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.
Théoden called Merry Holdwine, and the Hobbit was thus known as such in the records of Rohan. It most probably derives from the Old English words hold and wine, respectively meaning "faithful" and "friend". Tolkien used Old English to represent Rohirric, another of his fictional languages, so Holdwine, like Meriadoc Brandybuck, is not what the character was actually called. Tolkien does not give Merry's real Rohirric name.
It has been asserted that the name Meriadoc could be in itself an allusion to the British nobleman Conan Meriadoc, legendary founder of the House of Rohan in Brittany, since the character Meriadoc is closely associated with Tolkien's kingdom of Rohan.
Read more about this topic: Meriadoc Brandybuck
Famous quotes containing the words names and/or titles:
“When the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)