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Originally Posted by Esty
Interesting thoughts on Merry, and I'm enjoying davem's humorous hobbitish take on the issue!
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What can I say - I am in fact a hobbit
(how many other pipe smokers do we have on the Downs?)
It is quite strange that the Nazgul have both the power to repel & to attract those (supposedly) opposed to them. What exactly draws Merry to them? He is clearly a quiet, thoughtful type - I can't see Pippin getting involved without Merry's influence. I wonder how much of Tolkien there is in Merry - as I said earlier, he is the closest thing we have to a philologist - how many of us could imagine a hobbit writing a treatise on
Old Words & Names in the Shire, & more to the point, how many hobbits would be interested in reading it? He seems drawn to the Nazgul (or the
Ulairi - I love that word, one of my favourite of Tolkien's words!) almost from the first, & he also seems to have been destined to encounter the Rohirrim - an encounter with 'Anglo-Saxon' which insprired him to become a philologist in the way it inspired Tolkien. What does this say about Tolkien's concept of 'fate'?
So, why is Merry the 'forgotten' hobbit? The more attention we pay to him the more complex he becomes. He seems to be on a quest of his own, one he seeks out - I can't help wondering whether if Frodo hadn't given him the excuse to go off travelling he wouldn't have found some other reason to go off exploring the wide world. Maybe it wasn't just Frodo & Sam who were inspired by Mr Bilbo's tales of high adventure.