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Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

About the ponies, though: do we know for a fact that Merry bought them, or even owned them? Might he have borrowed them from his father, or purchased them from those the Master already owned?

No one was to know of the conspiracy, and so you would think that Merry would acquire the ponies in the most covert means he could effect. I don't know why he had so many - 6! - as for all he knew, he and the other two conspirators would be chasing after an invisible Frodo who would be trying to give them the slip.

Maybe Fatty needed a few to himself. Or, when the plan came together to leave on the ponies with Frodo, maybe the extra pony (which seems to oddly disappear) was to masquerade as Fatty, who was pretending to be Frodo.

Then again, Brandybucks and Tooks are odd, to other hobbits, and Merry had already been to the Old Forest, if not far into it. And he knew things like boating and swimming. If he bought six ponies (or five), it might have been under the pretext that he and some of his equally peculiar friends and relatives were planning a holiday, riding off to Bree or some such. The Brandybucks may not have thought anything of it, nor those who did business with Bree. Some hobbits may have found it strange, but not all, I think.

That could be likely. It just seems that such an expense and oddity would have been talked about somewhere.