Aha, you think, it’s the wrong season for leprechauns – she must be talking about Hobbits! Correct, Watson. But, which Hobbitss iss it talking about, preciousss? That is the question.

One of the major "deep thoughts" in The Lord of the Rings is the exaltation of the lowly; or, in small words, that "little people can do big things too." Hence we have ordinary Bilbo dragged off to burgle a dragon, and then ordinary-and-young-and-little Frodo picked on for the deadly-perilous Quest of destroying the Enemy’s power by carrying the main receptacle of that power right under the Enemy’s nose, to the one place it can safely be destroyed. Well and good. In the process he is tempted, tormented, strained, supported, strengthened, and goes through all manner of unpleasantries which serve, in the vulgar phrase, to ‘build his character.’ Well again. But a character cannot undergo all this building-up without becoming something other than he was – especially if he was little and ordinary and insignificant to begin with. By the time the king comes again Frodo is – little perhaps – but far from ordinary. All the men of the West are crying out "Praise him with great praise!", and from the Elves he receives a greater gift: the chance to pass with them to the Havens, where he may at last be healed of the scars of his Quest.

Well yet again. But is the message, then, that a little person may be thrust in the way of greatness, only to be removed by that means from the littleness which he first inhabited? A stirring message certainly, but there are not so many great quests to go around. Even the post of Sam, servant to the Ring-bearer, is a narrow and uncomfortable one: he remains, perhaps, the simple gardener, but he too has passed to the Cracks of Doom, and he is too closely tied to Frodo to be dissociated from his master’s hard-won greatness.

The question then remains: what about the little people? Are they to be left aside, "to be called for like luggage upon return"? Have they a place only so long as the great ones are with them, then to vanish back to the wings when the Quest has passed on? In some worlds perhaps – in newspapers and history, quite often. But in Middle-Earth, through the chronicle of the trilogy, we the curious reader are given more.

Meriadoc Brandybuck, "young Master Merry." Peregrin Took, Pippin, "fool of a Took." Halflings, scapegrace, not yet of age. Hobbitton origins notwithstanding, these are not your archetypal Young Man From the Provinces. There is no mystery about their origins, no arcane power or strength to be revealed in them, no great role or Destiny for them to fulfill – on the contrary, people are forever trying to leave them behind! Only by stubbornness and conspiracy do they ever leave Hobbitton; only by stubbornness and Gandalf’s ‘folly’ do they go on from Elrond’s house. They are constantly on the fringes trying not to be left behind (in which goal they are thwarted, by Frodo’s elusiveness and the interference of Orcs, by the end of Book 1).

This is not, needless to say, the behavior of proper Quest Companions. A proper Companion – say after the school of David Eddings – never for a moment worries about being left behind (unless, as in the case of Ce’Nedra, it is necessary for plot purposes). A Companion’s function is, first, bad-guy bashing, or on-looking during the same; second, Prophetic Significance in one form or another; and third, the providing of sundry scrapes from which he must then be extracted, to the properly suspenseful delay of the Quest. Merry and Pippin have very little Significance: they make up Elrond’s Nine Walkers, but any elf-lord would have done as well; Boromir’s dream mentions one Halfling, but not these two. Their scrapes, too, are all wrong: first too little and then too great, to the point not merely of delaying the Fellowship, but at the last of breaking it apart. This is hardly the behavior that is expected of them.

True Companions, having stuck around to the end of the Quest, should step back gracefully for the finale, then trot off home, married off or not as they choose. These two, besides several extraneous adventures on their own, finish up in entirely the wrong manner. Rather than dropping quietly out of sight, they have the effrontery when they trot off home to tangle again with the Minor Villain (who also has behaved most improperly in reappearing). They do not even confine themselves to the decent obscurity of letters to the hero, but go on boldly with their lives in the plain sight of the reader, leaving the hero on the sidelines! Truly this is not what is expected of Quest Companions!

It is, however, what is expected of little people. I once used the phrase "seeing around corners" to describe a peculiarity of mine: wishing to see what happened to the people taking the long way around, or waiting around the castle, or doing any number of uninteresting things while their protagonists were off adventuring. Then up popped Merry and Pippin, and lo and behold they were not uninteresting at all – they made their own choices, had their own likes and dislikes, and managed on occasion to surprise even Gandalf the White! But, you say, these are nobodies – to steal a line, "the ones that nobody really notices often, but when they do, sort of smile with affection as for a small child pointed out to one while one is focused on something else."*** Certainly so. But they have their own story all the same.

Would their story, apart from Frodo’s, be as epic etc. etc.? Of course not. But would it be interesting, fulfilling, with that sense of completeness authors strive for and reviewers talk of? Most certainly it would. Stories need not happen at the center of world-changing events to have merit. What of the Fourth Wise Man, always a day too late; or the American patriot, say, who misses all the major battles and glimpses General Washington once from afar? Merry and Pippin at least get to a battle or two, besides being friends of Frodo and Aragorn!~*~

Recommended Links:

E! Force of Hobbit

The End

---

(c) 2002
By Annie McAndrew
All Rights Reserved
Biography