Meriadoc Brandybuck

Meriadoc Brandybuck
Tolkien character
Portrayed by	Dominic Monaghan
Information
Aliases	Merry, Kalimac Brandagamba, Meriadoc the Magnificent, Master of Buckland, Holdwine of the Mark
Race	Hobbit
Book(s)	The Lord of the Rings

Meriadoc Brandybuck, usually called Merry, is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, featured throughout his most famous work, The Lord of the Rings . Merry is described as one of the closest friends of Frodo Baggins, the main protagonist. Merry and his friend Pippin are members of the Fellowship of the Ring. They become separated from the rest of the group and spend much of The Two Towers making their own decisions. By the time of The Return of the King , Merry has enlisted in the army of Rohan as an esquire to King Théoden, in whose service he fights during the War of the Ring. After the war, he returns home, where he and Pippin lead the Scouring of the Shire, ridding it of Saruman's influence.

Middle-earth narrative

Fictional family background

Merry was born in Buckland. ^[1] He is the only child of Saradoc Brandybuck, a Master of Buckland, and Esmeralda Brandybuck (née Took), the younger sister of Paladin Took II, making him first cousin to Paladin's son, his friend Peregrin Took. ^[2] He married Estella (Bolger) Brandybuck, the younger sister of Fredegar Bolger, who helped Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin on the first leg of their quest journey. Frodo and Merry are first cousins once removed. Meriadoc and Estella had at least one son. ^[3]

Fictional history

In The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien describes Merry as the most perceptive and intelligent of the hobbits. Even before Bilbo Baggins left the Shire, Merry knew of the One Ring and its power of invisibility. He guarded Bag End after Bilbo's party, protecting Frodo from unwanted guests. He is knowledgeable and has an innocent, teasing sense of humour. In one incident, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins accused Frodo of being a Brandybuck and no true Baggins. Merry assured Frodo, "It was a compliment; and so, of course, not true".

Merry was a force behind "the Conspiracy" of Sam, Pippin, Fredegar Bolger and himself to help Frodo. Thus, at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring , Merry was well-prepared and organized — he assembled their packs and brought ponies. His shortcut through the Old Forest distanced them from the Nazgûl for a time. In the Barrow-downs, he is given his sword, a dagger forged in the kingdom of Arnor.

At Bree, Merry was not present in the Prancing Pony when Frodo put on the Ring; he was outside taking a walk, and was nearly overcome by a Nazgûl. At Rivendell, he was seen studying maps and plotting their path. The Council of Elrond reluctantly admitted him and Pippin to the Fellowship.

At the entrance to Moria, Merry asks Gandalf the meaning of the door inscription "Speak, friend, and enter". When Gandalf discovers the true interpretation, he says, "Merry, of all people, was on the right track".

At Amon Hen, he and Pippin are captured by a band of Saruman's Uruk-hai, despite's Boromir defence. Escaping with Pippin into Fangorn forest, they are rescued by Treebeard and given an Ent-draught to drink: it makes them both grow unnaturally tall for hobbits. Accompanying Treebeard to the Entmoot and later to Isengard, which the ents destroy, they took up residence in an Isengard gate-house, meeting King Théoden of Rohan, and are reunited with the Fellowship.

Merry swears allegiance to Théoden and becomes his esquire. Against Théoden's orders, he rides to Gondor with Éowyn, disguised as a common soldier. In the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, while the leader of the Nazgûl is preoccupied with Éowyn, Merry stabs him behind his knee. The Black Captain stumbles, and Éowyn kills him. This fulfils the prophecy that he would not be killed "by the hand of man," as it is a hobbit and a woman that end his life. Éomer makes Meriadoc a Knight of the Mark for his bravery.

After the War of the Ring, Merry and Pippin return home as the tallest of hobbits, only to find that Saruman has taken over the Shire. Merry and Pippin rouse the hobbits to revolt. During the resulting Scouring of the Shire, Merry commands the hobbit forces, and kills the leader of Saruman's "ruffians" at the Battle of Bywater.

Merry inherits the title Master of Buckland at the start of the Fourth Age. He retains his links with Rohan and becomes an expert in Rohan's language and traditions, which he discovers, to his surprise, to have close affinity to the early history of the hobbits. According to the "Note on the Shire Records" contained in the prologue, he composed a number of scholarly works, ^[4] including Herblore of the Shire, Reckoning of Years , and Old Words and Names in the Shire.

It appears that Tolkien invented these documents to provide notional sources for some of the information contained in Lord of the Rings. Herblore of the Shire is explicitly stated to be the source of the section of the Prologue called "Concerning Pipe-weed." Merry's interest in this topic appears in the chapter "Flotsam and Jetsam", ^[5] where he lectures King Théoden on the topic. "Reckoning of Years, which discusses "the relation of the calendars of the Shire and Bree to those of Rivendell, Gondor, and Rohan," is likely intended to be taken as the source of the calendrical materials in Appendix D. ^{[lower-alpha 1]}

At the age of 102, Merry returns to Rohan and Gondor with Pippin; they die in Gondor several years later, and are laid to rest among the Kings of Gondor in Rath Dínen, then moved to lie next to Aragorn after he died in F.A.  120. He had at least one son, who succeeds him as Master of Buckland when he left the Shire for Gondor in SR 1484. ^[6]

Reception

The critic Jane Chance Nitzsche discusses the role of Merry and his friend Pippin in illuminating the contrast between the "good and bad Germanic lords Theoden and Denethor". She writes that both leaders receive the allegiance of a hobbit, but very differently: Theoden, King of Rohan, treats Merry with love, which is reciprocated, whereas Denethor, Steward of Gondor, undervalues Pippin because he is small, and binds him with a harsh formal oath. ^[7]

The critic Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien uses the two hobbits and their low simple humour as foils for the much higher romance to which he was aspiring with the more heroic and kingly figures of Theoden, Denethor, and Aragorn: an unfamiliar and old-fashioned writing style that might otherwise, Shippey writes, have lost his readers entirely. ^[8] He notes that Merry and Pippin serve, too, as guides to introduce the reader to seeing the various non-human characters, letting the reader know that an ent looks an old tree stump or "almost like the figure of some gnarled old man". ^[9]

The two apparently minor hobbits have another role, Shippey writes: it it to remain of good courage when even strong men start to doubt whether victory is possible, as when Merry encourages Theoden when even he seems to be succumbing to "horror and doubt". ^[10]

A fourth purpose, notes the Tolkien critic Paul Kocher, is given by Tolkien himself, in the words of the wizard Gandalf: "the young hobbits ... were brought to Fangorn, and their coming was like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." ^[11] Kocher observes that Tolkien is describing Merry and Pippin's role in the same terms as he spells out Gollum's purpose and Gandalf's "reincarnation"; in Kocher's words, the "finger of Providence" ^[11] can be glimpsed: "All are filling roles written for them by the same great playwright." ^[11]

Adaptations

Merry (right) and Pippin in Ralph Bakshi's animated 1978 version of The Lord of the Rings

Merry as voiced by Casey Kasem in the 1980 animated version of The Return of the King

Dominic Monaghan as Merry in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings, Merry was voiced by Simon Chandler. In the live-action recordings Bakshi used for rotoscoping, Billy Barty was the model for several of the hobbits, but it is not clear whether Barty modelled for Merry.

In the 1980 animated version of The Return of the King , made for television, the character was voiced by radio personality Casey Kasem, who is also known for voicing the character of Shaggy in Scooby-Doo .

In the 1981 BBC radio serial of The Lord of the Rings, Merry was played by Richard O'Callaghan.

He was portrayed by Jarmo Hyttinen in the 1993 Finnish miniseries Hobitit .

In Peter Jackson's 2001-2003 film trilogy adaptation of the books, Merry was portrayed by Dominic Monaghan as a cheerful prankster full of fun and practical jokes, quite unlike the responsible hobbit who organises a temporary home for Frodo in Crickhollow. ^[12] In Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Merry accompanied the army of the West to the Black Gate, while in the book he remained in Minas Tirith to heal from the wound he received when assisting in the killing of the Witch-king of Angmar and was instrumental in the romance between Faramir and Éowyn.

Names and titles

In the prefaces and appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien employed the conceit that he was the modern translator of a unique manuscript, the Red Book of Westmarch , and that his stories of Middle-earth derived from that. In this guise of translator, he maintained that the character's real name was not Meriadoc Brandybuck but rather Kalimac Brandagamba. This was said to be an actual phonetic transcription of the name in Tolkien's invented language of Westron, which Tolkien said he transliterated to English as follows: The nickname "Merry" represents his actual nickname Kali which meant "handsome, happy", and "Meriadoc" serves as a plausible name from which a nickname meaning "happy" could be derived. ^[13] Alternately, The Middle-Earth Encyclopedia writes that Meriadoc means "joyful" or "cheerful," while Merry means "having high spirits." ^[3]

Théoden called Merry Holdwine, from Old English hold "faithful" and wine, "friend". ^[14] Tolkien used Old English to represent Rohirric, one of his fictional languages. Merry is also called Master Holbytla ("Master Hole-Dweller [Hobbit]") in Rohan.

It has been asserted that the name Meriadoc could be an allusion to the British nobleman Conan Meriadoc, legendary founder of the medieval House of Rohan in Brittany, ^[15] since Tolkien's Meriadoc is closely associated with his fictional kingdom of Rohan. Tolkien however denied that the Breton name had any connection with his fictional kingdom. ^[16]

When Merry first appeared in Tolkien's early drafts, his name was Drogo Took. He was later renamed Vigo, and the name Drogo reassigned to Frodo's father. After that, he was renamed Marmaduke, and finally Meriadoc Brandybuck. ^[17]

Notes

1. The title may be an allusion to the influential treatise De Temporum Ratione, (The Reckoning of Time), by the seventh-century English monk Bede.

References

1. "Meriadoc Brandybuck". Tolkien Gateway. Retrieved January 5, 2015.
2. See The Lord of the Rings, Appendix C.
3. "Meriadoc Brandybuck". The Middle-Earth Encyclopedia. 2010. Retrieved January 5, 2015.
4. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954), The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published 1987), Prologue, "Note on the Shire Records", ISBN   0-395-08254-4.
5. Lord of the Rings, book III, ch. 9
6. "Later Events Concerning the Members of the Fellowship of the Ring," entry for 1484, Appendix B to RotK
7. Nitzsche 1980, pp. 119-122.
8. Shippey 2005, pp. 238-240.
9. Shippey 2005, p. 151.
10. Shippey 2005, p. 180.
11. Kocher 1974, pp. 44-45.
12. "Lord of the Rings General Changes" . Retrieved 26 January 2020.
13. For the derivation of Brandybuck from "Brandagamba", see here.
14. The Encyclopedia of Arda, "Holdwine" Archived 2007-11-22 at the Wayback Machine
15. Friesian.com
16. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 383 (2d ed., Boston, 2000).
17. see Tolkien, J. R. R., The Return of the Shadow: The History of Middle-earth Vol. 6 (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

Sources

• Kocher, Paul (1974) [1972]. Master of Middle-Earth: The Achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien. Penguin Books. ISBN   0140038779.
• Nitzsche, Jane Chance (1980) [1979]. Tolkien's Art. Papermac. ISBN   0-333-29034-8.
• Shippey, Tom (2005) [1982]. The Road to Middle-Earth (Third ed.). Grafton (HarperCollins). ISBN   978-0261102750.

External links

• Speculative fiction portal

• "Meriadoc Brandybuck". Tolkien Gateway.