Bakshi's animated version of 1978 Merry was voiced by Simon Chandler. Because that film begins the journey without the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs or Tom Bombadil, the conspiracy at Crickhollow and the origin of the hobbit's Westernesse dagger disappear with them, and Merry enters the story simply as one of Frodo's companions on the road east; since the film stops after the fighting at Helm's Deep, his service to Théoden and his part in the great battle before Minas Tirith were never reached. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, in which Richard O'Callaghan took the role, is the fuller treatment: its twenty-six parts keep the character's arc essentially intact, including the return to the Shire and its rising, which most screen versions drop, although the radio series likewise passes over Bombadil and the episodes in the Old Forest.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 cast Dominic Monaghan, and reshaped the character considerably. The forethought that marks the hobbit of the book is removed at the outset: instead of organising a conspiracy and preparing a refuge across the river, Merry is swept into the journey by chance while running from an angry farmer, so that he leaves the Shire knowing nothing of the Ring. He and Pippin are treated for much of the films as a comic pair of near-equals, which flattens the distinction the novel draws between them, and the initiative before Isengard shifts to Pippin, who steers Treebeard toward the felled woods after the Ents have already refused to march. The stroke against the Lord of the Nazgûl is retained, but without the account of the blade's making that explains why it worked; Éowyn's smuggling of Merry out of Dunharrow is kept. The Shire's own war is cut entirely, and with it his standing as a leader at home, as are the Rohirric name given him afterwards and his later career as a writer and Master of Buckland.