I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
Every reader of The Lord of the Rings carries away a private council of favourite moments. For some, the silhouette of Aragorn against the dawn at Minas Tirith burns brightest; for others, the slow unfolding of Gandalf's patience in Fangorn. Yet in the long run, the most quietly subversive arc belongs to the youngest members of the Fellowship: Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took, two hobbits who began the quest as comic footnotes and ended it as the reason the Shire survived. Their friendship, more than any sword or staff, is the hinge on which the courage of Tolkien's world turns.
Tolkien's vision of heroism was always plural. He distrusted the lone warrior myth and instead wrote a story in which bravery is a thing one learns from the people walking beside you. In Australia, where the bush ballad and the mateship myth sit deep in the cultural grain, that sentiment lands with particular resonance. Readers in Melbourne and Brisbane have long kept Tolkien's volumes on crowded shelves beside Tim Winton and Peter Carey, and the appeal of two ordinary friends rising to meet an impossible hour feels native to the country's literature of shared trial.
Merry and Pippin were not strangers to one another when Bilbo's farewell party scattered the Shire into the long adventure. They were cousins in a tangled hobbit genealogy, neighbours in Buckland and Tuckborough, and familiar companions at every harvest fair and smoke-fight the Shire could offer. Tolkien gives us a hundred small glimpses of this pre-history: shared mischief at the Green Dragon, long walks through the Water, a childhood apprenticeship in the unhurried art of being useless together. It is precisely this ordinary closeness that later makes their courage legible. Bravery is not a costume one dons; it is the by-product of years spent paying attention to another person.
In this, their story rhymes with one of the oldest patterns in Australian storytelling. The bush legend is rarely about the lone bushman; it is about two or three under a coolibah, watching the sky and the road and trusting one another with the small unsaid things. When Pippin recklessly volunteers to join Frodo and Sam, and Merry quietly insists on joining Pippin, we are watching that pattern re-emerge. The reader in Sydney's Gleebooks or Adelaide's Imprints Booksellers has probably felt the same gentle tug of a friend who simply refuses to be left behind.
The morning that Frodo departs Bag End is one of Tolkien's most quietly engineered set-pieces. He leaves in secret, intending to spare Sam the danger, and by the time the morning mists rise over Hobbiton he has already stolen an hour on his companions. Pippin and Merry, however, are not fools. They have tracked the conspiracy of the ring-bearer through half a Shire of rumour and a kitchen window, and they have made their own plans. Their confrontation on the road to Bucklebury is both comic and slightly chilling: two young hobbits, still in the bloom of their twenties, deliberately choosing the impossible over the safe.
That choice is the seed of their bravery, and it is one that resonates strongly with the Australian literary imagination. From Henry Lawson to the contemporary writing of Alexis Wright, the bush tradition has always insisted that courage is most authentic when it is volunteered rather than commanded. Merry and Pippin are not soldiers conscripted by oath or kings. They are curious, loyal hobbits who refuse the comfortable life they were born to. The decision itself is the first chapter of their heroism.
The moment in which their friendship is tested most harshly is not Helm's Deep or the Pelennor. It is the long march through Emyn Muil, the capture by Uglúk's company, and the forced march across the plains of Rohan. Tolkien handles this passage with the unhurried attention of a man who knew what real fear did to people. Merry and Pippin endure thirst, blows, and the slow erosion of hope, and yet they endure together. Pippin tells stories to keep Merry from despair. Merry steadies Pippin when the wizard's staff falls. Neither breaks because the other will not let him.
What is striking here is that Tolkien refuses to make them stoic heroes. They are frightened, and they remain frightened. Their bravery is not the absence of terror but the presence of someone whose hand you can reach for in the dark. Readers in Perth or Hobart who have walked long distances with a mate in the bush will recognise the texture of this. The Australian idiom of the good bastard, the dependable friend who keeps you company through an ugly stretch, is precisely what Merry offers Pippin among the orcs, and what Pippin offers back.
When the two hobbits are finally lifted into Fangorn, they meet Treebeard, the oldest living thing in the north, and they persuade him to march on Isengard. The scene is one of Tolkien's quiet triumphs: two small creatures, ragged and half-starved, convincing a being older than forests that the world has changed. It works because of the bond between them. Pippin performs the comedy, drawing Treebeard out with his Tookish charm. Merry performs the credibility, supplying the sober detail about the orc-fires and the burning of the wood. The act is a duet, and only the duet works.
It is also a scene that Australian readers tend to read with particular warmth. The country has its own deep traditions of small voices addressing ancient things: the Aboriginal songlines that speak into country, the protest songs of the 1980s that addressed the old forests of the Daintree. There is a certain kinship between Pippin standing his ground before Treebeard and the moral courage of the conservation writers who have shaped modern Australian environmental thought. The friendship of the two hobbits is what allows that small voice to carry.
After the breaking of the Fellowship, the two hobbits move into very different orbits. Pippin finds himself in Minas Tirith, swearing service to Denethor and standing in white before a Steward in despair. Merry rides with Théoden, walks into Edoras, and befriends Éowyn in the golden hall of Meduseld. In both settings the hobbits are physically tiny and politically marginal, and yet they assert themselves with a calm dignity that surprises the great. Pippin's offer of his sword is not naive; it is the deliberate act of a creature who has been forged in the fire of loss. Merry's quiet companionship with Théoden teaches the old king how to laugh again.
The parallel with Australian manners is not exact, but it is real. The Australian habit of standing up to authority, the laconic refusal to be awed by title, is in the same moral family as these two hobbits in their borrowed finery. A reader in Brisbane's Avid Reader bookshop, thumbing through the chapter in which Pippin faces Denethor, will recognise the familiar demotic voice. It is a voice that says, without raising itself, that titles do not exempt their bearers from the basic duties of hospitality and grief.
Their courage comes to its sharpest edge on the Pelennor Fields. Merry rides with the Rohirrim and stabs the Witch-king in the back of the knee, fulfilling the prophecy of the Barrow-downs and saving Éowyn's life. Pippin, on the wall of Minas Tirith, kills a troll and saves his lord Faramir from a pyre. Neither act is individually decisive in the larger war. Yet each is decisive in the moral economy of Tolkien's world, and each is unimaginable without the friendship that formed the hobbits in the first place. The Witch-king falls because a small companion was willing to follow a king into death. Faramir lives because another small companion was willing to leap onto a burning pyre.
These moments are the thematic climax of the pair's arc. Courage, Tolkien insists, is not a single act. It is the sum of a thousand small decisions, made over years, in the company of someone who will not let you quit. Australian readers often note that the same insight lives at the heart of the country's best writing about war and the bush. The mate who calls you forward at dawn, the friend who insists you finish the last kilometre, the companion who will not let the fire go out: these are the figures by which a literature of endurance defines itself.
The final measure of Merry and Pippin's bravery is given to them in the Shire. When they return from the long road, they find their home occupied, their trees cut, their innkeepers bullied. The hobbits who set out as boys now lead the rebellion that throws down the ruffians. Merry is appointed Master of Buckland. Pippin becomes Thain. Their bravery, in other words, becomes a political institution. They learned it together, and they exercise it together, in the same village lanes they once walked as careless cousins.
This is the quietly subversive end of Tolkien's design. The Shire is saved not by returning kings but by the friendship of two hobbits who refused to let the road break them apart. Anne Marie Gazzolo has often written about the way Tolkien's small places carry the largest meanings, and the bond between Merry and Pippin is perhaps his clearest argument for that claim. Bravery, in his pages, is not a solitary thunderclap. It is the long, patient craft of staying beside someone, season after season, until the world forces both of you to grow taller than you ever thought you could.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading