Peregrin Took

Peregrin Took belonged to the hobbits of the Shire, and within that people to the Tooks, one of the oldest and most prominent of its families. The Tooks held the Tookland in the Westfarthing, where their chief dwelling, the Great Smials at Tuckborough, housed the head of the family and a large body of kindred. Like the Brandybucks of Buckland, they were reckoned to preserve something of the Fallohide strain, the least numerous of the three ancestral hobbit-kinds, noted for a readiness to look outward and for friendship with Elves. Peregrin was born in the year 2990 of the Third Age, the son of Paladin Took the Second, and stood in line to inherit both the headship of his family and the office of Thain that had long attended it. He was a first cousin of Meriadoc Brandybuck and a kinsman of Frodo Baggins; since hobbits reached their majority at thirty-three, he was still short of full age when he left the Shire, and the youngest of those who set out with the Ring.

The name by which he is known in the Red Book is, on Tolkien's own account, a rendering rather than a transcription. The everyday speech of the Shire was Westron, and the hobbit names of the story were turned into English equivalents so that their flavour would not be lost; the family name Took stands for Tûk, and Peregrin for a Westron name given as Razanur. The English form was chosen because it carries the sense of one who travels in far countries, which answered to the meaning of the original. The familiar shortening Pippin corresponds to Razar, glossed as the name of a small red apple, so that the diminutive is a fruit-name in both languages and not merely a clipped form of the longer one. The apparent Latin colouring of Peregrin is therefore an artefact of translation: unlike the names of Gondor it has no Elvish derivation, and is pronounced as the ordinary English name would be.

Two bynames attached to him from outside his own family. In Minas Tirith the people of the city, seeing a hobbit in the livery of the Guard, took him for a person of rank among his own kind and called him Ernil i Pheriannath in Sindarin, that is Prince of the Halflings; the title rested on a misunderstanding, but it spread through the streets and outlasted the correction. The second came from Gandalf, who more than once reproached him as a foolish Took when curiosity outran judgement, a rebuke that turned on the family's long reputation for restlessness. That reputation was older than Peregrin: it was said in the Shire, half in jest, that some remote Took ancestor had married outside hobbit-kind, which was the readiest explanation offered for the tendency of that house to leave home and do unexpected things.

Peregrin's part in the great events began in September of the year 3018 of the Third Age, when he left Hobbiton in Frodo Baggins's company. He had been one of the small band of friends who, with Meriadoc Brandybuck, had watched Frodo for months and guessed the secret he meant to keep, and who refused to let him go east alone. The road took the party through the Old Forest, where Peregrin was among those caught by Old Man Willow and freed by Tom Bombadil, and afterwards over the Barrow-downs to Bree and the long march to Rivendell, which they reached in late October. At the Council of Elrond he was present and spoke against being left behind; Elrond doubted the wisdom of it, but Gandalf's judgement prevailed, and when the Company of the Ring set out on 25 December he went with them as the youngest of the nine.

In Moria, in the middle of January 3019, he let a stone fall down a well in the guardroom beside the Chamber of Mazarbul, and the answering knocks in the deep were taken as a signal to the enemy; Gandalf's anger at this is the source of the rebuke that later clung to him. Two days afterwards, on 15 January, Gandalf fell with the Balrog at the bridge of Khazad-dûm, and the leaderless Company went on to Lothlórien and then down Anduin. At Parth Galen on 26 February the Fellowship broke. Peregrin and Meriadoc were attacked by orcs of Isengard and of Barad-dûr, and Boromir was killed while defending them; the two hobbits were bound and carried off westward across Rohan, an error of identity that drew the pursuit away from Frodo.

During the forced march he contrived to leave a trace for any tracker, casting aside the brooch of his Lórien cloak where it might be found, and he worked his bonds loose when the chance came. On the eaves of Fangorn the orc-company was destroyed by the Riders of Rohan, and on 29 February the two hobbits slipped away into the forest, where they were found by Treebeard. The draughts he gave them added visibly to their growth. Peregrin was thus a witness to the Entmoot, and to the decision that sent the Ents south; Isengard was broken on the night of 3 March, and when Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli rode up to its ruined gates on 5 March, they found him and Meriadoc keeping watch there.

That same night curiosity carried him further than any of his earlier lapses. He took the seeing-stone of Orthanc from the sleeping Gandalf and looked into it, and so came face to face with Sauron, who took him for a captive of Saruman and questioned him. He escaped lasting harm, but the incident revealed how Saruman had been ensnared, and Gandalf at once set out for Gondor with Peregrin before him on Shadowfax, reaching Minas Tirith on 9 March. There he offered his service to the Steward Denethor and was sworn into the Guard of the Citadel, forming a friendship with the guardsman Beregond. On 15 March, seeing Denethor's madness, he ran to fetch Gandalf and so brought about the rescue of Faramir from the funeral pyre while the Steward died in the flames; the Battle of the Pelennor Fields was fought the same day.

He marched with the host that went to the Black Gate, and in the battle there on 25 March he killed a troll-chieftain and was crushed under its body; he was found alive beneath the slain by Gimli after the Ring had gone into the Fire. Healed in Ithilien, he was present at the crowning of Aragorn on 1 May and travelled north again with the company that broke up by stages along the road. He and his companions crossed the Brandywine Bridge on 1 November 3019 to find the Shire under Sharkey's men. Peregrin rode to Tuckborough and raised the Tooks of his own country, and the levy he brought had its share in the Battle of Bywater two days later. In September 3021 he rode with Meriadoc to the Grey Havens to see Frodo depart.

Within the story Peregrin occupies the place of the least considered person set among the great, and nothing in his descent or equipment gave him power of his own. He had no lore, no craft, and no authority beyond the domestic dignity that awaited him at home; what he carried was in every case lent to him by others. His weapon was a long knife of Westernesse work, a sword by hobbit measure, taken from the hoard of a barrow and made in a kingdom long fallen; his cloak came from Lórien, and its virtue was concealment rather than protection; the mail and livery he later wore belonged to a city not his own. Even the increase of his stature was borrowed, being the work of the Ents' drink, and it made him taller without making him more formidable. What he possessed in his own right were quickness, an unembarrassed tongue, and the ordinary hobbit toughness that outlasted conditions likely to have killed a man of similar size.

The clearest measure of his limits is the seeing-stone. The palantíri were instruments of the Númenórean kings, answering to right of ownership and to strength of will, and Peregrin had neither; he could not break off the contact of his own accord, and what happened to him was suffered rather than contested. He came away with his mind unbroken chiefly because Sauron took him for a prisoner held by Saruman and was satisfied with a short questioning, so that Gandalf afterwards drew more from the episode than the Enemy had. His standing in Minas Tirith was similarly bounded: the oath he swore to Denethor made him a servant with duties, not a counsellor with a voice, and the errand of the Guard was ceremonial as much as military. His one decisive act in the city was to abandon his post and go for help, which was a breach of the service he had undertaken.

The authority he eventually held at home was real but narrow. The Thainship had come to the Tooks after the Oldbucks laid it down, and it carried the mastership of the Shire-moot together with the captaincy of the muster and of the Hobbitry-in-arms; but since the law of the northern kingdom had long since lapsed and the Shire had almost no occasion to arm, the office had shrunk in practice to a matter of precedence. His raising of the Tookland briefly restored the muster to its literal meaning, and the quiet closed over it again afterwards. His later title of Counsellor rested on the regard of the restored king rather than on anything the Shire itself could confer.

The closest of Peregrin's ties was to Meriadoc Brandybuck, some eight years his elder and, in nearly every matter that fell to the two of them, the deciding voice. They act as a pair throughout, and the pairing is one of dependence as much as affection: the plot to watch over Frodo's preparations and to force their way into his journey was Meriadoc's design, and Peregrin joined it as the younger conspirator rather than its author. Their parting below Dol Baran was the first the cousins had known, and each afterwards made his own way among strangers, in armies that did not speak the same tongue. Something of what that friendship meant appears after the Pelennor, when Peregrin found his cousin astray and untended in the streets of the city and brought him to the Houses of Healing. With Frodo he kept the manner of a young relative toward an older one, presuming on kinship in a way that Samwise, who was neither kin nor gentry, never did.

His attachments in Gondor grew out of a debt. Boromir had shown the hobbits a plain kindness on the road, carrying them through the snows of Caradhras, and had died on their account; it was in payment of that death that Peregrin offered his sword to Denethor, who accepted the service with a dry acknowledgement of how little it was worth to him. The bond that followed was unequal on both sides: the Steward drew out of him more than he meant to tell, yet also spoke to him with a candour he granted to few, and at the end released him from his oath before going to the pyre. Among the ordinary men of the city he fared better. Beregond of the Guard explained to him a place he could not read, and Beregond's young son Bergil went with him about the streets; but that friendship also cost, for it was to save Faramir at Peregrin's word that Beregond abandoned his post and shed blood in the Hallows, an offence for which he was afterwards judged and set instead over Faramir's guard in Ithilien.

Gandalf stood toward him in a relation that was neither kinship nor service. The sharpness of his rebukes has been much noticed, but they were the sharpness of a guardian, and after the worst of Peregrin's lapses he set the fault aside at once and took the offender up onto his own horse. That the wizard chose to carry him south, rather than leave him with the others, is the plainest statement of the case. In the Shire the older ties reasserted themselves in due course, and one new one is worth remarking: the son born to Peregrin and Diamond of Long Cleeve married Goldilocks, a daughter of Samwise Gamgee, so that the house of the Tooks and the family of the Ring-bearer's servant were joined in the next generation. It is a quiet ending to a set of relationships that had begun in unequal terms, and it belongs to the same pattern as the friendships of the war: Peregrin's attachments were almost always to those older, higher placed or more competent than himself, and what they record is less what he brought to them than what they were willing to spend on him.

In the earliest written stages of the work that became The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit who was eventually named Peregrin Took existed only as one of a shifting group of companions attached to a protagonist called Bingo Bolger-Baggins. Two Tooks travelled with Bingo in the first phase of composition, Odo and Frodo, and the name Frodo therefore belonged to a young Took long before it was transferred to the bearer of the Ring. When Bingo was renamed Frodo, the Took had to be renamed in turn, and Christopher Tolkien traces the sequence by which he was called first Folco and then Faramond before the form Peregrin was settled upon at a comparatively late stage; the discarded name Folco was afterwards given to a minor hobbit who appears only in the Shire chapters. The parallel adjustment by which Marmaduke Brandybuck became Meriadoc belongs to the same tangle of substitutions, and the pairing of the two younger hobbits was among the few elements that survived it unchanged.

The name Peregrin had also been used earlier for an entirely different figure. While the ranger met at Bree was still conceived as a hobbit named Trotter, Tolkien considered identifying him as Peregrin Boffin, an older relative of Bilbo's who had left the Shire in his youth, had been taken into Mordor, and wore wooden shoes because of what was done to him there. That conception was abandoned when Trotter became a Man, and the name was free to be given to the youngest of the travellers. A second difficulty was the number of hobbits: Odo proved redundant once the party was fixed, and in removing him Tolkien redistributed his speeches and his part in events, some of it passing to the character who became Peregrin and some to the hobbit left behind at Crickhollow. Much of what reads as Peregrin's characteristic manner was therefore assembled from material first written for others.

In Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 the part was spoken by Dominic Guard, whose brother Christopher voiced Frodo. Because that film covers only the earlier half of the story and stops after the fighting at Helm's Deep, Peregrin's role is confined to the journey out of the Shire, the breaking of the Fellowship and the escape into Fangorn; the seeing-stone, the service in Minas Tirith and the return home lie beyond its ending, and the sequel that would have contained them was never produced. The film also passes over the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs, so the Westernesse blade and the circumstances in which the hobbits obtained their weapons are absent. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, in which John McAndrew took the role, is far more complete: spread over twenty-six half-hour parts, it retains the episode at Orthanc, the oath sworn to the Steward, the march to the Black Gate and the disorders in the Shire, and is generally reckoned the closest of the older versions to the printed text, though it too dispenses with Tom Bombadil.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001 to 2003, in which Billy Boyd plays the part, alters the character's function at several points. The conspiracy by which the younger hobbits force their way into the journey is dropped, and the two cousins instead fall in with Frodo and Samwise by accident while trespassing in a field, which removes the deliberate loyalty that motivates them in the novel. The alarm in Moria is caused by a skeleton dislodged into the well rather than by a thrown stone, and the Ents' resolution is reassigned: instead of reaching their decision in council, they are turned toward Isengard because Peregrin steers Treebeard past a stretch of felled woodland. His theft of the palantír is moved forward into the third film and away from its setting in the book. In Minas Tirith he is given a song before the Steward, who does not release him from his service, and his killing of a troll before the Black Gate is not shown. The films end with the departure from the Grey Havens, so the return of the travellers to a Shire under occupation, the raising of his own country and his later succession as Thain have no place in them.